Deciding what gets built — discovery, prioritisation, metrics and experimentation, judged by what shipped.
11 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager
Ben Horowitz · 1996
Contrasts product managers by what they actually do day to day, arguing the good ones take responsibility for a product's success without the…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Camels and Rubber Duckies
Joel Spolsky · 2004
Works through the textbook theory that software should be priced and versioned to capture consumer surplus, then argues the theory breaks down in…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Dynamic Model of Process and Product Innovation
James Utterback & William Abernathy · 1975
Argues a product's rate of process versus product innovation shifts predictably as an industry matures, from a fluid early phase of experimentation…
+2 more at this level
11 works
Ben Horowitz
Contrasts product managers by what they actually do day to day, arguing the good ones take responsibility for a product's success without the authority to order anyone to do anything.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jakob Nielsen
Argues usability problems surface with diminishing returns after about five test participants, so teams should run many small rounds of testing rather than one large study — a claim since qualified for problems that are rare or unevenly distributed across users.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Joel Spolsky
Works through the textbook theory that software should be priced and versioned to capture consumer surplus, then argues the theory breaks down in practice and most real pricing is closer to informed guesswork anchored on a few reference points.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Dave McClure
Proposes the AARRR framework — acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue — as the ordered set of metrics a startup should track through its funnel, rather than vanity numbers like total signups.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Teresa Torres
Proposes mapping a single desired outcome down through customer opportunities to candidate solutions as a visual structure for continuous discovery, replacing one-off big-bang research projects.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Sean McBride
Introduces the RICE score (reach, impact, confidence, effort) as a way to force comparable prioritisation across otherwise incommensurable feature ideas, rather than ranking by whoever argues loudest.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Blake Bartlett
Argues a growing share of successful software companies use the product itself, not sales or marketing, as the primary driver of acquisition, conversion and expansion.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Janna Bastow
Argues a dated roadmap of features misleads stakeholders into treating estimates as commitments, and proposes organising the roadmap by time horizon and outcome instead of ship date.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Utterback & William Abernathy
Argues a product's rate of process versus product innovation shifts predictably as an industry matures, from a fluid early phase of experimentation to a specific phase dominated by cost and scale.
Jean-Charles Rochet & Jean Tirole
Models platforms serving two distinct groups of users as setting a price structure, not just a price level, to get both sides on board — explaining why one side is often subsidised or free.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ron Kohavi, Randal Henne & Dan Sommerfield
Lays out the statistical and organisational pitfalls that make online controlled experiments harder to run correctly than they look, from underpowered samples to metrics an interim look can fool a team into trusting too early.
link checked 17 Sept 2026