Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

Duke, a former professional poker player turned decision-science teacher, argues that the quality of a decision and the quality of its outcome are different things, and that treating them as the same is the single most expensive cognitive mistake in business. Good decisions can produce bad outcomes; bad decisions can produce good outcomes. The book teaches how to reason about choices under genuine uncertainty without either fatalism or false confidence, using techniques like "resulting", pre-mortems and betting framing. For product direction it is one of the cleanest treatments of a problem that sits at the heart of the job: every meaningful product decision is made with incomplete information and ambiguous feedback. Short, practical, and unusually useful.