Atlassian

2x Activation Energy for Change

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

Add a Zero (10x First-Principles Reframing)

Force a 10x version of the goal so the team must rethink the problem from first principles, not optimize the current process.

AI at the Core vs AI at the Edge

Decide whether to sprinkle AI onto existing code or rebuild the workflow with the LLM as the core

Alpha Co-Creation Loop

Pick the users who are already pushing the boundary, build with them in a shared channel, ship only when they're thrilled.

Influence4 steps

Anchor the Pitch to the Exec's Incentives

Find the metric, OKR, or board pressure they own, then show how your idea moves it.

Artist / Scientist / General Manager Spike

Hire PMs by which of three modes they spike in, and compose the team so the spikes cover each other.

Influence5 steps

Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play

Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence

Brain-Dump, Group, Vote, Single-Author (Company Values Workshop)

Crowdsource the raw material for values, but never write the definitions by committee

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

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

Build for the Future Model

Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today

Build for Your Best User, Not Your Worst

In early product development, design for the user who gets it instantly, not the edge-case abuser

Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

Learn from execution, self-retrospect, deep-dive one skill gap at a time, and keep only what works for you.

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

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

Influence4 steps

Buy-In as a Journey, Not a Meeting

Win the decision before the decision meeting by looping stakeholders in early and staying open on the solution.

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.

Care Deeply, Challenge Directly — The Feedback Script

Three moves that let hard feedback land as care instead of criticism

Charter, Goals, Roadmap: The Three Documents

Every level of the org needs three docs — mission/strategy, goals, roadmap — written top-down

Choose Your Abstraction Layer Deliberately

Delegate the work you don't enjoy to a higher abstraction; keep the parts that make you good and happy.

Clarity and Conviction: Insights, Strategy, Big Rocks

The whole craft of PM in two words, expressed as a two-page narrative every team can recite.

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

New leader's first move: earn trust before inflicting the change you were hired to make.

Context Over Models: The Data-Management Bet

AI products win on getting good, timely, well-structured data to the model — not on the model itself

Sales4 steps

Conversation-Intelligence Deal Diagnosis (the Dealbot)

Run an AI agent over every call, email and Slack to find the real reason you win, lose, and stall

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

Ship an AI feature by naming its 3-4 core behaviors and teaching them with model-generated data

CORE Feedback Structure

Context, Observation, Result, Next Step — feedback about behavior, never personality

Data Is a Compass, Not a GPS

Data disproves the ridiculous — it rarely hands you the answer, so validate findings before you trust them

Peak Performance4 steps

Desensitization for Performance Fear

Neutralize public-speaking (or any) fear by exposing yourself in tiny, low-stakes, escalating doses

Design the Job to Fit the Person

Stop hunting unicorns against made-up job descriptions; reshape roles around the good people you find

Sales3 steps

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

Great salespeople talk under half the time and answer a question with a question about the question

Do the Opposite

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

Sales3 steps

Dual-Motion Growth: PLG and Sales That Feed Each Other

Win by having both many customers and lots of revenue — with PLG and sales feeding each other

Dual-Track Category Building (Sell Into Today's Budget, Build Tomorrow's Category)

Rank in the funded category you already fit while running a long-tail campaign to shift the market to your new one

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

The three-stage loop for developing a product vision: understand deeply, imagine the solved world, then sell it.

Energy Drivers and Energy Drains Audit

Mine your past for moments that energized or drained you, then turn them into job design requirements

Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference

Observe what customers do, not what they say — AI transcript-reading is not true customer insight

Eval-First AI Product Development

Define what 'correct' looks like as evals first; the spec becomes the scorecard, not the build instructions

Failure-as-Default Framing to Create Startup Scarcity

Openly declaring a new bet will most likely fail buys the autonomy and speed a big company otherwise smothers

Fight Club: A Standing Slot for Conflict

Reserve a recurring weekly slot with your key peers specifically to surface and resolve conflict early.

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

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

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

Mindset4 steps

First-Principles Thinking as a Hiring Filter

Build your own framework from context instead of importing one — and hire for it deliberately

Flying Formation

Define cross-team roles (DACI) plus operating rhythms before growth ships anything

Follow the Breadcrumbs and Calibrate Urgency

Act fast on an exec's subtle hints, but ask how strongly they actually feel first.

Forest Time

Schedule intentional monthly time to leave the trees and survey the forest — because good aim precedes huge investment.

