Coinbase

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.

Marketing5 steps

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

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

Marketing4 steps

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

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

Back-Channel Reference Digging

Trust peer back-channels over provided references, and probe harder than feels comfortable.

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

Adding headcount doesn't add output — only adding people who drive initiatives end-to-end does.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Behavioral Activation

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

Best-for-the-Role, Not Best-in-Market

Hire for the specific mandate at this specific stage, not the most impressive resume available.

Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea

At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.

Strategy6 steps

Black Loops and Blue Loops

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

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.

Influence5 steps

Building Your Own Social Radar

Turn people-reading from a mystery gift into a deliberate practice: checklist, conscious questions, and follow-up calibration.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build on Undiscovered Talent

Beat better-funded incumbents by hiring people the market's hiring machines systematically misprice.

Coach vs. Advise Decision

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

Onboard early users in small waves so each cohort surfaces new bugs instead of duplicating the last cohort's feedback.

Self-Mastery4 steps

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.

Criticize in Public

Deliver negative feedback in front of the team so the whole system learns the issue is seen and being handled.

Deadlines as P-Zero

Have few deadlines, but make each one a P0 that nothing else can touch — and cut scope to hit it

Define the Mandate Before You Search

Get granular on the outcome, spike, and 90-day plan before opening a product-leader search.

Define What Problem Matters

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

Marketing3 steps

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

The more crowded and mature a category, the more design and brand become the deciding differentiator.

Innovation7 steps

Design for the Most Complex Use Case First

Architect for the hardest customer you'll ever have, then choose what to ship first.

Communication5 steps

Dory and Pulse

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

Strategy6 steps

Eigen Questions

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

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

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

Communication3 steps

Emotional Discovery: Feel Bad Like the Customer

On customer calls, dig until you feel the exact emotion the customer wants to avoid, then build to remove it

Self-Mastery5 steps

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

Mindset4 steps

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

First-Principles Framework Method

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

Innovation5 steps

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

Strategy5 steps

Foundational Insight Over Customer Research

For consumer and SMB products, customer feedback is directionally wrong — build from your own insight instead.

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.

Strategy5 steps

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.

Leadership6 steps

Go and See: Walking All the Way to Ground

Product leaders become the world's foremost expert in their domain by going to the source themselves.

Leadership7 steps

Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)

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

GROW Model for Powerful Questions

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

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.

Hire People Bigger Than Their Title

Build a small team of high-caliber people who each own more scope than their role, and screen for it with a paid work trial.

Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product

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

Innovation5 steps

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.

Strategy5 steps

Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List

A short force-ranked list every team must absorb — defined by what it excludes.

Innovation5 steps

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Strategy7 steps

International Market Entry Stack Rank

Assume you'll need everywhere, order by demand, then re-rank by build cost, strategic value, and long poles.

Influence4 steps

Interview as Discovery: Be the Solution to Their Burning Problem

Treat a job interview like product discovery — find the hiring manager's burning problem and position yourself as its solution

Mindset5 steps

Ladder vs Map

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

Leave It Better Than You Found It

Build career capital by making visible, others-verifiable impact — not by collecting logos.

Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

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

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Magic and Science Decision-Making

Replace A/B tests and metric goals with deep shared customer understanding, then decide by informed intuition.

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.

Productivity3 steps

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

Filter every opportunity by 'does this advance the main quest, and is it important now or later?'

Market Map, Then Go a Layer Deeper

Start from the best companies for a skill, but never assume a great logo means a great individual.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

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

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

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

Morale Is Made of Progress

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

Nail the First Three Sentences

Spend a disproportionate share of your time framing the opening — get it right and the rest writes itself.

Non-Violent Communication (OFNR) for Difficult Conversations

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

Nothing Is Above Them, In The Details, They Adapt

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

One-Page Plan and Operating Rhythm

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

Opinionated Software: Good Defaults Over Flexibility

Ship the one best workflow as a strong default so users spend time on their work, not on configuring your tool.

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Fit as Segment Territory

Treat PMF not as a binary but as territory won segment by segment, and double down hard on whatever segment is pulling.

PSHE Career Growth Framework

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

PSHE — Problem, Solution, How, Execution

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

Influence5 steps

Reframe, Don't Push Back

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

Relentless Application of Force

The CEO's core job is offsetting the complacency that success naturally breeds — push hardest when winning.

Ruthless Referencing

Diagnose talent by extracting the right information from many references, not by trusting a 45-minute interview.

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

Ship-Ugly-Then-Polish Craft Loop

Combine shipping fast with fixing fast: get rough builds in front of real users, reserve polish for general release.

Sales4 steps

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

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

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

Build the most extreme version along one attribute, feel it, repeat in the opposite direction, then find where they meet

Productivity4 steps

The 10% Working-Version Rule

Have a testable working version by the time 10% of your time budget elapses, not at the halfway point

Marketing11 steps

The 11 Zero-Day Marketing Exploits

Eleven recurring meta-patterns for engineering an unfair go-to-market advantage.

Leadership6 steps

The Assumption-Break PM Interview

Give a case study too big to solve, break one assumption, and watch whether they rattle off the implications.

Marketing5 steps

The Attributed Influencer Launch Sequence

Stagger tracked influencer shares over days, then weaponize the leaderboard.

The Calibration Test for Recruiters

Vet a recruiter by testing whether they can play back your brief and name candidates on the spot.

Strategy6 steps

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.

Leadership7 steps

The Decision Tempo System

Never leave a decision in the room: decide now, pull in whoever is missing, and let deadlines actually bite.

Marketing3 steps

The Double Triangle: PM as Go-To-Market Discipline

Sit the PM between two triangles — build (eng/product/design) and sell (sales/marketing/PM) — and originate the customer's language

Peak Performance5 steps

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Enthusiastic Rehire Test

One binary question that cuts through months of avoided talent decisions

Productivity5 steps

The Four Levers of Velocity at Scale

Small missions, a real platform, leaders in the trenches, and a team you keep recalibrating.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

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

Leadership8 steps

The Hiring Signal Stack Rank

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

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

Entrepreneurship8 steps

The Internal Founder Pod

One entrepreneurial engineer, one designer, a platform apprenticeship, and a new product line in 6-9 months.

Communication3 steps

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

Mindset5 steps

The 'Just Evil Enough' Ethics Test

An Occam's-razor line between subversive-and-clever and actually evil.

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.

The Pre-Need Talent Pipeline

Build relationships with great people long before you have a role open, with no agenda.

Innovation8 steps

The PRFAQ Working Backwards Document

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

Marketing3 steps

The Recon Canvas

An 18-square grid for scanning product, medium, and market for subversive openings.

Innovation6 steps

The Sean Ellis Scale Gate

Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Social Radar Founder-Read

Read the human signals in a founder interview to catch red flags the idea-focused people miss.

The Subversive Mindset (System Awareness → Novelty → Disagreeability)

Get a system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend, in three learnable steps.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Three B's of Behavior Change

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

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Trust-First Interview Method

Talk less, promise review before publishing, and follow the tangents — so guests open up and the conversation goes somewhere real.

The Ugly Baby Test

Seek ideas that make smart peers laugh — real alpha lives in the ugly babies everyone dismisses.

Three Levels of Listening

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

Productivity3 steps

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

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

Values as a Sharp Knife

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

Wartime Company Reset

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

Mindset4 steps

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.