The full index
Frameworks
Every named framework pulled from the show — searchable, filterable, and structured down to the steps, examples, and mistakes.
483 frameworks
DHM Product Strategy
Delight customers in hard-to-copy ways that improve the economics
GEM Prioritization Model
Force-rank growth, engagement, and monetization before ranking the roadmap
Obviously Awesome Positioning Method
Build positioning from alternatives, differentiation, value, customers, and context.
Opportunity Solution Tree
Trace an outcome through customer opportunities to solutions and assumption tests.
Pre-Mortem with Tigers, Paper Tigers, and Elephants
Surface launch risks before failure makes them expensive
The Magic Box Paradigm
Let a buyer imagine the future, prove it, then price that future
The Modular Product-Led Growth Fit Test
Map each customer-journey stage to product automation or a human backstop.
The Product Ecosystem Trade-off Map
Map every actor, incentive, and interaction before choosing a product trade-off.
Vision-Mission-Strategy-Objectives Pyramid
Translate a long-term destination into near-term work the team can execute
Building State
Increase retention by letting users accumulate value they do not want to lose
Fish Where the Fish Are
Match your edge to an overlooked niche where customer economics support healthy margins.
Opportunity-Cost Prioritization
Choose the best use of leverage, not merely another positive return
PM Your Career Like a Product
Give your career a vision, roadmap, metrics, and review cycle.
Product-Led Readiness Gate
Require independent adoption and day-zero value before choosing PLG.
Quality-Growth Seesaw
Balance acquisition with a downstream signal that proves customers succeed
Reversibility and Second-Order Decision Review
Match decision rigor to reversibility and trace the consequences that follow
Three-Part Product Strategy
Unite an inspiring vision, a strategic framework, and a feasibility roadmap
Intentionality Before Experimentation
Set the product destination first, then use experiments to find the route.
Micro-Macro-Metagame Model
Manage execution, strategy, and the changing rules of the market at once
Platform Principles and Constituent Stack Rank
Rank who the platform serves before policy and design force a trade-off
The Customer-Problem Separation Review
Separate customer, business, and efficiency problems before choosing a solution.
The Strategy Choice Cascade
Five interlocking questions that force a strategy into an integrated, reinforcing whole.
Investment Plans and Quarterly Bets
Set an annual direction, empower quarterly bets, and abandon stale work
Magnitude and Reversibility Test
Match decision effort to the size of the stakes and the cost of reversal
One-Click Zoom-Out
Step back once from a local task to test the wider problem and assumptions
Six Rules for Goals and Alignment
Goals are a communication tool: three max, one that wins, intern-legible, painful, single-owned, and followed up.
The PLG Readiness Checklist
Fund growth with a real team, patient expectations, and usable evidence.
Three-Lever Growth Model
Choose the right motion for acquisition, retention, and monetization
Build AND Buy
Reframe build-vs-buy as build-and-buy: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% that differentiates.
Candidate Market Fit
Position yourself as a narrow spear, not a net — three-to-four attributes the market actually wants.
Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand
Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.
Column B Thinking
Plan from the dream future backward, not from the bricks in front of you.
Company-Product Fit
Prove a product belongs in your portfolio before chasing product-market fit
Competitor-as-Gift Ambition Reset
Turn a competitor's leap into permission to set a goal so ambitious your old way of working can't reach it
Conditional-Layer Validation
Reduce a consumer product to ~4 things that must be true and validate them one at a time
Curiosity Loops
Turn a hard decision into structured, contextual advice by asking the right people the right question.
Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)
Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.
Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design
Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.
Eigen Questions
Rank open questions by how many other questions they kill, then answer that one first.
Escaping the Low-Impact PM Death Spiral
Low-impact work begets low-impact work until layoffs — break the cycle by proactively claiming high-impact work.
Execution Beats Strategy
Perfect strategy with poor execution teaches you nothing. Good-enough strategy with perfect execution compounds.
Explore & Exploit at the Insight Level
Oscillate between finding the right mountain and climbing it — but do it insight by insight, not just at strategy level.
Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)
Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.
Founder Intuition Boundary
Trust instinct in proportion to how closely you match and understand the customer.
Four-Destination Backward Planning
Choose the destination, define what must be true, and plan backward
Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better
Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.
Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)
Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.
Growth Accounting
Measure net growth as new minus churned plus resurrected to find your real lever.
Hard-Bar Activation Metric Selection
Pick the activation metric only 5-15% of users hit, then decompose it into levers
Hard Things Are the Only Moat
Every moat gets crossed eventually — the one that lasts is a willingness to do what rivals won't
Human Takeoff and Landing Model
Let humans set direction and verify the landing while AI handles execution.
Impact Above All Else: The Two-Question Priority Loop
Two daily questions, driver-mapping, and back-of-envelope math before any project earns your time
Inflict Pain, With a Smile
Get acquired by becoming the competitor your buyer cannot ignore — while staying their friendliest partner
Input Metrics Over Output Metrics
Stop managing the revenue number. Instrument the controllable customer-experience inputs that produce it.
Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)
A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action
Macro / Middle-Range / Micro Research Portfolio
Sort every research question into three altitudes and starve the middle one that eats your team's time.
Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do
Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet
One-Step-Away Team Goals
Set your team's goal exactly one why-statement or one math operator away from a company goal.
