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Coda

By Coda

52 recommend/use · 54 sourced episodes

Every sourced reference

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

UsesWhen enough is enough

“I use Kota every day to Wrangle my newsletter content calendar my interview notes for podcasts and to coordinate my sponsors”

Speaker: Lenny Rachitsky▶ Watch at ~3:30approx.
UsesLeading with empathy

“I use Coda every day to Wrangle my newsletter content calendar my interview notes for podcasts and to coordinate my sponsors”

Speaker: Lenny Rachitsky▶ Watch at ~26:00approx.

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$100 Voting for Prioritization

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2x Activation Energy for Change

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Accountable Equals Decider

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Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

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AI at the Core vs AI at the Edge

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Alignment-First Founder Meeting Protocol

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Anchor the Streak to Your Unit of Use

Tie a streak to the smallest genuinely-meaningful action, not the easiest possible tap.

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Answer the Question Behind the Question

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

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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.

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Appetite Bracketing

Set a time budget, then ask what you'd do with more and less — the bracket reveals the efficient frontier.

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Appetite-Driven Product Cycles (Shape Up)

Fix the time budget, not the scope: six-week appetites, two-person teams, and work that dies on time

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April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

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Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

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

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Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

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Avoidance Reversal

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

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B2B Channel Sequencing Ladder

Turn on growth channels in a fixed order, cheapest-and-least-scalable first, because each later channel needs the customer knowledge the earlier ones produce.

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Leadership6 steps

Baseline, Train, Practice, Level-Set

Turn hundreds of legacy product owners into real PMs by letting people self-select out

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Beat-Your-Plan Fundraising: Trade Dilution for Trust

Pitch numbers you'll hit, eat the lower valuation, and turn every passer into a future lead.

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Beginner's Mind Practice

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Be Interested, Not Interesting

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Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

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

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Bend-Not-Break Flexibility with a Sanctity Keeper

Add flexibility so users don't break a streak — but appoint someone to guard it from being cheapened.

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Black Loops and Blue Loops

Diagram your growth as loops, not funnels — then remove the friction on the sharing edge.

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Brand as Physical Proof of Service

The best brand assets don't just show your logo — they demonstrate your value prop while people watch

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Building Toward a Portfolio Career

Engineer a narrow-but-deep expertise plus branded credibility so you can advise many companies, not one.

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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

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Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

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

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Burnout vs Depression Self-Diagnosis

Tell exhaustion apart from depression by checking whether the flatness spreads beyond work.

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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

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Cap Table as a Growth Strategy

Recruit influential founders and operators onto your cap table so they become your earliest, most credible customers and evangelists.

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Career-First Management: Help Them Find Their Next Job

Commit to helping reports leave, and win transparency, backfill lead time, and reputation.

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Catalyst Review Forum

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

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Cathedrals Not Bricks

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

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CEDAF Delegation Framework

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

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Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

When you're bleeding to competitors, throw out the plan and build the churn list, sorted by ARR.

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Communication4 steps

Clarity Over Cleverness in Feature Design

Comprehensibility is a retention lever — make the design a plain distillation of what you're tracking.

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Leadership4 steps

Commit-and-Celebrate Weekly Cadence

Bookend every week with Monday commitments and Friday celebrations, tracked by a short weekly status.

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Productivity4 steps

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

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

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Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

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Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

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Compelling Reason to Buy (Not to Sell)

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

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Competitive Wargaming

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

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Productivity4 steps

Compounding Urgency: Pull the Roadmap Up a Week

Ship a week earlier, start the next thing a week sooner, and the gap compounds into a lap.

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Strategy3 steps

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.

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Conditioned Response Interception

Spot the reflex, intercept it, choose differently: a 30-year narrative, rewritten daily

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Consistent, Distinctive, Famous

The three-word brand brief for founders — and why fame is the nonlinear one nobody names.

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Context Over Control: Debate Upstream of the Solution

Empower teams by aligning on goal, hypothesis, and data—never by prescribing the solution.

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Contribution-Margin Payback Period over CAC

Judge acquisition ROI by how many months of contribution-margin profit it takes to repay CAC, not by CAC or LTV:CAC.

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Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

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Leadership3 steps

Crossing the Product Leader Canyon

Escape the manager death spiral by shifting from doer to editor and owning outcomes over output.

