The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Three Horizons and the Ambidextrous Organization: Where New Bets Should Live
The two most-cited frameworks for structuring innovation inside a big company are both routinely used wrong. Three Horizons was a portfolio-attention tool that got corrupted into a delivery timeline — and Steve Blank has argued the timeline reading is now actively dangerous. Ambidexterity has a 35-project evidence base almost nobody reads past the diagram. Here's what each actually says, where each breaks, and how to decide where a given bet should live.
- Product·3 min read
Nokia and Kodak: Two Ways a Strategy Fails to Cascade
On July 8, 2015, Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion on a Nokia acquisition it had paid roughly $7.2–7.9 billion for — the write-off was bigger than the purchase price — and cut 7,800 jobs. Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, invested billions in the technology, was roughly the #1 US digital camera seller around 2005, and still went bankrupt in January 2012. Two completely different diseases, one autopsy line: the strategy never cascaded into anything that could ship and make money.
- Product·3 min read
Why Good Companies Kill Good Ideas
Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975. Blockbuster's management proposed the Netflix-killing strategy in 2004. Neither company was blind, and that's the uncomfortable part: the ideas died because good managers, doing exactly what good management prescribes, rationally killed them. Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is a structural diagnosis, not a culture complaint — which means the fixes have to be structural too.
- Product·3 min read
Blockbuster Didn't Laugh: The Netflix Story the Record Actually Supports
In 2000, a cash-burning Netflix offered itself to Blockbuster for $50 million, and Blockbuster passed. That much of the legend is real. What the legend leaves out is that Blockbuster later built Total Access, a counterattack that by Antioco's account was beating Netflix — until a board fight, franchisee economics, and a billion dollars of debt killed the commitment behind it. The real lesson isn't about arrogance. It's about what happens to a coherent strategy when the organization stops paying for it.
- Product·3 min read
The Deadline That Moved Three Times: Cyberpunk 2077
Cyberpunk 2077's release date moved three times in a single year — April to September to November to December 2020 — and each move was the plan absorbing information the organization refused to respond to. Scope didn't move. Marketing promises didn't move. The gap was paid first in mandatory overtime, then in a launch so broken Sony pulled the game from its store. The closing post of this series, on what 'responding to change' costs when you decline to pay for it.
- Product·3 min read
The Spotify Model Spotify Doesn't Use
The most copied agile framework of the 2010s was a 13-page snapshot of one company at one moment — a company that kept changing, whose authors spent years telling everyone not to copy it, and whose own employees later reported it didn't work as marketed. The story isn't that Spotify lied. It's that thousands of organizations bought the org chart and skipped the reasoning.
- Product·3 min read
FBI's Sentinel: Green Status Reports vs. Working Software
The FBI spent roughly a decade and over half a billion dollars on two failed attempts to replace its paper case-management system — with reportedly 800-page requirements documents and status reports that stayed green right up until the products turned out not to exist. Then a small in-house team in the basement of the Hoover Building shipped it in about a year for roughly $30 million. The interesting question isn't which methodology won. It's why documentation can lie for years and a sprint demo can't.
- Product·3 min read
Backlog Cleanup: How to Actually Do It
A 900-item backlog feels like diligence and functions as denial. Here's the working playbook for rescuing a rotten one: the deletion pass, the now/next/never triage, the hard cap, and the standing hygiene rules that stop it from growing back — plus why the fear of losing important ideas is the least justified fear in product work.
- Product·3 min read
Running Fully Agile Without Scrum or Kanban
Scrum and Kanban aren't agile — they're vendors of defaults. Defaults are great when they match your constraints and cargo cult when they don't. Here's how to derive the minimum process your team actually needs from the principles directly, five minimal shapes real teams run, and the honest cases where the frameworks are still the right answer.
- Product·3 min read
The Agile Manifesto, Reread: Four Values, Twelve Principles
The Agile Manifesto contains no sprints, no standups, no story points, no backlogs — not one of the ceremonies teams point to when they say 'we're agile.' Reread as engineering advice instead of poster material, it's four priority calls under uncertainty and twelve principles about feedback, people, and simplicity. Everything else is derived — and derived practices decay into ritual the moment they're severed from the principle that produced them.