Every entity in the persona registry -- 171 named-human thought leaders and 7 composite archetypes. Filter by tier to see which voices receive the most active investment.
Product Thought Leader
Archetype
Composite of Torres, Cagan, Patton, Huryn. Discovery before delivery, outcomes over output.
Transformation Architect
Archetype
Composite of Kotter, Kersten, Perri, Smart, Schein. Transformation is architectural, not motivational.
Flow Engineer
Archetype
Composite of Reinertsen, Kersten, Skelton, DeGrandis, Goldratt. Flow is the unit of delivery health.
Systems Strategist
Archetype
Composite of Rumelt, Meadows, Lafley, Martin, Wardley. Strategy as diagnosis and leverage points.
Organizational Psychologist
Archetype
Composite of Edmondson, Schein, McGregor, Harvey, Janis, Peter. Safety before speed.
Visual Strategist
Archetype
Composite of Roam, Duarte, Gray, Brown, Patton. Drawing IS thinking, not decoration.
Engineering Excellence Advisor
Archetype
Composite of Fowler, Skelton, Beck, Ford, R. Martin. Bridge between engineering and organizational.
Adam Grant
Foundational
Organizational psychologist. Rethinking how we work through originals, givers, and productive disagreement.
A.G. Lafley
Foundational
Playing to Win choice cascade. Where to play, how to win, capabilities, management systems.
Annie Duke
Foundational
Decision quality under uncertainty. Thinking in bets, quitting strategy, and separating decisions from outcomes.
Dan Roam
Foundational
Napkin method -- six ways of seeing. Any problem can be drawn, any drawing can convince.
Donella Meadows
Foundational
Leverage points and system dynamics. Where to intervene in a system for maximum effect.
Jeff Gothelf
Foundational
Lean UX and Sense & Respond. Outcomes-based product management and organizational agility.
Jeff Patton
Foundational
User Story Mapping. Shared understanding, narrative-first planning, conversation tools not documentation.
Jim Collins
Foundational
Good to Great, Built to Last. Hedgehog concept, Level 5 leadership, flywheel effect.
Josh Seiden
Foundational
Outcomes Over Output. Lean UX co-author. The discipline of measuring behavior change, not feature delivery.
Manuel Pais
Foundational
Team Topologies co-author. Cognitive load, team interaction modes, platform-as-product.
Marty Cagan
Foundational
Product Operating Model. Empowered teams, feature factory diagnosis, discovery as risk reduction.
Matthew Skelton
Foundational
Team Topologies. Four team types, three interaction modes. Fast flow of change as organizing principle.
Mik Kersten
Foundational
Flow Framework. Project-to-product, four flow items, value stream measurement.
Petra Wille
Foundational
Strong Product People. PM coaching competency model and leadership development framework.
Richard Rumelt
Foundational
Strategy kernel -- diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent actions. The crux as strategy's starting point.
Roger Martin
Foundational
Integrative thinking and Playing to Win co-architect. The "both/and" strategist who holds opposing models in tension.
Taiichi Ohno
Foundational
Toyota Production System. Genchi genbutsu, waste elimination, pull systems. The root of lean.
Teresa Torres
Foundational
Opportunity-Solution Tree, continuous discovery habits, assumption mapping, interview snapshots.
W. Edwards Deming
Foundational
System of Profound Knowledge. 94% of problems are system problems. Variation, learning, cooperation.
Alexander Osterwalder
Primary
Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas. Visual business model prototyping.
Amy Edmondson
Primary
Psychological safety. The prerequisite for team learning, innovation, and performance.
Andy Grove
Primary
High Output Management. OKRs, strategic inflection points, only the paranoid survive.
April Dunford
Primary
Obviously Awesome. Positioning methodology -- competitive alternatives, unique value, ideal customer.
Ben Horowitz
Primary
The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Wartime CEO, peacetime CEO, culture as action.
Chip Heath
Primary
Made to Stick, Switch. Making ideas sticky, designing for behavior change.
Clayton Christensen
Primary
Innovator's Dilemma, Jobs to Be Done theory. Disruptive innovation mechanics.
Dan Heath
Primary
Switch, Upstream. Behavior change design, preventive problem-solving.
Daniel Kahneman
Primary
Thinking Fast and Slow. System 1/System 2, cognitive biases, prospect theory.
Daniel Pink
Primary
Drive. Autonomy, mastery, purpose as intrinsic motivation framework.
Dave Gray
Primary
Gamestorming, Connected Company. Innovation games and visual collaboration techniques.
David Maister
Primary
Managing the Professional Services Firm. Trusted Advisor equation, leverage models.
David Sibbet
Primary
Visual facilitation and graphic recording. Group process visualization pioneer.
Dominica DeGrandis
Primary
Making Work Visible. Five time thieves, WIP limits, flow time as customer metric.
Don Norman
Primary
Design of Everyday Things. Affordances, signifiers, human-centered design principles.
Donald Reinertsen
Primary
Product Development Flow. Cost of delay, queueing theory, batch size economics.
Douglas McGregor
Primary
Theory X vs. Theory Y. The most fundamental split in management philosophy.
Edgar Schein
Primary
Three-layer culture model. Artifacts, espoused values, basic assumptions. Clinical cultural diagnosis.
Eliyahu Goldratt
Primary
Theory of Constraints. The Goal. Find the bottleneck, exploit it, subordinate everything else.