Founder-in-the-Details Operating Model

Rebuild a company like a startup: functional teams, one road map, one shared consciousness, CEO in the work.

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

Adopt a specific user's identity, walk your own product end-to-end, and log every point of friction.

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

The tell-tale signals that friction, not capability, is capping your team's speed

Gauge How It Lands

Read the reaction in real time and adjust which axis you move on — sad/mad means move up on care

Go-to-Market as a Product

Design the buying journey as a sequence of experiences, and add value at every touch whether or not they buy

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

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

Hire-Experienced vs. Train-Up Decision Matrix

Decide whether to hire an experienced product ops person or train one, based on time and coaching capacity

Hire for Autonomy: References, Real Work, and Default Trust

You'll be in none of the decisions that matter — so hire people you can hand autonomy to, and verify via references.

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

Hire two gritty early-stage sellers from an analogous company, not a professionally rich VP.

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

Evaluate people in three dimensions — skills, attributes, and values — not skills alone, which is only ~50% predictive.

Hiring Profiles by Product Ops Pillar

Match each product ops pillar to a distinct candidate background and skillset

Incubate-Iterate-Integrate for Innovating Inside a Mature Product

Build the new experience beside your core product, perfect it, then fold it back in — so you don't break existing customers

Innovation by Isolation

The beneficial silo: how to actually make a startup-within-a-company work.

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

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

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Intentional Remote Operating Model

Make remote work productive by scheduling connection in bursts, protecting synced deep-work blocks, and banning status meetings.

Productivity6 steps

Internal Tools as a Product (The Crying Octopus)

Run your dev-productivity team like a product team: monthly surveys, hard metrics, and one-click paper cuts.

Introvert-Inclusive Meeting Design

Four manager tactics to surface the best ideas from quiet people, not just the loudest three

Job Prototyping via Informational Interviews

Treat yourself as a product: prototype many roles wide, interview people who hold them, then narrow

Keep the Flame Alive: The High-Speed-Train Comms Cadence

Weekly bite-sized, honest updates and 3-minute customer snippets build momentum no one wants to step in front of

Keep vs. Offload: The PM Decision-Rights Boundary

A clear line for what a PM keeps versus hands to product ops — decision rights never move

Knowledge Redundancy Through Pairing and Pair Switching

No single owner of any system — pair, rotate pairs, and your org becomes fault-tolerant.

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product

LLM as Disconfirmation Engine

Point the model at where your strategy does NOT fit — and reverse-engineer competitors from their public docs

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Finance4 steps

LTV Expansion Over Top-of-Funnel Expansion

When capital is cheap and rivals buy growth, grow the value of organic traffic instead.

Mandatory vs. Optional Onboarding Split

Split onboarding into a spare mandatory setup and a random-access optional layer — model the buyer's mind, not your features.

Market It in Their Words

Never invent positioning — put the exact words your reference customers used on the box

Meet the Bar and Be Different

Incumbents overshoot average utility — win by meeting the bar while being materially different

Minimum Viable Process (MVP)

Introduce the least process that reduces variance, and give your best people escape hatches

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone

New Products as Internal Startups

Incubate new products like funded startups: tiny teams, prove ROI before funding, keep them separate

Opinionated Simplicity

Ship one compelling opinion instead of ten confusing options — you learn faster being wrong than being neutral

Influence5 steps

Organic Mentorship Sourcing

Never ask 'will you be my mentor' — pick managers whose success depends on yours, then bring real problems

Output as the Leading Indicator of Outcomes

Outcomes are the goal, but shipping rate is the only early signal you'll get that you'll hit them.

Outside-the-Building Product Management

Spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building and argue every case from the market's point of view

Passion-Project Learning (An Eval for Your Life)

Learn new tech by picking one passion project that forces you to touch everything you need to learn

Peer Feedback Groups

Small standing peer pods that review each other's rough-draft work to build feedback muscle and trust.

Performance = Potential − Interference

Two levers only: raise the team's ceiling, or remove the weight sitting on top of it.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Picking a Sharp Problem

Build on a problem so acute customers spontaneously ask to pay — it becomes a tailwind that carries your mistakes.

Pickup Games: Getting Reps Without a Coach

No good coach at work? Manufacture low-stakes arenas for collaborative problem solving

Players, Coaches, Captains

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

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

Practice Before the Promotion

Promote people to DO the job, never to learn it — coach the next role before the title arrives

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

Know whether your metric is a recipe or a lens — and never misuse a recipe

Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

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

Finance3 steps

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

Front-load the architecture, fan out to agents, then step back and evaluate

Proactive Time Allocation (Kill Fake Work, Guard Relationships)

Stop letting your inbox set your agenda; allocate time from strategy and finite-life priorities instead of reacting.

