Is Your Workflow Too Fast? 4 Books on the Art of Friction-Maxxing for PMs

You shipped the feature on time. The sprint velocity looked great. Your stakeholders nodded approvingly at the dashboard full of green checkmarks. And six weeks later, you're rebuilding everything because nobody stopped to ask whether you were solving the right problem.

Welcome to the hidden cost of speed.

Product management culture has become obsessed with velocity. Ship fast. Fail fast. Move fast and break things. The PM who clears the most tickets wins. Except — that's not actually true. The PM who makes the fewest catastrophically wrong decisions wins. And those decisions almost always happen when someone was moving too fast to think.

"Friction-maxxing" sounds like a joke, but the concept is deadly serious. The best PMs aren't the ones sprinting through their backlogs. They're the ones who deliberately slow down at critical moments — who introduce intentional friction into workflows designed to eliminate it.

These four books explain why that works and how to do it without killing your career in the process.

'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman

'Thinking, Fast and Slow' by Daniel Kahneman explains the neuroscience behind why friction-maxxing works. Kahneman spent decades researching how the human brain makes decisions, and his findings should terrify anyone making product choices at speed.

Your brain has two systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, and intuitive — it's what fires when you glance at a dashboard and "just know" what to prioritise. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and logical — it's what you need for complex decisions with long-term consequences. The problem is that System 1 feels confident even when it's wrong, and it takes effort to engage System 2.

When PMs operate in constant fast-mode, they're making System 1 decisions all day. That works fine for routine choices. It's catastrophic for strategic ones. Kahneman documents the cognitive biases that emerge when we don't slow down: anchoring on the first number we hear, confirming what we already believe, overweighting recent experiences.

Friction-maxxing is essentially a System 2 forcing function. When you introduce deliberate friction into your workflow — mandatory waiting periods before decisions, required devil's advocate reviews, structured frameworks that slow you down — you're creating the conditions where your brain can actually think instead of just react.

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'Essentialism' by Greg McKeown

'Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less' by Greg McKeown introduces the ultimate form of friction: the word "no."

McKeown's argument is simple but radical. Most of what we do doesn't matter. We spread ourselves across dozens of initiatives because saying yes is easier than saying no, and then we wonder why nothing seems to move the needle. The essentialist approach means ruthlessly eliminating everything except the vital few things that actually create value.

For PMs, this is existentially important. Your job isn't to build everything stakeholders request. Your job is to figure out which requests would actually matter if built — and protect your team from the rest. Every feature you don't build is time and attention preserved for features that could transform the product.

McKeown provides frameworks for evaluating opportunities that force you to slow down and think critically. Instead of asking "Is this a good idea?" you ask "Is this the most important thing I could be doing right now?" That question introduces friction because the honest answer is usually no, and then you have to have uncomfortable conversations.

The book also addresses the social pressure to move fast. McKeown acknowledges that essentialists often look less productive in the short term because they're not constantly shipping. The payoff comes in outcomes — fewer things, done better, with actual impact.

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'Deep Work' by Cal Newport

'Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World' by Cal Newport makes the case that speed itself is often an illusion. What feels fast — answering emails immediately, jumping between tasks, staying "responsive" — actually produces less output than dedicated blocks of focused time.

Newport distinguishes between deep work and shallow work. Deep work is a cognitively demanding effort performed without distraction. Shallow work is logistical stuff that doesn't require intense focus. Most PMs spend their days drowning in shallow work and wonder why they never have time for strategic thinking.

The friction here is structural. Newport advocates for ritualising deep work: scheduled blocks where you're genuinely unavailable, not just "trying to focus" while Slack stays open. For PMs, this might mean mornings blocked for roadmap thinking, or one day per week with no meetings. The friction is in enforcing these boundaries against a culture that expects constant availability.

What makes this book essential for the friction-maxxing philosophy is Newport's evidence that deep work produces exponentially more value than shallow work. The PM who disappears for four hours and emerges with a clear strategy beats the PM who spent those four hours "staying on top of things."

📘 Protect deep focus with Headway.

'Upstream' by Dan Heath

'Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen' by Dan Heath explains why fast workflows create more work, not less.

Heath's central metaphor is perfect for PMs: most organisations spend their time pulling drowning people out of the river instead of walking upstream to find out who's pushing them in. Reactive work feels urgent and heroic. Proactive work feels slow and boring. But proactive work is how you actually solve problems.

For product managers, this translates directly to the difference between shipping features that address symptoms versus shipping features that address root causes. Fast workflows push you toward symptoms because they're visible and urgent. Slow, deliberate analysis reveals the upstream problems that, once solved, eliminate entire categories of downstream fires.

Heath profiles organisations that made the shift from reactive to proactive, and the pattern is consistent: it requires slowing down. You have to resist the pressure to immediately "do something" and instead invest time in understanding the system. That feels like friction against the need to ship. It's actually the only way to stop rebuilding the same features over and over.

The book provides frameworks for upstream thinking that PMs can apply directly: looking for patterns in support tickets, asking "why" multiple times before accepting a problem definition, and building feedback loops that surface issues before they become emergencies.

📘 Anticipate problems early with Headway.

Your competitive advantage is the willingness to slow down

Here's the uncomfortable truth: the PMs who burn out fastest are often the ones who look most productive. They're shipping constantly. They're responsive. They're on top of everything. And they're making decisions so quickly that they don't have time to notice when those decisions are wrong.

The friction-maxxing approach isn't about becoming lazy or unresponsive. It's about recognising that speed is a tool, not a goal. Some decisions need to happen fast. Strategic decisions — the ones that determine whether your product succeeds or fails — need to happen carefully.

Newport teaches you to protect your time for meaningful work. Kahneman explains the cognitive science behind why fast decisions go wrong. McKeown gives you permission to do less. Newport (again) shows you how to structure deep focus. Heath reveals how upstream thinking prevents downstream disasters.

You don't need to read all four this week. Pick the one that addresses your biggest weakness. If you're burned out and moving constantly, start with 'Slow Productivity.' If you say yes to everything, start with 'Essentialism.' If you're always fighting fires, start with 'Upstream.'

The best PMs in 2026 won't be the fastest. They'll be the ones who learned when to add friction — and had the discipline to actually do it.

📘 Ready to slow down strategically? Start building your friction-maxxing toolkit with Headway.