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0 recommend/use · 11 sourced episodes

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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.

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Leadership4 steps

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

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Peak Performance4 steps

Binary Quality Calibration

Instead of documenting what 'quality' means, classify shipped work as high-quality or not — and let examples teach the bar.

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Communication4 steps

Care Deeply, Challenge Directly — The Feedback Script

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

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Marketing5 steps

Champions at Scale: Manual-to-Machine Word-of-Mouth Engine

Over-invest by hand in early product champions, learn their patterns, then productize those patterns into scalable content.

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Strategy3 steps

Choosing a Startup PR Agency

Vet PR agencies on month-one behavior, writing samples, and lead time — not on big-brand logos.

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Productivity4 steps

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

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

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Strategy4 steps

Competitive Wargaming

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

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Leadership4 steps

Critique in Public, Build Trust in Private

Invert the management-book rule: debate directly in public, lavish reassurance in private.

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Leadership4 steps

Deliver Customer Value Faster with High Quality

One sentence, three measurable attributes — the motto that drives Miro's entire product reward and measurement system.

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Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

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

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Influence3 steps

Don't Be Stingy With Words

People can't read your mind — make appreciation explicit, and never fake it.

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Marketing3 steps

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

Instead of creating a software category, make a job into a meaningful identity people will fight for.

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Marketing3 steps

Find-the-Nugget Angle Selection

Ignore the company's own messaging; find the single thread reporters care about and double down.

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Mindset4 steps

First-Principles Thinking as a Hiring Filter

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

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Innovation4 steps

First to Hit the Brick Wall

In innovation, speed is the biggest determinant of success because you learn what doesn't work before anyone else.

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Leadership4 steps

Flying Formation

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

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Leadership3 steps

Follow the Breadcrumbs and Calibrate Urgency

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

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

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

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Marketing4 steps

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

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Innovation4 steps

Go All-In When the Experiment Works

Big companies experiment plenty — they fail by hedging instead of doubling down on what works.

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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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Guilty-Pleasure Career Bet

Find the thing you feel guilty getting paid for, do the hell out of it with intensity, and take non-linear risks.

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Marketing4 steps

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

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Marketing3 steps

Incumbent Anchoring

Position your product as taking on a household-name incumbent, never as a new category.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Laughably Small MVP Under High Stakes

Ship the smallest possible thing even for high-stakes problems — it delivers impact and reveals what to actually build.

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Innovation4 steps

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

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

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

Mega Trend vs Hype Cycle — The PhD Test

If you need a PhD to understand it, it's not a mega trend. Don't fight mega trends.

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Innovation3 steps

North Star Exploration

Turn aimless tech-tinkering into learning by chasing an arbitrary-but-real goal and being stubborn about reaching it.

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Influence5 steps

Organic Mentorship Sourcing

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

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Communication4 steps

Own the Story — No Packet Loss

The leader is the custodian of the message — deliver it to the front line yourself, never via cascade.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Pick Hard Problems to Attract the Best Team

Hard, important problems attract the best people — and business is a team sport.

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Marketing5 steps

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

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Marketing3 steps

PR and Launch Strategy: Credibility Over Leads

Treat PR as a credibility asset for hiring and cold outbound, and replace one big launch with a cadence of launches.

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Productivity3 steps

Problems One and Two

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

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Productivity4 steps

P-Stage Cycle-Time Benchmarking

Stage-gate every initiative (PStrat→P0→P1→P2), size it S/M/L, and benchmark cycle time against yourself like golf.

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Marketing3 steps

Publication-to-Story Fit Map

Match each story type to the one publication most likely to cover it, before pitching anyone.

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Marketing4 steps

Punch Above Your Weight: Trust Signaling for Small Startups

Use small, cheap signals of polish and legitimacy so large customers trust a tiny company with big contracts.

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Strategy3 steps

Right to Win via Permission to Play

Before building, ask if it's logical that YOU built it — and whether you have a route to market.

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Mindset3 steps

Robust-Across-Futures Action

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

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Strategy4 steps

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

A six-month roadmap refreshed quarterly, with 80% commitment in months 1-3 and 50% in months 4-6.

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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

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Influence3 steps

Shrink the Change to Build Trust

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

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Communication3 steps

Stewart Plus Two More

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

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Innovation6 steps

Study Group

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

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Marketing3 steps

Systematic Customer Conversations

Build a lightweight, repeatable system to talk to customers by phone on a regular cadence.

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Communication4 steps

The 60-Second Meeting Reset

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

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Leadership4 steps

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

Redefine 'product org' as Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design — all embedded in every stream.

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Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

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

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Strategy4 steps

The Chess-Points Competitive Lens

Every release is a move against your competitor in the customer's mind — positive or negative, never neutral.

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Leadership3 steps

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

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

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Communication3 steps

The Contrarian Coverage-Gap Angle

Give reporters the bold opposing view on a trending topic they're already covering positively.

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Communication3 steps

The Direct Funding Pitch

Pitch funding news by pattern-matching a beat reporter and stating the deal in three sentences.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The First Growth Hire as Portfolio Manager

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Five Ingredients of a High-Performing Team

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

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Strategy4 steps

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

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Marketing5 steps

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

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Communication3 steps

The Jargon-Strip Clarity Test

Say what your product does out loud in plain answers; if the writing can't match, strip the jargon.

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Strategy6 steps

The Leakable Metric

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

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Communication3 steps

The Lightweight-First Outreach Opener

Open cold with a one-line 'are you open to ideas?' instead of a full pitch, to earn a reply.

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Innovation3 steps

The Love-Hate Disruption Test

Gauge whether an idea is truly disruptive by how polarized the reactions are, not how positive.

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Communication3 steps

Themes for Discussion at the Top of the Doc

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

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Leadership4 steps

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.

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Leadership3 steps

The Ownership Engine

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

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Leadership4 steps

The Prep-Call PM Interview Loop

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

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Strategy6 steps

The Six-Factor Company Stack Rank

Timing > market > team > product > brand > distribution — you need all six, ranked.

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Marketing4 steps

The Sticky Engine of Growth

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Talent Development Lifecycle

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

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

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Leadership4 steps

The Two-Persona Product Leader

Every product leader wears two hats: as a leadership-team member drive accountability; as a stream leader drive improvement.

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Leadership4 steps

The Unblock Virtuous Cycle

Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.

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Innovation5 steps

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

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Strategy4 steps

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

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

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Influence4 steps

Treat the Executive as Your Key User

Run stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews, not approval requests.

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Leadership4 steps

Trust-by-Structure Governance

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

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Strategy4 steps

User-Value Thermodynamics

Users are lazy; adoption only happens when total value delivered exceeds total effort spent, ideally by 10x.

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Innovation4 steps

What-If Before Why-Not

Evaluate a disruptive idea by imagining its upside first, then treat the objections as your build list.

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Strategy5 steps

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.

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