Problem-First AI Adoption

Start from the customer problem and ask where AI helps — never from 'what do we do with AI?'

Mindset4 steps

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

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

Product-Lens Metrics: Monitoring Product Health vs. Business Health

Segment company metrics through a product lens so leaders can actually monitor their strategy

Product Marketing Fusion (Inbound + Outbound in One Function)

Merge product management with product marketing so the people who build the product also own how it's told and sold.

Prompting-as-Prototyping

Validate a product idea by prompting a model in a local browser before building anything

Pushes and Pulls Compass

You only truly change jobs when a set of pushes builds enough energy and pulls point the direction

Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case

Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.

Radically Human Support as a Growth Engine

Route every support email to every employee, ban macros, and let candour create word of mouth.

Mindset4 steps

Raising the Longer-Runway Child

Four principles for parenting introverted or shy kids without shaming their temperament

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

Sketch the ideal end-state journey, then work backwards and ship it in measurable pieces.

Sales4 steps

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

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

Marketing6 steps

Rebrand as a Product Development Process

Run a rebrand with sprint teams, owners, and transparency — not as a marketing reveal

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Reference Customer Discovery

Build with a fixed number of real customers until they'll stake their reputation on your product

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

Pick two or three metrics that speak the exact word your leaders keep repeating

Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision

Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it

RIDE — Decision-Making Clarity for Change

For any change, name who Requests, who Inputs, who Decides, and who Executes.

Mindset3 steps

Robust-Across-Futures Action

When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios

Schedule Syncing (Managing Your Manager)

Never say no to your boss — show your timeboxed calendar and ask them to help you prioritize.

Seek the Counterfactual, Not Confirmation

The competitive edge lives in the data you're trying to prove yourself wrong with, not the data you hoped to see

Sales3 steps

Sell to Reduce Risk, Not Increase Upside

Four of five buyers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — anchor the sale there, not on the art of the possible

Set the Pace Through Decisiveness (Bias for Action)

A company's speed is governed by how fast it decides, not how hard it works — so refuse to 'circle back.'

Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

Gather internal data, customer research and company goals, make the best informed bet, then reevaluate and pivot.

Strategy6 steps

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.

Influence3 steps

Shrink the Change to Build Trust

De-risk a scary idea into a two-week experiment with a fixed check-in date.

Soliciting Feedback: The Order of Operations

Ask a go-to question, count to six, listen to understand, then reward the candor

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.

Speak Early, Speak From Conviction

Two tactics to get an introvert's ideas heard and acted on in loud meetings

Influence3 steps

Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust

Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet

Stage-Gated Product Incubation

Grow new products through five funded stages — wonder, explore, make, impact, scale — validating at each gate.

Stewart Plus Two More

Never bring one option; show a Goldilocks three and hold the rest in the appendix.

Story of Our Team

A merge ritual: two timelines on a wall become one shared history.

Strategy Activation via Crossing the Chasm

Treat internal strategy rollout as an adoption curve — over-communicate the why and manage early adopters vs laggards

Surfing the Detail Edge (CEO Engagement Dial)

Stay deep enough to understand, light enough not to hijack — a CEO's every aside is an order.

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

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

Take People With You Before You Fix Anything

A new leader's toolbox is worthless until the team agrees a problem exists — build the why first.

Taste, Humility, Hutzpah: The Designer Hiring Lens

Hire for judgment, humility, and the courage to say 'not good enough' — tools and process you can teach.

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.

The $10 Game for Personal Priorities

Allocate a notional $10 across your priorities to expose where your time actually goes versus where it should.

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

Hire salespeople with enough product depth that engineers can't tell they aren't a PM

The 10-Minute Rule (Surfing the Urge)

Beat any urge to get distracted by waiting ten minutes and riding the emotion until it subsides.

Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

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

The 10x Lens on New Ideas

For every promising idea, ask where it could go in 3-5 years if it were 10x bigger — and let that reshape it now.

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

The 60-Second Meeting Reset

Buy a context-starved exec 30 seconds of orientation before you pitch.

The 70/20/10 Investment Split

Allocate product building time 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% bets to balance stability and innovation

The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)

Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply

The Business Is an Equation

Model the whole business as one equation before optimizing any funnel leaf node.

