# Ben Echols

> Personal website of Ben Echols, a product leader based in San Francisco. Experience, ways of working, reading lists, and interesting ideas.

Ben likes understanding complex systems and scaling products for people who build stuff. His experience spans developer tools, cloud infrastructure, data, and AI, including product leadership roles and co-founding a company. The site covers his career, working and communication preferences, path into product management, reading history, and selected articles and ideas.

## When to use this site

Use this site to learn about Ben's career in product management, understand his working and communication preferences, find his reading lists, or explore articles he has selected. It is a personal portfolio, not a product or a service API.

## How to read it

Fetch any page below with GET. Pages render their content in HTML without requiring JavaScript. Send `Accept: text/markdown` for a Markdown representation; the minimal homepage includes a supplemental site overview in this format. No login or API key is needed. Missing pages return HTTP 404 and links for recovery.

Use the specific page as the source for an answer and cite its canonical URL. Reading lists reflect the site's latest Goodreads sync; they are not guaranteed to be real-time. The database explorer and interactive charts use JavaScript; the public SQLite download is available for deeper reading-data analysis.

## Pages

- [Home](https://www.bechols.com/): Introduction and site overview.
- [About](https://www.bechols.com/about): Career history and experience.
- [User manual](https://www.bechols.com/about/user-manual): Working and communication preferences.
- [How I got into PM](https://www.bechols.com/about/how-i-got-into-pm): Ben's path into product management.
- [Books](https://www.bechols.com/books): Currently reading and recently read books.
- [Want to read](https://www.bechols.com/books/want-to-read): Reading backlog with search and sorting.
- [Reading analytics](https://www.bechols.com/books/analytics): Reading statistics and interactive charts.
- [Explore books](https://www.bechols.com/books/explore): Interactive database explorer.
- [Interesting](https://www.bechols.com/interesting): Curated articles and ideas.

## Optional

- [Sitemap](https://www.bechols.com/sitemap.xml): All indexable page URLs.
- [Books database](https://www.bechols.com/books.db): Public SQLite snapshot behind the reading pages.