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Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager
Compares good and bad product manager behavior trait by trait in Horowitz's 1996 essay.
a16z.comvia Sachin Rekhi’s PM canon
92 pieces that cleared seventy. Ordered by how far each sits from the centre of this catalogue.
Compares good and bad product manager behavior trait by trait in Horowitz's 1996 essay.
Argues that market choice matters more than team or product quality in startup success.
Describes Amazon's practice of drafting a press release before building a product.
Presents Jeff Bezos's 1997 shareholder letter, the founding statement of Amazon's long-term thinking.
Explains why evaluation skill is becoming essential for building reliable AI products.
Explains a one-line mechanism for turning a standalone tool into a network-effect product.
Describes how Superhuman used a 'very disappointed' survey threshold to measure product-market fit.
Argues that not all revenue deserves the same valuation and sets out ten metrics for business quality.
Argues, in Slack's founding internal memo, that the product sells transformation, not features.
Describes a research-plan-implement workflow that withholds coding until a written plan is approved.
Explains how tactical decision games accelerate expertise by compressing decades of experience into drills.
Explains how to build a self-improving PM workflow with Claude Code's skills and CLAUDE.md router pattern.
Argues that the acquisition channel should shape the product, not the other way around.
Lays out Sarah Tavel's hierarchy of user engagement: core action, cumulative value, and rising switching cost.
Introduces a triangular framework meant to improve the quality of everyday decision-making.
Lays out 15 principles for managing up, from proposing solutions to over-communicating with a manager.
Walks through Claude Code's anatomy: the .claude directory, CLAUDE.md conventions, skills, and subagents.
Profiles the four hardest senior engineer types to manage and how to coach each one.
Examines how persuasive design techniques, drawn from magic, hijack attention in technology products.
Explains how to recognize product/market fit by turning gut feeling into measurable signals.
Questions confidence-scored frameworks like RICE and proposes deciding well under real uncertainty.
Distinguishes good product strategy from a roadmap and clears up common confusion between the two.
Explores why founders fail through the paradox facing CEOs who must also act as product leader.
Draws on ARPA and Xerox PARC to outline guidelines for agency and ambitious undertakings.
Treats companies as systems and argues that fixing one bottleneck at a time drives the most improvement.
Argues that speed is a habit and outlines how organizations can institutionalize faster decision-making.
Explains Ben Thompson's Amazon Tax thesis and how vertical integration reshapes competitive dynamics.
Argues for making agent-driven engineering work falsifiable and resumable, via a compiler-age analogy.
Explains why teams that treat AI as shared infrastructure see bigger productivity gains than solo hackers.
Surveys sixteen startup metrics and the blind spots each one can hide.
Lists seven phrases that make giving feedback easier and more likely to prompt action.
Breaks great product leadership into expectations that shift by seniority level.
Recounts a year of replacing sprints with Shape Up and its effect on output and morale.
Presents the original architecture of Google's web search engine, from its 1998 paper.
Outlines the High Agency mindset: clear thinking, bias toward action, and comfort with friction.
Tests the 7 Powers framework for competitive moats against a library of real business cases.
Opens a guide to hiring product managers by first defining what the role actually is.
Explains how to bootstrap a marketplace by sequencing supply and demand, then scale it.
Argues a truly great product doesn't need to be merely good, and defines the difference.
Shares growth frameworks drawn from the author's experience at Facebook, Twitter and Wealthfront.
Weighs metrics against direct user experience and where measurement can distort a product.
Argues that a well-loved product can still fail as a business, and explains why.
Contrasts peacetime and wartime product management styles and when each applies.
Argues that testing a strategy requires red-teaming it and shows why certainty needs constraints.
Argues for choosing a single north star metric and explains the reasoning behind it.
Introduces third-order thinking as a way to change the underlying board, not just the game being played.
Explains what growth teams are for and the kinds of work they actually do.
Corrects the common misreading of MVP, framing it as an iterative process rather than a product.
Argues that writing, not talking, is the mechanism behind good management communication.
Presents Nakamoto's original design for a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
Applies a who/what/where/when/why/how framework to critical thinking in the age of AI.
Examines the classic tension between distribution advantage and product innovation.
Explains in depth how the Model Context Protocol works under the hood.
Argues that becoming more agentic is less difficult than it's commonly assumed to be.
Orders company building as product first, strategy second, business model third.
Outlines a disciplined approach to shipping software, emphasizing release and versioning practices.
A Whatnot CPO argues product management as a role is fundamentally broken.
Applies the Kano model to sort features by how each affects customer satisfaction.
Lists the advantages a startup gains from competing against a large, profitable incumbent.
Distills ten field lessons from practicing customer development research.
Uses Babe Ruth's home-run-to-strikeout ratio to argue for placing fewer, bigger product bets.
Frames onboarding as an integral part of the product rather than a separate afterthought.
Argues that manufactured urgency undermines teams and that a sense of purpose motivates better.
Argues for guarding independent judgment against the pull to offload thinking onto AI tools.
Explains how Shazam identifies songs through spectrograms, constellation maps and hash fingerprinting.
Lays out practical norms for the working interface between product managers and engineers.
Describes how an engineering leader cut hours of daily status-gathering with a streamlined workflow.
Sets out James Shore's model of what makes a product engineering organization the best in the world.
Examines the tension between platform and vertical strategies and forecasts the next wave of unbundling.
Presents Elon Musk's 2006 master plan outlining Tesla's original long-term strategy.
Defines a leader's core job as making decisions and supplying context, not micromanaging.
Argues that a single hour of user research can save roughly ten hours of development work.
Covers fifty system design concepts, including scaling, CAP theorem, sharding, caching and queues.
Introduces the fundamentals of agentic, AI-assisted software development practices.
Recounts firsthand how building an AI executive assistant with Claude Code reshaped a CTO's daily work.
Lays out a foundational account of what product management actually involves.
Argues that the format of a product spec functions as a tool for structuring thought.
Argues that companies often draw the wrong lesson from Uber's success, imitating the wrong trap.
Proposes framing product roadmaps around themes instead of features to change outcomes.
Questions whether having a long-term career plan is actually necessary or beneficial.
Examines management anti-patterns that erode engineers' trust and offers practical fixes.
Argues the file system already behaves like a graph database for organizing personal knowledge.
Argues DAU, WAU and MAU are becoming the core metric for AI-native B2B products, citing Harvey.
A First Round guide to sourcing, vetting and hiring the strongest product manager candidates.
Defends disciplined process as the reason great products emerge rather than happening by chance.
Describes a personal workflow for planning, coding and structuring AI-assisted software development.
Argues that narrowing a product's target market can counterintuitively increase its odds of winning.
Examines the psychological shift that happens as a team nears a product's ship date.
Christina Wodtke questions the industry's habit of chasing the next silver-bullet framework.
Sets out three core responsibilities that define effective product leadership.
Outlines the traits of an effective Tech Lead and clarifies how the role differs from an Engineering Manager.
Andrew Chen argues that growth channels are saturating and asks what comes after them.