Arc

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.

Influence3 steps

Align, Don't Convince (Perception vs Perspective)

Win delight buy-in by mapping it to what the leader already values, not by arguing for it

Blow Their Socks Off: The 10x Word-of-Mouth Bar

To earn recommendation, give users an experience they didn't know was previously possible

Strategy6 steps

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

Innovation3 steps

Business-to-Human (Humanization Delighter)

Ask 'if my product were a human, how would the experience be better?' to raise the bar

Strategy5 steps

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.

Productivity5 steps

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

Channel Diversification Before the Drought

A one-channel growth company is always a no-no — turn on the second channel while the first still works.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

Conviction-Led Product Management

You can't split-test your way to love — build conviction on what matters, then make one big change

Finance4 steps

Cost-Allocation Pricing to Fuel Word-of-Mouth

Allocate every real cost to the customer who caused it, raise heavy users, cut everyone else's price

Innovation5 steps

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

Fix the incentive system and the time horizon first — everything else about internal incubation follows.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do the Unscalable to Get Customers to Lobby For You

Deliver a painful manual experience so good that customers complain to the regulator, not to you

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

Mission Authenticity as an Emotional Referral Engine

An authentic mission that customers genuinely believe becomes a word-of-mouth channel money can't buy

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Product Marketing: Closing the Perception Delta

Make users perceive the value you actually delivered — close the gap between done and perceived

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.

Innovation6 steps

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

Communication5 steps

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

Stamina as the Kill Signal

Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Stretch With an Anchor

Take the role that will hurt you into growth — but only if one or two things in it are already in your wheelhouse.

The 50/40/10 Delight Allocation

Split your roadmap 50% low delight, 40% deep delight, 10% surface delight

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

Strategy5 steps

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

The Delight Model

A 4-step process to find the highest-ROI delight opportunities instead of shipping low-value confetti

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 Marketplace Priority Stack

Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.

The NPS Doubling Curve for Viral Growth

Optimize NPS instead of conversion, because each promoter tier doubles how many people they tell

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

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.

Innovation3 steps

The Three Pillars of Delight

Create delight by removing friction, anticipating needs, or exceeding expectations

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

Values as a Mirror

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