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Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

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Communication5 steps

Culture-Add Interview Diligence

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

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Leadership5 steps

Culture as Calcification: The Pocket Rollout

You cannot melt an enterprise's culture — you chip it, one advocate-led pocket at a time.

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Sales5 steps

Customer Zero Launch Motion

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

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Productivity3 steps

Cut Scope, Not Quality

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

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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.

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Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

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Dare to Be Dull

Strive for connection over perfection to free up cognitive bandwidth when speaking spontaneously

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Define What Problem Matters

The single highest-leverage PM skill: get crystal clear on which problem you're solving, first

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Demand-Feedback-First (T3/B3)

Force your team to critique you before you critique them — then report back what you changed.

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Communication4 steps

De-Risking the High-Stakes Meeting

Turn important meetings from big-reveal gambles into pre-worked, question-proof conversations.

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Design for Humanity, Not the Organogram

Small teams plus human briefs beat large teams plus metrics — reciprocity does not scale.

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Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

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Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

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

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Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

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

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Dory and Pulse

Write opinions blind, upvote the questions, and mark each person's decision role.

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Do the Job Badly to Learn What Excellence Looks Like

Founders in talent-poor markets should personally hold each role until they can recognise someone better

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Do the Opposite

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

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Leadership4 steps

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

Before rejecting an idea, sincerely attempt to make it work — then say no with receipts.

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Marketing4 steps

Editorial SEO Operating Model

Split the work: SEO manager picks topics and outlines, a domain-expert writer writes, then analyze.

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Eigen Questions

Rank open questions by how many other questions they kill, then answer that one first.

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Strategy3 steps

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

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Innovation4 steps

Embrace-the-Next-Thing Mindset

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

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

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

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Finance3 steps

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

Land enterprise deals at 75K-150K — a cheap land price poisons your expand.

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Productivity3 steps

Escape-Velocity Activation Metric

Identify the specific actions a user must take in their first window to become durably active, then make one team obsess over driving them.

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Strategy3 steps

Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference

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

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Strategy4 steps

Expected-Conversions Prioritization

Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

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

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Sales3 steps

First-Call Yes-or-No Qualification

On the first call it's yes or no, never maybe — a no is data that saves the relationship.

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Strategy5 steps

Five Principles to Live By

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

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Leadership5 steps

Five-Star Meetings

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

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Communication3 steps

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

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

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Mindset5 steps

Float Down River (Surrender Over Summit)

Stop climbing mountains that only reveal more mountains: go mummy mode and follow the current

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Focused Hours Over Long Hours

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

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Forest Time

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

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

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

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Marketing5 steps

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

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Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

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Leadership5 steps

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

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

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Marketing4 steps

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

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

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Strategy5 steps

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

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Mindset6 steps

Give Your Gut Credit: Judgment-First Decision Making

Every decision a human makes is a judgment call — so ask 'what do you think?' not 'what do you know?'

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Leadership7 steps

Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)

Culture is the product you build for employees; rituals are how you ship it.

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Productivity3 steps

Grade for Learning, Not Precision

Hand-wave the OKR score; spend your energy on the retrospective 'why' behind it.

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Marketing3 steps

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

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

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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.

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Strategy4 steps

Hard Things Are the Only Moat

Every moat gets crossed eventually — the one that lasts is a willingness to do what rivals won't

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Communication4 steps

Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

Dissent is an obligation, not a right — and commitment only starts once you've been genuinely heard.

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Productivity4 steps

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

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

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Leadership4 steps

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

For the first enterprise rep, hire someone who can cosplay the founder — vision, not scripts.

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Leadership5 steps

Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product

Run recruiting like a business funnel — brand, discovery call, and an iterative role spec

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Leadership4 steps

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

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

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Communication4 steps

Hook-Middle-End Story Structure

Package your message as a story with a hook, a middle that hides the message, and a celebratory end — then ask how to make it better.

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Marketing4 steps

Hypothesis-Driven SEO

Generate hypotheses by analyzing sites (and asking their SEO managers), then test to validate.

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Marketing5 steps

Idiosyncrasy Preservation (The Stand-Up Comedian Test)

Protect the odd, inconsistent details of your product — idiosyncrasies count double.

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Marketing4 steps

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

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

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Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

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Strategy5 steps

Input Metrics Over Output Metrics

Stop managing the revenue number. Instrument the controllable customer-experience inputs that produce it.

