Reading Notes from My 2023 Shelf: Strategy, Curiosity, and Better Product Decisions

I revisited parts of my 2023 reading notes this quarter, and a few titles still directly shape how I make engineering decisions.

Books I keep coming back to

• Good to Great (4/5)
• Start with Why (5/5)
• Range (3/5)
• The Strangest Secret (4/5)
• The Last Question (3/5)

These books come from very different traditions, but they keep pointing to the same operating principle: choose clear direction, stay adaptable, and keep curiosity alive.

What this means for AI and iOS work

1. Start with user intent before model choice.
2. Design for adaptation, not one-time certainty.
3. Measure outcome quality, not feature novelty.
4. Keep architecture open to iteration.

Practical changes I made

• Better problem framing before implementation.
• Smaller experiments with explicit rollback rules.
• More cross-functional design reviews for AI-assisted flows.
• More attention to long-term maintainability over demo speed.

The reading takeaway is simple: durable product judgment is usually a compounding effect of clear principles, not clever one-off decisions.