Library

The Library is the bibliography behind the whole toolkit, the books and thinking that inform how The Thought Layer helps you validate, model, and build.

Where the methods come from

The frameworks in the toolkit are not invented from scratch. The customer conversations in The Big Idea follow Rob Fitzpatrick's The Mom Test, which is largely a set of rules about not asking people whether they like your idea. Positioning draws on April Dunford's Obviously Awesome, and the press release you write before the product exists is the PR-FAQ method from Working Backwards. Pricing comes from Madhavan Ramanujam's Monetizing Innovation, acquisition from Traction, and Decision Support is built on the six-element Decision Quality framework from Spetzler, Winter and Meyer.

Twenty-seven works in all, each attached to the part of the workflow it informs.

Why a reading list at all

An AI will give you a confident answer whether or not there is anything behind it, and a framework it invented reads much like one that took a decade of practice to arrive at. Naming the source is how you tell the two apart. It is also how you argue with a method when it does not fit your case, because you can go and read what it was actually claiming and decide whether your situation is the exception.

The Library is here so the toolkit can be audited rather than taken on trust.

Go deeper on any area

Six books sit behind The Big Idea, seven behind Business Model, seven behind the product work, four behind Decision Support, and three behind Strategy. Crossing the Chasm and Zero to One on entering a market, Lean Analytics on what to measure and when, Inspired and Continuous Discovery Habits on product practice, Domain-Driven Design on modelling the thing itself, and Kahneman and Tetlock on the ways judgment quietly goes wrong.

A complement, not a substitute

Reading is not a substitute for doing the work. The Library is there to deepen your thinking, while the rest of the toolkit is where you apply it to your own idea.