PMBOK Guide
Project Management InstituteThe vocabulary of the trade. What I kept: risk thinking and the discipline of knowing who owns what. What I dropped: the illusion that a plan survives contact with reality.
The shelf
Library
What shaped how I work — with honest notes on what each thing actually left behind. Not endorsements; residue.
Standards & frameworks I’ve worked from
The canon behind the certifications — kept here for what survived contact with real teams, not for the certificates themselves.
The Scrum Guide
Schwaber & SutherlandNineteen pages that most teams have opinions about and few have read. Re-reading it yearly is the cheapest process audit available.
SAFe — the body of knowledge
Scaled AgileI hold the certifications and have run it at scale. My honest position — keep the coordination, skip the ceremony — is a full essay. Read it →
Agile Practice Guide
PMI & Agile AllianceThe bridge document: predictive where the risk is irreversibility, adaptive where the risk is ignorance. That single framing settles most methodology arguments.
Disciplined Agile
PMIIts one big idea — choose your way of working deliberately, per team, per context — outlived my certification in it.
PROSCI / ADKAR
Prosci Inc.Change management sounds corporate until you ship a product change nobody adopts. Awareness before ability; desire before knowledge. It maps 1:1 to product activation.
Managing Successful Programmes
AxelosProgramme thinking for when "a bigger project" stops being a useful model — benefits over deliverables, tranches over phases. Used it hardest during M&A integrations.
Six Sigma / DMAIC
Master Black Belt trackThe measurement discipline behind my growth work: define, measure, analyze before improving anything. Most funnels fail at "measure".
Harvard CORe
Harvard Business School OnlineEconomics, accounting, and analytics as one toolkit. The accounting half quietly became domain expertise the day I moved into fintech.
Research reading
The academic side of the shelf — project management, hybrid delivery, AI in software processes — feeds directly into my own publications and into essays like Run your roadmap like a research program.
Books
Sixteen that actually rewired something, on four shelves. The notes are the residue — the one idea each book left behind after the details faded.
Product
Inspired
Marty CaganThe bar: empowered teams solving problems, not feature factories shipping requests. I measure product orgs against this book, including my own.
Escaping the Build Trap
Melissa PerriOutcomes over output, said plainly enough to reorganize around. Pairs with treating the roadmap as a set of falsifiable bets. Related essay →
Continuous Discovery Habits
Teresa TorresTurned "talk to users" from a value into a calendar entry. The weekly cadence is the whole trick.
Shape Up
Ryan SingerAppetite instead of estimates — decide what a problem is worth before asking what it costs. Half of why deadlines slip is ignoring this. Related essay →
Delivery & leadership
Accelerate
Forsgren, Humble & KimThe evidence that speed and stability are allies, not a trade-off. My agent fleet is judged on DORA-style terms: small batches, fast reviews, safe deploys.
The Phoenix Project
Gene KimMade invisible work visible for a generation of teams. The four types of work still explain most "why is everything late" mysteries.
Team Topologies
Skelton & PaisCognitive load as the unit of org design. It gave me the language for what scaling squads actually optimizes. Related essay →
High Output Management
Andy GroveManagement as a production system, leverage as the manager’s metric. Forty years old and still the least sentimental book on the job.
Growth & strategy
Crossing the Chasm
Geoffrey MooreSequencing beats size: win a beachhead segment completely before touching the next. In a small market this is not advice, it is physics. Related essay →
Good Strategy / Bad Strategy
Richard RumeltThe kernel — diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action — is the fastest test I know for whether a "strategy" document contains one.
Obviously Awesome
April DunfordPositioning as a deliberate choice of frame of reference. Changed how I present products: context first, features later.
Hooked
Nir EyalThe mechanics of habit loops — read as a builder and as a user. Powerful, and exactly why guardrails belong in product ethics.
Thinking & research
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel KahnemanThe catalog of ways judgment fails. Kill criteria decided in advance exist because System 1 will otherwise defend any sunk cost.
How to Measure Anything
Douglas Hubbard"Intangible" usually means "nobody defined it". Measurement as uncertainty reduction is the bridge between my Six Sigma training and product work.
The Lean Startup
Eric RiesValidated learning as the unit of progress. Dated in places, foundational everywhere else — most of modern discovery is footnotes to it.
Deep Work
Cal NewportFocus as a trainable asset. Building platforms solo, with agents doing the typing, the scarce input really is uninterrupted thought.
The shelf keeps growing — subscribe and you’ll notice when it does.