Ideas from
[the books]

The 2009 iPhone tower defense game Defender Chronicles is gone from the App Store. Here's its history, why it likely vanished, and the games that come closest to its side-view, hero-led feel today, including our own spiritual successor.

A curated, verified reading list for anyone who finished Severance — show or novel — and wanted more fiction about the company that owns you.

Our honest 2026 list of the best tower defense games on phone and PC: what each one does well, what it costs, and where to play it. Plus one upcoming game on our radar (we make it).

Some companies keep 9 of 10 customers every year. AI is pushing everyone back to the market square, and companies stuck in the middle will get squeezed.

Most companies collect feedback, and almost none can act on it. The real gap isn't data. It's scaffolding. Here's what customer-led development fixes.

When AI agents can build anything, the hard part is choosing what to build. The PM books that still hold in 2026, ranked, with honest drawbacks.

Most churn books fix customer success. The best ones fix what you build. 8 retention books ranked for B2B teams, with honest drawbacks.

Looking for books like Inspired? Compare its product-team framework with Customer-Led Development on customer evidence, commitments and delivery.

Escaping the Build Trap vs Customer-Led Development: where they agree, where they split, why AI changes the math, and which to read first.

Your runway is too short to build what nobody wants. Ten commitments that turn customer-led from a slogan into practice, plus a one-year test.

For decades, nobody could listen to every customer. AI changed the math. Now if you're not listening, it's because you won't, not because you can't.

You don't need a transformation project to get closer to customers. You need ten churned names, two hours, and one uncomfortable phone call.

You don't have to burn down PLG, sales, or Agile to go customer-led. You replace exactly one thing, and kill four habits. Here's which.

A 5-day loop runs 73 times a year. An 8-month loop runs 1.5. Why learning speed, not feature count, is the advantage rivals can't copy.

Your $100K logo may be worth less than a $20K customer. Why champions compound, and why ranking customers by ARR quietly misallocates your team.

Dropbox paid up to $388 to acquire a $99 customer, then let its users do the selling. Here's why growth should run through champions, not strangers.

Your sprint ends when code merges, and that's the problem. Sonos learned it the hard way. Here's what a sprint that ends with the customer looks like.

Agile tells you how to ship, not who it's for. Why every feature should trace to a real customer name, and what changes when it does.

Most APMs fail the same way: they fall in love with solutions before they understand customers. Here's the customer-led path that avoids it.

Most teams think Product Ops is admin or project management. It's the role that keeps customer truth flowing, and the reason it breaks without one.

An 8-step method to hand your daily routine to a personal AI agent: read-only scopes, a supervised week, approval on every write, and spend caps.

Set up an always-on personal AI agent on a Raspberry Pi: hardware, model routing, secure dashboard access, spend caps and a tested 07:30 email summary.

A six-step method to supervise Codex, Claude Code and Conductor sessions in parallel: track states, verify 'done' claims, set sweeps, and log every nudge.

OpenAGI is a self-hosted personal agent with persistent memory, approved routines and a Supervisor for Codex and Claude Code. Install, privacy and limits.

Every PM candidate claims customer obsession. One interview question separates the ones who practice it from the ones who just say it.

The generalist PM is gone. AI split the job into two roles with different outputs and different metrics. Here's which one you are, and which one you need.

Every department claims to know what customers want. None can prove it. Here's the three-loop system that gets customer truth straight to decisions.

80% of features are rarely or never used. The problem isn't your team, it's your metrics. Here are the four that matter, and what Costco gets right.

Customer-led isn't for everyone. One question tells you if it's for you: when you commit to a feature, can you name the customers who asked for it?

A $10B operator gave me one piece of advice at 19. It took me a decade to understand it, and it changed how I build products. Here's why it works.

We treated churn as weather because building was expensive. AI removed that excuse. Here's the math, and the only three reasons a customer should leave.

Seven product discovery books for founders and PMs, ranked: who each is for, the one idea worth stealing, and the honest drawback nobody mentions.

The Mom Test still nails the single customer conversation. But when AI builds a prototype in a weekend, the hard part moves to deciding and following

An honest head-to-head of Teresa Torres's discovery classic and Customer-Led Development, and why AI changes which one your team should read first.

63% of execs say customer feedback drives growth ideas. Only 15% use it consistently. One question shows which side of that gap you're on.

Your exit survey says "missing features." The real cause was a promise made five months earlier that nobody tracked. Here's how the gap forms.

Research was insurance against expensive builds. Builds aren't expensive anymore. Here's why shipping to the customer who asked beats a six-week study.

Engineering time ruled software for 70 years. AI made it cheap. Here's the constraint that replaced it, and why most teams are aiming at the wrong one.

Every chapter of Customer-Led Development, Spencer Shulem's book on building what customers want when AI can build anything. Read the free essays or get th

NPS and the 'very disappointed' test measure what customers say, not what they do. Here's how to read revealed preference and find real PMF.

Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, SAFe, product-led, sales-led: each one fails the same way. They filter the customer through a department. Here's the fix.

You didn't fall for the aliens. You fell for the voice. Here are seven sci-fi novels — plus one honest note about my own — that scratch the exact Scalzi itch: a smart, funny narrator who explains the impossible like it's Tuesday.

If you finished The Circle wanting more fiction where nobody is forced and choosing privacy becomes the suspicious act, here are seven real novels worth your time — quoted accurately, drawbacks included.

