A working draft of what the job actually is.
None of these are laws in the legal or scientific sense. A few have empirical backing; most are named patterns that every working PM eventually meets in the wild. The common thread: each one will change a decision you make next Tuesday.
I've spent enough time in product meetings watching smart people rediscover the same lessons the hard way — the estimate that slipped for the reason the last three estimates slipped, the metric that rotted the moment it became an OKR, the "small addition" from a VP that quietly reshaped the quarter — to start writing them down. This site is that notebook.
It's a working draft, not a canon. Some entries are classical frameworks (Kano, JTBD, RICE). Some are named cognitive effects (Peak-End, Zeigarnik, IKEA). Some are sharp observations someone once tweeted that landed hard enough to survive. All of them shape product decisions, and all of them are easier to recognise once you know their name.
How to use it
There's no one right way. You can read it front-to-back like a reference, browse by category when you have a feel for the shape of the problem, or jump to the Situation Finder if you already know what you're dealing with and need the laws that apply. Some specific starting points:
The seven categories
Every law is tagged with one of seven groups. The grouping isn't rigid — a lot of laws legitimately span two or three — but each entry sits where it's most useful to look for it.
- Strategy — the shape of the bet. Prioritisation, positioning, the tier of features you're choosing to ship, the axis you're choosing to compete on.
- Decisions — the mental traps that quietly distort judgement. Bias, anchoring, sunk cost, confirmation, and the mechanics of how groups talk themselves into things.
- Discovery — how you learn what's true about users. Interviews, research design, the gap between what people say and what they do.
- Design — the UX laws: attention, choice, motion, memory. The principles that decide whether a flow feels obvious or painful.
- Growth — retention, virality, onboarding, the shape of the funnel. The laws that apply when you're trying to move a number.
- Teams — how the people building the thing actually behave. Brooks, Conway, Dunbar, Parkinson — the laws of team physics.
- Stakeholders — the politics of getting it shipped. HiPPOs, escalating commitment, IKEA effect, the laws of people who don't report to you but can block you.
Career stage tags
Each law is also tagged with a career-stage hint — early-career, experienced, or leadership. This isn't a ranking. It's a signal about when the law tends to land hardest. Pareto is something a PM on day one should know. HiPPO politics, Escalating Commitment, and Chesterton's Fence tend to land with the most force once you've been burned by them at least once. Use the filter to match the stage you're in, or ignore it and read freely.
Why I built it
Partly because I got tired of pretending I remembered what Goodhart's Law actually said. Partly because the best product decisions I've seen come from people who have a wide vocabulary of named patterns and the self-awareness to notice when one applies. And partly because a field guide is more useful than a textbook — you keep it close, you dip in when you need it, and every entry is short enough to read before the meeting starts.
If a law you live by isn't here, send it over. Origin, one-line summary, and a real example if you have one.
Built by a product manager. Corrected by product managers who found something wrong.