Amazon Web Services

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

AI Possibility-Space Mapping

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

Artificial Density Testing

Manually cram enough users into one cluster to get a clean yes/no on a social product

Autonomy at the VP Level

Place decision autonomy at the VP layer — not the leaves, not the top — to maximize thinking without producing chaos.

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

Two gates block senior promotion: can you do the job, and does the job exist.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

Leadership6 steps

Buying Life One Hour at a Time (Public Failure Recovery)

Own the failure, buy trust back one hour at a time, then get face-to-face.

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

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.

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

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.

Conditional-Layer Validation

Reduce a consumer product to ~4 things that must be true and validate them one at a time

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

Define What Problem Matters

The single highest-leverage PM skill: get crystal clear on which problem you're solving, first

Design the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

Disassemble the Lego Set

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

Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

Stop pitching, ask an open question about their whole life, then say nothing until the roadmap falls out

Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does

Market leaders survive by challenging and cannibalizing their own products before an upstart does it for them.

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

When products in a category are basically interchangeable, an adequate product with superior distribution wins

Self-Mastery4 steps

Dive-In Career Strategy for a Platform Shift

Facing a disruptive technology, submerge yourself in it and aim to hold at least two of three career pillars

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

Communication4 steps

Explain-It-to-Prove-You-Understand-It

Force yourself and others to explain decisions; if you can't articulate it, you probably don't understand it.

Fault-Tolerant User Interfaces

Design your UI to match the real hit-rate of your machine learning, not a fantasy of 100% accuracy.

Communication3 steps

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

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.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Peak Performance3 steps

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Get Promoted by Not Optimizing for the Promotion

Focus 100% on business impact and make your ambitions known — but never engineer your work around the title.

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.

Strategy6 steps

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

Communication4 steps

Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

Dissent is an obligation, not a right — and commitment only starts once you've been genuinely heard.

Hire Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product

Run recruiting like a business funnel — brand, discovery call, and an iterative role spec

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Input Metrics Over Output Metrics

Stop managing the revenue number. Instrument the controllable customer-experience inputs that produce it.

Inverted Time-to-Value

Engineer the aha moment into the first 3 seconds using non-obvious platform mechanics

Mindset5 steps

Ladder vs Map

Choose career moves by what makes an interesting life, not by what climbs the next rung

Latent Demand Detection

Find product ideas where people already fight through a distorted process to get a value

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

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?

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Minimum Awesome Product

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

Morale Is Made of Progress

In a downturn, no speech and no bonus works — only visible shipping keeps a team alive

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

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.

Nothing Is Above Them, In The Details, They Adapt

The three traits Shah observed in Bezos, Chesky and Sacks — humility, craft, and adaptation

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Sales4 steps

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

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

Marketing5 steps

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

Discount friends' feedback to zero, and convert 'willing to pay' into money actually moving — refundable

Self-Mastery5 steps

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

Mindset4 steps

Presume Radical Uncertainty (The 1997 Lens)

Treat an emerging platform as if it were 1997 for the internet: assume most of it doesn't work and you can't yet name the winners

Price-Elasticity Three-Response Model

When a technology makes something cheaper, work out which of three demand responses your market will take

Productivity3 steps

Problems One and Two

Stop reporting your productivity on problems 3-100; get stuck on the two hardest ones

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.

Communication4 steps

Radical Trust Building

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

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

Match interface density to user intent: dense grids for recall, low-density sound-rich feeds for discovery.

Influence5 steps

Reframe, Don't Push Back

Win a disagreement with your CEO by finding the goal you already share, then renaming the problem

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

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.

Separating Change-Aversion from Real Problems in a Redesign

After a redesign, split 'upset because it changed' from 'upset because it's worse' before you react.

Leadership6 steps

Shipping 0-to-1 Inside a Big Company

Make it the customer's idea, storyboard it in Sharpie, prove it once, and show the economics

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Single-Threaded Leadership

Kill resource contention by giving one leader one mission and every function they need to deliver it.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

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.

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

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.

Structural Conditions for Innovation

Companies that say they tolerate failure but punish it in comp and career don't get innovation. Change the structure.

Innovation6 steps

Study Group

A one-hour role-play where employees forget they work at your company and try to use your product

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

Be an expert, book two hours a month, and fuse two things that already exist.

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 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

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 Age-Invitation Curve

Target the age band still adding social connections, or plan to buy every user with ads

The Bar Raiser Hiring Process

Put a trained, independent standard-keeper with veto power on every interview loop — and let them run the debrief.

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.

Productivity5 steps

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

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).

Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

The Failure Interview Question

Ask senior candidates about one time they failed and what they learned — and watch how they answer.

The Fork-in-the-Road Reset

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

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

Communication3 steps

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

Win interviews on presence and enthusiasm first, then on impact — never on how hard you worked.

Strategy6 steps

The Leakable Metric

Pick the one metric your customer would be delighted to discover you'd been measuring all along

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

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.

The Magic Loop

A five-step, repeatable loop that converts helping your manager into leverage for your own goals.

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

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

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

Innovation8 steps

The PRFAQ Working Backwards Document

Write the launch press release before you build, so every word forces a real decision

The Process Power Qualifier: Material and Opaque

Operational excellence is only power when it's both material AND impossible for rivals to copy.

Communication3 steps

The Rule of Seven

When an email thread hits seven replies without resolution, stop typing and get on a call.

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

Self-Mastery5 steps

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.

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

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

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

The Users Having a Bad Day Chart

Emit a log line every time a user hits pain, stack them in a bar chart, and burn the bars down

The Working Backwards PR/FAQ Process

Start every new product from the customer's problem, written as a press release, before any constraint enters the room.

Productivity4 steps

Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

Four product phases where spend rises stage by stage — so you must retire risk before the money starts.

Mindset3 steps

Three-Model Triangulation

Apply three different mental models to a problem; agreement across them sharply raises your odds of being right.

Timeline Padding Audit

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

Mindset4 steps

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

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

Values as a Mirror

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

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

Communication5 steps

Viral Hoax Counter-Attack

When a hoax threatens your app, treat it as a growth problem and out-viral it on every vector

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Innovation3 steps

Write the Press Release First

Before building anything, write the launch press release as if the product shipped today.