Adobe

AI Possibility-Space Mapping

Use AI to enumerate the full combinatorial space of a multi-dimensional decision and build intuition fast.

Peak Performance3 steps

All-In / All-Out Delineation

Full intensity when working, full disconnection when not — to keep bringing your best.

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Influence5 steps

Calibrated Acceptance of No

Don't over-accept a no into a life verdict, or under-accept it into something you can override.

Can't Do / Won't Do / Not Set Up To Do

Three reasons things don't happen — and 70-80% of the time it's the third one, which is yours.

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.

Chaos to Clarity

Move any big idea from your head to reality one clarity-adding step at a time.

Productivity4 steps

Closing the Loop with Community

Systematically collect, route, ship, and close every customer request as a product engine.

Column B Thinking

Plan from the dream future backward, not from the bricks in front of you.

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Crazy Big Goals with a Ladder to the Moon

Set an inadequacy-inducing goal, then climb toward it one tiny rung at a time.

Data-Driven Self-Story Rewriting

Debunk or validate the limiting stories you tell yourself by researching how people actually experience you.

De-Risking the High-Stakes Meeting

Turn important meetings from big-reveal gambles into pre-worked, question-proof conversations.

Productivity3 steps

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Mindset4 steps

Envision-the-Ending Goal Discovery

Surface hidden goals by vividly imagining the finished future first, then reverse-engineering the journey to it.

Mindset4 steps

Excellence Over Speed (The Thought-Experiment Filter)

If you must choose, choose excellence — and kill most experiments before they ever go live.

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.

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

Replace support, success, research, PR and marketing with two teams that own a human relationship end to end.

Goal-Driven Company Structure

Cascade a mission into pillars into yearly goals so the work you fund IS the mission.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Go From Strength to Strength (Don't Design by TAM)

Bet on the trend that expands the market, not the market size that exists today.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Head-Heart-Hands Micro-Experiments

Change yourself by running the tiniest possible experiment and reading the result through head, heart, and body.

Inside-Out Leadership Circles

Lead from the center out — self first, then one-on-ones, teams, and the business — because external fuel cracks.

Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments

Fund performance, UX and velocity work by making the invisible measurable and the downside of neglect concrete.

Marketing4 steps

Kindle and Fire Growth Strategies

Non-scalable kindle hacks exist only to unlock the scalable fire strategy worth hiring for.

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

Innovation5 steps

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

Productivity3 steps

Meeting Priming Before Decision-Making

Every meeting has a priming phase and a decision phase; skipping or reversing them guarantees dysfunction

Leadership3 steps

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Minimum Awesome Product

Ship fast, but not naked: an MVP needs one awesome thing and a visible vision, not just adequacy.

Strategy6 steps

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.

Optimizing for Feelings

Name the emotion the product must evoke, build to that, and use metrics only as an honesty check.

Perceived Simplicity

Keep advanced power in the product but discoverable only to those who go looking — invisible to everyone else.

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.

Problem-Centered Wedge

Ignore competitors; find an unsolved painpoint people will pay to fix, then expand.

Project-Chosen Leads and the Mutt Hire

PM is a role on a project, not a department — and you staff it with multi-disciplinary makers, not title-holders.

Radical Trust Building

Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.

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.

Rejection-as-Refinement Pitching

Treat every investor 'no' as free feedback and pre-answer it in your next deck.

Reverse Engineering to Build Openness

Two reverse-engineering habits that let a conscientious brain manufacture the openness it lacks

Leadership3 steps

Role-Based Culture by Logical Deduction

Replace performative Mission-Vision-Values with a deduced 'role you play' that logically derives your standards

Shadows of Superpowers

Your plateau is almost always the shadow cast by the exact strength that got you here.

Show Don't Tell (The Wall)

Lay out the entire user journey — pixel by pixel, minute by minute — on one physical wall.

Productivity4 steps

Strike Down the Blockers (Time to Value)

Removing what stops adoption beats adding shiny features; hunt blockers and watch the retention graph move.

Superpower Excavation from Peak Stories

Find your true strengths by overlaying three peak-experience stories and spotting the theme that recurs.

