Fathom

References

Where to go for more, organised by the level each source serves. Every link here returned a live page when checked on 12 October 2026. Anything that could not be reached from a plain request was left out rather than quoted from memory, which is why some well known names are missing.

A note on how to use this. The sources below are not a reading list to work through. They are places to go when a specific lesson raised a question this course deliberately stopped short of answering, and the right time to open one is when you have a decision in front of you, not before.

Foundations: the product function#

SourceWhat it is good for
SVPG articlesMarty Cagan on product teams, discovery and the difference between feature teams and empowered ones
Product TalkTeresa Torres on continuous discovery and interviewing. The most practical writing on discovery habits
Lenny’s NewsletterBroad, interview driven, strongest on growth and career questions
Melissa PerriStrategy, product operations and the build trap
John CutlerSystems thinking about how product organisations actually behave
Shape UpA complete, opinionated alternative to sprint planning. Worth reading even if you adopt none of it
Atlassian agile guidesPlain descriptions of the ceremonies, useful when you need the standard version of a term

Foundations: strategy, pricing and business writing#

SourceWhat it is good for
StratecheryBen Thompson on why companies compete the way they do. The best standing education in strategy
Benedict Evans essaysTechnology shifts and market structure, written for people who have to make decisions
A Smart BearJason Cohen on pricing, positioning and early stage decisions, with unusual rigour
Paul Graham essaysEarly stage product and company judgement
Derek SiversShort, clear pieces on deciding what not to do
Tomasz TunguzSoftware business economics, usually with the arithmetic shown

Foundations: design and technical literacy#

SourceWhat it is good for
Nielsen Norman GroupUsability research, written up properly. The source most design claims trace back to
Laws of UXThe named heuristics, each with its actual origin
Inclusive ComponentsAccessible interface patterns, built up from first principles
WCAGThe accessibility standard itself, which is what a procurement review will cite
web.dev learnHow the web platform actually works, including performance
MDN HTTPThe reference for requests, caching and status codes
Martin FowlerArchitecture vocabulary, written so a non engineer can follow it
System Design PrimerA long, free walk through the components in the technical foundations topic

Basic and Intermediate: what a model is, and building with one#

SourceWhat it is good for
Anthropic docsPrimitives, tool use, context handling, prompt caching, and current model behaviour
Anthropic engineeringHow agents, context and evaluation are built in practice rather than in principle
Anthropic cookbookRunnable examples, which is the fastest way to understand a primitive
OpenAI cookbookThe same, from the other side. Worth reading both
Model Context ProtocolThe integration layer from the agents topic, specified properly
Chip HuyenAI engineering as a discipline, including the parts that are systems rather than models
Eugene YanApplied machine learning and LLM systems, strong on patterns and tradeoffs
Simon WillisonThe most reliable running commentary on what models can newly do, and what broke
The BatchA weekly summary that is accurate and does not overclaim
LangChain docsVocabulary for chains, agents and tools, whether or not you use the framework
Pinecone learnRetrieval explained carefully, including why it fails
Weaviate docsAnother retrieval perspective, with the hybrid search detail
Elastic Search LabsSearch quality from people who did search before it was called retrieval

Advanced: evaluation, safety and lifecycle#

SourceWhat it is good for
Hamel HusainThe clearest practical writing on building evals that are actually used
OpenAI evals guideThe mechanics of defining and running an eval
openai/evalsA real eval harness to read rather than imagine
LangfuseTracing and evaluation, open source, good conceptual docs
BraintrustEval tooling with an opinionated and well explained workflow
Arize PhoenixTracing and evaluation with a strong focus on retrieval quality
LangSmithDataset, trace and regression workflow
OWASP Top 10 for LLM ApplicationsThe standard reference for prompt injection and the rest of the attack surface
NIST AI Risk Management FrameworkWhat a governance conversation will be benchmarked against
EU AI Act explorerThe text, searchable, for the transparency duties lesson
Anthropic researchWhere model behaviour claims come from
Meta AI researchOpen weights model work
DeepMind researchFrontier research, useful for knowing what is coming
arXivThe primary source for everything above, and usually not where to start

Expert: measurement, experiments and money#

SourceWhat it is good for
Evan Miller on A/B testingSample size, sequential testing and the peeking problem, with calculators
Statsig docsExperiment mechanics, and a clear explanation of what the statistics are doing
Amplitude blogProduct analytics definitions and cohort practice
Mixpanel blogThe same, with different conventions, which is itself instructive
PostHog handbookAn entire company operating manual written in public
Reforge blogGrowth models and retention, the most structured writing in this area
Andrew ChenGrowth loops, marketplaces and network effects
Brian BalfourChannel and product fit, and why growth tactics fail to transfer
Bessemer AtlasCloud business benchmarks with the methodology stated
SaaStrOperating detail on sales, pricing and scaling, high volume and uneven
The Analytics Setup GuidebookHow a data stack is actually assembled, free and complete
dbt docsMetric definitions as code, which is the fix for the two dashboards problem

Sectors#

SourceWhat it is good for
Stripe docsThe best written documentation in payments, and an education in money movement
Plaid docsBank data access, and the constraints that shape fintech products
Shopify devWhat an ecommerce platform permits and forbids
HL7 FHIRThe healthcare interoperability standard every health product integrates against
a16z Marketplace 100Marketplace structure and scale, with real numbers
FCAA regulator’s own material, which is more readable than its reputation suggests
Federal ReservePayments and banking infrastructure in the United States
GDPR textThe regulation itself, searchable by article

Books worth the time#

No links, because editions and sellers change. These are the ones whose arguments recur across this course.

BookWhy
Inspired, Marty CaganThe clearest statement of what product teams are for
Continuous Discovery Habits, Teresa TorresDiscovery as a weekly practice rather than a phase
Trustworthy Online Controlled Experiments, Kohavi, Tang and XuThe definitive book on experimentation, and the source of most A/B folklore
The Mom Test, Rob FitzpatrickHow to ask questions that cannot be answered politely
Monetizing Innovation, Ramanujam and TackePricing as a design input rather than an afterthought
Good Strategy Bad Strategy, Richard RumeltWhy most strategy documents contain no strategy
AI Engineering, Chip HuyenThe systems view of building with models
Thinking in Systems, Donella MeadowsWhy interventions produce the opposite of what was intended

What is deliberately not here#

Certification programmes, prompt engineering courses, and anything selling a framework as a career. The useful material in this field is written by people describing what they did, and it is free.

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