Optimize Absolute Throughput, Not Local Conversion Rates
Goal teams on the total number of people who complete a funnel stage, never the conversion rate.
Physics-Then-Loops Growth Modeling
Map the fixed physics of your business first, then find the one underused lever inside them to change.
PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)
Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data
PMF for Candidates (People, Mission, Financials)
Evaluate a company you might join like an investor evaluates a deal — across People, Mission, and Financials.
PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product
Write a spec for your career: destination, metrics, milestones, and a measuring stick for every offer.
Present-Forward Product Strategy Playbook (Small-s)
A repeatable five-phase, 8–12 week process to turn scattered inputs into three focused strategic pillars.
Price Before Product: The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation
Have the pricing conversation months before launch and use it to prioritize what you build.
Problem-to-Pillar Down-Select
Cluster raw problems, flip them into opportunities, then rank on four criteria to pick exactly three pillars.
Product-Market Fit = Retention
There is one metric for product-market fit: do customers come back?
Product Principle Decision Filter
Use one clear product identity to settle thousands of feature decisions.
Proxy Metric Selection
Goal on simple short-term inputs you can prove drive the long-term output you actually want
Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two
Every launch drops one of three; software lets you drop quality only if you plan to earn it back
Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM) Validity Check
Verify your traffic split matches its design before trusting any experiment result
Scrape the Barnacles
Remove low-use features before their complexity spreads across the product
SEO Readiness Assessment
Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?
Sequential Growth Motion Layering
Add new growth motions without starving the engine that created demand
Skeleton Before the Makeup
Sequence early growth investment from site fundamentals up to awareness — never the reverse.
Strategic Inflection Point Reset
Detect the inflection point, choose the arena you can lead, and commit
Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage
Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies
Subscriber-First Sloth Mode
Brake acquisition before constrained supply breaks promises to current customers
The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist
Ten hard metrics to judge whether a company is worth betting your career on
The 4B Framework (100 Focus Points)
Split 100 focus points across Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter, Big Bets and Breaking Bad.
The 5-Question Stalled Growth Diagnostic
Diagnose why growth is slowing by asking five questions in strict priority order.
The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star
Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.
The Beachhead Segment Formula
Pick a first market that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and fits your crown jewels.
The Benefit-and-Barrier Power Test (To Be or Not to Be)
Only call it power if it delivers a cost/price benefit AND a barrier competitors can't erase.
The Breaking News Dress Rehearsal
Script and run a fake crisis end-to-end to stress test your product and your people at once
The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy
Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.
The Broken Equation Test
No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.
The Business Is an Equation
Model the whole business as one equation before optimizing any funnel leaf node.
The Carve-Out Cohort Turnaround
To fix a load-bearing product, secede from the metrics system with a small randomized cohort.
The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star
One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.
The Differentiation Stack
Four ordered tests a product must pass to matter, not just exist
The Four Marketplace Health Metrics
Track GMV, unit economics, liquidity, and share of wallet to know if a marketplace is truly healthy
The Four Ps of Pivoting
Persona, Problem, Promise, Product — the four levers to change when you're stuck
The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle
Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.
The Four Strategic Choices
Choose customers, competition, validation, and distribution deliberately — each choice determines your product and your future.
The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision
A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.
The Growth Model Building Blocks
Build a spreadsheet formula of how your business grows, layer by layer, to find your real levers
The Hierarchy of Engagement
Three stacked levels — core action, accruing benefits, self-perpetuation — that decide if a consumer product endures
The Hill Climb
Name whether you're optimising a local hill or crossing the valley to a bigger mountain — then price the valley.
The Kernel of Good Strategy
Every real strategy has three parts: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and coherent action.
The Landscape-First Product Strategy Doc
A bullet-driven Google Doc that builds an unbroken logic chain from company mission down to a single team priority.
The Leakable Metric
Pick the one metric your customer would be delighted to discover you'd been measuring all along
The Lethal Trifecta
Any AI agent that combines three capabilities can be tricked into stealing your data — cut one leg.
The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)
Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early
The Marginal User Method
Find the user on the cusp of converting, then go watch the worst-case version of them.
The Market Health Metric
Find the leading proxy that predicts liquidity, then find the threshold where it plateaus.
The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto
Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow
The Now-Next-Later Roadmap
Replace the Gantt timeline with three confidence buckets so plans get vaguer as they get further out.
The Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC)
Define one success metric with countervailing guardrails that predicts long-term lifetime value
The Product/Market Fit Engine
Turn PMF into a number you can raise: focus only on the 'somewhat disappointed' users whose reason for loving you matches the mass market's
The Product Strategy Stack
Separate mission, strategy, product strategy, roadmap, and goals into five layers you can define top-down and debug bottom-up.
The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan
Never go away for a year to rebuild — uplift well-contained pieces of the system instead
The Six-Factor Company Stack Rank
Timing > market > team > product > brand > distribution — you need all six, ranked.
The Strategic Formula: Simple Why x Change Agent
Being seen as strategic = articulating a compelling, simple why AND championing big, hard ideas.
The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)
Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.
The Unifying Concept Test
Before adding a service to your app, check it fits the one mental model customers already hold of you
Three Divergent PRFAQs (The Power of Three)
Write three fully-thought-through, divergent press releases — then recommend one.
