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The same plain words, between covers.

Four field guides for the people actually making the thing: founders, product managers, product leaders. Built like a jigsaw, written from the operator's chair, and honest about exactly how each idea goes wrong.

In short

Alex Feltwell, founder of Product Pieces, has written four plain-English field guides for product people, all published June 2026: Product Pieces (product management) and its companion Product Pieces: AI Solutions (building with AI), plus two standalone guides: Where Your Product Lives (surface strategy) and Cold Start by Design (network effects). Each turns a hard part of the job into one-page concepts you can act on. All are on Amazon in Kindle, paperback and hardback.

Cover of Product Pieces: The plain-English field guide to product management by Alex Feltwell
Product Pieces · Book 1

Product Pieces

The plain-English field guide to product management — and how every idea goes wrong.

Most product failure isn't a failure of strategy. It's the basics, done vaguely.

100 one-page concepts, built like a jigsaw. Start with the corners (what a product even is, who it's for, what good looks like), then work out to the harder middle: retention, pricing, habits, leading a team. It covers both halves most books skip past: deciding what to build, and getting it built the Agile way. And it names, out loud, exactly how each idea goes wrong. The book the agency is named after.

323 pagesKindlePaperback
Read on Amazon
Cover of Product Pieces: AI Solutions by Alex Feltwell
Product Pieces · Book 2

Product Pieces: AI Solutions

The plain-English field guide to building with AI — and how every idea goes wrong.

Everyone wants to "add AI." Almost nobody can say what happens when it's wrong.

The jigsaw approach, rebuilt for AI. Corner pieces first: deterministic versus probabilistic, why models hallucinate. Then the higher-stakes ones: RAG versus fine-tuning, evals as the new unit test, observability and drift, cost per successful task, agents, audit trails, explainability, and governing AI when money, people or a regulated process is on the line. 113 concepts, one page each, analogy first and jargon second.

312 pagesKindlePaperbackHardback
Read on Amazon
Cover of Where Your Product Lives by Alex Feltwell
Surface strategy

Where Your Product Lives

Surface strategy for product managers — choosing where your product lives, and knowing when not to build at all.

You decided to build an app. You just can't remember deciding it.

The product decision nobody has a method for. The canon tells you whether to build, why, and how, not where. This short, sharp field guide turns "we need an app" back into a real decision: price the four taxes the business case forgets, run the earn-it test, choose from the whole menu (owned, in-context, conversational, ambient, programmatic, human), and get ahead of the agent shift. With documented cases (Figma, Wordle, Starbucks, Quibi) and a playbook you can run in twenty minutes.

151 pagesKindlePaperbackHardback
Read on Amazon
Cover of Cold Start by Design by Alex Feltwell
Network effects

Cold Start by Design

The product manager's method for building when the network isn't there yet.

Every book on network effects explains why networks win. This one tells you what to build before the network exists.

The missing build manual for the people actually making the thing: founders and product managers, not the strategists explaining it after the fact. A cold start is a design problem you engineer your way through, not a budget problem you spend your way out of: read the empty room, design single-player value worth using alone, engineer the moment a solo user becomes connected, win the hard side, and reach escape velocity. Ends with an eight-phase playbook, a 90-day plan and a full set of fill-in worksheets.

172 pagesKindlePaperbackHardback
Read on Amazon
The author

Written the way the work is done.

Alex Feltwell has spent twenty years building product in regulated platforms and consumer marketplaces, including the £10m Fidelity programme at Bravura, the UK's largest wealth migration, with more than a million accounts moved. He's Toptal Top 3%, founder of Atomise (named the #1 UK company on the Clutch 100 in 2025) and founder of Product Pieces.

He writes the way he works: plain words, no jargon for its own sake, and the bit other books leave out: exactly how each idea goes wrong. The books and the agency share one belief — get the basics sharp, and most of the clever stuff takes care of itself.

Alex's Amazon author page →

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