ChatGPT

$100 Voting for Prioritization

Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.

Adaptive Evaluation Over Static Benchmarks

Measure AI robustness with attackers that learn, not with a frozen dataset of yesterday's attacks

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.

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

Force all your work through your own product even when it's the wrong tool, so it becomes the right tool

Adversarial Multi-Model Peer Review

Have rival LLMs review each other's code and fight it out until no issues remain

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

Ignore role boundaries — use AI tools to execute your own ideas end to end

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

Brainstorm high-value actions, correlate them with conversion and retention, then experiment to prove causation

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

AI as Undermind Mirror

Use a structured five-days-of-questions prompt to make an LLM reflect back patterns you already sense but can't articulate.

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

AI Computer Interfaces (ACI)

Give AI agents purpose-built text interfaces, not the human GUIs they were never designed for

AI Rep-Loop Compression

Build AI tools that give you feedback 80% as good as an expert's, on demand, to get years of judgment-building reps in a fraction of the time.

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

Alignment-First Founder Meeting Protocol

Open every high-stakes meeting by locking success criteria, then anchor back to them when a combustible leader derails.

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.

Ambitious Retry (Pass@N) Tool Use

Get more from AI tools by asking for the ambitious change and fully restarting on failure instead of hammering the same attempt

Answer the Question Behind the Question

When caught without a number, answer the adjacent question and surface the real concern.

Anticipated Regret Decision Test

Ask '10 years from now, what will I regret if I don't learn or do this now?' to unlock action.

Artificial Density Testing

Manually cram enough users into one cluster to get a clean yes/no on a social product

Asking for Help Well

Ask for advice, not answers — the counterintuitive skill that separates who rises from who stalls.

Autonomy at the VP Level

Place decision autonomy at the VP layer — not the leaves, not the top — to maximize thinking without producing chaos.

Balcony Rhythm for Co-Founder Relationships

Build shared self-awareness, then protect the relationship with vows and a real check-in cadence

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

Staff each team from the gap, not from a fixed PM/EM/designer template

Beginner's Mind Practice

Deliberately clear the expert's mind to keep every possibility open for the next decision.

Behavioral Activation

Act first, then feel better — keep a pre-written list of small actions that reliably reverse a low mood.

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Be The User Reset (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Zoom out and ask what the user hires your product for — then be that user and ask if you'd even buy what you made.

Be Your Own First Customer: Internal Tools to Product

Turn the ugly tools your team builds to serve customers into the product — most of the value is below the waterline

Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization

Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.

Bold-Move Leap (Not Moving Is the Risk)

When you need a step-change, make the committing bold move all at once — because playing safe is itself the risk

Boundaries Are What You Will Do

A real boundary is something you will do that requires the other person to do nothing — anything else is just a request

Brand as a Promise

A brand isn't a logo — it's a promise you make and keep, worth paying extra for.

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

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

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Broadcast How Leaders Think (Mental-Model Transparency)

Teach your team how key leaders think — not just what they decided — via weekly verbatim-plus-interpretation notes.

Build-and-Bake: Ship the Same Feature Until the Model Catches Up

Prototype ambitious features now, let them sit, and re-release the same shape each time models leap

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

Build for the Exponential (Skate to Where the Puck Is Going)

Build products for the model that arrives in 6-12 months, betting that today's 20%-working features hit 100%

Build for the Future Model

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

Build for the Models Six Months Out

Ship for the AI capabilities that will land in ~6 months, not the ones available today

Build for Where the Models Are Going

Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.

Building the Network Effect Into the Product

For SaaS, ask if the product works better when users tell others — if not, your marketing is doomed.

Building the PLG Team and Org

Start with a growth PM and an analyst, then formalize into a cross-functional PLG org with three growth heads

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

Build Only at the Magic Intersection

Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.

Build Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)

Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy

Peak Performance4 steps

Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software

Develop design intuition by watching real people use OTHER products, not your own.

Build-With-The-Tools Assessment

Don't test people on doing work without AI — hand them the tools and score what they can build in an hour

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

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

Business-to-Human (Humanization Delighter)

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

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.

CaMeL Permission Pre-Restriction

Grant an agent only the permissions its stated task needs, decided before it runs

Candidate Market Fit

Position yourself as a narrow spear, not a net — three-to-four attributes the market actually wants.

Cannibalize Your Own Product Every 6-12 Months

Make your current product look silly on a fixed cadence instead of only shipping what users ask for

Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity

New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales

Care Deeply, Challenge Directly — The Feedback Script

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

Catalyst Review Forum

Replace the standing weekly review with parallel, role-based topic blocks anyone can join.

Cathedrals Not Bricks

Make every team member see the whole cathedral, not just the brick they're laying.

CEDAF Delegation Framework

A five-part checklist for delegating without lowering your standards — to humans or AI.

Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor

Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.

CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook

The single predictor of AI adoption is whether the CEO uses it daily — then amplify your 10% early adopters

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

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.

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.

Chronic vs Acute Organisational Challenges

Work down the chronic issues so you have capacity to absorb the acute shocks.

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.

Clarity Over Cleverness

Lean into understood standards instead of reinventing them, and you get leverage for free

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

Clear Is Kind: The Three-Sentence Correction

State the failure, state your belief in them, hand them the responsibility — starting tomorrow

Coach vs. Advise Decision

Stop training your team to bring you every problem by knowing when to coach instead of solve

Codify Your Judgment into Prompts (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Turn every piece of feedback you give into a reusable prompt so you never say it twice

Sales5 steps

Compelling Reason to Buy (Not to Sell)

In the bowling alley it is never about you — close the laptop and collect problem domain knowledge.

Competitor-as-Gift Ambition Reset

Turn a competitor's leap into permission to set a goal so ambitious your old way of working can't reach it

Complaint Storms

A team ritual to see your own product with fresh, critical eyes — by first ripping apart someone else's.

Complementary Format Integration

Bring a proven new format into a mature product so it expands, not contorts, the core

Compounding Engineering

Spend a little effort now so each repeat of a task is cheaper than the last

Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)

Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.