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Leadership4 steps

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

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

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Marketing4 steps

Internal Link Spread Optimization

Most sites starve their own pages of internal links; fixing spread is SEO's biggest quick win.

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Leadership4 steps

Internal Virality for Alignment

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

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Innovation5 steps

Intuition as Hypothesis Generator

Treat product taste as a hypothesis machine, not an oracle — then debate it down to a working hypothesis

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Strategy5 steps

Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test

Fund new bets from the core's profits — never by moving engineers off the core.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

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

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Innovation5 steps

Irreducible Complexity — The Simplicity Audit

1 + 1 = 1.5, not 3 — every addition subtracts, so audit the system, not the local decisions

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Strategy4 steps

Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments

Fund performance, UX and velocity work by making the invisible measurable and the downside of neglect concrete.

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Strategy4 steps

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

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Marketing4 steps

Kindle and Fire Growth Strategies

Non-scalable kindle hacks exist only to unlock the scalable fire strategy worth hiring for.

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Mindset5 steps

Ladder vs Map

Choose career moves by what makes an interesting life, not by what climbs the next rung

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Innovation3 steps

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

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

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Leadership5 steps

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

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Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

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Leadership5 steps

Low-Criticality Pilot for Changing How You Work

Never test a new way of working on something that matters — you get one shot at first impressions

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Finance4 steps

LTV Expansion Over Top-of-Funnel Expansion

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

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Strategy4 steps

Magic Lenses

Evaluate competing implementation paths by plotting each through the eyes of the advisers you wish you had

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Strategy5 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong

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Leadership3 steps

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

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

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Productivity5 steps

Mandatory vs. Optional Onboarding Split

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

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Innovation5 steps

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

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Leadership4 steps

Mastery Before Management

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

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Sales4 steps

Match the Sales Hire to the Motion and the Buyer (PLG to SLG)

Layering sales onto PLG: hire growers for inbound and department-head buyers, not CIO hunters.

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Innovation3 steps

Maximize the Treatment Effect to Fail Conclusively

In low-sample B2B tests, throw every tactic at a hypothesis at once so a failure kills the idea for good instead of resurfacing for years.

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Innovation5 steps

MAYA: The Right Amount of Weird

Ship the most novelty a market will swallow — one notch past familiar, never past comprehensible.

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Strategy4 steps

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

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Strategy3 steps

MECE Problem Decomposition

Break any problem into buckets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so you never miss a possible cause or solution.

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Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

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Leadership3 steps

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

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

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Leadership3 steps

Metric-Owned Teams with Soft Feature Ownership

Give teams a metric to move, not a feature to own — anyone can touch any surface that helps their number.

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Marketing3 steps

Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

Build a growing pool of aware, engaged leads — via freemium — and let them convert on their timing

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Communication4 steps

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

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Communication3 steps

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

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

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Leadership5 steps

Morale Is Made of Progress

In a downturn, no speech and no bonus works — only visible shipping keeps a team alive

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Innovation4 steps

NLX: Designing the Natural-Language Interface

Conversation is an interface with real constructs — design it, don't just let the model lead

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Mindset4 steps

No Linear Success Resilience

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

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Strategy5 steps

North Star Translation Layer

Give every team a metric they can directly move, then convert each into a single company North Star using a shared translation factor.

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Leadership4 steps

Nothing Is Above Them, In The Details, They Adapt

The three traits Shah observed in Bezos, Chesky and Sacks — humility, craft, and adaptation

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

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

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Strategy4 steps

Onboarding as a Retention Lever

Treat onboarding as a habit-and-retention engine, not a conversion funnel — and accept lower conversion to weed out the wrong users.

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Leadership5 steps

One Product Ladder (Kill the PO/PM Split)

Collapse product owner and product manager into a single APM → PM → Senior PM ladder

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Innovation3 steps

Opinionated Defaults for Onboarding

Encode what you've learned works into product defaults — make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard, without removing choice.

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Communication3 steps

Opinionated Simplicity

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

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Strategy3 steps

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

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

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Leadership5 steps

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

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Innovation4 steps

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

Design partners guide the build — set the pricing frame up front and filter feedback 80/20.

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Strategy4 steps

Packaging for Spread, Not for Revenue

Never gate the mechanism that grows you: limit files, not collaborators; charge editors, not viewers.

