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37signals

By Jason Fried and co-founders

0 recommend/use · 7 sourced episodes

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Productivity6 steps

Appetite-Driven Product Cycles (Shape Up)

Fix the time budget, not the scope: six-week appetites, two-person teams, and work that dies on time

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Influence4 steps

Asking for Help Well

Ask for advice, not answers — the counterintuitive skill that separates who rises from who stalls.

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Strategy4 steps

Bezos's Three Tests for a New Bet

Big idea, right owner, legitimate plan — an idea needs all three or it dies

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Strategy4 steps

Candidate Market Fit

Position yourself as a narrow spear, not a net — three-to-four attributes the market actually wants.

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Innovation4 steps

Disassemble the Lego Set

Don't digitize the old thing — reassemble the pieces into an experience native to the new platform.

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Leadership5 steps

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

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Productivity3 steps

Fixed Time, Variable Scope (Appetite-Based Planning)

Set the max time you'll spend first, then design a solution that fits it — instead of estimating a concept.

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Marketing5 steps

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

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Strategy3 steps

Framing (Setting the Boundaries)

Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.

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Mindset6 steps

Give Your Gut Credit: Judgment-First Decision Making

Every decision a human makes is a judgment call — so ask 'what do you think?' not 'what do you know?'

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Influence3 steps

Job Mission with OKRs (Play to Win)

Write your own version of the role with OKRs and share it with the hiring manager to win the offer.

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Innovation5 steps

Live Shaping Session

Put product, a senior engineer, and a designer in a room to sketch and break ideas until one is clearly buildable in the appetite.

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Leadership5 steps

Low-Criticality Pilot for Changing How You Work

Never test a new way of working on something that matters — you get one shot at first impressions

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Sales4 steps

Match Go-To-Market to Buyer-User Alignment

Pick developer-led, PLG, or direct sales by asking one thing: are the buyer and the user the same person?

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Finance4 steps

Net Revenue Retention Above 100% (and Why NRR Lies)

Expansion revenue must beat churn, but NRR flatters you — watch logo churn too.

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Sales4 steps

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

If the work is autonomous and the result is measurable, price the outcome — not the tokens.

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Strategy4 steps

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

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Sales4 steps

Pricing Selects the Market (Sell Growth, Not Savings)

Price and positioning choose your market — reframe your product as growth to charge many times more.

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Productivity4 steps

Root-Cause Context Engineering for AI Coding

Don't just fix the AI's bad code — root-cause the missing context so it's right next time.

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Strategy5 steps

The 5-Question Stalled Growth Diagnostic

Diagnose why growth is slowing by asking five questions in strict priority order.

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Bootstrapper's Constraint Discipline

Costs are the only thing you control — so stay small, do it yourself, and practice making money

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Finance3 steps

The Cancellation Ceiling (Maximum Customer Cap)

New customers divided by cancellation rate is the hard ceiling on how big you can ever get.

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Leadership5 steps

The Career-Stage PM Skill Stack

Master three skills as a junior PM, three different ones as a senior — not all twelve at once

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Leadership5 steps

The Cascading Metrics Review

One hour a week of public metric probing that forces every leader to actually know their business

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Productivity3 steps

The Circuit Breaker (Back to Shaping)

When a project overruns its appetite, don't extend it or gut the agreed value — pull it back into shaping mode.

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Strategy6 steps

The Commodity Generic Play (ONCE)

Find commodity software still charging luxury subscription prices, then sell a beautiful generic once

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Leadership4 steps

The Detail Dial

Calibrate how prescriptive a shaped plan is to the builder's seniority — more detail lifts juniors, less frees seniors.

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Marketing3 steps

The Elephant Curve (Channels Saturate and Sag)

Every acquisition channel starts as an S-curve then sags — assume your winners will decline.

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Influence4 steps

The Four Legs of the Negotiation Stool

Negotiate the resources you need to hit your OKRs before salary, then ask 'are you open to?'

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Strategy4 steps

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.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Job Search Council

Run your job hunt as a committed 6-8 person peer group that flips anxiety into accountability.

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Strategy4 steps

The Manukan Two-Pager & Listening Tour

Draft what you want and don't want, then run structured listening-tour conversations to find your fit.

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Leadership3 steps

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

Wake up asking what maximizes impact — then interrogate your answer for skill-set bias.

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Productivity3 steps

The Nine-Scopes Kickoff

At kickoff, have the builders translate the shaped idea into nine-or-fewer implementation chunks to test scope and build clarity.

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Communication6 steps

The Operator's Manual (Answer First)

Answer the question, then explain — or shut up. The tactical checklist for PM communication

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Innovation4 steps

The Pantry Test

If the idea starts with the ingredients you already have, you are not working backwards

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Leadership5 steps

The Riff Test: Hiring for Gut Instinct

Pay finalists to build something, then critique it and ask what they'd do with two more days

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Stay-Up Scorecard

One number (profit) and one question (would I do it again) instead of OKRs, KPIs and a five-year plan

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Strategy3 steps

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.

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Marketing5 steps

The 'What Made You Cancel?' Rooter-Cause Diagnosis

Ask what made them cancel (not why), then dig past the surface reason to the real causes.

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Influence5 steps

Trust as Currency

Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations — and it buys you resources

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Mindset4 steps

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

Don't collect rules — ask why, triangulate three people, and rebuild the reasoning underneath.

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Innovation5 steps

Working Backwards (Problem-First Product Development)

Start from the customer problem, not the ingredients you happen to have in the pantry

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