I found this a few years ago. I've read most of them.
If I'm honest: I can repeat a lot of the insights. But I haven't really applied them — not the way you would if the ideas had genuinely changed how you work.
Two things got in the way.
You can't apply what isn't relevant yet.
You read something genuinely useful — but you don't have a negotiation coming up, a reorg to navigate, a strategy decision on the table. The idea lands, and then quietly disappears.
You're reading alone.
Most people don't have someone who's deep enough in the same ideas to actually push back. So the insight never gets questioned, never gets applied to a real situation, never sticks.
The friction is the point.
In my MBA at ESMT Berlin, we have group sessions — sometimes on topics I know well, sometimes on things I'm genuinely unsure about. Either way, I find them more valuable than solo study.
The reason isn't the material. It's the friction. Other people's problems force you to apply ideas you wouldn't have reached on your own. A framework that felt abstract in a book becomes concrete when someone at the table has a real version of it in front of them.
Not more books. A structure that forces you to actually engage with the one you're reading.
A book that's worth your time, read with people who'll make you think harder about it.
The cohort is an attempt to bring that structure to PM reading. Read alongside product managers working on different problems than yours — with weekly sessions that force you to engage, not just consume.
You may not be able to apply every chapter to your job right now. But you'll leave having thought harder about it than you ever would have alone.
I tend to build the things I wish existed.
I'm a product manager and a previous founder. The pattern's always been the same: I run into a problem in my own life, can't find a clean answer, and end up making one.
This is one of those. I kept noticing that group discussion did more for my understanding of PM ideas than solo reading ever had — and that nothing out there was structured to take advantage of that. So I'm trying it.
Cohort 01 is the experiment. If it works, we run it again.