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Leadership2 steps

Painter, Architect, Surgeon Hiring Archetypes

Match your growth hire to your stage — a versatile painter, a structural architect, or a precision surgeon.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Passion-Project Learning (An Eval for Your Life)

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

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Innovation4 steps

Perceived Simplicity

Keep advanced power in the product but discoverable only to those who go looking — invisible to everyone else.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Picking a Sharp Problem

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

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Leadership4 steps

Pilot-With-Your-Best-Team Rollout

Don't roll OKRs out company-wide; hand the book to your strongest team, let them adapt it, then spread by twos.

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Marketing5 steps

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

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

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Leadership5 steps

Platforms Are Products

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

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Leadership4 steps

Players, Coaches, Captains

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

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

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Strategy4 steps

PMF for Candidates (People, Mission, Financials)

Evaluate a company you might join like an investor evaluates a deal — across People, Mission, and Financials.

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Productivity3 steps

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

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Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

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

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Productivity4 steps

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

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

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Strategy4 steps

Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework

You can't solve a problem directly — break it into ranked causes, then solve the biggest

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Mindset4 steps

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

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

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Productivity4 steps

Processing Over Memory: A Task System for the Overwhelmed Manager

Write everything down at the moment it's owed, groom into logical chunks, and free your head for thinking not remembering.

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Influence4 steps

Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

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

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Productivity4 steps

Prompt Sets Are the New PRD

Communicate product ideas by building the prototype, not writing the doc — demos before memos

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Leadership4 steps

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

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Leadership5 steps

PSHE — Problem, Solution, How, Execution

Level people by how much of the problem-to-execution chain they own, not by scope.

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Strategy5 steps

Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two

Every launch drops one of three; software lets you drop quality only if you plan to earn it back

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Mindset5 steps

Question the Assumption

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

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

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Marketing4 steps

Radically Human Support as a Growth Engine

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

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Sales4 steps

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

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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Reflex Archaeology (Pen-and-Paper Truth Seeking)

List your most reactive moments, then ask why until it hurts or lands: every reflex has a root

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Mindset3 steps

Reframe Anxiety as Excitement

Relabel the identical arousal response from nervous to excited to calm yourself and speak better

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Influence5 steps

Reframe, Don't Push Back

Win a disagreement with your CEO by finding the goal you already share, then renaming the problem

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Communication5 steps

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

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.

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Marketing3 steps

Revealed-Behavior Notification Timing

Trigger reminders off what users actually did, not what they said they'd do — 23.5 hours after last use.

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Productivity4 steps

RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort

Score reach and impact first; sit with the innovative bets before letting C and E kill them.

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Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

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

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Sales4 steps

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

Sell leaders the opportunity to become a superhero, not a fix for a narrow problem.

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Strategy4 steps

SEO Readiness Assessment

Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?

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Marketing3 steps

SERP Reverse-Engineering

To learn what page to build, read what Google already ranks for your target keywords.

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Innovation5 steps

Server-Side Events as the Default

Track events from your servers, not your clients — logs with a user ID are already events.

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Sales3 steps

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

Sell enterprises a service they already know how to buy, then migrate them to the product.

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Strategy5 steps

Signal Over Metrics (Pre-PMF Decision Rule)

You cannot optimize your way to product-market fit — hunt for pull, not conversion lifts.

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Communication3 steps

Signposting

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

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Innovation4 steps

Simplest-V1-Then-Amplify Experimentation

Ship the barest encapsulation of a hypothesis, confirm it has legs, then beat the heck out of it.

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Leadership5 steps

Single-Threaded Leadership

Kill resource contention by giving one leader one mission and every function they need to deliver it.

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Strategy6 steps

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.

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Marketing3 steps

Sizing and Time-Boxing a Channel Experiment

How much team and time to commit to a new channel, and what signal to look for before killing it.

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Leadership4 steps

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

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Marketing5 steps

Soft Launch / Hard Launch Decoupling

Let engineering ship when it's ready and let marketing launch when they're ready — never on the same date.

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Strategy4 steps

Solve Before Scale

Run in a distinct 'solve' mode before you ever switch to 'scale' mode

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Strategy4 steps

Solving for Everyone Is Solving for No One

Get specific about who you're NOT for—that guardrail is stronger than defining who you are.

