Systems Thinking in Product Management
Start with the core idea behind the site: product problems are often system problems.
Why Smart Product Managers Keep Solving the Wrong Problem
8 min read →New here?
Start here
Three useful entry points into the ideas, methods, and examples on this site.
Optimisation is The Only Way is Earl
The opening guide to transport optimisation, framed as a product problem before an algorithm problem.
The series opener: why transport optimisation is a product problem before it is an algorithm problem, and why Earl Hickey's list is the right way to frame it.
9 min read →Probabilistic Forecasting for Product Management
A practical introduction to making better decisions when delivery and outcomes are uncertain.
Why a fixed deadline hides uncertainty, and how probabilistic forecasts support better product decisions.
6 min read → Filter by category
Forecasting
Peep Show , football and probability as narrated by Mark Corrigan
Mark Corrigan explains why a ten-leg football accumulator and a ten-assumption business plan fail for exactly the same mathematical reason.
Published 27 June 2026
ForecastingProduct Management
5 min read
Chris Kamara, AI, and Why Football Refuses to Be Predicted
Why more data cannot make an open system predictable, and what goes wrong when a 57% probability gets reported as a promise.
Published 5 July 2026
AIForecasting
8 min read
Probabilistic Forecasting for Product Management
Why a fixed deadline hides uncertainty, and how probabilistic forecasts support better product decisions.
Published 15 January 2026
ForecastingProduct Management
6 min read
Optimising My Name is Earl
Optimisation is The Only Way is Earl
The series opener: why transport optimisation is a product problem before it is an algorithm problem, and why Earl Hickey's list is the right way to frame it.
Published 9 June 2026
OptimisationProduct Management
9 min read
Earl learns about a man called Clarke
The Clarke-Wright savings algorithm from 1964, still running inside commercial transport optimisers, and why chaining stops beats visiting them one at a time.
Published 26 July 2026
Optimisation
6 min read
Earl learns about belonging
Before a route can exist, something has to decide which orders belong together, and that clustering decision constrains everything downstream.
Published 12 June 2026
Optimisation
11 min read
Earl’s List Is the Objective Function
Why transport optimisation has to start by defining what better actually means.
Published 9 June 2026
OptimisationProduct Management
12 min read
Earl rewrites the list
Two-Opt and Three-Opt formalise the planner's instinct that a route crossing its own path “looks wrong”, and then run straight into the local optimum.
Published 26 July 2026
Optimisation
6 min read
Earl is steel
Simulated Annealing: why a routing engine sometimes has to accept a worse route in order to reach a much better one.
Published 19 July 2026
Optimisation
15 min read
Earl's Genetics
Genetic algorithms stop improving one plan and instead run a whole population of competing plans that can breed.
Published 25 July 2026
Optimisation
12 min read
Earl is Tabu
Tabu Search escapes a local optimum using memory rather than chance: the optimiser keeps a list of what it has just tried and refuses to repeat it.
Published 22 July 2026
Optimisation
6 min read
Earl Lets the Ants Take Over: How Ant Colony Optimisation Learns from Successful Routes
How pheromone trails, exploration, and evaporation help a routing system learn from successful routes.
Published 1 August 2026
Optimisation
12 min read
My Name Is Earl and Large Neighbourhood Search: Sometimes You Have to Break the Plan
How destroying and repairing part of a route helps an optimiser escape the traps that small improvements cannot reach.
Published 7 August 2026
Optimisation
6 min read
Earl Finishes the List: There Is No Best Optimisation Algorithm
From Clarke-Wright and 2-Opt to Simulated Annealing, Tabu Search, Ant Colony and Large Neighbourhood Search, what Earl taught us about solving real optimisation problems.
Published 15 August 2026
Optimisation
4 min read
Product Management
The Framework Is Not the Product
Why product-management frameworks are useful models, not reality
Published 16 August 2026
Product Management
4 min read
Systems Thinking
What Porridge Can Teach Us About Business: The Gap Between Systems and Reality
Hollnagel's Work as Imagined and Work as Done, explained through Slade Prison, and why transformation programmes that automate the process map make things worse.
Published 11 July 2026
Systems ThinkingProduct Management
7 min read
The Football World Cup and What Monty Python Knew About Analysis Paralysis
How the Monty Python philosophers' football match explains analysis paralysis, and why “gather more data” only works in systems that hold still while you study them.
Published 21 June 2026
Product ManagementSystems Thinking
5 min read
What Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? Can Teach Us About Objectives
Two failure modes that stakeholder management usually treats as one: people who do not share your objective, and people who share it but are quietly optimising for something else.
Published 21 June 2026
Product ManagementSystems Thinking
4 min read
It Stands to Reason: What Alf Garnett Can Teach Us About Organisational Tribalism
Social Identity Theory and Senge's mental models, via Alf Garnett: why each department's partial view of the business feels like the whole system.
Published 21 July 2026
Systems ThinkingProduct Management
6 min read
Technology, systems and society
Ray Bradbury’s August 4, 2026 Has Arrived
Ulrich’s boundary critique, via Bradbury’s automated house: why a system can meet every target it was set and still be making breakfast for nobody.
Published 4 August 2026
11 min read
AI and Yes Minister
Sir Humphrey never lied outright either. Why fluent, confident AI output moves the cost from drafting to judgement.
Published 29 June 2026
AIProduct Management
5 min read
What other disciplines can teach you about product
Harari and the Power of Product Narratives
Why customers buy stories, not features, and what product managers can learn from Yuval Harari.
Published 1 May 2026
History & PhilosophyProduct Management
6 min read
The myth of Data-Driven Product Management
E.H. Carr and the Myth of Data-Driven Product Management.
Published 20 May 2026
History & PhilosophyProduct Management
6 min read
Fernand Braudel and Why Product Managers Focus on the Wrong Things
What product managers can learn from Fernand Braudel about events, trends, structures, AI, and long-term product strategy.
Published 30 May 2026
History & PhilosophyProduct Management
8 min read
Theory of Constraints in Software Operations
Finding and defeating the final boss
Published 19 January 2024
Systems ThinkingOptimisation
11 min read
Schumpeter, AI, and the Art of Creative Destruction
Why artificial intelligence is not just coming for jobs, but for business models, value chains, and product assumptions.
Published 20 March 2026
AIHistory & Philosophy
7 min read
Hammer and the Most Dangerous Question in Product Management
What product managers can learn from Michael Hammer, business process reengineering, and the danger of automating bad processes.
Published 10 May 2026
Product ManagementSystems Thinking
8 min read
Systems & Constraints
Systems Thinking in Product Management
Why Smart Product Managers Keep Solving the Wrong Problem
Published 30 January 2026
Systems ThinkingProduct Management
8 min read
Why Most Software Projects Fail Like a Tarantino Heist
What an old PhD thesis can teach product managers about systems thinking, requirements discovery and building the right thing
Published 20 April 2026
Systems ThinkingProduct ManagementAI
9 min read
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