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

The 4B Framework (100 Focus Points)

Split 100 focus points across Brilliant Basics, Bread and Butter, Big Bets and Breaking Bad.

Communication3 steps

The Ability-Trust-Appeal Relationship Model

Every professional relationship rests on ability, trust, and appeal; the experience you are matters most

The Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

Peak Performance3 steps

The Alpha-Beta-Gamma Focus Grid

Map brain-wave states against motivation systems and deliberately spend ~25% of your year outside busy beta

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

Sales5 steps

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

The Articulate-Ask-Accept Loop

Treat wanting as an iterative dev cycle: articulate, ask intentionally, accept the response, try again.

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

The Believability Spectrum for Vision & Strategy

Every idea lands as believed, believable, conceivable, or inconceivable; your openness sets where the lines fall

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Brain's Three Systems (Safety, Reward, Purpose)

Diagnose which of three motivational systems is driving someone's behavior before you try to change it

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.

Innovation5 steps

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

The Dream Behind the Complaint

You're bad at dreaming and great at complaining. Mine the complaint for the dream it implies.

Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

The Ex-Growth Company Test

Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

The Fork-in-the-Road Reset

After a shock, offer a graceful, reversible exit to re-establish who is truly bought in.

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

The Four Reasons You're Not Getting Promoted

A diagnostic that separates 'the system can't promote you' from 'you're not ready' — because the fix differs.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Full-Stack PM Triad: Sharpness, Drive, Influence

Raw sharpness you can build, drive you can barely coach, influence is non-negotiable.

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

Formal feedback is noise. Pull the real signal, prove you heard it, and publicly reward whoever gave it.

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

Leadership6 steps

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

The Hell Yes Standard

Anything short of a hell yes is a no. Don't settle for it — negotiate toward it.

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

Influence5 steps

The Humble Ask (Influence Without Authority)

State the want clearly, disclaim the authority explicitly, then ask them to reconsider.

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.

Mindset4 steps

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Kryptonite Reframe

Ask 'how does this serve me?' to convert a perceived weakness into a functional advantage — or decide to route around it.

Marketing4 steps

The Lazy, Vain, Selfish User Lens

Design acquisition and onboarding for a user who is lazy, vain and selfish — not for your loyal fans.

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

The Made-Up Name Reset

Give a team or feature a name nobody recognizes, so nobody can skip the argument about what it should be.

Productivity5 steps

The Meeting Operating System

Version your team's meetings like a product — ship a new rev every 90 days.

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

The Product People Spectrum: Innovators to Executors

Great product careers get filtered at strategy — deliberately move executors toward the strategic middle.

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

Leadership6 steps

The Relationship Design Conversation

Design how you'll work together before you need to — and assume your founder is terrified.

The Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

Sales5 steps

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

The Sidecar Model of Management

You don't take the wheel or hand it over — you ride attached, and you have to be invited in first.

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 Story Chapters Framework for Executive Communication

Find the last obvious point for your audience, then build from there — skip neither the setup nor the basics.

The Taste-Development Loop

Taste isn't innate; it's a repeatable loop of reacting, interrogating, and building a point of view.

The Team Is the Product

Choose the company you want to build first, pick a problem worthy of it, then treat every hire as a product launch.

Leadership6 steps

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

Mindset5 steps

The Three Acts and the Next North Star

The greyhound that catches the rabbit never runs again — pick your second North Star before you catch the first.

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

The VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

Mindset5 steps

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

Sales5 steps

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

Three Divergent PRFAQs (The Power of Three)

Write three fully-thought-through, divergent press releases — then recommend one.

Influence3 steps

Three Speeds of Influence + Choose Your Character

Pick an influence character that fits your personality, then choose slow, moderate, or fast based on the situation

Timeline Padding Audit

Keep startup pace by curiously separating real constraints from padding, and killing projects that won't converge.

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

Values as a Mirror

Don't author values. Interview the whole team, harvest their exact words, and write them back as a story.

Peak Performance5 steps

Vision Over Fear (There's No Tiger in the Room)

Fear and discipline are short-term coping strategies. Sustainable drive comes from vision.

Mindset5 steps

Working the Resistance by Parts

The part of you that's scared to ask won't go away by being ignored — interview it instead.