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Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

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

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Peak Performance3 steps

Speaking Visualization Rehearsal

Mentally rehearse the whole speaking event in advance to desensitize yourself and gain a sense of agency

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Influence4 steps

Sponsorship Over Mentorship

Career inflection comes not from a coach but from a sponsor who trusts you with a bigger problem.

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Strategy4 steps

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

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

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Leadership3 steps

Strategy Activation via Crossing the Chasm

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

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Leadership3 steps

Strategy Not Self-Expression

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

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Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

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Innovation5 steps

Structural Conditions for Innovation

Companies that say they tolerate failure but punish it in comp and career don't get innovation. Change the structure.

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Leadership4 steps

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

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Leadership4 steps

Surfing the Detail Edge (CEO Engagement Dial)

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

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Communication5 steps

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

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Productivity3 steps

Systems Not Goals

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

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Strategy4 steps

Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

Fix the 25-40% of churn product teams ignore — payment failures, off-boarding, cancel flows

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Strategy4 steps

Tactic-to-Strategy Discovery

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

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Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

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Strategy4 steps

Tell Me What It Takes to Win, Then Tell Me the Costs

Ask for the un-watered-down plan to win first; negotiate the costs down second.

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Peak Performance5 steps

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

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

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Productivity3 steps

The 10% Planning Rule

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

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Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

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

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Leadership4 steps

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

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Mindset5 steps

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

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

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Mindset5 steps

The Adaptation That Overshoots

The strategy that saved you as a child is the one wrecking your life as an adult

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Communication3 steps

The ADD Answer Structure

Answer, Detailed example, Describe relevance: give complete, value-adding responses in Q&A

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Strategy5 steps

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

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Mindset6 steps

The Agile Industrial Complex Test

Before you adopt a methodology, ask how the people selling it make their money

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Leadership5 steps

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Anxiety Balance Sheet

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

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Strategy5 steps

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

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Leadership5 steps

The Bar Raiser Hiring Process

Put a trained, independent standard-keeper with veto power on every interview loop — and let them run the debrief.

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Strategy5 steps

The BD-Product Operating Contract

Test deals with hacky ops before code, build platforms not bespoke, time product's entry.

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Strategy5 steps

The Beachhead Segment Formula

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

Match funding to goal: bootstrap cash-flow businesses, fund only clear paths to $1B revenue

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Productivity5 steps

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Bootstrapper's Constraint Discipline

Costs are the only thing you control — so stay small, do it yourself, and practice making money

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Strategy5 steps

The Bottom-Up Fit Checklist

Four market conditions plus one leadership condition that decide whether an IC-led motion will work.

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Strategy4 steps

The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion

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

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Strategy5 steps

The Business Is an Equation

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

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Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

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Leadership5 steps

The 'Can You See What Good Looks Like?' Staffing Test

If nobody in your org has done it before, no amount of training will produce it

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Influence4 steps

The Champion Amplification Flywheel

Grow your internal champions' careers, and their credibility becomes your credibility.

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Marketing3 steps

The Chasm Positioning Formula

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

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Sales3 steps

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

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Strategy6 steps

The Commodity Generic Play (ONCE)

Find commodity software still charging luxury subscription prices, then sell a beautiful generic once

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Marketing4 steps

The Community Node-Graph Channel Strategy

Map the influence graph of an existing community, then go to its centres — for feedback, not a pitch.

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Communication5 steps

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

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Leadership4 steps

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Complementary-Axis PM Skill Development Framework

Level up (or transition into) PM by picking the skill axis opposite your background, then strategy

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Communication7 steps

The Conference Talk Prep Loop

Narrative before slides, rehearse until it's automatic, then own the room before anyone is in it.

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Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Contributor Path: Pick the Equation, Not the Title

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

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

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Peak Performance4 steps

The Core-Functions Red Alarm (Burnout Triage)

Sleep, diet, exercise, play, socialisation: when the fundamentals break, your body is the scoreboard

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Leadership4 steps

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

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

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Innovation5 steps

The Design-Led Architecture Stream

Give design a protected block to define the product's building blocks — or it will smuggle scope in at the end.