Where-to-Play Product Strategy as the Prioritization Engine
Turn an integrated set of strategic choices into the filter that decides every roadmap trade-off.
Career Serendipity Loop
Do excellent core work, explore nearby opportunities, and act when one compounds
Category-Attribute Fit
Don't pick a market then decide how to win. Work out what wins there, and only pick markets where that's who you are.
Fail-State Goaling
Name your worst-case experiences, set a team's goal on eradicating them, and hunt for the data you don't have
Growth Can't Reverse a Decline
A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.
Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test
Fund new bets from the core's profits — never by moving engineers off the core.
Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments
Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong
Right to Win via Permission to Play
Before building, ask if it's logical that YOU built it — and whether you have a route to market.
Six-Month Strategy Draft Cycle
Learn the product first, then draft and pressure-test strategy with the team
Solve Before Scale
Run in a distinct 'solve' mode before you ever switch to 'scale' mode
The Culture-to-Behavior Localization Loop
Read local culture, observe behavior, then fine-tune product and distribution.
The Portfolio Growth Model: Optimize for Churn
Lower the barrier to entry and accept high churn; a few power-law winners make the whole cohort pay off.
The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test
SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.
The Skip: Career as a Product
Plan for the job after next, not the next job — and treat promotion as a means, not the goal.
The Three-Pillar Competition Philosophy
Hold true to your vision, grow the pie, lean into strengths — and name the two things you defend
Top 10 Things You Should Know
A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.
Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets
Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.
Bezos's Three Tests for a New Bet
Big idea, right owner, legitimate plan — an idea needs all three or it dies
Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy
Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest
Category-Leader Career Filter
Choose the likely category winner over a bigger title at a weaker company
CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook
The single predictor of AI adoption is whether the CEO uses it daily — then amplify your 10% early adopters
Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap
When you're bleeding to competitors, throw out the plan and build the churn list, sorted by ARR.
Differentiation vs Table Stakes
Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all
Double Down on Why People Love You
Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it
Five Principles to Live By
Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.
Force a Choice, Not a Comparison
Be the world's first banana, not a 10x better apple
How You Charge Beats How Much: Pricing-Model Design
Pick the monetization model, then the price metric, then the structure — the number comes last.
Multi-Sided Marketplace Operating Rules
In a three-sided marketplace, OKRs and A/B tests break — establish stability, name your primary customer, then bet.
Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have
Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.
Pick a Lane and Write the Story
Master one of the five product ambiguities early, then write the paragraph your next employer needs to hear.
Predict vs. Decide: Think in Differentials
Prediction finds correlations; decisions need causal differences. Optimize the lift, not the level.
Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case
Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.
Startup Power Progression: Eliminate Three, Sequence Four
Cross off the three powers a startup can't have yet, then pursue the remaining four in sequence — counter-positioning first.
Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis
Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.
System-First Product Ops (Build It, Then Get Out of the Way)
Product ops is first a system you build, only second a team you hire — and the system should outlive the role.
The 60/30/10 Portfolio Capacity Split
Allocate team capacity across incremental wins, operations, and audacious bets before priorities compete
The Action Agenda (Ambition-Filter Method)
Stop writing a 'strategy.' Filter your ambitions down to one important, addressable challenge and act.
The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)
Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.
The Asynchronous Scaffolding Test
A synchronous-only consumer product can't retain. Surround it with async, or pick a vertical.
The Boring Engineering Strategy
Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.
The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion
Grow segment by segment along adjacencies — same customer new use case, or same use case new customer.
The Buyer Set of a Dozen
Run a real sale process: build a 12-name list, disqualify against the sit-out criteria, then call it
The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test
A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.
The Common Currency Model
Convert every lever in the business into one shared unit so cross-team tradeoffs become arithmetic
The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision
Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet
The Full PLG Funnel Audit
Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix
The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)
Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org
The Low-Trust Market Playbook
In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.
The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge
Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.
The Pivot Decision Algorithm
Five ordered gates — problem, assets, energy, team, capital — that decide whether to pivot or shut down after losing PMF
The Platform Encroachment Test
Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.
The Public and Secret Roadmap
Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second
There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop
Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones
The Reverse Anna Karenina Principle
Dysfunctional companies all fail the same way; high performers succeed in wildly different ways.
The Roadmap as a Prototype for Your Strategy
Treat the roadmap like a design mock-up: its value is in the feedback it provokes, not the document itself.
The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet
Lead with themes and a narrative; link out to the systems for the granular how
The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)
A regular PM ships the right product; an AI PM solves the right problem.
The Solar System Bundle
Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA
The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)
Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.
Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift
Express multi-year strategy as a yearly percentage split of resources across three horizons.
Two Routes to Win: Differentiation or Low Cost
You must be the differentiated choice or the lowest-cost provider — anything in between gets bullied.
Understand, Identify, Execute
Instrument the data first, find the drop-offs, then build products to fix them.
User-Value Thermodynamics
Users are lazy; adoption only happens when total value delivered exceeds total effort spent, ideally by 10x.
Anchor the Streak to Your Unit of Use
Tie a streak to the smallest genuinely-meaningful action, not the easiest possible tap.
Build for Where the Models Are Going
Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.