Concierge Manual Onboarding

Hand-onboard every early user one-to-one to manufacture superfans and dodge premature self-service engineering

Conditional-Layer Validation

Reduce a consumer product to ~4 things that must be true and validate them one at a time

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Connect Before Correcting

Join someone's reality for 30 agenda-free seconds before you ask them to do anything — connection is the bridge to cooperation

Connect-Users-to-Value Journey Staffing

Growth's job is to connect users to your product's value — so staff teams around each stage of the user journey.

Constitutional AI Self-Critique Loop

Align a model to written principles by having it critique and rewrite its own outputs, then train on the fix

Context-First Agent Debugging

When a coding agent won't do what you want, treat it as a missing-context problem, not a model problem.

Context Is All You Need Prompting

Treat the model as a brilliant stranger with zero context, and supply what a colleague would already know.

Context Loading (Additional Information)

Front-load all relevant task information — and put it at the top for caching

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

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Conversation as Ping-Pong (Give-to-Get)

Index toward asking questions, but hit the ball back and forth instead of interrogating or monologuing.

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

Conviction-Gated Team Scaling

Start tiny to earn conviction, then staff up enough to actually ship the best version

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

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

Counterprogram the Narrative (Take a Punch)

When you fear someone thinks less of you, take one small action that proves the opposite instead of litigating the past.

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Critique in Public, Build Trust in Private

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

Cross-Functional Voice-of-Customer Synthesis

Put sales, success and TAMs in one room, synthesise the signal, then have research validate or dispute it.

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.

Culture-Add Interview Diligence

Interview the company back with adjective and endemic-problem questions to judge culture before you accept.

Customer-Insight Career Leverage

Grow your career by pulling ground-level customer insights up to executives instead of waiting to be promoted

Sales5 steps

Customer Zero Launch Motion

Deploy a breakthrough product on yourself first, then use your own results as the sales engine.

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Cycle-Time Is the Enemy (Ship Ship Ship)

The gap between knowing something is good and users seeing it is your biggest enemy — attack the decision time, not the work time.

Mindset5 steps

Dancing With Your Fears

Price the cost of inaction, then stop trying to kill the fears that won't die — have a conversation with them.

Data Is a Compass, Not a GPS

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

De-Ambiguate Upstream: The Brief as a Prompt

Design is slow only when the brief is vague; remove variables upstream like you'd add context to an AI prompt.

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.

Defensible Moats for AI Startups

Four durable places to build in AI where foundation-model labs are least likely to squash you.

Finance3 steps

Deferred-Buyout Creative Pricing

Keep the exploration phase cheap by billing rights separately, so a late pivot doesn't mean you already paid to own dead work.

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Delay the Primal Mark

Stay in low-fidelity blocks and conversation as long as possible before drawing anything that looks real.

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

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

Design in the Material

PMs and designers should code — not to ship, but to master the material and truly understand what they're designing.

Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)

Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.

Design the Job to Fit the Person

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

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

The shorter the horizon, the more detail; keep long-range plans deliberately hazy to avoid false precision

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Dictate-and-Template AI Story Scaling

Prime ChatGPT with your team's exact template, then dictate context naturally to generate an org's worth of specs.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.

Differentiation vs Table Stakes

Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Disassemble the Lego Set

Don't digitize the old thing — reassemble the pieces into an experience native to the new platform.

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

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

When products in a category are basically interchangeable, an adequate product with superior distribution wins

Distribution-First Moat

Solve distribution before you obsess over product-market fit; it is the harder, more durable edge.

Dive-In Career Strategy for a Platform Shift

Facing a disruptive technology, submerge yourself in it and aim to hold at least two of three career pillars

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

Don't Be Stingy With Words

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

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Draft-First LLM Augmentation

Never ask the model to do your job — write your version first, then have it improve it.

Dress to Signal Effort, Not Expense

Fit beats brand, dress one level up, and ask when you don't know the code.

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

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

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.

Earn the Secret by Savoring Surprises

There's no recipe for a breakthrough — hunt surprises at the edge instead of validation

Elastic-Demand Career Bet

Invest in domains where making people 10x more productive increases demand rather than reducing it

Embrace-the-Next-Thing Mindset

Greet each new technology wave with 'I can't wait for the next thing' instead of resentment.

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

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

Empathize-Then-Invent (The Stories Method)

Listen deeply to users for hours, then build something new — never the literal feature they asked for.

Energy Audit for Your Zone of Genius

Track what energizes and depletes you for two weeks, then redesign your role toward 80% in your gifts

Energy Drivers and Energy Drains Audit

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

Engineering Financial Space

Convert your job into a contract, cut the burn, and buy back time without a clean break.

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

Solve the same problem several ways and take the most common answer

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Innovation6 steps

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

Turn messy LLM logs into a prioritized list of failures before you write a single test.

Eval-Driven Product Development

Design the test for your AI product alongside the product, then hill-climb the model against it.

Eval-First AI Product Development

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

Evals as Articulating Success

An eval is just a clear spec of ideal behavior — the shared language of AI product work

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.

Existing-User Retention & Resurrection Priority

As a consumer subscription matures, the biggest lever isn't new users — it's current-user retention and resurrecting the dormant.

Explain-It-to-Prove-You-Understand-It

Force yourself and others to explain decisions; if you can't articulate it, you probably don't understand it.

Explore & Exploit at the Insight Level

Oscillate between finding the right mountain and climbing it — but do it insight by insight, not just at strategy level.

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

Exposure Time for Taste

Deliberately spend more time learning than building to develop the judgment AI can't give you.

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fail-Fast Iterative Validation

Since ~80% of hypotheses fail, use cheap validation methods first and reserve A/B testing for pre-vetted ideas

Fake the AI Before You Build It

Never train a model for an MVP — prototype the AI's output and test demand first.

Fall in Love with the Problem

Start every venture with a validated problem, not a solution, so the problem becomes your North Star.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Fault-Tolerant User Interfaces

Design your UI to match the real hit-rate of your machine learning, not a fantasy of 100% accuracy.

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Feelings That Overpower Skills

Bad behavior at any age is feelings overpowering skills — set the boundary, then teach the missing skill, don't just punish

Few-Shot Prompting

Show the model examples of what good looks like instead of describing it

Fight Club: A Standing Slot for Conflict

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

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

Find the Loops Available to You

Even when told exactly what to build, you can still run most of the product loop.