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Innovation4 steps

The Design Sprint Scorecard

Break your founding hypothesis into rows and grade each one red/yellow/green after head-to-head customer tests

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Leadership4 steps

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

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Strategy4 steps

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

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Strategy5 steps

The Double Lock (Sober and Drunk)

Debate every big decision twice — once rationally, once psychologically — and only act if both agree.

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Strategy5 steps

The Elevator-Pitch Product Vision Template

Fill six slots — customer, need, name, category, reason to buy, differentiation — and you have a vision statement.

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Leadership6 steps

The Empathy Steel-Man Decision Framework

Make each side argue the other's case, then name the tiebreaker and the deadline before debating.

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Strategy4 steps

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

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

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Innovation4 steps

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

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

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Innovation3 steps

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

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

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Leadership4 steps

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

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Leadership4 steps

The Fixit OKR

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

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

A 10-hour, 3-phase team sprint that turns a vague startup idea into one testable founding hypothesis

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Founding Hypothesis (Mad Libs Strategy Sentence)

Compress your entire startup strategy into one testable fill-in-the-blank sentence — then go prove it

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Marketing5 steps

The Four Go-To-Market Playbooks

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

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Leadership4 steps

The Four I's Feedback Structure

Information, Impact, Invitation, Implications: package feedback so it lands as collaborative problem-solving

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Marketing4 steps

The Four Keys to IC Love

Credibility, build-with-users, go where they already are, and radical transparency.

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Strategy6 steps

The Four-Pillar Product Operating Model

Build a product operating model on strategy, org design, product ops and incentives — not a dev framework

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Communication4 steps

The Four PM Annoyances

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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Four Steps of Deep Personal Transformation

Suffer, seek truth, self-compassion, compassion for others: the order real change follows

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Leadership4 steps

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

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Strategy4 steps

The Four Types of Product Work

Feature, growth, PMF-expansion, and scaling work — the portfolio a product leader must learn to balance.

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Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

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

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Marketing5 steps

The GACCS Marketing Brief

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Generalist Placement Play

Put a non-expert in charge to unlock 10x thinking, then hire the expert and get out of the way.

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Strategy3 steps

The 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

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Innovation4 steps

The Gravity Model for Zero-to-One Products

Ship new products with tiny shielded teams, then let traction—not headcount—pull in resources.

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Marketing4 steps

The Growth CMO Operating Model

Run marketing like agile product development — data-driven, iterative, and married to product.

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Leadership4 steps

The Growth Competency Model

Four competency buckets for hiring, evaluating, and balancing a growth team without chasing a unicorn.

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Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

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Leadership6 steps

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

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Leadership4 steps

The Highest Best Use Interview

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

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Leadership8 steps

The Hiring Signal Stack Rank

Reference check beats work sample beats interview — and run the reference check first.

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Leadership4 steps

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

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Leadership5 steps

The 'How to Work With Me' Document

Scale culture through one written doc: expectations, your real flaws, your commitments.

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Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

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Marketing4 steps

The 'If I Could Have Written It' Content Bar

A one-question filter for whether technical content will earn credibility or be ignored.

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Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Inertia of Society (Why Transformation Stalls)

You traded individuality for acceptance before you could speak; reclaiming it is the fear

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Marketing5 steps

The Influence-Graph Fanboy Loop

Run PageRank on your community's network, then approach the central nodes for feedback — not distribution

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Mindset4 steps

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

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Strategy6 steps

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy4 steps

The Mission-to-Monday Cascade

Translate a 5-year mission down through strategy and quarterly OKRs into what you actually do this week.

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Leadership5 steps

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.

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Leadership4 steps

The Most Charitable Interpretation

Hire for and enforce a norm of assuming good intent, and let the misfits leave

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Strategy5 steps

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

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Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

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Leadership5 steps

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

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Leadership5 steps

The Non-Fatal Override

If it isn't fatal, let them run it — but log your skepticism first so the outcome teaches both of you

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Strategy6 steps

The Now-Next-Later Roadmap

Replace the Gantt timeline with three confidence buckets so plans get vaguer as they get further out.

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Innovation3 steps

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

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

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Productivity4 steps

The One-on-One Diet

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

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Leadership4 steps

The OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities

A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.

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Leadership3 steps

The Orchestra Leader Model

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Outside-Silicon-Valley Playbook

Compete with global giants from a talent-poor market: go ops-heavy, go remote early, and refuse to clone

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Innovation5 steps

The Parallel Sweet Spot: Psychological, Technological, Economic

Solve all three constraints at once — running them in series is how great products die.

