A Short Book About Hats is not really about hats.
It's about the many roles we wear when we work together to make digital things - and what happens when we forget that other people are wearing hats too.
Written for designers, developers, product managers, and anyone involved in building software, the book explores collaboration as a lived, human practice rather than a process diagram. Through short chapters, light metaphors, and quietly practical observations, it looks at how empathy, communication, and shared understanding shape the quality of the things we make.
The metaphor
The "hats" are a way in. They represent perspectives, assumptions, responsibilities, and constraints - the invisible layers that sit on top of job titles. A designer's hat. A developer's hat. A stakeholder's hat. A user's hat. Sometimes we wear several at once. Sometimes we forget which one we're in. And sometimes we assume everyone else is wearing the same one we are.
The approach
Rather than offering frameworks to follow or rules to enforce, A Short Book About Hats invites reflection. It asks simple questions:
- What happens when we slow down?
- What do we miss when we optimise too early?
- How do small misunderstandings quietly grow into large, expensive problems?
The book is intentionally concise and approachable. Each chapter is designed to be read in a single sitting, making it as suitable for a quiet afternoon as it is for dipping into between meetings. It avoids jargon, diagrams, and absolutes, focusing instead on shared experiences that will feel familiar to anyone who has ever worked on a digital product with other humans involved.
At its heart
This is a book about making things together - imperfectly, thoughtfully, and with a little more care. Not by wearing the right hat, but by noticing which hat we're wearing, and being curious about everyone else's.
Availability
A Short Book About Hats is currently in development. Updates will be shared as they become available.
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