The Business-Rules Moat: Why 'Forms on Databases' Are Unclonable

B2B SaaS lock-in isn't the UI or data model — it's years of accreted, configured business rules

The Career Bingo Card

Deliberately take adjacent-but-different roles to fill in squares and become 'scribble-shaped'

The Category Creation Go/No-Go Test

Four checks — budget, buyer language, competition, and vision scope — decide whether to invent a category or win an existing one

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head

The Consultant With a Predilection

Be a consultant who favours one solution: yours. Disqualify hard, let discovery persuade.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Contributor Path: Pick the Equation, Not the Title

You don't have to raise the seed round; join a team whose math already wins.

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The Effort Metric (Measure Attention, Not Completion)

Track 'did I do what I said for as long as I said without distraction' instead of whether you finished.

The Engineer-cation

Leaders clear 3-4 days, join a team as an IC, ship one small feature to production, and log the friction.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The First Growth Hire as Portfolio Manager

Hire acquisition first, and hire for attributes over channel expertise — expertise causes false precision

The Five Ingredients of a High-Performing Team

Clear goals + a why, results culture, team-first, ownership, and fun — in that order

The Five Patterns of Dynamic Reteaming

Every team change is one of five patterns — name it, then manage it deliberately.

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

The Four Career Quests

Diagnose which of four job-change 'quests' you're on so you optimize the move correctly

The Four-Channel Category Rollout

Customer language, PR testing, analyst/directory validation, and content — the mechanics of making a category real

The Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

Group effort, vision + alignment, an editor, and the courage to say 'almost, but no'.

The Four Product Risks

Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last

The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision

A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.

Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

A start-anywhere playbook to stand up a developer-experience initiative

The Future Headline

Write the tech-press headline your launch would earn, mocked into the real publication's page.

Communication6 steps

The Gnarly-Problem Offsite

Remote by default, but collapse a stalled hard decision into a tightly-agenda'd 48-hour in-person burst.

The GTM Engineer Agent-Deployment Loop

Turn a sales function into an AI agent by shadowing your best rep, then redeploy the humans up-market

The Highest Best Use Interview

Ban hypotheticals, ask for lived history, and finish by asking what a great day looks like.

The Horizon-3 Research Team That Ships

Fund a 3-5 year research team, then bolt it to product so ideas actually reach production.

The Human Behind the Role

Optimise for being loved, not liked — earn the right to give raw feedback by proving you care first.

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

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

The Indistractable Model

The four-step system for controlling your attention: master triggers, make time, hack back, and pre-commit.

The Indistractable Workplace (Three Traits)

Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction — fix it with psychological safety, a forum, and leaders who model it.

The Input-Metrics Stack for Developer Productivity

No single metric rules them all — combine per-component input metrics that ladder up to time-to-value.

The Introvert's Career Visibility Playbook

Five moves to get your value seen and your ambition known without becoming someone you're not

Strategy6 steps

The Inverted W Planning Process

Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

Judge a new seller each month on the indicator due that month, not on bookings.

The Levels of Quality Ladder

Rate every feature 1-5: works → error-free → usable → desirable → surprisingly great.

The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)

Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early

The Live Problem Interview

Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing

The Low-Maintenance Work-in-Progress Deck

One shared slide deck of screenshots, updated monthly, that kills redundant work and spreads patterns.

The Magic Loop

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

The Marquee Mock Exercise

Hand everyone blank App Store screenshot panels and make them draw the world where the problems are solved.

Themes for Discussion at the Top of the Doc

Bubble up the spiciest 3 topics live; answer the hundred nitpicks offline.

The Nielsen Number: Right-Size Your Research

Interview 7-14 people — fewer teaches too little, more teaches nothing new

The Once Upon a Time Vision Story

A five-blank Mad Libs template that turns a product vision into a story anyone can retell.

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

The Ownership Engine

Ownership is manufactured by scope design first, culture second, and leader accountability third

The Path to the C-Suite

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

The Pixar Career Story Template

Distill your career into a seven-line Pixar-style story that intrigues interviewers and clarifies your direction

The Prep-Call PM Interview Loop

Coach the candidate before their final presentation — how they use your feedback is the real signal

The Product Talent Portfolio

Build a team of complementary spikes instead of clones of yourself, and hire specifically for your gaps

The Radical Candor 2x2

Care personally AND challenge directly — the two axes that place every act of feedback

The Reteaming Anti-Patterns

The three ways leaders reliably wreck a reorg: percentages, poof, and spreading stars.