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Leadership5 steps

The Path to the C-Suite

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Peak Hierarchy of Needs (Three Pyramids)

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

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Leadership6 steps

The PM Framework Wrapper

A PM's real output is a framework that wraps strategy plus a point of view — and gets everyone to the same destination

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Leadership5 steps

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

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Leadership6 steps

The Post-Interview Culture Probe

Give a strong-but-culturally-questionable candidate blunt feedback and hire on how they react.

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Sales5 steps

The Practitioner Advocate Role (The Tom Factor)

Hire a passionate user from your community into marketing and sales — no quota, no CRM.

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Innovation8 steps

The PRFAQ Working Backwards Document

Write the launch press release before you build, so every word forces a real decision

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Leadership4 steps

The Product Career Learning Loop

A four-stage loop — execute, generalize, communicate, scale — that compounds a PM's ability over a career.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Product Owner Escape Ladder

Five moves to climb out of the order-taker trap without quitting first

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Leadership4 steps

The Product People Spectrum: Innovators to Executors

Great product careers get filtered at strategy — deliberately move executors toward the strategic middle.

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Leadership5 steps

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

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Strategy4 steps

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

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Finance4 steps

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

Stand up a pricing committee and do one small monetization thing every quarter, forever

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Therapist Speed-Dating: Safety, Intellect, Router

Pick for felt safety first, intellect second; the rest is implementation detail

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Strategy4 steps

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones

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Strategy5 steps

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Riff Test: Hiring for Gut Instinct

Pay finalists to build something, then critique it and ask what they'd do with two more days

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Strategy4 steps

The Roadmap as a Prototype for Your Strategy

Treat the roadmap like a design mock-up: its value is in the feedback it provokes, not the document itself.

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Peak Performance3 steps

The Rule of Lung

Make your exhale twice as long as your inhale to trigger the relaxation response before speaking

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Influence4 steps

The Sales Team Parity Argument

Ask for exactly the accountability sales gets: budget, experiments, and outcomes — not named deals on named dates.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Sharp Problem

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

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Leadership3 steps

The Shipyard Team

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

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Innovation5 steps

The Single Affordance Rule

One product, one job. Added functionality can subtract value by destroying clarity of purpose.

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Strategy3 steps

The SMB-or-Enterprise Binary (Mid-Market Doesn't Exist)

There is no mid-market — decide which of two distinct games you're playing and don't bleed them.

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Productivity4 steps

The SPACE Framework

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

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Stay-Up Scorecard

One number (profit) and one question (would I do it again) instead of OKRs, KPIs and a five-year plan

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Communication4 steps

The Story Chapters Framework for Executive Communication

Find the last obvious point for your audience, then build from there — skip neither the setup nor the basics.

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Strategy5 steps

The Strategy Contract

A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Swipe File

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

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Strategy6 steps

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

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Leadership6 steps

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

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Leadership3 steps

The Tempo Framework

Align every team on what shipping cadence 'good' looks like, then close the gap

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Innovation3 steps

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth

Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth

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Innovation4 steps

The Three Dimensions of an Agent

Score any 'agent' on autonomy, complexity, and natural interaction — each a spectrum

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Strategy3 steps

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

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

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Mindset3 steps

The Three Mindset Shifts That Stall or Restart PM Growth

Fix the three stories — control, change, and self-image — that quietly stall product careers

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Strategy5 steps

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

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

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Leadership3 steps

The Three-Peer 24-Hour Approval

Replace slow top-down OKR sign-off with three peers who sanity-check your goals in a 24-hour turnaround.

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Leadership5 steps

The Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

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

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Communication3 steps

The Three Tenets of PM Stakeholder Collaboration

A mantra for working with stakeholders: surface issues, not yourself; drive decisions, don't hoard them

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Types of SEO

Programmatic, editorial and technical SEO are different games; pick the one your queries reward.

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Leadership3 steps

The Three Ws of PM Career Growth

Rise faster by performing on all three axes: what you produce, what you bring, and how you operate

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Productivity5 steps

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

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

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Communication4 steps

The Trade-Off Menu: Turn a Velocity Demand Into Leverage

When leadership wants everything faster, hand them a menu of what you'll do and what you won't—and make them choose.