First-Principles Framework Method

Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.

First-Principles Thinking as a Hiring Filter

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

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

Tag every piece of feedback FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, or Plea so teams know how hard to weigh it.

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

Flying Formation

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

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

Overwork lets you skip the hard work of deciding what matters — force the constraint that makes you decide

Follow People, Not Plans

Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.

Force a Choice, Not a Comparison

Be the world's first banana, not a 10x better apple

Founder-in-the-Details Operating Model

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

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage

Frameworks as Job Aids, Reps as the Goal

Adopting a framework is never the goal; getting reps through the full loop is.

Strategy2 steps

Freemium Two-Product Rule

Make the free tier good enough to spark word of mouth and the paid tier different enough to justify upgrading

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

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

Full-Value Free Sampling (Reverse Free Trial)

Make your free product a live, rationed taste of everything paid can do — not a walled-off basic tier.

Game Design, Not Gamification (Build Toys, Then Games)

Make software fun by designing real toys that reward playful exploration — not by bolting on points and badges

Gamification's Three Pillars: Core Loop, Metagame, Profile

Durable habit-forming products stand on three legs: a tight core loop, a long-horizon metagame, and an accumulating profile.

Generalist-With-A-Superpower Hiring

Hire people who care obsessively, have a generalist brain, and one absolute superpower — then trial them for a week.

Generative-First Skill Stack for the AI Era

When making things gets cheap, your bottleneck becomes idea generation — train that muscle, plus just enough coding

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Give-It-Away Growth Engine

Reclassify free product and AI costs as marketing spend, then give the product away to your best distributors

Give It Your Hardest Task

Evaluate a serious AI tool on your gnarliest real problem, not a dumbed-down toy.

Go All-In When the Experiment Works

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

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

Good Friction vs Bad Friction

Adding friction that addresses the user's psyche can increase conversion, because not all friction is bad

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

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

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

GROW Model for Powerful Questions

Four question categories that let people solve their own problem and walk away with a concrete next step

Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function

Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

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.

Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)

Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.

Habit-Formation Model for Team Behavior Change

Drive team adoption (e.g. of AI) with behavioral psychology, not education: consistency, low friction, and a powerful reward loop.

Hand the Toil to the Model First

Delegate the boring, repetitive parts of engineering to agents before anything else, and collapse the path to production.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.

Hills-and-Valleys: Getting Value From Probabilistic AI Tools

Be patient and explicit, start small, and learn where the model is strong vs weak

Hire an AI Operations Lead

Give one person the dedicated job of automating everyone else's repetitive work with AI

Hire an Organism of Strengths

Interview for three universal traits and compose a team of complementary strengths over hiring the most optimal individual stars

Hire by Repelling: The Distinctive Bat Signal

The best talent magnets deliberately turn some people off — clarity on who you're NOT for is the point

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 for Clarity-from-Chaos

Screen for fire-in-the-belly, high agency, and the ability to create clarity out of chaos — proven by work trials

Hire Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

Hire Yourself First (Build in Public)

Do the job professionally in public before anyone hires you — then the hire is just changing the vehicle.

Hiring for the Extra 20%

Skills are table stakes — screen for the people who'll chase the real outcome, using lateral personality signals

Hoard What You Know How To Do

Keep a searchable backlog of verified, working experiments so agents can recombine them into new solutions.

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Humor as a Calibrated Mastery Signal

A joke landed right up the line proves you own the room; keep a ranked joke file to do it on demand.

Hunting New Bottlenecks When AI Writes the Code

When AI removes the coding bottleneck, constraints shift up and downstream — go find them.

I Believe You + I Believe In You

For anyone struggling, pair 'I believe you' (one foot in the hole) with 'I believe in you' (one foot out) — doing both at once is magic

ICE Prioritization

Score every experiment idea on Impact, Confidence and Ease to run a high-velocity testing program fairly

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

Impact-Over-Output Operating Model

Measure teams by validated impact on customers, not by features shipped — and prove the needle moved

Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization

Let retention curves and diminishing returns tell you when to optimize and when to bet on something new

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.

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Interview for Design in the DNA

Before joining, verify the founders valued your function from the very beginning; it can't be grafted on later.

Inverted Time-to-Value

Engineer the aha moment into the first 3 seconds using non-obvious platform mechanics

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

Push hard toward a future you believe in while killing your own hypotheses as data arrives

Job Mission with OKRs (Play to Win)

Write your own version of the role with OKRs and share it with the hiring manager to win the offer.

Job Prototyping via Informational Interviews

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

Jobs-to-Be-Done Agent Mapping

Bring order to AI chaos by listing every stakeholder's jobs-to-be-done, then mapping agents onto them.

Jobs-to-Be-Done Interrogation (The Big Hire)

Interrogate the moment someone first hired your product to find the real cause of usage

Kind and Candid

Reframe candor as an act of kindness so you actually deliver the hard message.

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

A production-looking prototype no longer means it's production-ready — say the stage out loud

Latent Demand Detection

Find product ideas where people already fight through a distorted process to get a value

Lean-Into-Organic-Sharing Virality

Don't manufacture virality — instrument where users already share, then make those exact moments 5-10x more delightful.

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

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

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

Stop debating consequential decisions — run the experiment that shows the upper and lower bounds now.

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

Live in the Future and Notice What's Missing

Don't try to think of a startup idea — get out of the present so ideas find you

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

Hold the far-future vision, but land with users where they already work today.

LLM as Disconfirmation Engine

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

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

Lowercase-c vs Capital-C: AI-Proofing Your Skill Stack

Sort every task into what AI does 80% well and what only a human can do — then invest accordingly

Lower-Confidence, Higher-Volume Experimentation

Drop the 95% confidence bar to run more experiments, backstopped by qualitative corroboration and a pre-set game plan

Magic Questions (Statements That End in 'Do You Agree?')

To understand how someone thinks, feed them statements ending in 'is that right?' rather than asking open-ended questions.

Maintain Noise in the Market

Ship every day and talk about it constantly so the product feels alive — with tiered big launches on top

Make the Other Mistake (Prompting for Brutal Feedback)

To get honest AI critique, over-correct toward brutal — the model won't actually overshoot.

