Build

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

Innovation6 steps

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.

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Marketing4 steps

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.

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.

Productivity3 steps

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Empowerment Without Anarchy

Leaders place the bets; teams figure out how to win them. Neither top-down nor bottom-up.

Innovation4 steps

Evaluative User Research (Hunt for Reasons They Won't Use It)

Test prototypes to find every reason people won't use it — and never let the researcher go alone

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Tell in minutes whether your squad is handed features to ship or problems to solve

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

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

Leadership6 steps

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

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

Leadership6 steps

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.

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.

Leadership3 steps

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Leadership4 steps

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

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

Strategy3 steps

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Strategy6 steps

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

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

Innovation4 steps

Solution-Weighted Discovery

Spend a little time validating the problem; spend most of it winning on the solution

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.

Mindset4 steps

The Best-Teams Adoption Heuristic

Adopt a practice only if several of the best teams already use it — then strip the culture from the technique

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

Four diagnosable diseases that turn a great product company into a feature factory

Leadership6 steps

The Engineer-cation

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

The Feature Team vs Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Diagnose whether your team ships output or owns outcomes — and what that means for the PM role.

Innovation3 steps

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder's First-PM Timing Rule

The founder IS the product manager until scale forces the handoff — around 20 to 25 engineers.

Innovation4 steps

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

Valuable, usable, feasible, viable — any one fails and the product fails

Strategy6 steps

The Inverted W Planning Process

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

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.

Innovation3 steps

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

Convert a single feature team into an empowered product team in one low-risk quarter

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Product Manager's Four Areas of Homework

The four knowledge domains a PM must own because nobody else on the team can bring them

Strategy5 steps

The Product Operating Model

Three dimensions and four competencies that separate companies that consistently innovate from the rest.

The Three Sacred Accesses

Delegate anything off the PM's plate except direct access to customers, engineers, and stakeholders

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Value and Viability Skill Ladder

Climb from backlog administrator to real product manager by owning the two risks nobody else can.

Mindset4 steps

Think First, Then Challenge with AI

Reverse the default AI workflow: form your own answer, then use the model to attack it.