Product & Systems Thinking
Discovery, UX, experiments, workflows, and feedback loops
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Solve a Real Job
Products succeed when they help someone make progress in a situation.
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Feedback Loops
Systems change through reinforcing and balancing feedback.
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Small Experiments
A good experiment reduces a specific uncertainty cheaply.
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Constraints Shape Design
Explicit constraints prevent solutions that work only in theory.
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Bottlenecks Govern Flow
Improving non-bottlenecks rarely improves total throughput.
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Observability Enables Learning
You cannot improve a system you cannot see.
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Defaults Are Decisions
Most people never change a default, so the default setting is the choice you are actually making for them.
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Queues Reveal Capacity
A growing queue means arrivals exceed the rate of service, and no amount of urgency changes the arithmetic.
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Local Optimisation Hurts
Improving one part of a system in isolation often makes the whole worse by shifting work elsewhere.
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Design for Failure
Components fail, so a resilient system is one where a failure is contained rather than one where nothing fails.
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Where to Push a System
Some interventions barely move a system while others reshape it, and the powerful ones are rarely the obvious ones.
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Scope Grows Unless Bounded
Every reasonable small addition expands a project, and the sum of reasonable additions is an unshippable one.