My December 2025 best business reads roundup
social signals 2025_v5 – Matthew Stasoff
From the creator of the best slides of 2024 comes the most brilliant deck of 2025. If you care about Internet culture, this is essential reading.
/What Will a UX Designer Do in 2026?
Design is more than code – Karri Saarinen
What does it mean to be a designer in tech today? How do we keep instinct alive as tools evolve? A sharp perspective from the co-founder of one of the best-designed digital products out there.
Systems That Design Themselves – Giulio Rusciano
On the same topic, with a different angle: why you should design the cognitive layer (the logic that drives behavior) before even deciding how a product looks.
/Leadership Notes for 2026
A profile of Josh Woodward that credit his leadership style with getting Google’s ship its best AI products. He built a system where employees flag internal roadblocks directly to Labs team members, who actually resolve them – bypassing bureaucracy. Is this the management reset tech needs?
Role of a PM at Plaid – Zachary Perret
I can relate to this description of founder-first mindset for product managers, straight from Plaid’s CEO.
What happens when the coding becomes the least interesting part of the work - Obie Fernandez, Medium
A smart take: coding agents don’t just automate – they force teams to articulate the senior thinking that often goes undocumented.
/AI Beyond the Hype
The Normalization of Deviance in AI – Johann Rehberger
Too many AI organizations confuse the absence of headline-grabbing attacks with the presence of security. A wake-up call for 2026.
The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI – Cory Doctorow
Are machines using humans as tools? A provocative analogy—and a speech full of sharp insights, from the creator of the word “enshittification".
Bonus read: Your holiday dinner conversation starter:
52 things I learned in 2025 – Tom Whitwell, Medium
(Photo of the month: on December 14th, the pioneering American maker of the Roomba, iRobot – once the leader in robot vacuums – said that it had filed for bankruptcy and that control of the company would be taken over by its Chinese supplier)
Originally shared as a LinkedIn post. Check it out here.
