A Fire Upon the Deep

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

Staff each team from the gap, not from a fixed PM/EM/designer template

Productivity5 steps

Best-Model-First Agent Workflow

Use the most capable model on max effort, start in plan mode, then auto-accept — counterintuitively cheaper.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build for the Model Six Months Out

Design your AI product for the model that ships in six months, not the one you have today.

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Don't Box the Model In

Give the model tools and a goal, not a rigid workflow — scaffolding gains get wiped out by the next model.

Mindset4 steps

Don't Stop Until You Reach the End

Distrust expert answers and drive every problem to ground-truth yourself

Communication4 steps

Evals as Articulating Success

An eval is just a clear spec of ideal behavior — the shared language of AI product work

Strategy3 steps

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

Productivity3 steps

Give It Your Hardest Task

Evaluate a serious AI tool on your gnarliest real problem, not a dumbed-down toy.

Strategy3 steps

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Hire Founders (Eyes Open to the Costs)

Recruit ex-founders for outsized output and truth-telling, budgeting for high attrition

Hire the People That People Pick

Win great hires over months by adding value first, long before there's a role

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Communication3 steps

Kind and Candid

Reframe candor as an act of kindness so you actually deliver the hard message.

Latent Demand Product Discovery

Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

Hold the far-future vision, but land with users where they already work today.

Finance4 steps

LTV Expansion Over Top-of-Funnel Expansion

When capital is cheap and rivals buy growth, grow the value of organic traffic instead.

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

Surface AI help at the moment it's relevant instead of interrupting with notifications.

Marketing4 steps

Radically Human Support as a Growth Engine

Route every support email to every employee, ban macros, and let candour create word of mouth.

Marketing3 steps

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Strategy5 steps

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Innovation5 steps

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

When product properties are emergent, launching is how you discover them

Startup-Within-a-Company Team Design

Build new things inside big companies with small, senior, trusted teams and manufactured discipline

Surfing the Detail Edge (CEO Engagement Dial)

Stay deep enough to understand, light enough not to hijack — a CEO's every aside is an order.

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.

Innovation3 steps

The Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

Strategy5 steps

The Business Is an Equation

Model the whole business as one equation before optimizing any funnel leaf node.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Contributor Path: Pick the Equation, Not the Title

You don't have to raise the seed round; join a team whose math already wins.

The Differentiation Stack

Four ordered tests a product must pass to matter, not just exist

Marketing4 steps

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

Communication4 steps

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

Fix every piece of user feedback within minutes so people feel heard and give you even more.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

The Highest Best Use Interview

Ban hypotheticals, ask for lived history, and finish by asking what a great day looks like.

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

Productivity4 steps

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

Productivity4 steps

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

Adopt a coding agent the way you'd onboard a new intern — pair first, then delegate.

Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.

Under-Resource to Force Automation

Deliberately under-staff projects and hand out unlimited tokens so people are forced to automate with AI.

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Productivity4 steps

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.