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

Bring your manager a recommendation to react to, not an open question to solve.

Manufacture the Room (Bending the Universe)

Decide which room you must be in, then engineer a legitimate reason to be standing in it

Many Bets, Charge Early

Maximize the number of fast bets, then force a verdict by asking the customer to pay a lot — now

Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do

Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet

Marginal-Impact Reasoning Under Tail Risk

Prioritize catastrophic low-probability risks by expected value and by how few people are already working on them

Mastery Before Management

Get technical skill into your bones before you leave IC — then stay technical by listening, not coding

Match Go-To-Market to Buyer-User Alignment

Pick developer-led, PLG, or direct sales by asking one thing: are the buyer and the user the same person?

Match the Medium to the Point

When implementation is cheap, the skill is choosing document vs prototype for the point you're making

Measure in Hundreds

If your unit of measurement is one hundred attempts, five failures means you have effectively tried zero times.

Meet the Bar and Be Different

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

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.

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Minimum Lovable Product

Viability is no longer enough — the bar is a product people love and want to talk about

Minimum Lovable Product Ladder

Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Mission-Over-Minutiae Opportunity Choice

Choose your next big move by passion, mission, and team — not by optimizing every minor variable.

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

Surface AI help at the moment it's relevant instead of interrupting with notifications.

Model Casting by Personality

Route each task to the model whose 'personality' matches, and split plans to fit

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

Model Maximalism

Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

Spend two minutes pre-empting the objection you'll obviously get, and stop feeling blindsided.

Move the PMF Score: Reposition + Speed to Value

Raise a low product-market-fit score without changing the product — refocus expectations and collapse time-to-value

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

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

Must-Have Benefit Excavation

A three-question survey sequence that turns 'they like it' into the exact hook that acquires customers

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

Network Effects vs Network Economies: The Materiality Test

Almost everything has some network effect; only ask whether it's large enough to change your margins.

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

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

No Linear Success Resilience

Expect the roller coaster: massive issues never stop coming, so build the skin to ride them.

Non-Violent Communication (OFNR) for Difficult Conversations

Observation, feeling, need, request — get mutual understanding instead of trying to win the argument

North Star Exploration

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

Northstar Problem Commitment

Pick one foundational building-block problem and commit years to it, not a scatter of trendy ones.

Objective-Data Alignment Test

Before betting on an AI capability, check that your training data is the same shape as your desired output.

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

Measure growth by counting the moments you felt underqualified and stretched.

One Click Faster (Clock Speed Management)

Three tactics to raise an organization's pace without lowering its bar

One-Page Plan and Operating Rhythm

Put vision through quarterly goals on one page, then meet in a rhythm to reflect on it

One-Week Top-1% AI Fluency Sprint

Pick a real problem and spend one full week taking it end-to-end with AI — that alone puts you in the global top 1%.

Optical Correction X-Ray

Blow a single letter up huge and probe its joints to see where a real type designer breaks geometry to look perfect.

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

Organic Mentorship Sourcing

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

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

If the work is autonomous and the result is measurable, price the outcome — not the tokens.

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

Own the Story — No Packet Loss

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

Parallel Draft Divergence

Start one idea 4-5 times in parallel, each with more precision, then pick the obvious winner.

Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring

Be obsessively patient hiring the founding team; step on the gas the moment demand exceeds what you can handle

Pattern-Breaking Inside a Big Company

Make small bets that can fail a lot — and hide them from the mother ship

Peer Feedback Groups

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

Physical-System Reality Check

For anything embodied, budget for three things — a brain, a body, and real application scenarios.

Pick Hard Problems to Attract the Best Team

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

Pivot to the Burning Problem

Founders are usually too anchored to their own product vision — index to the customer's real fire instead

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

Platforms Are Products

When to start a platform team, who staffs it, and the impact metrics that keep it honest

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data

PM Prototype-to-Production Handoff

PMs build a working V1 with AI, validate it with real users, then hand a working artifact to engineering

Productivity2 steps

Poor Man's Fine-Tuning (Few-Shot + Role Priming)

Steer a model with in-prompt examples and a role identity instead of a full fine-tune.

Portfolio Hiring: Range Over Style

Hire designers on portfolio alone; wide range proves a designer, a signature style reveals an artist.

Positioning Before Pricing (The Single-Attribute Position)

Own one clear position that is unique, available, and reinforces your product strategy — then let it dictate price

Positive Delusion, Bounded by Learning

Assume everything is possible until proven wrong — but keep learning what's actually possible.

Precision Prompting for AI Builders

Never tell the AI 'it doesn't work' — state exactly what you expected and which parts do and don't.

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

Presume Radical Uncertainty (The 1997 Lens)

Treat an emerging platform as if it were 1997 for the internet: assume most of it doesn't work and you can't yet name the winners

Price-Elasticity Three-Response Model

When a technology makes something cheaper, work out which of three demand responses your market will take

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

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

Match UI confidence to data quality, be transparent about sources, and design virtuous data cycles.

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?'

Product-First, Add-AI-Later

Design the end-to-end product experience first, then add AI to solve specific problems — never retrofit AI into a broken flow.

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

Product-Led SEO

Treat SEO as a product you build for the search user, not content you optimize for a keyword.

Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side

Frustrated by a slow internal platform team? Supply the product management they don't have

Product-Market Fit = Retention

There is one metric for product-market fit: do customers come back?

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.

Product-Market-Story Fit

Great product in a great market still fails if the story is wrong or missing — add the third leg

Product Scrapbooking

Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.

Programmatic vs Editorial Decision Rule

Go programmatic only where scale meets a real use case — otherwise you scale nothing.

Prompt Decomposition

Make the model list the sub-problems first, then solve each before the whole

Prompting-as-Prototyping

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

Prompt Injection Defense Stack

Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level

Pull-Based Product-Market Fit

Be stubborn on your thesis but open on its form — chase the customer who is surprisingly easy to sell, not the one you must force

Pushes and Pulls Compass

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

Query Fan-Out Content Strategy (AEO/GEO)

Win AI answers by understanding that a machine, not a person, is doing the searching behind every response

Radical Transparency Operating System

Share every metric with every employee to put everyone's brains on the challenge, not just their hands

Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools

ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.

