525 articles
Full ArticleProduct ManagementProduct LeadershipGrowth & Experimentation
Behind Every Great Product
Behind every great product there is someone who led the product team to combine technology and design to solve real customer problems in a way that meets the needs of the business.
Classic Articles·27 min read·Jun 1, 2017
Full ArticleManagementStrategy
Process Improvement: The Theory of Constraints Applied
This article applies Goldratt's Theory of Constraints to modern operations, showing how identifying and systematically addressing bottlenecks produces dramatic improvements in throughput. The framework of identify, exploit, subordinate, elevate, and repeat provides a practical methodology for continuous operational improvement in any organization.
MIT Sloan Management Review·11 min read·Apr 15, 2017
Full ArticleProduct StrategyManagementProduct Management
The Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real Value
Explores how organizations become trapped in a cycle of building features without understanding whether they create value. The output trap: measuring success by number of features shipped rather than outcomes achieved. Shows how to shift from project-based to product-based thinking, and from outputs to outcomes. Critical reading for product teams.
Harvard Business Review·12 min read·Mar 1, 2017
Full ArticleUI DesignProduct DesignUX Design
Animation Principles for UX: Creating Meaningful Motion in Interfaces
Applies Disney's 12 principles of animation to interface design, showing how motion can guide attention, provide feedback, and create a sense of continuity. Covers easing curves, duration guidelines, and the distinction between decorative and functional animation.
Smashing Magazine·12 min read·Jan 24, 2017
Full ArticleLeadershipManagementStrategy
Systems Thinking for Social Change: A Practical Guide
An introduction to applying systems thinking to organizational and social challenges. Covers mental models, system archetypes (fixes that fail, shifting the burden, tragedy of the commons, success to the successful), and leverage points where small changes produce big results. Based on Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline. Widely used in MBA organizational behavior courses.
Harvard Business Review·10 min read·Jan 1, 2017
Full ArticleCareer DevelopmentTime Management
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World
Proposes a philosophy of technology use where you start from zero and add back only the tools that provide substantial value to things you deeply care about. Challenges the default assumption that every new app and platform deserves a place in your life.
Classic Articles·9 min read·Dec 18, 2016
Full ArticleLeadershipStrategy
The Comprehensive Business Case for Sustainability
Whelan and Fink compile evidence showing that sustainability practices drive financial outperformance through improved risk management, innovation, employee productivity, and brand reputation. The article quantifies the business benefits across multiple dimensions, making a data-driven case that sustainability is not philanthropy but a source of competitive advantage.
Harvard Business Review·13 min read·Oct 21, 2016
Full ArticleCareer DevelopmentTime Management
Task Batching: The Productivity Secret of Elite Performers
Explains how grouping similar tasks together—email, phone calls, creative work—minimizes the cognitive cost of context switching. Newport draws on research showing that even brief mental blocks from switching tasks can cost up to 40% of productive time.
Classic Articles·7 min read·Oct 6, 2016
Full ArticleManagementProject Management
Risk Management in Projects: Identifying, Assessing, and Mitigating Threats
Presents a categorization of risks into preventable, strategic, and external types, each requiring different management approaches. Provides a practical framework for building risk management processes that go beyond compliance checklists to genuinely protect project outcomes.
Harvard Business Review·14 min read·Oct 1, 2016
Full ArticleProduct AnalyticsStrategyGrowth & Experimentation
The Customer Success Economy: Why Every Company Needs a Post-Sale Strategy
Magids, Zorfas, and Leemon present research showing that emotionally connected customers are 52% more valuable than merely satisfied ones. The article introduces a lexicon of emotional motivators and demonstrates how companies can systematically identify, measure, and cultivate emotional connections to drive customer lifetime value.
Harvard Business Review·15 min read·Oct 1, 2016
Full ArticleUser ResearchProduct DesignUX Design
Customer Journey Mapping: A Complete Guide
Kaplan provides a comprehensive guide to creating customer journey maps, from defining scope and gathering research to visualizing touchpoints and identifying pain points. The article distinguishes between current-state and future-state maps and explains how journey mapping drives organizational alignment around the customer experience.