The Roles and Responsibilities Contract

Each function writes what it expects of the others, then the group negotiates one shared contract.

The Sales Motion as Source Code

Treat the pitch like a codebase: run cohorts of 10, patch the bug the prospect found, redeploy.

The Scrappy Wedge for Unglamorous Investment

Win backing for unsexy work by starting small, showing it visually, making it easy for others, and proving momentum.

The Second-Date Funnel

Win rate is a lagging indicator. Manage the meeting-to-meeting conversions like dates.

Sales6 steps

The Selling While Loop

Sell it yourself until it reliably runs on your local, then package it and ship it to other brains.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Sharp Problem

Build for old, enduring needs re-imagined with new tech so the improvement is 3-10x undeniable

The Shipyard Team

Organize product work as a six-capability pod of controlled chaos with sensory 'tendrils' to customers

The SPACE Framework

Pick balanced developer productivity metrics across five dimensions — never rely on one.

The Sticky Engine of Growth

Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product

The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.

The Talent Development Lifecycle

Develop people across five stages: fit, ramp, early wins, visibility, lifelong relationship

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Three Career Conversations

Past, dreams, and action plan — three 45-minute conversations to show you care and grow people

Influence5 steps

The Three Concentric Circles of Evangelism

Socialise a vision outward: core team, then stakeholders, then leadership as high as you can reach.

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 Innovation Blockers

Diagnose why a team plays it safe by checking the three specific things that quietly kill big thinking

The Three Levels of Listening

Internal, focused, global — know which level you're on and deliberately move up.

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

Separate targeted Discovery, always-on Continuous Conversations, and passive Customer Listening — each needs its own machinery.

The Three Pacts (Pre-Commitment Firewall)

Lock in your intentions ahead of time with an effort pact, a price pact, or an identity pact.

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Structure a product ops function around data insights, customer insights, and process to free PMs for strategic work

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Scale product management with internal data & insights, customer research at scale, and standardized strategy cadences.

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Tomorrow Test for Saying No

Decide whether to accept a distant commitment by imagining you had to do it tomorrow

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

Force a top-three, weight by frequency, and never ask four questions at once

The Two Paths to Opinionated Software

Either encode a best practice that already exists without technology, or teach a better way and enforce it in the product

The Two-Question Introvert Diagnostic

Two thought experiments that reveal your true temperament preference, cutting through learned behavior

The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)

Define what to build and how to grow from the use case, not the persona.

The Values-Encoded Brand System

Build the brand as a system whose elements each encode a company value, so every touchpoint stays on-brand without training

The 'Why Now' Perishability Test for Internal Pitches

A good business case that lacks a strong 'why now' trigger gets parked; make the opportunity feel perishable

The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact Incubation Gate

A four-stage vocabulary with 6-pager gates that lets a big company incubate new bets without prematurely scaling them

The Written Screen Job Simulation

Send a shared doc of a dozen easy questions. Half the candidates disqualify themselves.

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.

The Zero-Ask Assistant (Copilot Design Philosophy)

If the user has to ask for it or wait for it, they won't adopt it — build assistance that infers.

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

A product must make the customer at least 3x better before they notice enough to switch and pay.

Timeboxing Your Values (Make Time for Traction)

Replace the to-do list with a weekly timeboxed calendar built from your values across three life domains.

Top 10 Things You Should Know

A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.

Influence4 steps

Treat the Executive as Your Key User

Run stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews, not approval requests.

Trust-by-Structure Governance

Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

Sales is a set of drills, not a birthright — practise your scales on baristas and bartenders.

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

Real virality is high-quality word of mouth from a great product — not synthetic referral traps bolted on top.

Leadership7 steps

Walk the Store: The Essential Journeys Quality Program

Name your 15 critical user journeys, give each a cross-functional owner, and score them on a fixed cadence.

What Are You Optimizing For?

Replace 'balance' with 'optimization' — name the one thing this horizon is for, then let the trade-offs follow.

When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

Use portfolio complexity, revenue scale, PM headcount and trigger events — not a title chart — to know it's CPO time.

Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant

Score a B2B SaaS idea on two axes — workflow breadth and frequency — to predict billion-dollar potential.

Which Product Ops Pillar to Start With

Choose your first product ops investment by company stage and where your biggest fire is

Whiteboard Reteaming

Roll the draft org chart out in public and let the people in it fix it.

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Writing a Compelling Product Vision

A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.