Reading the Invisible Language of the To/CC Line

Recipient order, To vs CC, and reply order all send signals people quietly read.

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

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

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Reason About It Like a Human

To design or debug AI behavior, ask what an equivalent human would do in the same situation.

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

Match interface density to user intent: dense grids for recall, low-density sound-rich feeds for discovery.

Red/Green TDD for Coding Agents

Force agents to write the test first, watch it fail, then pass — the compressed prompt is just 'red/green TDD'.

Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)

When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

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

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Reps-to-Judgment (Building Product Sense)

Product sense isn't taught — it's earned through thousands of shipped micro-decisions with the shortest possible cycle time.

Respect the Hustle: Goal-Based Product Ops Allocation

Allocate ops support to goals, not headcount ratios — and deliberately under-process the teams still finding their way.

Resting in Motion

Treat the busy, working state as your normal baseline so heavy long-term work stays sustainable

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue

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.

RLAIF Reward Design

Have an expert define success criteria and a rubric once, then let AI reinforce the capability — more scalable than labeling examples

Roadmap-Less Agility for AI-Era Building

Drop the explicit roadmap and jump on capability drops the moment they land

Robust-Across-Futures Action

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

Root-Cause Context Engineering for AI Coding

Don't just fix the AI's bad code — root-cause the missing context so it's right next time.

Root-Cause Tooling Post-Mortem

When AI botches something, ask what in its prompt caused it — then patch the tooling

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Sales Then Logistics

Sell the why before you explain the how, or your ask gets crickets.

Scheduling by Deference

The one asking does the work: let the busier person set the time, and give real options.

Scope-by-Time Traps

Box work by a fixed deadline, cut scope to fit, and ship early enough that the feedback is 'this is premature'

Seeing the System

Strategic thinking is naming the invisible systems and their self-protecting culture so you can change the rules.

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

Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable

Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.

Self-Criticism Loop

Get the model to critique its own answer, then implement its own critique

Selling to Developers via Self-Serve Proof

Developers must prove products themselves, so invest in self-serve — sales can't convert them at the build stage

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

SEO Conversion-Metric Rigor

Rankings and traffic are not results. Hold SEO to the same efficiency standard as paid.

Separate Behavior From Identity (Good Inside)

Say 'this is a good person who is late' — split who someone is from what they did, so the conversation can actually be about the behavior

Separating Change-Aversion from Real Problems in a Redesign

After a redesign, split 'upset because it changed' from 'upset because it's worse' before you react.

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.'

Shed Your Superpowers at Each Scale

The strengths that got you here can become damage at the next phase — constantly re-evaluate what your role actually needs

Ship-Fast Operating Model

Lightweight bottoms-up planning, PM-light teams, and iterative deployment in a fast-moving domain.

Strategy6 steps

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

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

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

Ship, Quit, and Learn

Design the smallest thing you can ship that is built to be quit — then let shipping it tell you what's next.

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

When product properties are emergent, launching is how you discover them

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Signposting

Use structural cue-words to guide the reader through your writing without heavy formatting.

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

Deliberately give away revenue to simplify pricing — it lifts retention and restores a customer-obsessed culture.

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Single Decisive Reason (SDR)

For any important decision, isolate the one reason that alone justifies it — a pile of weak reasons is a red flag

Software Is Not a Moat

Any feature you ship can be cloned; build ecosystems, platforms, and hardware that can't be copied.

Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening

Classify every build as deepening the product for current users or widening it to new ones — to diagnose 'why we feel slow'

Song Exploder Your Intuition

Turn a gut reaction to a design into a reusable, articulable design rule by reverse-justifying why you feel it.

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

Match your stated confidence to your actual evidence — neither overreach nor over-hedge.

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

Stage-Gated Product Incubation

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

Stamina as the Kill Signal

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

Startup Power Progression: Eliminate Three, Sequence Four

Cross off the three powers a startup can't have yet, then pursue the remaining four in sequence — counter-positioning first.

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

Strategy Not Self-Expression

Feedback's goal is behavior change, so cut everything that doesn't serve it — usually 90%.

Street-Smart Decision-Making

Give the customer's perception as much weight as your logic — model the narrative, not just the numbers.

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.

Stuck-Point Scaling Law

Reliably improve an AI system by hunting where it gets stuck and tuning those spots with a fast feedback loop.

Sturdy Leadership (The Three Pilot Announcements)

Validate someone's experience as real without being overwhelmed by it — like a pilot who contains the cabin's fear and flies the plane

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them

Survival Before Thriving

Make asymmetrically positive bets and protect the enterprise — you must survive long enough for timing and insight to arrive

Swinging the Pendulum

Spot an undesirable state, correct it — but know you'll overcorrect, so aim for the middle

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

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

System-First Product Ops (Build It, Then Get Out of the Way)

Product ops is first a system you build, only second a team you hire — and the system should outlive the role.

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

Systems Not Goals

Build a default-on repeatable system instead of chasing a one-off target.

Tactic-to-Strategy Discovery

Run many small experiments in parallel, then scale the one that breaks through into your strategy.

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.

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

Task vs. Job Automation Test

Before predicting a role's automation, ask whether the automatable task IS the job or just one piece of it

Taste and Standards as Meeting Spec

Good taste is knowing what people want just before they do; high standards means relentlessly improving the spec, not hiding behind perfectionism.

Taste as a Trainable Model

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts whether your in-group will like an idea — built by reps with feedback.

Tension at the Center of Strategy

Every great strategy creates 'it might not work' tension — the possibility a customer falls in love with.

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 1,000-Experiments 'What Would Need To Be True' Goal

Set an audacious experiment-volume goal — not to hit it, but to force the conversations that unlock a whole experimentation culture.

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

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% Planning Rule

Never spend more than 10% of an execution period planning it.

Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

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

The 10-to-1 Input/Output Kill Test

When you pour 10 units of effort in for 1 unit of output, the project has run its course.

The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers

A definition of what the PM job actually is — facilitation, execution, and impact — not a career ladder.

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 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

The 30-Day Keeper Test

Calendar every new hire 30 days out and ask: knowing what I know now, would I hire this person?

