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Teaching

Courses in product, cities, and systems

Two tracks, one practitioner's perspective. An academic series for dual-listed undergraduate and graduate audiences — with reading lists, instructor guides, and session-by-session facilitation notes. And practitioner seminars drawn directly from the work: short-form, craft-first, no classroom required.

Four courses. One through-line.

Technology shapes space. Space shapes behavior. Behavior shapes products. A four-course academic series tracing that chain — from the living room to the city to the org chart. Each course is designed for dual-listed undergraduate and graduate audiences, with full reading lists and instructor materials.

Course 01

Technology, Space & Society

How do technologies reshape the spaces we inhabit? A 15-week seminar tracing the television, the automobile, the smartphone, and ambient AI through the built environment using STS frameworks.

Course 02

Urban Systems & Product Design

Cities as complex systems; products as interventions. A seminar for planners, MBAs, and engineers building technology for urban environments. Includes a half-day field session.

Course 03

Product Management for Physical + Digital Systems

Why hardware is different. A skills-first course covering BOM modeling, firmware strategy, supply chain, and the full arc of a physical-digital product lifecycle.

Course 04

Organizational Design for Product Teams

Organizations are products. A seminar applying Conway's Law, the Rule of Seven, and platform team theory to real product org design — from startups to enterprise to the agentic era.

For practitioners, not classrooms.

Short-form seminars drawn from practice. No reading lists or instructor guides — just the craft, direct.

Practitioner Seminar · Eight sessions

Storytelling for Product Managers

The craft of product narrative — from the five load-bearing elements of every story that holds, to making a narrative portable enough to survive being carried by others, to building the kind of ambient story that the organization eventually tells to itself.

About these courses

These seminars are designed for dual-listed undergraduate and graduate audiences. Each course runs fifteen weeks and includes session-by-session reading lists with separate tracks for undergraduates (1–3 anchor texts per session) and graduate students (6–10 texts, full scholarly apparatus). A facilitation guide for instructors and TAs is available as a PDF download on each course page.

The courses draw on the same practitioner perspective that runs through my writing: I have built technology that reshapes urban space, managed teams that scaled from four people to four hundred, and watched the consequences of design decisions ripple outward in ways that weren't visible at the time. That experience is the courses' primary practitioner resource — not a substitute for the scholarly literature, but a complement to it.

If you are an instructor interested in adopting or adapting these materials, I welcome correspondence at @arcktip or via the Connect page.