Nielsen Norman Group·13 min read·Jul 31, 2016
Full ArticleLeadershipManagementCareer Development
What Great Listeners Actually Do
Zenger and Folkman's research on 3,500 managers challenges conventional wisdom about listening, showing that the best listeners are not passive sponges but active participants who ask questions and offer suggestions. The article identifies six levels of listening skill and demonstrates how great listening creates a safe environment for open discussion.
Harvard Business Review·7 min read·Jul 14, 2016
Full ArticleUI DesignProduct Design
Design Systems: Building for Scale
How to build modular UI systems through style guide driven development. Covers atomic design methodology (atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, pages), component libraries, design tokens, and the workflow for maintaining design consistency at scale. Essential reading for teams building products with consistent interfaces.
Smashing Magazine·12 min read·Jun 1, 2016
Full ArticleManagementAgile & ScrumProject Management
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Comprehensive guide to adopting agile methods. Agile started in software but now applies to manufacturing, marketing, HR, and C-suite strategy. Covers the conditions where agile works best (complex problems, uncertain requirements, creative solutions), how to start (begin with a pilot), and six practices of agile: lean staffing, small empowered teams, short cycles, active involvement, daily standups, rapid iteration.
Harvard Business Review·16 min read·May 1, 2016
Full ArticleCareer DevelopmentGrowth & Experimentation
Networking Effectively: Building Professional Relationships That Last
Addresses why many professionals find networking distasteful and provides research-backed strategies to overcome that aversion. Shows how reframing networking as learning and mutual benefit—rather than self-promotion—transforms it from a dreaded chore into a natural extension of genuine curiosity.
Harvard Business Review·11 min read·May 1, 2016
Full ArticleProduct AnalyticsStrategy
A Refresher on Return on Assets and Return on Equity
Gallo demystifies ROA and ROE for non-finance managers, explaining what these ratios measure, how to calculate them, and what they reveal about a company's performance. The article uses clear examples to show how these metrics help evaluate management effectiveness and compare companies across industries.
Harvard Business Review·7 min read·Apr 4, 2016
Full ArticleProduct StrategyStrategyGrowth & Experimentation
Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Transform the Economy
How platform businesses (Uber, Airbnb, Amazon) have upended traditional pipeline businesses. Platforms create value by facilitating exchanges between producers and consumers. Covers network effects, winner-take-all dynamics, platform governance, and the shift from resource control to resource orchestration. Essential reading in digital strategy and technology management courses.
Harvard Business Review·12 min read·Apr 1, 2016
Full ArticleLeadershipStrategyGrowth & Experimentation
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
Hoffman and Yeh introduce blitzscaling as the strategy of prioritizing speed over efficiency in the face of uncertainty, deliberately accepting the chaos of hyper-growth to capture winner-take-all markets. The article examines when blitzscaling makes sense, the organizational challenges it creates, and how companies like LinkedIn and Airbnb applied it.
Harvard Business Review·15 min read·Apr 1, 2016
Full ArticleAgile & ScrumProduct DesignUX Design
How Google Builds New Products Using Design Sprints
Knapp outlines the five-day design sprint process developed at Google Ventures for rapidly prototyping and testing new product ideas. The methodology compresses months of debate into a structured week of mapping, sketching, deciding, prototyping, and user testing to validate concepts before committing resources.
Classic Articles·14 min read·Mar 8, 2016
Full ArticleLeadershipManagementCase Studies
What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team
Duhigg chronicles Google's Project Aristotle, a multi-year research initiative to identify what makes teams effective. The surprising finding was that psychological safety, not talent composition or team structure, was the single most important factor, fundamentally shifting how organizations think about building high-performing teams.
Classic Articles·18 min read·Feb 25, 2016