The 3-of-500 Months Sabbatical

Frame a sabbatical as 3 months out of a ~500-month working life, and budget 6-8 weeks just to unwind.

The 4x4 Debugging Framework

Four escalating ways to unstick a broken build, each tried exactly once, ending by teaching the agent.

The 50/40/10 Delight Allocation

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

The 95/5 Growth Inversion

In fast-moving AI markets, spend 95% inventing new growth loops and 5% optimizing existing ones

The Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

The Access-to-an-Audience Moat

In human data the only durable moat is a trusted, targetable audience — not recruiters or ads

The Accountability Question (Selling Product Ops Internally)

Don't argue scope with defensive PMs — ask leaders what they hold PMs accountable to, then show what's crowding it out.

The Adjacent-Precedent De-Risk Pitch

Win leadership buy-in for a big AI bet by anchoring it to a past bet that already worked.

The Age-Invitation Curve

Target the age band still adding social connections, or plan to buy every user with ads

The Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

The AI-as-CTO Persona Project

Cast the AI as an opinionated technical co-founder to kill sycophancy and premature coding

The AI Deployment Risk Triage

Classify any AI deployment into one of three risk tiers before spending a dollar on defense

The AI-Fit Accuracy Test

Deploy AI where the human baseline is low-accuracy — not where it's already near-perfect and you need the last 2%

Peak Performance5 steps

The AI Interview-Prep Coach System

Build an AI coach, mine the real question bank, drill weak spots — then mock with humans

The AI PM Upskilling Path

Learn the fundamentals, shadow a research scientist an hour a week, and build one model end to end.

The AI Security Vendor Due-Diligence Test

Five questions that expose whether an AI guardrail vendor is selling real protection or theater

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

Build a one-failure, pass/fail judge and align it to a human with a confusion matrix before you trust it.

The Allocation Economy: Manage Models Like a First-Time Manager

AI turns everyone into a manager — the valuable skills become the ones first-time managers must learn

The Angry-God Containment Lens

Assume the AI is a malicious agent trying to hurt you, then engineer so it structurally can't

The Anxiety Balance Sheet

Convert free-floating anxiety into a four-column ledger of known/unknown and controllable/uncontrollable.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

Break growth experimentation into four evaluable stages an AI can hill-climb, keeping humans on alignment

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Beachhead Segment Formula

Pick a first market that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and fits your crown jewels.

The Benefit-and-Barrier Power Test (To Be or Not to Be)

Only call it power if it delivers a cost/price benefit AND a barrier competitors can't erase.

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

Appoint one trusted domain expert to own eval judgments instead of running it by committee.

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

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

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

Every model leap gets normalised within months — build for the boring future, not the euphoric one.

The Blur Test

Take your glasses off and squint at a brand to judge its cohesion, color story, and overall feeling.

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion

Grow segment by segment along adjacencies — same customer new use case, or same use case new customer.

The Business-Meal Deference Protocol

Order middle-to-last, never the priciest dish, always offer to pay, and keep your tip invisible.

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 Castle-or-Shack Audit

Go capability by capability and separate the ones a rival can copy (shack) from the ones they truly can't (castle).

The Chasm Positioning Formula

Technology leaders who have specialised and committed to THIS problem — respect the incumbent, outclass the peers.

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

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

The Cold-Pattern Positivity Flip

Find the moments where users feel bad, and flip the product to reinforce progress instead of failure.

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

Move from T-shaped to comb-shaped — multiple deep skills you deploy on-demand via diagnosis

The Company-Inside-a-Company Incubation Playbook

Spin a 0-to-1 business inside a mature company by ring-fencing it completely from the core

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

When the bottleneck isn't people, each new hire is a net productivity loss unless they uplevel everyone.

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

The Dance of 100 Nos — Fundraising Storytelling

Investors decide in seconds and 1% say yes — so lead with your strongest point and tell an emotional, detailed story.

The Dark Factory Software Model

Ship production software no human writes or reads — replace review with simulated-user QA swarms.

Innovation7 steps

The Data-Informed Product Loop

Strategy to models to measurement to bets to impact to learning — find the broken link.

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

Diagnose, Analyze, Take a different path, Experiment — an engineer's anti-playbook for marketing

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

Only hire when a function is underwater, so headcount forces ruthless prioritization

The Delight Model

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

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

Treat a product roadmap like an investment portfolio, balanced across three axes of risk and intent.

The Economic Turing Test

Measure transformative AI by whether you'd hire an agent for a real job without knowing it's a machine

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.

Peak Performance4 steps

The Energy Audit

After every activity, log energised or drained — then do more of one and less of the other.

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 Enthusiastic Rehire Test

One binary question that cuts through months of avoided talent decisions

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The Expectations-Reality Delta

Unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality — and expectations are far easier to change

The Exposure-Therapy Tool On-Ramp

Ease into coding tools in graduated steps so code stops being terrifying

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

Use your own product at scale, document every flaw with screenshots, then personally drive the fixes to closure.

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 Markers of High-Performing Product Teams

Coherence, stubborn beliefs, faith in product, matching words to actions, contextual skills.

The Five PLG Readiness Components

The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

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

The Fixit OKR

Put a hard number on fixing known-broken issues and fund it alongside growth, so quality work never gets zero resources.

The Forgotten-Name Recovery Playbook

Tactical moves to survive not remembering names or whether you've met someone before.

The Forward Deployed Engineer Loop

Embed a real engineer inside the customer's building and run a build-show-iterate cycle every single day

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

The Four Career Quests

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

The Four Challenges of AI Product Management

Uncertainty, pivots, data scarcity and a broken promo path — the four taxes of the AI PM role.

The Four Forces of Switching

Understand any adoption decision as a tug-of-war between attraction, anxiety, habit, and inertia

The Four Go-To-Market Playbooks

Early Market, Bowling Alley, Tornado, Main Street — each has its own playbook, and mixing them backfires.

The Four Legs of the Negotiation Stool

Negotiate the resources you need to hit your OKRs before salary, then ask 'are you open to?'

The Four Phases of Focus

Do one thing at a time — idea, PMF, then either growth or business model — and shift gears cleanly.

