It’s live! The Anatomy of a Product, written as a field guide as to how to build better products, is available for your expert opinions and (hopefully kind!) reviews now.
After years of working with product teams, Sander Dur and I noticed a troubling pattern: for all the hype around “product-led” organizations, the reality is often chaotic and unhealthy. Frameworks get misapplied, features are shipped without a clear purpose, and many companies still struggle to define what their product really is. We wrote The Anatomy of a Product (or TAP as we call it, because it's too long to type into WhatsApp 17 times a day...) to confront these issues head-on. It became clear to us that the problem extends beyond any single team – it’s a systemic issue that rarely gets the holistic scrutiny it needs. Too often, there’s no shared understanding of why a product exists, leading teams to hammer out features for problems customers don’t even have. If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone, and it’s exactly the pain we set out to address.
We’ve seen products built on shaky foundations and endless workarounds – like houses on quicksand. We’ve watched role confusion sap team autonomy (e.g. the old Product Manager vs Product Owner debate) and witnessed how ignoring user feedback in favour of “just ship it” can steer a product right into the ground. These common dysfunctions can make product development frustrating for everyone involved. TAP exists to shine a light on these pitfalls and offer a cure.
Practical Takeaways
TAP is packed with actionable insights and hard-won lessons that we’ve both personally experienced. Here are a few examples of the principles you’ll find inside:
- Every product is temporary. No matter how successful or loved, every product will eventually reach an end. Embracing this truth isn’t pessimism – it’s responsibility, prompting you to plan with the full lifecycle in mind.
- Your job is not to ship features; it’s to create value. Shipping new things can never be the goal in itself. Sometimes creating value means building a new feature, but other times it means ending something that isn’t working. Killing a flawed feature can be as much an act of leadership as launching a new one.
- Metrics won’t always save you. Data is crucial, but it isn’t omniscient. Learn to read between the numbers and pay attention to the user signals that don’t show up on a dashboard. In product, intuition and data need to co-exist, not compete.
- You can say no. Not every idea, request, or deadline is worth your product’s time. It’s OK to push back – respectfully – on features that don’t serve a real user need or on arbitrary deadlines that could jeopardise quality. Saying “no” when necessary is actually an act of care for your product, your team, and yourself.
Ultimately, The Anatomy of a Product is our answer to the many frustrations product professionals face. We wrote it in a conversational, light-hearted style (yes, there’s a bit of humour in there) because building products is hard enough – a book about it shouldn’t feel like a chore to read. Our goal is to meet you where you are, whether you’re a newcomer eager to avoid common mistakes or a veteran looking for a fresh perspective. Think of this book as a conversation with two product practitioners swapping stories and remedies for healthier products.
We firmly believe that with the right approach, better is possible in product development. By understanding the “anatomy” of your product, you can diagnose issues more effectively and nurture its growth more deliberately. So, if you’re ready we invite you to give The Anatomy of a Product a read. It’s available as of today, and we couldn’t be more excited to finally share it with the product community. We hope it informs, inspires, and equips you to build products that not only function, but truly thrive.
Happy reading!
Ryan Brook & Sander Dur
Read more about the book below…
Products and services are, in many ways, alive. That’s the core idea behind the book’s extended metaphor: we examine products as if they were living organisms, with a full “human anatomy” of interdependent parts. Just as a healthy body has a strong skeleton, a heart pumping life to every limb, and nerves sensing pain and pleasure, a successful product has analogous components working in harmony.
- We start with the Spark of Life – the genesis of a product idea and why it truly exists. Without a clear purpose or “problem to solve,” a product has no heartbeat. (After all, “people are not waiting for a solution to a problem they don’t have”.)
- We then examine the Product DNA – the vision, context, and core values encoded into a product from the start. This DNA influences every decision and iteration to come.
From there, the book goes on to explore each major “organ system” of a product’s anatomy:
- The Skeleton: building the product’s foundation and architecture, because without solid bones, your product can’t stand upright for long.
- The Circulatory System: marketing and distribution, which circulate your product’s value to customers. Even the best product will fail if its value isn’t delivered to the market’s extremities.
- The Nervous System: interpreting signals through analytics, user feedback, and learning loops, so you can sense what’s working and what’s not. A product must learn and adapt, much like a body responding to stimuli.
- The Digestive System: intake and “nutrition” – how you ingest ideas, requirements, and feedback without choking on too much “junk food” (bad data or misaligned requests). This is about processing input into something useful and filtering out waste.
- The Respiratory System: customer support and communication. It’s the breath of the organization – inhale feedback, exhale trust. Healthy communication ensures your product team and users can breathe easy.
- The Reproductive System: brand expansion and product growth. How does your product “reproduce” into new markets or spawn new offerings without losing its identity? This chapter looks at scaling up and out sustainably.
Finally, we look at a product’s lifecycle. We cover the First Steps (go-to-market strategies for a new product’s launch), through to End of Life (deciding when to sunset a product or feature gracefully), and even Product Family dynamics (managing a portfolio of products so they complement rather than cannibalise each other). We devote chapters to Staying Lean – keeping your product healthy and fit by eliminating waste – and to Intuition – trusting the inner signal as a product maker when data alone isn’t enough. By the end, you’ll have a holistic view of your product as a living, breathing entity. As Radhika Dutt notes in her foreword, this approach “shows how the parts of a product work together and depend on each other,” helping you see your product as “a coherent, functioning whole.”
Who Is This Book For?
This book is for anyone who has felt the highs and lows of building products. We wrote it for:
- Product managers who are asked to "own" a product without truly having the organisational support or authority to make it successful.
- Product designers who keep fighting for coherence and great user experience, even as the roadmap fills up with compromises made by others.
- Engineers who see technical debt piling up but aren’t invited to the strategy discussions where direction is set.
- Product leaders and founders who care deeply about building better products and teams, but feel stuck with an org chart or process that isn’t working.