Cross-Application Strategy Transfer
Borrow decision lenses from other products to unlock a stuck strategic choice
Cross-Functional Voice-of-Customer Synthesis
Put sales, success and TAMs in one room, synthesise the signal, then have research validate or dispute it.
Distribution-First Moat
Solve distribution before you obsess over product-market fit; it is the harder, more durable edge.
Don't Compete With What You Bought
The classic acquisition killer: building a rival in-house version of the thing you just acquired.
Empathize–Create–Evangelize
The three-stage loop for developing a product vision: understand deeply, imagine the solved world, then sell it.
Experiment Only When You Need To
Treat A/B tests as risk mitigation, not as the default proof of impact
Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion
Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage
Go-Go-Go Plus Long-Term Compounding
Sprint to a proof of existence today; slow down to build the thing you will never regret owning
Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function
Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.
Happy GMV and Minimum Viable Happiness
Track only the GMV that produced a retained customer, and boil the thimble until it clears the bar
Inspiration, Not Imitation
Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.
Latent Demand Product Discovery
Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.
Manufacture Your Own Supply
Find the asset blocking non-suppliers from supplying, then rent it to them with strings attached.
Metrics Trees
Decompose your North Star metric and top business KPI into a tree of sub-metrics to align teams and estimate impact
Mistakes of Commission Over Omission
Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.
Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation
Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone
Network Effects vs Network Economies: The Materiality Test
Almost everything has some network effect; only ask whether it's large enough to change your margins.
Phase-Bounded Big Bets
Dream big, but chunk the bet into named learning phases with quarterly go/no-go gates
Planning in Seasons
Replace rigid roadmaps with secular 'seasons', loose quarterly OKRs, and deliberate slack
Problem-Centered Wedge
Ignore competitors; find an unsolved painpoint people will pay to fix, then expand.
Prompt Injection Defense Stack
Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level
Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools
ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.
Ship Fast Without Breaking Money
Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.
Signal Over Metrics (Pre-PMF Decision Rule)
You cannot optimize your way to product-market fit — hunt for pull, not conversion lifts.
Skills-First Hiring
Rebalance a stuck labor market by matching people on transferable skills, not job titles
Spotting Bad Strategy
Four tells that a 'strategy' is actually empty: no diagnosis, goals-as-strategy, fluff, and incoherent actions.
Supply-First Marketplace Building
Marketplaces aren't chicken-and-egg — they're two-sided, and you always start with supply.
SWAG-and-Refine Strategy Draft
Draft strategy quickly, improve it one conversation at a time, then share it
The 200K-User Experimentation Readiness Rule
Below ~200K users detect only big effects; use the wait to build platform and culture
The 50/40/10 Delight Allocation
Split your roadmap 50% low delight, 40% deep delight, 10% surface delight
The Chess-Points Competitive Lens
Every release is a move against your competitor in the customer's mind — positive or negative, never neutral.
The Control Principle Prioritization Filter
When several designs solve the problem, ship the one that leaves your users most in control.
The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)
Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville
The End-User Feedback Spectrum
Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.
The Ex-Growth Company Test
Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.
The Five PLG Readiness Components
The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work
The Four-Pillar Product Operating Model
Build a product operating model on strategy, org design, product ops and incentives — not a dev framework
The Framework Limit Test
Two tripwires that tell you your product framework (JTBD, OKRs, DAU) has become the enemy.
The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model
Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.
The Manukan Two-Pager & Listening Tour
Draft what you want and don't want, then run structured listening-tour conversations to find your fit.
The Marketplace Fragmentation Test
A marketplace only works if the market is fragmented and the per-transaction dollars are small enough to keep it in the middle
The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks
Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.
The Product Operating Model
Three dimensions and four competencies that separate companies that consistently innovate from the rest.
The Purpose Statement (We Exist To)
Distill why you exist into one 10-year 'we exist to' sentence that makes people root for you
The Rallying Activation Metric
The value of an activation metric is shared clarity, not statistical precision.
The Refounding Test
Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.
The Word-of-Mouth Machine PMF Test
Real product-market fit is organic pull, not award-winning launch spikes
Treat the World as One Market
Default to one global version; localize only where law or platform forces you to
Triangulated Key Results
Measure one quarterly objective from three angles — a hard number, a squishy quality metric, and a dollar figure.
Vision-Strategy-Execution Split (and the Controversy Test)
Vision is the destination, strategy is an opinionated path — and a real strategy must be disagreeable
What Actually Improves AI Apps
Stop chasing AI news and vector DBs; the real levers are users, data, and prompts.
Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant
Score a B2B SaaS idea on two axes — workflow breadth and frequency — to predict billion-dollar potential.
Writing a Compelling Product Vision
A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.
Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next
Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock
Lowercase-c vs Capital-C: AI-Proofing Your Skill Stack
Sort every task into what AI does 80% well and what only a human can do — then invest accordingly
Packaging for Spread, Not for Revenue
Never gate the mechanism that grows you: limit files, not collaborators; charge editors, not viewers.
The BD-Product Operating Contract
Test deals with hacky ops before code, build platforms not bespoke, time product's entry.
The Break-Even Indifference Test
Offer economically identical pricing models and see which one people irrationally prefer.
The Dogfooding Boundary Rule
Use your own product walkthrough to generate the issue list — never to prioritize it.
The Negative-Growth Rehearsal
Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.
