Stuff I Keep Rereading

Diego Navarro

@turbochargediego

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This is the deep-cut playlist I end up DM’ing PM friends after we’ve finished complaining about roadmaps and start asking, “Okay but why are users like this?” It’s a mashup of behavioral econ, HCI, and old‑school software papers that still dunk on most Medium think pieces. None of these are beach reads, but every one of them has paid rent in my brain (and in a couple OKRs). Skim the abstracts, steal the mental models, and suddenly half your “product instincts” have citations.

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Stuff I Keep Rereading — 5 items
Name	Field	Year	Author(s)	Core idea	Why I care	Great for	Key concept to Google	Difficulty
1Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk	Behavioral economics	1979	Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky	People value gains and losses asymmetrically, evaluate outcomes relative to a reference point, and overweight low probabilities.	Any time someone asks why users won’t switch to our clearly better thing, I mentally pull up this paper; it explains loss aversion and status quo bias better than any slide I’ve ever made.	Pricing changes, migration plans, churn prevention, and messaging around “upgrade” flows instead of hard switches.	Value function and loss aversion in prospect theory	Medium—mathy in spots but the intuition is gold once you push through.
2A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice	Decision theory / organizational behavior	1955	Herbert A. Simon	Real humans and firms don’t optimize perfectly; they satisfice under bounded rationality and limited information.	This is my antidote to over‑fit dashboards—reminds me that both our users and our teams are hacking their way to “good enough,” not solving global optimization problems.	Scoping MVPs, designing defaults, and arguing against yet another complex configuration screen.	Bounded rationality and satisficing	Medium—old‑school econ prose but very readable if you’re caffeinated.
3The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two	Cognitive psychology	1956	George A. Miller	Working memory has a limited capacity (around 7 ±2 chunks), which constrains how much information people can process at once.	Whenever a settings page starts looking like a CVS receipt, I think of this and start deleting options like I’m over the salary cap.	Navigation design, form design, and deciding how many choices to put on a screen before users mentally bail.	Chunking in short‑term memory	Low—surprisingly fun read for something older than my parents’ first car.
4The Strength of Weak Ties	Social network theory / sociology	1973	Mark S. Granovetter	Loose, “weak” social connections are disproportionately powerful for spreading information and creating opportunities.	Explains why tiny social features (follows, lightweight sharing, referrals) can outperform giant in‑product billboards when you’re trying to grow.	Referral flows, virality loops, B2B invite mechanics, and anything community‑ish.	Bridging vs bonding social capital	Medium—classic sociology style, but the main punchline is super portable.
5No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering	Software engineering	1987	Frederick P. Brooks Jr.	Some complexity in software is essential to the problem itself; tools and processes mainly chip away at accidental complexity, so there’s no single magic fix.	Great reality check when someone thinks a new framework, methodology, or AI tool is going to save the release—helps you separate hard product problems from tooling drama.	Planning big rewrites, discussing tech debt with non‑engineers, and saying “no” to silver‑bullet vendor pitches.	Essential vs accidental complexity in software	Medium—short but dense; worth a slow pass.