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Communication3 steps

The Triple-A Apology

Acknowledge, Appreciate, Amend: apologize for the transgression, not for how someone feels

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Innovation4 steps

The Two-of-Three Inflection Test

Only build a new zero-to-one product when at least two of three inflections line up

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Marketing5 steps

The Two-Step Bottom-Up GTM Motion

Make individual contributors love you, then arm them to spread you inside their company.

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Communication5 steps

The Ungated Customer Feed

Pipe raw customer feedback into Slack with no gatekeeper — and let engineers email the customer directly.

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Strategy4 steps

The Unifying Concept Test

Before adding a service to your app, check it fits the one mental model customers already hold of you

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Strategy5 steps

The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)

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

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Marketing5 steps

The User Imagery Adoption Test

Adoption stalls on who owns the product, not what it does — audit your user imagery before you scale.

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Communication5 steps

The Value-Framed Product Résumé

Rewrite every bullet from process to problem, decision, and metric moved

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Finance3 steps

The Value Metric Pricing Model

Charge on a metric that scales with value so acquisition, retention, and expansion self-correct

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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.

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Innovation5 steps

The Weekly Marketable Feature

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

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Communication4 steps

The WHAT Toast Structure

Why we're here, How you're connected, Anecdote, Thank you: a GPS for any toast or tribute

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Innovation5 steps

The Working Backwards PR/FAQ Process

Start every new product from the customer's problem, written as a press release, before any constraint enters the room.

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Strategy3 steps

The Year Is Made in the First Six Months

Because buying cycles lag, your annual number is set by what you ship in H1, not H2.

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Strategy3 steps

The Zero-to-Seven-Day Retention Sprint

Concentrate experiments and flexibility on the first 7 days, where loss aversion actually locks in.

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Innovation4 steps

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Think From First Principles by Writing

Close the laptop, write the question at the top of a blank page, and answer it before Googling anything.

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Strategy4 steps

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

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

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Marketing3 steps

Three-Ingredient Emerging Channel Evaluation Framework

Decide whether a hot new acquisition channel is worth your time using three lenses before you invest.

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Sales4 steps

Tier-One Logo First

Chase the Walmarts and Nvidias first — the market leaders are your real early adopters.

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Marketing3 steps

Topical Authority Adjacency

Rank by starting where you're already known, then expand into semantically adjacent topics.

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Marketing3 steps

Topics Over Keywords

Modern Google ranks one page for a cluster of 200-2,000 keywords; target the topic, not the keyword.

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Innovation3 steps

Trapped Value and the 10% Capture Rule

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

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Strategy4 steps

Triangulated Key Results

Measure one quarterly objective from three angles — a hard number, a squishy quality metric, and a dollar figure.

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Strategy4 steps

Turn Your Biggest Blocker Into Your Upgrade Wedge

Find the single thing stopping adoption, go deeper on it than anyone, and make it the reason to upgrade.

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Leadership3 steps

Two-Path Talent Sourcing (Network + Data)

Find the companies best at the skill you're hiring for, then find the best person there - via referral chains or via public performance data.

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Communication3 steps

Two-Way Write-Ups

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

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Mindset4 steps

Update Your Priors: The AI Capability Arbitrage

Re-test what AI can do today and demand more of it — old scar tissue is leaving alpha on the table

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Productivity4 steps

Velocity Guardrails: Ship Freely Until the Metrics Go Red

Standardize a few quality metrics per team; below the line they ship anything, above it they fix before they ship.

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Marketing5 steps

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

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

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Marketing3 steps

Visibility Signals Importance

Users care about a feature in proportion to how much the product visibly cares about it.

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Mindset5 steps

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

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

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Leadership5 steps

WeDash: Mandatory Dogfooding as a Culture Governor

Make every employee do frontline work, then advertise it in interviews to self-select hires.

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Communication3 steps

What / So What / Now What

A three-part structure that turns any on-the-spot update or answer into a memorable, digestible message

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Strategy5 steps

Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant

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

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Strategy5 steps

Where-to-Play Product Strategy as the Prioritization Engine

Turn an integrated set of strategic choices into the filter that decides every roadmap trade-off.

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Communication4 steps

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

Replace group brainstorms with silent individual idea generation, a quiet vote, and one designated decider

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