Airtable

2x Activation Energy for Change

A new bet must grow at a multiple of your baseline to matter—don't dribble it in.

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

Brainstorm high-value actions, correlate them with conversion and retention, then experiment to prove causation

Productivity4 steps

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

Marketing4 steps

B2B Channel Sequencing Ladder

Turn on growth channels in a fixed order, cheapest-and-least-scalable first, because each later channel needs the customer knowledge the earlier ones produce.

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

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

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

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

Building the PLG Team and Org

Start with a growth PM and an analyst, then formalize into a cross-functional PLG org with three growth heads

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

When to bundle products and when a single-product land wins

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cap Table as a Growth Strategy

Recruit influential founders and operators onto your cap table so they become your earliest, most credible customers and evangelists.

Productivity4 steps

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

Roadmap the phase, not the feature: Discovery, then Solutioning, then Build, then a ship date.

Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

Competitive Wargaming

Assign each squad one competitor for a quarter, then pool the intel on a presentation day.

Finance3 steps

Contribution-Margin Payback Period over CAC

Judge acquisition ROI by how many months of contribution-margin profit it takes to repay CAC, not by CAC or LTV:CAC.

Customer Research as a Documentarian

Observe like a non-judgmental documentarian, find the pattern, then validate the truth with data

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

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.

Do the Opposite

Study what everyone's doing not to copy it, but to find the 180 that stands out.

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.

Dynamic North Star Metrics

Hold a North Star for at least six months, then be willing to abandon it

Sales5 steps

Enterprise Procurement Navigation

Do procurement's work for them, define exactly what you do, and split contracts so deals don't die on the vine

Productivity3 steps

Escape-Velocity Activation Metric

Identify the specific actions a user must take in their first window to become durably active, then make one team obsess over driving them.

Communication4 steps

Evals as Articulating Success

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

Experiment Only When You Need To

Treat A/B tests as risk mitigation, not as the default proof of impact

Communication4 steps

Exponential Feedback via the Competency Lens

Give feedback on root-cause behaviors, not surface symptoms, so it compounds — use a competency rubric as the diagnostic lens.

Mindset3 steps

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

Seek peers in the ring with you who'll throw real punches—not advice from the sidelines.

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.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

Two formal and two informal routes into PM — the informal ones convert most often.

Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

Productivity5 steps

Frontier of Understanding (Goal by Risk Type)

Before committing to an outcome goal, set the goal at the true edge of what your team knows — understanding, dependency, execution, or strategic risk.

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

Productivity3 steps

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Marketing3 steps

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

Change one part of the growth system and you change them all—so fix the true source.

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.

Guided Onboarding Wizard

Replace tooltips with an immersive wizard that builds the user's first workflow with them

Hard-Bar Activation Metric Selection

Pick the activation metric only 5-15% of users hit, then decompose it into levers

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

Judge people by their actual output, not by how they talk in a conversation.

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Latency Over Velocity: Conviction-Based Startup Decisions

A startup's edge isn't speed — it's a tight turning radius; swap experiment-driven decisions for informed conviction.

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

Match the Sales Hire to the Motion and the Buyer (PLG to SLG)

Layering sales onto PLG: hire growers for inbound and department-head buyers, not CIO hunters.

Maximize the Treatment Effect to Fail Conclusively

In low-sample B2B tests, throw every tactic at a hypothesis at once so a failure kills the idea for good instead of resurfacing for years.

MECE Problem Decomposition

Break any problem into buckets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so you never miss a possible cause or solution.

Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

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

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.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

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.

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

Match the PM archetype you hire to the product's stage of maturity

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

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

Players, Coaches, Captains

Split leadership into on-field captains and sideline coaches so top ICs never leave the game.

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data

Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

Write the launch press release before you build to keep products marketable

Mindset4 steps

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

Stop hoping the next fix makes it easier; reframe success as earning harder problems.

Sales3 steps

Qualification-First Diagnosis

There is no bottom-of-funnel problem — slow deals trace back to qualifying the wrong people, message, or problem

Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

Reading the Signals for Product-Led vs Sales-Led Growth

A decision tree for whether and when to hire your first salespeople

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

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

Scalable Leadership vs. Selective Micromanagement

When you lack confidence in your team's direction, don't go hands-off — micromanage tactically and temporarily to get them back on track.

Segment by Learning and Building Style

Personalize onboarding by how someone builds and learns, not by their job title

Innovation5 steps

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

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.

Standing Up a Product Discipline From Scratch

Turn an implicit PM function into a real one by writing the ladder first, then wiring hiring to it

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

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.

Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

Ten hard metrics to judge whether a company is worth betting your career on

The 12 Product Management Competencies

Map every PM skill into four areas — execution, customer insight, product strategy, influence — and 12 competencies that hold from APM to CPO.

Sales5 steps

The 30-Prospect Manual Discovery Experiment

Before buying any sales tool, hand-pick 30 prospects, write each a real note, and let the response rate reveal your ICP parameters

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

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

The Career S-Curve for Attracting Talent

Map where a candidate sits on the ambiguity-vs-scale S-curve, then sell them their next step

Communication5 steps

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?

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 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 Five PLG Readiness Components

The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

The Four-Component Cold Outreach Message

Open cold with relevancy + a counterintuitive hook + a problem (never the solution), kept short enough not to scroll

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 Full PLG Funnel Audit

Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

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 Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

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

Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

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.

The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)

Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org

Strategy6 steps

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

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 OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities

A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

The Path to the C-Suite

Five career levers plus a work ethic that compound you into an executive

Productivity4 steps

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

The three infrastructure layers plus per-funnel-stage tools every PLG motion needs

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 Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

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

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Reverse Trial

Run a premium trial on top of freemium: showcase everything, then fall back to free forever

The Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

Innovation5 steps

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

Incubate new product lines as separate 'seed companies' with dedicated teams and adjacency-based selection

The Service-First Wedge

When the buyer has no process to buy your tech, sell a time-boxed service that gets you the logo, revenue, and the pen

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

The Strategy-Isn't-Done-Without-Wireframes Rule

Treat a strategy doc like a house blueprint: it isn't complete until wireframes show what the product looks like when the strategy is built.

Strategy6 steps

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

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.

Marketing3 steps

The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth

Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning

The Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

No OKRs, then siloed team OKRs, then company OKRs with cross-org dependency mapping.

The Two Onboarding Traps

Stop naming features and stop mapping onboarding to your pricing tiers

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.

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

Express multi-year strategy as a yearly percentage split of resources across three horizons.

Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Two-Path Talent Sourcing (Network + Data)

Find the companies best at the skill you're hiring for, then find the best person there - via referral chains or via public performance data.

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Sales5 steps

Vulnerability-Based Customer Discovery

Admit you're early and unfinished (even if you're not) to get raw feedback, then gate-check whether the problem is real

When to Hire Your First PM

Stay founder-as-PM until bottlenecks, hijacked eng/design, or new customer segments force the hire

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.

Sales3 steps

Win-Rate-First Funnel Math

Stop obsessing over conversion rate — a high win rate means you need far less top-of-funnel throughput