The Tippability Test
Check supply fragmentation, supply heterogeneity and incumbent competition before you fund a marketplace
Adjacency-and-Network Expansion Test
Prioritize marketplace expansion by adjacency and network reinforcement, not by the size of the adjacent TAM
Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter
Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo
Assume the Disruptor Is Right
During an existential threat, assume the disruptor is playing an optimal game and respond with overreaction
Backwards From the Peak: Ambition Set by Potential, Not by Numbers
Derive goals from what the thing could be, then work backwards; today's numbers are not the anchor.
Bend-Not-Break Flexibility with a Sanctity Keeper
Add flexibility so users don't break a streak — but appoint someone to guard it from being cheapened.
Be the Historian
Systematically reconstruct why past decisions were made so you inherit the lessons and see the baggage.
Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea
At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.
Betterment Over Perfection (The Painful-Gap Method)
Don't craft a perfect strategy — close your single most painful gap, then the next, forever.
Black Loops and Blue Loops
Diagram your growth as loops, not funnels — then remove the friction on the sharing edge.
Bold-Move Leap (Not Moving Is the Risk)
When you need a step-change, make the committing bold move all at once — because playing safe is itself the risk
Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point
Two gates block senior promotion: can you do the job, and does the job exist.
Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio
Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.
Builder vs. Information Mover
Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.
Build for Day 365 Retention
The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals
Build for the 80, Kill Your Darlings
When a product is loved but too small for the mission, serve the silent 80% and abandon what the vocal 20% cling to
Build Infrastructure, Not Features
Ask 'what has to be true so anyone could build this in an hour?' and build that instead.
Building Trust Through Speed
Ship an honest 'research preview' early, then visibly iterate on feedback so speed builds trust instead of eroding it.
Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion
When to bundle products and when a single-product land wins
Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice
Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.
Choosing a Startup PR Agency
Vet PR agencies on month-one behavior, writing samples, and lead time — not on big-brand logos.
Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut
Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out
Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success
Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success
Competitive Wargaming
Assign each squad one competitor for a quarter, then pool the intel on a presentation day.
Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)
Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.
Conservative Plan with Milestone Unlocks
Plan for the downside, then let pre-agreed milestones unlock the budget to accelerate.
Customer Job Prioritization Criteria
Five tests for choosing which customer job to lead with when research surfaces more than one.
CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy
Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it
Damming the Demand
Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.
Define What Problem Matters
The single highest-leverage PM skill: get crystal clear on which problem you're solving, first
Design Capabilities So Rivals Say 'Life's Too Short'
Build capabilities and systems so nuanced that imitators choose a different battlefield instead of copying you.
Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)
Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.
Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop
Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.
Evidence-First Intervention Design
Literature review, then hypothesis, then 30 variants, then relative testing — never show users one design.
Expected-Conversions Prioritization
Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.
Experiment at 30: Trend Over Precision
You can run meaningful experiments with as few as 30 users — more data buys precision, not different trends.
Explore and Exploit Career Strategy
Explore widely with a thesis early, then exploit a role for the specific learnings your next goal needs.
Focusing Power on an Addressable Target
Strategy works only when you concentrate a genuine source of power on a target that can actually be moved.
Focus With Guardrails
Concentrate on one channel but set abandonment criteria up front so you know exactly when to move on
Follow-the-Workflow Expansion
Find your next product by tracing the user's end-to-end journey and carving out the steps that overload your core tool.
Format Malleability: Any Input, Any Output
Stop shipping content in one format — give people the power to remix knowledge into the medium they're in the mood for
Foundational Insight Over Customer Research
For consumer and SMB products, customer feedback is directionally wrong — build from your own insight instead.
Framing (Setting the Boundaries)
Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.
Growth Is a Game of Inches
Don't chase the step function. Ship 20 bets at 20% instead of 4 perfect ones — then raise the hit rate.
Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)
Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.
Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy
For most PMs, strategy is overrated — your real job is to shrink the time from hypothesis to data.
International Market Entry Stack Rank
Assume you'll need everywhere, order by demand, then re-rank by build cost, strategic value, and long poles.
Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS
Build product-led sales as an evolution, not a revolution: intuition, then regression, then platforms.
Iterate-Then-Automate Scaling Ladder
Let ops manually iterate a process until it breaks at scale, then hand exactly that broken step to technology
Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments
Fund performance, UX and velocity work by making the invisible measurable and the downside of neglect concrete.
Marketplace Whack-a-Mole: Managing Winners and Losers
Most consequential marketplace changes create winners and losers; manage the trade, don't chase a metric.
Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)
Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.
Mega Trend vs Hype Cycle — The PhD Test
If you need a PhD to understand it, it's not a mega trend. Don't fight mega trends.
Mission Drive Audit
Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.
Model Maximalism
Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.
North Star Translation Layer
Give every team a metric they can directly move, then convert each into a single company North Star using a shared translation factor.
Onboarding as a Retention Lever
Treat onboarding as a habit-and-retention engine, not a conversion funnel — and accept lower conversion to weed out the wrong users.
Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage
Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.
Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)
Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.
Principles-First Product Design
Set non-negotiable principles up front — voice of the people, no override button, full transparency — and never bend them.
Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework
You can't solve a problem directly — break it into ranked causes, then solve the biggest
Product-Lens Metrics: Monitoring Product Health vs. Business Health
Segment company metrics through a product lens so leaders can actually monitor their strategy
Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout
Never take the next expansion step until the data from the last one has already convinced you.
Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon
Sketch the ideal end-state journey, then work backwards and ship it in measurable pieces.
Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion
Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue
Retention Benchmark Ladder
Concrete week-one cohort retention floors: ~80% friends/family, 60% free at scale, 20-30% paid.
Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers
A six-month roadmap refreshed quarterly, with 80% commitment in months 1-3 and 50% in months 4-6.
Run Toward the Hard Use Cases
Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great
Scale the Bright Spots (Quit-vs-Persist Criteria)
Persist while you can still see the vision and find green shoots to scale; quit when the vision dies.
Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice
Gather internal data, customer research and company goals, make the best informed bet, then reevaluate and pivot.
Software Is Not a Moat
Any feature you ship can be cloned; build ecosystems, platforms, and hardware that can't be copied.
Strategy-Led Planning
A real, pre-aligned product strategy collapses annual planning from six weeks to three days
Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy
Rank every component by how catastrophic losing it is — then pre-buy the killers.
Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)
Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.
Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow
Fix the 25-40% of churn product teams ignore — payment failures, off-boarding, cancel flows
Tactic-to-Strategy Discovery
Run many small experiments in parallel, then scale the one that breaks through into your strategy.
Task vs. Job Automation Test
Before predicting a role's automation, ask whether the automatable task IS the job or just one piece of it
The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay
Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.
The 51-49 Decision Rule
When options are near-even, just pick one fast — more data won't meaningfully improve a close call.
The 70/20/10 Investment Split
Allocate product building time 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% bets to balance stability and innovation
The Access-to-an-Audience Moat
In human data the only durable moat is a trusted, targetable audience — not recruiters or ads
The AI Deployment Risk Triage
Classify any AI deployment into one of three risk tiers before spending a dollar on defense
The Balanced Feedback Portfolio
Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.
The Business-Rules Moat: Why 'Forms on Databases' Are Unclonable
B2B SaaS lock-in isn't the UI or data model — it's years of accreted, configured business rules
The Cannonball / Lead Bullet Portfolio
Allocate growth energy between a few fundamental rebuilds and many small experiments — by product stage.
The Castle-or-Shack Audit
Go capability by capability and separate the ones a rival can copy (shack) from the ones they truly can't (castle).
The Commodity Generic Play (ONCE)
Find commodity software still charging luxury subscription prices, then sell a beautiful generic once
The Community Form-Factor Matrix
A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer
The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)
Build a company like a house: founding documents, operating system, and operating cadence
The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company
Four diagnosable diseases that turn a great product company into a feature factory
The Double Lock (Sober and Drunk)
Debate every big decision twice — once rationally, once psychologically — and only act if both agree.
The Economic Turing Test
Measure transformative AI by whether you'd hire an agent for a real job without knowing it's a machine
The Enterprise AI Adoption Ladder
Three sequential stages that separate companies winning with AI from those spinning their wheels
The Eval ROI Decision
Build evals where failure is catastrophic or you must win; vibe-check the rest.
The Forge and the Dam
Two career positions compound: the company's hottest fire, or the critical thing nobody watches.
The Four-Box Framework
Write your hypothesis in words before you touch data, so you can debug the idea and the measurement separately.
The Four Phases of Focus
Do one thing at a time — idea, PMF, then either growth or business model — and shift gears cleanly.
The Four Product Risks
Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last
The Four Types of Product Work
Feature, growth, PMF-expansion, and scaling work — the portfolio a product leader must learn to balance.
The 'Going Home' Pivot
A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you
The Incognito Cry Test
Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.
The Inverted W Planning Process
Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.
The Marketplace Priority Stack
Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.
The Mission-to-Monday Cascade
Translate a 5-year mission down through strategy and quarterly OKRs into what you actually do this week.
The Murder Board
Before starting a project, invite smart outsiders whose only job is to tear your two-page plan apart
The Press-as-Fundraising Filter
Only pursue press when you can name a specific business job it will do — same discipline as raising money.
The Process Power Qualifier: Material and Opaque
Operational excellence is only power when it's both material AND impossible for rivals to copy.
The Product-Market Fit Treadmill
In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you
The Proxy Goal Ladder
Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.
The Quality-Volume-Speed Priority Stack
What high-stakes data buyers actually rank: quality first, then volume, then speed
The Sales Roadmap Budget
Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.
The Scrappy Wedge for Unglamorous Investment
Win backing for unsexy work by starting small, showing it visually, making it easy for others, and proving momentum.
The SMB-or-Enterprise Binary (Mid-Market Doesn't Exist)
There is no mid-market — decide which of two distinct games you're playing and don't bleed them.
The Strategy Contract
A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.
The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth
Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning
The Three Network Effects (and Why Social Products Must Evolve)
Classify defensibility as direct, cross-side, or data network effects — and know social products must add the latter two
The Three-Segment AI Market Map
Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.
The Time-Boxed Leap Bet
De-risk a scary career leap by treating it as a fixed-length experiment with a fallback
The Transaction Tiebreaker for Marketplace Prioritization
Stop arguing supply vs demand — make the transaction itself the thing every team is accountable to.
The True Platform Test (and the Rug-Pull Trap)
A real platform is one where the ecosystem earns more than the core — and only open source protects you on it.
