Thinking in Systems: A Primer

The basic grammar of systems: stocks, flows, feedback loops, leverage points. Meadows teaches you to stop asking "who caused this" and start asking "what structure produces this behaviour" — the single most useful shift a product director can make. Every product is a system embedded in other systems (the team that builds it, the market it serves, the attention economy that places it), and most decisions that feel local turn out to have long tails downstream. The book is short and generous. It is the closest thing to a required reading on how not to mistake symptoms for causes.