“you mentioned Star Wars. Have you seen Andor by the way?”
Andor
By Tony Gilroy
2 recommend/use · 3 sourced episodes
Every sourced reference
Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.
“with the exception of Andor for those that have not seen Andor it really is very good”
“I love Andor I I just finished watching it about a week ago”
Related frameworks
AI as Undermind Mirror
Use a structured five-days-of-questions prompt to make an LLM reflect back patterns you already sense but can't articulate.
Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software
Develop design intuition by watching real people use OTHER products, not your own.
De-Ambiguate Upstream: The Brief as a Prompt
Design is slow only when the brief is vague; remove variables upstream like you'd add context to an AI prompt.
Delay the Primal Mark
Stay in low-fidelity blocks and conversation as long as possible before drawing anything that looks real.
Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)
Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.
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.
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.
Interview for Design in the DNA
Before joining, verify the founders valued your function from the very beginning; it can't be grafted on later.
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.
Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping
Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product
Robust-Across-Futures Action
When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios
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.
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.
The Best-Practice Inversion Interview
Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply
The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner
Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head
The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision
Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet
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 Sticky Engine of Growth
Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product
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.
Trust-by-Structure Governance
Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone
Values, Not Behaviors: The Culture Car Wash
When you change companies, keep the values that got you hired but recalibrate the behaviors to the new culture.
People in these episodes
Related resources
- Airbnb
- Airtable
- Amazon
- App Store
- Apple
- Apple Podcasts
- Atlassian
- Balsamiq
- Box
- ChatGPT
- Descript
- Discord
- Disney
- Disneyland
- Everything Marketplaces
- Figma
- Glitch
- Google Hangouts
- GPT-4
- Habitica
- Hacker News
- Hinge
- HowAboutWe
- IDEO
- IMVU
- Indie Hackers
- iPhone
- Jira Product Discovery
- Keynote
- Lawrence of Arabia
- LEGO
- Leica M6
- Lenny's Newsletter
- Lenny's Podcast
- Levoit Classic 300S Ultrasonic Smart Humidifier
- Linear
- Long-Term Stock Exchange
- Loom
- Macintosh
- Merge
- Microsoft
- Microsoft PowerPoint
- Midjourney
- Miro
- NASA
- Nest
- OneSchema
- OpenAI
- Palo Alto
- Patagonia
- PayPal
- Philip Morris
- Pixar
- Reforge
- Retool
- Sanity
- Segment
- Severance
- Shopify
- Slack
- Smithsonian Institution
- Sony
- Spotify
- Stable Diffusion
- Star Wars
- Stripe
- Stripe Billing
- Superhuman
- Tableau
- The Dandelion Dynasty
- The Elements of Typographic Style
- The Enlightened Capitalists
- The Ezra Klein Show
- The Lean Startup
- The Murderbot Diaries
- Tinder
- Toast
- Toyota
- Tripadvisor
- Venmo
- Vercel
- We choose to go to the Moon speech
- Webflow
- Working Backwards
- World of Warcraft
- Y Combinator
- Yahoo
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.