The Four PM Annoyances

The four PM behaviours that quietly destroy engineering trust — and the fix for each

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.

The Four Strategic Choices

Choose customers, competition, validation, and distribution deliberately — each choice determines your product and your future.

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

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The Full PLG Funnel Audit

Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews

AI answers eat top-of-funnel search. Move your SEO to where intent and conversion live.

The Future Headline

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

The Goals-First Refresh Cascade

Set the scope of a rebrand by naming the goal first, then let every later round cascade from broad to narrow.

The Golden Recipe of Modern AI

Every AI breakthrough sits on three legs: big data, the right neural architecture, and enough compute.

Finance3 steps

The Gross-Margin Short-Circuit

Use high gross margin + healthy churn as a fast litmus test for whether a business is truly differentiated

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

Sales5 steps

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

Innovation6 steps

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 IC Compensation Anchor

Believe your IC worth, then neutralize the 'grow into management' pay dodge by naming your non-management intent up front.

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

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

The Incognito Cry Test

Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.

The Inflection Stress Test

Four questions that separate a real inflection from a vague 'why now'

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

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 Insight Test

Before founding anything, prove why YOU uniquely hold an insight others don't — and why you'll endure it for a decade

Strategy6 steps

The Inverted W Planning Process

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

The Job Search Council

Run your job hunt as a committed 6-8 person peer group that flips anxiety into accountability.

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

The Learning-Opportunity Command

Turn every confusing moment into an 80/20 lesson aimed at your current skill level

The Lethal Trifecta

Any AI agent that combines three capabilities can be tricked into stealing your data — cut one leg.

Finance5 steps

The Life MBA Reframe

Set a runway budget, name it an investment in yourself, and give people a socially legible story for it.

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

The Loonshots Two-Structure Organization

Run a big rigorous org and a tiny flat innovation team side by side; the leader's job is the bridge.

The Love-Hate Disruption Test

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

The Low-Heart-Rate Abundance Posture

Enter high-stakes rooms calm by treating every meeting as one of many, not your one shot.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

The Magic Loop

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

The Manukan Two-Pager & Listening Tour

Draft what you want and don't want, then run structured listening-tour conversations to find your fit.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

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

The Marquee Customer and the 10th Executive Sponsor

Before you cross the chasm, win one famous logo — by finding the one exec in ten who wants to leapfrog.

The Marquee Mock Exercise

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

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Middleman-Signal Disintermediation Play

When middlemen and end-customers both come to you directly, that's the signal to build the business yourself

The Model Launch Bar

With probabilistic products, the PM — not the scientist — decides what accuracy is good enough to ship.

The Modern Elder Playbook (Thriving in Tech as You Age)

Pair a mentor's wisdom with an intern's curiosity, lead with energy, and trade wisdom for tech in mutual mentorships.

The Most Generous Interpretation (MGI)

Ask 'what's the most generous interpretation of why they did that?' to turn judgment into curiosity and unlock better interventions

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

Wake up asking what maximizes impact — then interrogate your answer for skill-set bias.

The Murder Board

Before starting a project, invite smart outsiders whose only job is to tear your two-page plan apart

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

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

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-on-One Diet

Hold direct-report 1:1s sacred; cut nearly all the rest — relationship-by-1:1 doesn't scale

The Orchestra Leader Model

A great founder conducts every function at once, not just the instrument they love to play.

The Org Chart With Your Name On It

Win the promotion by solving your boss's org problem, not by asking for your next title

The Ownership Engine

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

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

The Path Expert Conversation

Find someone a few years ahead on the path you're curious about, and offer them written questions.

The Path to the C-Suite

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

The Peak Hierarchy of Needs (Three Pyramids)

Apply Maslow to employees, customers, and investors to find the differentiating layer above the transactional base.

The Pill-in-the-Hot-Dog Onboarding

Bury the intimidating-but-necessary onboarding step inside familiar, exciting content instead of leading with it

The Pilot Program for De-Risking Launches

Build a diverse champion network of real customers to test new features in the wild before you ever launch.

The Pixar Career Story Template

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

The Platform Encroachment Test

Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

The three infrastructure layers plus per-funnel-stage tools every PLG motion needs

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.

The Power of Repair

Rebuild trust after a bad moment by owning your part, naming the impact, and stating what you'll do differently

The Prep-Call PM Interview Loop

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

The Process Power Qualifier: Material and Opaque

Operational excellence is only power when it's both material AND impossible for rivals to copy.

The Product/Market Fit Engine

Turn PMF into a number you can raise: focus only on the 'somewhat disappointed' users whose reason for loving you matches the mass market's

The Product-Market Fit Treadmill

In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you

The Product Ops Fit Test (and Job-Description Red Flag)

Three questions to know if product ops is your lane — and one line whose absence kills any product ops JD.

The Proxy Goal Ladder

Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

The Purple Cow: Building Customer Traction

Make something worth remarking about, and engineer in advance what you want people to say.

The Pyramid of Leadership Self-Awareness

Four levels from knowing nothing about yourself to treating diverse worldviews as an asset.

The Quality-Volume-Speed Priority Stack

What high-stakes data buyers actually rank: quality first, then volume, then speed

Communication6 steps

The Readiness Gap: Transparency Survey to Product Digest

Knowing something is coming isn't readiness. Survey the time drain, then ship a digest that says what to do with it.

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Reverse Anna Karenina Principle

Dysfunctional companies all fail the same way; high performers succeed in wildly different ways.

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

Never go away for a year to rebuild — uplift well-contained pieces of the system instead

The Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

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 Sean Ellis Test

A one-question survey that reveals product-market fit before your retention data can

The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test

SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

Productivity7 steps

The Seven-Command Build Loop

Six slash-commands turn vibe-coding into disciplined software delivery for non-coders

The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)

A regular PM ships the right product; an AI PM solves the right problem.

Finance4 steps

The Sip Seed Round

Get capital committed but pull it down only when needed, so you keep optionality and psychological freedom

Strategy6 steps

The Six-Factor Company Stack Rank

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

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

Productivity6 steps

The Source-of-Truth PRD Cascade

Spend a day writing five layered docs so the agent, not you, carries the context on every build.

