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For something a little different, I’m going to share seven essays that have had the most impact on my product career—that you likely haven’t read.
There’s so much content flying at us these days, it’s hard to separate the “this sounds so smart!” from the “this is genuinely correct, helpful, and timeless.” The essays below are ones I find myself quoting from, sharing with people, and coming back to most often, even though most are decades old.
“The thing I’ve tried to do the last few years is ‘barbell’ my inputs. I basically read things that are either up to this minute or things that are timeless. I’m trying to not read anything that’s from yesterday through to like 10 years ago.” —Marc Andreessen
Note that this isn’t an exhaustive list. And I’m not including books—yet. This post is the beginning of an essential and timeless reading library meant specifically for product leaders.
I’d love your help building out this list. What’s missing? Let me know in the comments. Bonus points for sharing the impact it had on your career/life, and more bonus points for sharing stuff people may not have heard of. 👇
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1. Who’s Got the Monkey?, by William Oncken, Jr., and Donald L. Wass
“Let us imagine that a manager is walking down the hall and that he notices one of his subordinates, Jones, coming his way. When the two meet, Jones greets the manager with, ‘Good morning. By the way, we’ve got a problem. You see. . . .’ As Jones continues, the manager recognizes in this problem the two characteristics common to all the problems his subordinates gratuitously bring to his attention. Namely, the manager knows (a) enough to get involved, but (b) not enough to make the on-the-spot decision expected of him. Eventually, the manager says, ‘So glad you brought this up. I’m in a rush right now. Meanwhile, let me think about it, and I’ll let you know.’ Then he and Jones part company.
Let us analyze what just happened. Before the two of them met, on whose back was the ‘monkey’? The subordinate’s. After they parted, on whose back was it? The manager’s. Subordinate-imposed time begins the moment a monkey successfully leaps from the back of a subordinate to the back of his or her superior and does not end until the monkey is returned to its proper owner for care and feeding.
In accepting the monkey, the manager has voluntarily assumed a position subordinate to his subordinate. That is, he has allowed Jones to make him her subordinate by doing two things a subordinate is generally expected to do for a boss—the manager has accepted a responsibility from his subordinate, and the manager has promised her a progress report.
The subordinate, to make sure the manager does not miss this point, will later stick her head in the manager’s office and cheerily query, ‘How’s it coming?’ (This is called supervision.) Or let us imagine in concluding a conference with Johnson, another subordinate, the manager’s parting words are, ‘Fine. Send me a memo on that.’
Let us analyze this one. The monkey is now on the subordinate’s back because the next move is his, but it is poised for a leap. Watch that monkey. Johnson dutifully writes the requested memo and drops it in his out-basket. Shortly thereafter, the manager plucks it from his in-basket and reads it. Whose move is it now? The manager’s. If he does not make that move soon, he will get a follow-up memo from the subordinate. (This is another form of supervision.) The longer the manager delays, the more frustrated the subordinate will become (he’ll be spinning his wheels) and the more guilty the manager will feel (his backlog of subordinate-imposed time will be mounting).”
2. On agency, by Henrik Karlsson
“Last year, when I talked about learning ‘how to handle being sentenced to freedom,’ a phrase I borrowed from Sartre, I meant roughly what people these days call ‘cultivating high agency.’ But I need to define my words, since some ways the phrase high agency is used feel foreign to me, and depressing.
Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.
Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I was getting at when I said ‘authentically, and responsibly’).
Agency also requires the ability and willingness to pursue those goals. It requires the ‘will to know,’ the drive to see reality as it is, so you can manipulate it deftly and solve the problems you want to solve, instead of fooling yourself that certain problems are ‘unsolvable.’ In other words, efficacy (‘handle it effectively’).
Or phrased negatively, the opposite of agency can mean one of two things. Either (1) doing what you are ‘supposed to do,’ playing social games that do not align with what, on reflection, seems valuable to you and/or (2) being passive or ineffective in the face of problems (assuming your problems can’t be solved, that someone else should solve them, or working on things that do not in a meaningful way address the problem).
Agency is often framed as a hard-edged, type-A, aggressive approach. But over the last year, as I’ve been thinking about writing this essay, I’ve talked to a lot of highly agentic people, and I’ve read biographies about and interviews with people whose agency I admire and . . . hard-edged does not fit what I’ve seen. Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a