Sources and further reading (2 of 2)

On questions and briefs

Warren Berger, "The Secret Phrase Top Innovators Use", Harvard Business Review, September 2012. The Basadur and "how might we" history, told properly.

Clayton Christensen, Scott Cook, Taddy Hall, "Marketing Malpractice: The Cause and the Cure", Harvard Business Review, December 2005. The milkshake study. Retold at book length in Competing Against Luck, 2016.

On pitching

Jenny Lindblad, Pitching Made Simple, weekly newsletter at jennylindblad.com. Chapters 23 and 24 adapt her four elements, her recovery sequence, and her Q&A thinking, with her issue numbers cited on each page. Short, practical, free. The single best follow for the pitching half of this method.

On decisions

Jeff Bezos, Letters to Shareholders, Amazon, 2015 and 2016. aboutamazon.com. Two-way doors, and disagree and commit.

Colin Bryar and Bill Carr, Working Backwards, 2021. Amazon's written-decision culture, if you want the deep end of the one-pager idea.

C. Northcote Parkinson, "Parkinson's Law", The Economist, 1955. Why the clock beats goodwill, sixty years before anyone said "timebox".

On the parallel build and synthetic users

Steven P. Dow, Alana Glassco, Jonathan Kass, Melissa Schwarz, Daniel L. Schwartz, Scott R. Klemmer, "Parallel Prototyping Leads to Better Design Results, More Divergence, and Increased Self-Efficacy", ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 2010. The experiment behind Chapter 21.

Steven P. Dow, Julie Fortuna, Dan Schwartz, Beth Altringer, Daniel L. Schwartz, Scott R. Klemmer, "Prototyping Dynamics: Sharing Multiple Designs Improves Exploration, Group Rapport, and Results", CHI, 2011. The team half of the evidence.

David Jansson and Steven Smith, "Design Fixation", Design Studies, 1991. Why the first idea anchors.

Jakob Nielsen and Jan Maurits Faber, "Improving System Usability Through Parallel Design", IEEE Computer, 1996. The merge finding; summarised on nngroup.com as "Parallel & Iterative Design + Competitive Testing = High Usability", 2011.

Murphy, Floresca, Fu and Linsey, "Comparing parallel and iterative prototyping strategies during engineering design", Research in Engineering Design, 2022. The modern replication.

Maria Rosala and Kate Moran, "Synthetic Users: If, When, and How to Use AI-Generated 'Research'", Nielsen Norman Group, 2024. Read this before you trust an AI tester.

The Good, "We Tested 6 AI Research Tools Against Real Users", thegood.com, 2026. The practitioner head-to-head.

uxia.app. The synthetic testing platform used as the example in Chapter 21.

From my own desk

The long-form articles behind this book are free at productbuildday.com/resources: what a Product Build Day is, how one runs step by step, how to define a good challenge, how to run the build hours, testing a business idea before and after you build, and the Lightning Decision Jam comparison. The playbook updates land there first.