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 Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

The Surgeon Management Model

Spend over half your time making your top 10% feel like a supported surgeon who can't be blocked.

The Swipe File

Capture examples of communication that work — the act of collecting trains your eye.

The Switch Log

Log every task-switch in real time so your actual work trail — not your calendar — reveals where your time really goes

The Talent Development Lifecycle

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

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

Adopt a coding agent the way you'd onboard a new intern — pair first, then delegate.

The Technology Wave Specialization Ladder

Ratchet down on a new technology while it's still weird — teardown, no-code, then fun build

The Thin Skeleton Template

Start every project from a minimal template — agents copy its style far better than they follow prose instructions.

Leadership7 steps

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

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 Elements of a Breakthrough Idea

Grade any startup idea on inflections, insight, and founder-future fit — not the implementation

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

The Three-Hour Work Mindfulness Experiment

Steal three hours from a workday, do something purposeless, and study the guilt that shows up.

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning

The Three-Part AI Product Utility Equation

A useful AI product needs model intelligence, context/memory, and application/UI to all converge.

The Three Pattern-Breaking Actions

Movements, storytelling, and disagreeableness — how you get people to move to your future

The Three Pillars of Delight

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

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.

The Three-Slide Believer Pitch

What you do, your non-obvious insight, then proof — built for believers, not objectors

The Tiny Core Principle

Every enduring product has one tiny thing that is a superpower — find it, protect it, and stop bolting on features.

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

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

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

The Two Departments That Matter Test

Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it

The U-Curve of Founder Involvement

Involve a product-minded founder heavily at the start and end of a project, but give the team space to run in the middle.

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

Finance4 steps

The Value-State Test for Crossing the Chasm

VC money buys a change in your company's value state — you have crossed when you no longer need the next round.

The Vibe-Coding Blast-Radius Rule

Vibe-code freely when only you get hurt by bugs; stop and take responsibility the moment others could.

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

Mindset5 steps

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

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 Genius Calendar Audit

Bucket last quarter's calendar by joy, then ask what only you can do

Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

Four product phases where spend rises stage by stage — so you must retire risk before the money starts.

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

Three Levels of Listening

Drop from your own inner monologue into hearing what people communicate beneath their words

Three-Model Triangulation

Apply three different mental models to a problem; agreement across them sharply raises your odds of being right.

Three-Prototype Ideation

Since prototypes are now free, build a feature three ways and let real use pick the winner.

Three Tenets: Can-Do, High Standards, Intensity

The three cultural tenets Foody credits for the fastest revenue ascent in history

Three Worlds Theory of Change

Decide what to actually do about a hard problem by naming the pessimistic, optimistic, and pivotal worlds you might be in

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.

Top 10 Things You Should Know

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

Top-Down Design Diagnosis

Before touching any detail, spend days naming the one big-picture reason a design bothers you.

Top-Down TAM SEO Forecast

Forecast SEO from market size down, not from keyword-tool volumes up.

Trapped Value and the 10% Capture Rule

Find the pool of value your technology unlocks — you keep roughly 10% of what you release.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Treat Your Course Like a Product

Hypothesise the audience, interview them, iterate the ICP, and run three weeks — not one.

Triangulate the Customer's Truth

Don't take what customers say literally — reconstruct their economics and incentives independently, then find the urgent one

Trust-by-Structure Governance

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

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

Don't collect rules — ask why, triangulate three people, and rebuild the reasoning underneath.

Turn the Recurring Break into a Strategic Moat

When the same problem breaks a third time, stop patching — pull your best people off features and solve it for 100x as a competitive edge

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Two-Sided AI Adoption

Pair top-down executive buy-in with a bottom-up tiger team of excited power users.

Two-Way Write-Ups

Make written docs conversational with done-reading, Dory questions, and a sentiment table.

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.

Unbundle Expensive Services into AI Apps

Find a service only the rich could afford, do it with a general chatbot, then spin the working ones into apps

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

Understand Users by Watching Failures in the Funnel

Watch real users, and interview the ones who failed in your funnel — they know what you need to fix.

Unpack the Mindset Into Teachable Skills

Replace 'product sense' and 'high agency' with the specific competencies underneath them.

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.

User-Value Thermodynamics

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

Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

Value-Chain Eval

Before applying AI to your business, build a systematic test that measures how well it automates your core value chain

Value Delivery Engine: Activation-First Growth Sequence

Fix conversion, engagement, referral and revenue before you obsess over acquisition

Values as a Sharp Knife

Rewrite company values as deliberate filters, then hardcode a scoring formula that removes people who don't fit.

Values, Not Behaviors: The Culture Car Wash

When you change companies, keep the values that got you hired but recalibrate the behaviors to the new culture.

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

Value-Up-The-Stack Test

To find where the money accrues in a platform shift, test the infrastructure layer for network effects, differentiation, and pricing power

Van Westendorp Premium Pricing (Price at the Third Question)

For a best-in-class position, price at the 'starting to feel expensive' point, not the 'bargain' point

Variety-as-Rest Anti-Burnout

Beat burnout by switching to a different kind of work when you lose steam, instead of stopping.

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

Build where the winning data is locked behind a company or industry's walls — foundation models won't go there.

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Viral Hoax Counter-Attack

When a hoax threatens your app, treat it as a growth problem and out-viral it on every vector

Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity

Great ideas come from many ideas; build a high-velocity, no-gate, ego-free making-and-critique culture.

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.

Wartime Company Reset

When a platform shift threatens your core business, declare wartime and go all-in rather than hedge.

What-If Before Why-Not

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

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Wide Aperture, Then Coalesce

Keep considering many ideas — including ones that look bad — and test cheap versions until the signals converge on one

Win the Early Majority with Simplicity

Market leaders are won in the change-averse early majority — and the only lever is simplicity.

Year-Horizon Growth Portfolio

Protect growth teams from weekly-win pressure by committing to low/medium/high bets over a year-long horizon

You Are Not the Protagonist (Operationalize, Don't Impose)

Your job isn't to convince everyone of your vision — it's to understand the leader's vision and find the spiky places you can shape it.

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.

Zone Defense for Product Work

Spread taste-makers out to cover the whole field instead of clustering on the same problem