Eric Ries
Primary
The Lean Startup. Build-measure-learn, validated learning, minimum viable product.
Frederick Brooks
Primary
Mythical Man-Month. No silver bullet, conceptual integrity, surgical team model.
Gene Kim
Primary
The Phoenix Project, DevOps Handbook. Three Ways, flow/feedback/learning.
Geoffrey Moore
Primary
Crossing the Chasm. Technology adoption lifecycle, whole product strategy.
Henri Lipmanowicz
Primary
Liberating Structures. 33 microstructures for group engagement and distributed control.
Irving Janis
Primary
Groupthink. How cohesive groups suppress dissent and make catastrophically bad decisions.
Jake Knapp
Primary
Sprint. Five-day process for solving big problems and testing ideas through prototyping.
James Macanufo
Primary
Gamestorming co-author. Innovation game design and visual collaboration exercises.
James Womack
Primary
The Machine That Changed the World. Lean manufacturing principles applied to knowledge work.
Jennifer Wagner
Primary
Product coaching methodology. Organizational product maturity assessment and team enablement.
Jerry Harvey
Primary
The Abilene Paradox. Organizations fail from inability to manage agreement, not disagreement.
Jez Humble
Primary
Continuous Delivery, Accelerate co-author. Deployment pipeline discipline, DORA metrics.
John Kotter
Primary
Eight-step change model, dual operating system. The structural DNA of staged transformation.
Jonathan Smart
Primary
Better Value Sooner Safer Happier. Antipattern/pattern lens for enterprise transformation.
Kaplan & Norton
Primary
Balanced Scorecard. Strategy maps, four-perspective measurement, strategy execution system.
Karen Martin
Primary
Value Stream Mapping. Organizational clarity, current-state/future-state analysis.
Keith McCandless
Primary
Liberating Structures co-creator. Distributed facilitation, inclusion as design principle.
Kent Beck
Primary
TDD, Extreme Programming. Engineering discipline as daily practice, not aspirational standard.
Kurt Lewin
Primary
Unfreeze-change-refreeze. Field theory, action research, group dynamics founder.
Laurence Peter
Primary
The Peter Principle. Promotion to incompetence as structural dysfunction, not individual failure.
Liz Wiseman
Primary
Multipliers. How the best leaders make everyone smarter vs. diminishers who drain capability.
Marc Stickdorn
Primary
This Is Service Design. Service blueprinting, journey mapping, design doing methodology.
Martin Fowler
Primary
Software architecture patterns, refactoring discipline, evolutionary architecture thinking.
Melissa Perri
Primary
Escaping the Build Trap. Product operations, strategy deployment, organizational product maturity.
Nancy Duarte
Primary
Data storytelling and presentation architecture. The sparkline -- narrative tension driving action.
Neal Ford
Primary
Building Evolutionary Architectures. Fitness functions, incremental change, anti-ossification.
Nicole Forsgren
Primary
Accelerate. DORA metrics, research-backed engineering performance measurement.
Nir Eyal
Primary
Hooked. Habit-forming product design, trigger-action-reward-investment loop.
Peter Senge
Primary
The Fifth Discipline. Learning organizations, systems thinking, mental models, shared vision.
Rob Fitzpatrick
Primary
The Mom Test. How to talk to customers without leading, how to learn from conversations.
Robert Cialdini
Primary
Influence. Six principles of persuasion -- reciprocity, scarcity, authority, consistency, liking, consensus.
Robert Martin
Primary
Clean Code, SOLID principles. Engineering craftsmanship standards and professional discipline.
Sam Kaner
Primary
Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Groan zone, convergent/divergent dynamics.
Seth Godin
Primary
Purple Cow, The Dip, Linchpin. Permission marketing, remarkable products, shipping creative work.
Simon Wardley
Primary
Wardley Mapping. Value chain evolution, situational awareness, strategic positioning.
Steve Blank
Primary
Customer Development. Four steps to epiphany, get out of the building, business model validation.
Sunni Brown
Primary
The Doodle Revolution. Visual thinking as legitimate cognition. Infodoodling as facilitation.
Tim Herbig
Primary
Product coaching, workshop facilitation, PM career development. Practitioner-oriented guidance.
Tony Fadell
Primary
Build. iPod/iPhone/Nest creation stories. Hardware-software product development lessons.
Angela Duckworth
Secondary
C. Todd Lombardo
Secondary
Christina Wodtke
Secondary
Dean Leffingwell
Secondary
Frederic Laloux
Secondary
Frederick Herzberg
Secondary
Henry Mintzberg
Secondary
Jakob Schneider
Secondary
Jeff Sutherland
Secondary
Kerry Patterson
Secondary
Kouzes & Posner
Secondary
Lenny Rachitsky
Secondary
Lisa Kay Solomon
Secondary
Marcus Buckingham
Secondary
Margaret Anne Storey
Secondary
Martin Lindstrom
Secondary
Mary Poppendieck
Secondary
Michael Bungay Stanier
Secondary
Michael Lewrick
Secondary
Michael Watkins
Secondary
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Secondary
Patrick Lencioni
Secondary
Renee Mauborgne
Secondary
Robert Greenleaf
Secondary
Tom Poppendieck
Secondary
Vishen Lakhiani
Secondary
William Bridges
Secondary