Productstein — Coming September 2026

About the Book

Every product is a creation story. And every creation story is, at its core, a story about what happens next. Productstein traces the parallel between the things we build and the mythology of the made thing that outgrows its maker -- from Mary Shelley's laboratory to your latest launch.

Through five acts and five mythic interludes, this book examines the full arc of product creation: the ambition that starts it, the assembly that shapes it, the moment it takes on a life of its own, the loss of control that follows, and the reckoning that demands we answer for what we've made.

This is not a how-to. It's an autopsy and a mirror. For anyone who has ever shipped something into the world and watched it become something they didn't intend.

Format Hardcover

Pages 230

Release September 2026

Architecture

Five Acts. Five Interludes. Twenty Chapters.

Act I

Belief · Obsession

Interlude

The Workshop

Act II

Stitching · Taste · Instinct

Interlude

The Stitch

III

Act III

Identity · Breath · Personality

Interlude

Animation

Act IV

Life · Exposure · Noise · Fear · Scale · Power · Consequence

Interlude

The Watching

Act V

Release · Aftermath · Integration · Stewardship · Compulsion

Interlude

The Ice

Advance Praise

"I've read every book about building products. This is the first one that told the truth about what building products does to the person who builds them."

-- Mariana Voss

Venture Partner & Former Chief Product Officer

"Every record I've ever made has a moment where it stops being mine. McLemore found the exact words for that feeling -- and then kept going until it hurt."

-- Theo Adeyemi

Grammy-nominated producer & songwriter

"The mythic interludes hit me the way the best short films do -- quiet, precise, devastating. This isn't a business book. It's literature that happens to understand business."

-- Lena Zhao

Independent filmmaker, Sundance alumna

"McLemore writes about products the way architects talk about buildings -- as things that outlive your intentions and reshape the people inside them."

-- Rafael Mendes

Creative Director & Industrial Designer

"Productstein does what the best nonfiction does: it takes something you thought you understood and makes you see it for the first time. I finished it in one sitting and immediately started over."

-- Claire Adler

Author of The Weight of Making

"I built a company that touched twenty million users. Reading this book, I finally understood what that meant -- for them and for me."

-- David Okonkwo

Founder & CEO, two-time exit

"There's a passage in Act IV about the moment your creation no longer recognizes you. I had to put the book down. It was too close. That's how you know it's real."

-- Sable Monroe

Singer-songwriter & visual artist

The Author

Christopher McLemore

Chris is a product manager, early-stage investor, and writer who has spent his career in and adjacent to Silicon Valley -- working at Apple, Meta, and IDEO while also helping entrepreneurs find product-market fit. He has spent years inside things where decisions travel farther than the people who make them. Close enough to feel their weight. Far enough to see how little of the story survives.

He grew up on classic films, 16-bit video games and LEGO blocks -- in worlds that could be taken apart and rebuilt with imagination. He picked up a habit of playing movie soundtracks while working, not as background noise but as design. He has always experienced building as scoring: finding the rhythm underneath the logic, the emotional arc beneath the work.

He wrote Productstein because he could not find a book that described building as it actually feels: obsessive, philosophical, consequential, unfinished. Not as a sequence of steps. As a transformation.