Seven funny-bleak novels about optimized societies, ranked by how much rage is hiding under the jokes — from Kling's warmth to Vonnegut's grief.

A reading list on universal basic income, post-scarcity, and what people would actually do if work stopped being mandatory — with honest drawbacks and a real alternative to UBI.

The strongest books on AI and jobs, organized by the real questions: does automation destroy work on net, what happens to the displaced, who captures the gains, and what to do about it.

Books like Abundance for different questions: Cheap Intelligence on AI and freedom, plus six reads on institutions, growth and delivery.

A ~15,000-word argument that American freedom is already mostly theoretical — and that cheap AI will either fix that or make it permanent. This is the page from the person who wrote it.

A superintelligent government runs the courts better than we ever did. Then one woman requests a jury — and to try her, the jury has to judge the machine.

Fiction about machines making legal and moral decisions about people — nine books, organized by the question each one asks: Can it be fair? Who audits it? What is lost?

Nine honestly-curated read-alikes for Bobiverse fans — the ones that actually nail Bob's dry, competent, first-person voice, plus who each one isn't for.

If you liked Infomocracy, QualityLand, or The Circle, here's the honest shelf: eight real, correctly attributed novels about societies that hand the decisions to the algorithm.

A verified, opinionated guide to the best fiction about artificial intelligence — every title real and correctly attributed, with an honest drawback for each.

If you finished Foundation and wanted more fiction about predicting and steering entire societies, here are eight real books — with honest drawbacks — organized around the one idea Asimov made unforgettable: psychohistory.

A proactive AI agent observes your context and surfaces work before you ask. Learn how it differs from reactive AI, why noise is the hard problem, and the

A curated list of parable and wisdom-story collections drawn from Zen, Sufi, Taoist, Jewish, and folk traditions — not religious instruction — sorted by the situation you're in.

Choose a local AI assistant by its job. Test OpenAGI tasks, local inference, permissions and coding-agent supervision with a practical checklist.

Product psychology books for real decisions: Product Theory, plus eight complementary reads on behavior, usability and customer research.

Eight short, parable-shaped books that give you the same feeling as The Alchemist — a life lesson that arrives as a story, not a sermon.

The Mom Test fixes your questions. These eight books cover what comes next: a free primer, a weekly discovery habit, the craft of interviewing, and what to do when your interviews never change the roadmap.

Every incentive creates a game. The Cobra Effect is what happens when it's not the game you wanted—and why your best-looking metric might be the one breeding snakes.

People value what they build far beyond its objective worth. The best products don't just get used — they get built on. Here's how to design for it.

A distinguished professor watched a Zen master pour tea until it spilled across the floor. The lesson still lands: you can't fill a cup that's already full.

People don't stay in bad situations because they can't see better options. They stay because their brain protects the known from the threat of the unknown.

The seams in your product are copies of the seams in your org chart. That's not a metaphor — it's Conway's Law, and it predicts what your app feels like to use.

Three old stories about choosing well: the crossroads, the strawberry on the cliff, and the woman carried across the mud. What they teach about the moment of decision.

Most product decisions go wrong for reasons that already have names. Here are 12 mental models — what each one is, a concrete product example, and when it quietly lies to you.

Everyone knows the $9.99 trick. Everyone still falls for it. Here's why the last digit of your price is a positioning decision, not a math one.

Being stuck and going nowhere are not the same thing. Three old stories about the difference — and what to do when you can't see your own progress.

A fast-food chain couldn't sell more milkshakes—until they stopped studying the milkshake and started watching who bought it, and when. That's Jobs to Be Done.

The medium popcorn was never meant to sell. It was meant to sell the large. Meet the decoy effect—and why it lives on your pricing page.

Temptation rarely shows up as a villain. It shows up as a reasonable-sounding voice. Three old stories for the moment you're about to give in.

Direct advice about letting go bounces right off. A story slips past the guard and stays. Here are nine of the best — on control, grudges, outcomes, and certainty.

A real estate agent shows you an $800,000 house you don't love. The next one is $650,000, and suddenly it's a steal. You're not judging the house. You're judging the first number that entered your head.

Some of the things you carry are cracked. An old Indian folk tale about the leak you keep apologizing for — and the flowers growing on the trail behind you.

Past investment shouldn't influence future decisions, but it always does. How the sunk cost fallacy retains your users — and why the retention it buys you might be a prison, not a product.

Every chapter in Product Theory — the mental models behind how users price, choose, stay, and churn. Read the free essays or get the book.

Three old stories for the days the floor drops out from under you — and why the smartest response to disaster might be four small words.

The military wanted to armor the bullet holes. A statistician told them to armor everywhere else. The same mistake is quietly wrecking your product decisions.

Price isn't a number. It's a story people tell themselves about what something is worth. Here are seven rules — anchoring, decoys, charm pricing, mental accounting — that quietly decide what people buy.

The more useful something is, the harder we scrutinize its price. Why we under-invest in essentials, over-invest in indulgences, and how great products flip the switch.

DAU up. Churn down. Everyone nods. Meanwhile a user is quietly switching to a competitor. That gap has a name — Metric Theater — and it's killing your product.

Set a target, and your team will hit it — often without touching the thing you actually care about. Goodhart's Law explains why every metric you optimize eventually lies to you.