The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test
Shared audience is not enough — partner only where your buyer already goes for this specific advice.
The Two Departments That Matter Test
Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.
The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect
Master market share and wallet share together — equal attention, not equal effort — to avoid the single-engine trap.
The Two-Way Door Reality Check
Most decisions that look reversible are one-way doors at your level — pause before you commit
The Zero-to-Seven-Day Retention Sprint
Concentrate experiments and flexibility on the first 7 days, where loss aversion actually locks in.
Turn Your Biggest Blocker Into Your Upgrade Wedge
Find the single thing stopping adoption, go deeper on it than anyone, and make it the reason to upgrade.
Two-Question New Technology Adoption Test
Before adopting any new AI tool, ask: how big is the gain, and how painful is the exit?
Unblock the Review Bottleneck
The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.
Vertical Unbundling Criteria
Only carve a vertical out of a horizontal marketplace if it has high value or frequency and a self-contained network
Which Product Ops Pillar to Start With
Choose your first product ops investment by company stage and where your biggest fire is
Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List
A short force-ranked list every team must absorb — defined by what it excludes.
One-Page Plan and Operating Rhythm
Put vision through quarterly goals on one page, then meet in a rhythm to reflect on it
AI Answer Box Keyword Triage
Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI
Benefit = (Volume × Quality) / Time
Measure AI-building impact as experimentation volume times quality, divided by time to launch
Bowling Pin Market Entry
Dominate one underserved niche, then knock over adjacent segments until you can challenge the leader
Build for the Models Six Months Out
Ship for the AI capabilities that will land in ~6 months, not the ones available today
Build Only at the Magic Intersection
Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.
Build Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)
Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy
CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision
Choose a centralized CDP stack or a warehouse-plus-reverse-ETL stack based on your engineering resources.
Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor
Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately
Chef's Menu Prioritization
Balance reported pain with capability bets customers cannot yet request.
Conviction-Led Product Management
You can't split-test your way to love — build conviction on what matters, then make one big change
Design the Dream Objective Function
You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.
Engineering Financial Space
Convert your job into a contract, cut the burn, and buy back time without a clean break.
Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval
After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.
Find the Cocktail Party
To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive
First-Principles Future Visualization
Build vision by vividly imagining the far future, then extracting what must be true
Freemium Two-Product Rule
Make the free tier good enough to spark word of mouth and the paid tier different enough to justify upgrading
Go Narrow to Grow Wide
Serve one narrow audience exceptionally well first; expansion opportunities reveal themselves later
Interview for Design in the DNA
Before joining, verify the founders valued your function from the very beginning; it can't be grafted on later.
Just-in-Time Planning
Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.
Magic Lenses
Evaluate competing implementation paths by plotting each through the eyes of the advisers you wish you had
Market Map, Then Go a Layer Deeper
Start from the best companies for a skill, but never assume a great logo means a great individual.
Nine Nos For Every Yes
Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever
Pivot to the Burning Problem
Founders are usually too anchored to their own product vision — index to the customer's real fire instead
Positional vs. Tactical Game
Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.
Progress Cadence as the Success Signal
Judge a startup by whether each check-in has genuinely new progress, not by hype
Pull the Thread on New Tools
Judge a new AI tool by where it'll be in a week or a month, not where it is on day one.
Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)
When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.
Reverse-Engineer-Then-Formalize at Scale
Do one instance deep by hand, reverse-engineer the best process, then codify it into a scalable algorithm
Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision
Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it
Seek the Counterfactual, Not Confirmation
The competitive edge lives in the data you're trying to prove yourself wrong with, not the data you hoped to see
Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W
Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.
Stamina as the Kill Signal
Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.
Task Loss, Not Job Loss
Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs
The AI Security Vendor Due-Diligence Test
Five questions that expose whether an AI guardrail vendor is selling real protection or theater
The Bottom-Up Fit Checklist
Four market conditions plus one leadership condition that decide whether an IC-led motion will work.
The Diversification Timing Test
Know whether it's too early to diversify growth channels or dangerously overdue
The Foundational Three Entry Path
Don't start in PM. Start as the person you'd be taking PM responsibilities from — engineer, designer, or seller.
The Full-Stack Centralized Insights Org
Keep data, research and engineering in one central team — objectivity is the asset you're protecting.
The Goals-First Refresh Cascade
Set the scope of a rebrand by naming the goal first, then let every later round cascade from broad to narrow.
The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test
Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow
The Long-Bet Vision Call: Ship What the Committee Would Veto
Great software follows a leader's vision, not a vote — accept years of hate for a decade-long payoff.
The Three Modes of Customer Understanding
Separate targeted Discovery, always-on Continuous Conversations, and passive Customer Listening — each needs its own machinery.
The VP of Free
Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.
Two Product-Market Fits
A marketplace must pass the disappointment test independently on each side.
User Immersion to Roadmap Loop
Turn constant user and non-user conversations into a prioritized roadmap and sales evangelism.
Value-Up-The-Stack Test
To find where the money accrues in a platform shift, test the infrastructure layer for network effects, differentiation, and pricing power
Win on the Platform, Not the Features
Durable products win on invisible infrastructure — reliability, reach, privacy — not on the feature list
Charter, Goals, Roadmap: The Three Documents
Every level of the org needs three docs — mission/strategy, goals, roadmap — written top-down
Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards
Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.
Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps
Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.
Existing-User Retention & Resurrection Priority
As a consumer subscription matures, the biggest lever isn't new users — it's current-user retention and resurrecting the dormant.
Magic and Science Decision-Making
Replace A/B tests and metric goals with deep shared customer understanding, then decide by informed intuition.
Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement
Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.
Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)
Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.
The Provenance Gate: Scaling Supply Without Diluting the Brand
Let sellers scale by outsourcing production — but only to a partner whose process they actually know.
Detune Precision by Time Horizon
The shorter the horizon, the more detail; keep long-range plans deliberately hazy to avoid false precision
Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference
Observe what customers do, not what they say — AI transcript-reading is not true customer insight
Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy
Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all
Three Worlds Theory of Change
Decide what to actually do about a hard problem by naming the pessimistic, optimistic, and pivotal worlds you might be in
$100 Voting for Prioritization
Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.
Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization
Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.
Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading
Read where the market sits in the eternal bundle/unbundle cycle to decide vertical vs horizontal.
Competition-Aware, Not Competition-Focused
Stay aware of rivals but anchor on the customer job, because the real competitor is the default old way
Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does
Market leaders survive by challenging and cannibalizing their own products before an upstart does it for them.
Elastic-Demand Career Bet
Invest in domains where making people 10x more productive increases demand rather than reducing it
Excitement-Signal Persona Discovery
Ship a broad tool, then let the segment with the most emotive joy tell you who to focus on
Exponential Bet Allocation
If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets
First-Principles Framework Method
Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.
Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization
Let retention curves and diminishing returns tell you when to optimize and when to bet on something new
Lower-Confidence, Higher-Volume Experimentation
Drop the 95% confidence bar to run more experiments, backstopped by qualitative corroboration and a pre-set game plan
Meet the Bar and Be Different
Incumbents overshoot average utility — win by meeting the bar while being materially different
Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio
Build products that make money in opposite macro conditions so troughs in one are peaks in another.
Negotiate From Genuine Indifference
The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.
Observe Users, Don't Just Ask Them
Watch what users actually do, because watching your assumptions get crushed beats any interview
Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness
Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.
Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)
Match robot form to the task; reserve humanoids for the long tail, not the line.
Seeing the System
Strategic thinking is naming the invisible systems and their self-protecting culture so you can change the rules.
Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening
Classify every build as deepening the product for current users or widening it to new ones — to diagnose 'why we feel slow'
Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product
Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.
Stickiness Over Moats
Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.
Stop Churn Before It Happens
To stop churn, acquire customers who won't leave — churn is an acquisition problem, not a save problem.
The AI-Fit Accuracy Test
Deploy AI where the human baseline is low-accuracy — not where it's already near-perfect and you need the last 2%
The Believability Spectrum for Vision & Strategy
Every idea lands as believed, believable, conceivable, or inconceivable; your openness sets where the lines fall
The Elevator-Pitch Product Vision Template
Fill six slots — customer, need, name, category, reason to buy, differentiation — and you have a vision statement.
The Measurement Journey
Start measuring from words and people, then scale into system data — don't wait for perfect.
The Model Launch Bar
With probabilistic products, the PM — not the scientist — decides what accuracy is good enough to ship.
The Product-Adjacent Inroad
Break into PM by moving internally from a product-adjacent function, trading domain knowledge for the role.
The Three Flavors of AI Product Management
Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.
The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage
Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket
Vision-Execution Polarity Balance
Diagnose whether you're over-theorizing or over-running-walls, and dynamically retune
Year-Horizon Growth Portfolio
Protect growth teams from weekly-win pressure by committing to low/medium/high bets over a year-long horizon
High-Ceiling Market Test
Attack markets with a high ceiling and easy switching; incumbents win only where there's little left to build.
Minimum Awesome Product
Ship fast, but not naked: an MVP needs one awesome thing and a visible vision, not just adequacy.
Model Casting by Personality
Route each task to the model whose 'personality' matches, and split plans to fit
Northstar Problem Commitment
Pick one foundational building-block problem and commit years to it, not a scatter of trendy ones.
The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio
Treat a product roadmap like an investment portfolio, balanced across three axes of risk and intent.
Build for the Future Model
Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today
Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity
New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales
Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)
Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts
Knowledge-Work End-State Idea Generation
Pick an area of knowledge work and reason forward to its end state as AI matures — then build for that.
Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom
The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.
The Golden Recipe of Modern AI
Every AI breakthrough sits on three legs: big data, the right neural architecture, and enough compute.
MECE Problem Decomposition
Break any problem into buckets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so you never miss a possible cause or solution.
2x Activation Energy for Change
A new bet must grow at a multiple of your baseline to matter—don't dribble it in.
Do the Opposite
Study what everyone's doing not to copy it, but to find the 180 that stands out.
Solving for Everyone Is Solving for No One
Get specific about who you're NOT for—that guardrail is stronger than defining who you are.
Tell Me What It Takes to Win, Then Tell Me the Costs
Ask for the un-watered-down plan to win first; negotiate the costs down second.
The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)
Define what to build and how to grow from the use case, not the persona.
The Year Is Made in the First Six Months
Because buying cycles lag, your annual number is set by what you ship in H1, not H2.