A special edition for the start of Q4: 4 write-ups worth a second read before planning season, and the books behind each one.
Every year around this time the energy at work changes. Q4 kicks off, the planning docs for next year start showing up in shared drives with blank sections waiting to be filled in, and whatever we committed to this year has one quarter left to land. I’m writing this from a week off with my family, and it’s a good reminder that time away from the keyboard is when I do my best reading and my best thinking about the year ahead.
So instead of a new numbered issue, this week is a special edition. Bookends pulls together 4 write-ups from this year that I think matter most heading into planning season, each with the books that sit behind it. The idea is to use them to close out this year’s work and to open next year’s plans, which is where the name comes from. Queue the books up now, while there’s still time to read them before the planning docs are due.
Show the Bridge, Not the Shore. Planning season is also vision season, and a lot of the visions we’ll read over the next 2 months will paint a beautiful destination with no path to it. This one is about drawing the path with the same care, and its shelf (Rumelt, Bungay, Duarte, and Lafley and Martin) is the best set I know for turning an ambition into a sequence of choices people can act on.
Prioritization Isn’t Real Until the Swap Is Named. Every plan for next year will add things, and fewer of them will say what comes off. That gap is where teams lose the time to do great work, and it usually traces back to leadership, myself included. If you’re writing a roadmap this quarter, I’d reread this one first.
The best planning I do all year happens on a couch with a book, weeks before anyone asks me for the doc.
Build and Maintain. Q4 is also when a lot of us rewrite how we describe our teams for next year’s planning docs. Role lines kept blurring all year, and this write-up offers a descriptor that can set the stage long before titles catch up. Shop Class as Soulcraft is the one I’d read on a weekend away from the laptop, and it’s the strongest argument I’ve found for putting “maintain” in the job at all.
Leverage Is What You Already Know. Next year, more designers and PMs will have an agent and write access to something they used to only look at. The best advice I heard all year about that moment was to resist becoming engineers and bring what we already know instead: how the product actually works, and the vocabulary of components and tokens. Continuous Discovery Habits pairs well with it, because the habits matter more once building gets cheap.
If you only read 4 books this quarter, here’s one from each shelf:
The shelf
Thank y’all for reading along. Regular issues pick back up once I’m back from this week off, there’s a holiday edition coming in December for looking back on the year, and if one of these books changes how you plan next year, I’d love to hear about it.