Readings on digital product
The Compass and the Terrain: Readings on the Direction of Digital Products
A curated reading list on product management, product leadership, and the organizational conditions that make digital products possible — from Drucker and Ohno to Cagan, Ries, and Team Topologies.
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Is there an ‘I’ in AI?
Hofstadter spent fifty years arguing that selfhood is an emergent loop — that the 'I' arises from recursive self-reference rather than from any special substance. That argument, made in Gödel, Escher, Bach and refined in…
When Coordination Is Avoidable: A Monotonicity Analysis of Organizational Tasks
Ju takes a question that organization theorists have circled for decades — when does coordination actually change the outcome rather than merely consuming resources? — and gives it a formal answer borrowed from distribut…
Beyond the tool view of AI: Intelligent technologies and the emergence of new epistemic regimes
Sergeeva, Leonardi, and Faraj identify a clean analytical failure in how organisations talk about AI: adoption, automation, and augmentation frameworks all presuppose that new technology is absorbed into existing authori…
LLMorphism: When humans come to see themselves as language models
Capraro names something real and undertheorised: the reverse inference problem, where LLMs that speak like humans lead people to conclude that humans think like LLMs. This is not a restatement of anthropomorphism or comp…
The Rise of AI Search: Implications for Information Markets and Human Judgement at Scale
Aral, Li, and Zuo do something rarely achieved in AI-impact research: they run a genuine global field experiment — 24,000 queries across 243 countries — rather than theorising from platform disclosures. The empirical arc…
The Division of Understanding: Specialization and Democratic Accountability
Bonomi takes a well-established result from production economics — that specialization raises output — and traces its civic cost: when cross-domain knowledge concentrates in a small integrator class, electoral competitio…
Human Trust in AI Search: A Large-Scale Experiment
Aral and Li treat the generative search interface not as a neutral conduit but as an architecture that actively shapes the epistemic dispositions of its users — a framing that connects squarely to the library's concern w…
Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment
The paper's most productive contribution is not technical but conceptual: it demonstrates that LLMs default to rigid policy adherence even when context demands discretionary judgment, which maps directly onto the classic…
Beyond Spot Markets: How Thick Sociality in Online Labor Markets is Reshaping Firm Boundaries
The paper's central move is to challenge a foundational assumption in the theory of the firm: that complex, co-specialized work cannot be contracted out. By introducing the concept of 'thick sociality' — the dense relati…
The Two Boundaries: Why Behavioral AI Governance Fails Structurally
McCann's central move is elegant and underexploited: Rice's theorem (1953) already proves that no behavioral layer added on top of a Turing-complete system can ever fully govern its effects — the gap between what a syste…
On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects
Simondon argued that the split between culture and technology is a modern pathology — that technical objects have their own mode of existence that deserves the same philosophical attention we give to art or language. His…
Programmed Visions: Software and Memory
Chun examines the paradox at the heart of software: it promises permanence through storage yet operates through constant execution, repetition, and decay. She argues that the ideology of software — the belief that code i…
Thought in a Hostile World
How did the mind evolve under real adaptive pressure — in a world of predators, parasites, deception, and environmental unpredictability — rather than in the sanitised environment many cognitive models assume? Sterelny a…
The AI Layoff Trap
Falk and Tsoukalas construct a task-based competitive model to show that the real problem with AI-driven displacement is not ignorance but a classic collective action failure: each firm rationally automates while the agg…
Usability Engineering
Where Card, Moran, and Newell gave HCI its theoretical foundation, Nielsen gave it a pragmatic engineering methodology. This book codified usability heuristics, discount usability testing, severity ratings for defects, a…
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
Banerjee and Duflo, later joint Nobel laureates, wrote the book that argued development economics had been asking the wrong question: not "what policies work" at the country level, but "what works for whom, under what co…
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The Place That Was Named Before It Was Built: Literature, Philosophy, and the Invention of Digital Space
How cyberspace was imagined in fiction, designed by engineers, inhabited by communities, and questioned by philosophers — from Borges to Carr.
The Shape That Repeats: Networks, Fractals, and the Geometry of Decentralisation
Why the same acentred, self-similar, scale-free structure keeps appearing across mathematics, philosophy, biology, computer science and political theory.
The Theory in the Code: A History of the Practice of Building Software
What does it mean to build software well — and who gets to decide? An itinerary through six decades of the craft, from the theoretical foundations that defined programming as an intellectual activity to the ongoing negotiation between the organisation's need for legibility and the builder's need for discretion.
From Coase to AI: Technology, Organizations, and the Frontier Between Compacting and Decentralizing
Why firms exist, why they grew, and how each technological wave redraws their boundaries — from Coase to AI.