BuildBetter

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Innovation6 steps

Automated User Research Pipeline

Wire sales-call keywords to Slack to email to your calendar so customer interviews book themselves.

Avoidance Reversal

Whatever emotion you avoid, you invite — in exactly the way you avoid it. Backward-engineer any problem.

Leadership4 steps

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Innovation3 steps

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

Stop fighting the critical voice in your head. Run a new response experiment on it every day.

Productivity3 steps

Data Is a Compass, Not a GPS

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

Drawing the Perimeter

The PM's job is to add constraints, not solutions — draw the box, then let engineers and designers fill it.

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

Unkink the hose: welcome, feel and physically express emotions instead of managing them.

Strategy5 steps

Five Principles to Live By

Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.

Five-Star Meetings

Make every meeting one people love leaving. The ones that stay bad are a map of your company's real problems.

Identity Separation After a Layoff

Sort what happened into 'not needed', 'wrong environment', and 'in my control' — only one of them is about you.

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Innovation3 steps

LLM as Disconfirmation Engine

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

Strategy3 steps

Meet the Bar and Be Different

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

Productivity3 steps

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

Marketing5 steps

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Question the Assumption

Every problem rests on hidden assumptions. Surface them and the problem often dissolves.

Strategy3 steps

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

Marketing3 steps

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Peak Performance5 steps

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

Enjoyment is a measure of efficiency. Enjoy the work 10% more and you are 10% more efficient.

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

Seven minutes of felt (not listed) gratitude with another person daily — then aim it at where you feel lack.

Strategy3 steps

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Career Bingo Card

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Decision Log

Build product sense by logging decisions you'd make, the reasoning, and later the actual outcome.

Strategy4 steps

The Foundational Three Entry Path

Don't start in PM. Start as the person you'd be taking PM responsibilities from — engineer, designer, or seller.

Productivity3 steps

The Nielsen Number: Right-Size Your Research

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

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

Leadership3 steps

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

Marketing3 steps

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

Communication5 steps

The Tuning Fork Silent Read

Don't ask what people think — put something concrete in front of them and force a live, in-room read.

The Unsell Email

At offer stage, email the candidate the eight worst truths about the job — then see if they still say yes.

Want Over Should (Self-Discovery, Not Self-Improvement)

Replace shoulds with wants and experiments — self-improvement encodes 'I'm broken' and slows evolution.