LLenny's Podcast
← All resources
book

Crossing the Chasm

By Geoffrey Moore

6 recommend/use · 9 sourced episodes

Every sourced reference

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

Related frameworks

Leadership4 steps

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.

Read →
Leadership4 steps

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

Let people bring themselves to the work; you trade a little visibility for higher velocity, morale, and results.

Read →
Strategy6 steps

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

Read →
Self-Mastery3 steps

Burnout vs Depression Self-Diagnosis

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

Read →
Productivity5 steps

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

Read →
Sales5 steps

Compelling Reason to Buy (Not to Sell)

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

Read →
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.

Read →
Leadership3 steps

Deadlines as P-Zero

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

Read →
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

Read →
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?

Read →
Leadership5 steps

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

Read →
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.

Read →
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

Read →
Finance4 steps

Net Revenue Retention Above 100% (and Why NRR Lies)

Expansion revenue must beat churn, but NRR flatters you — watch logo churn too.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

Pick a Lane and Write the Story

Master one of the five product ambiguities early, then write the paragraph your next employer needs to hear.

Read →
Marketing5 steps

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

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

Read →
Sales4 steps

Pricing Selects the Market (Sell Growth, Not Savings)

Price and positioning choose your market — reframe your product as growth to charge many times more.

Read →
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.

Read →
Innovation6 steps

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

Read →
Self-Mastery5 steps

Shadows of Superpowers

Your plateau is almost always the shadow cast by the exact strength that got you here.

Read →
Communication5 steps

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

Read →
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.

Read →
Marketing4 steps

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

Constrain your first ICP so tightly that customers talk to each other — then let word of mouth light the fire.

Read →
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.

Read →
Innovation4 steps

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

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

Read →
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

Read →
Strategy3 steps

The 51-49 Decision Rule

When options are near-even, just pick one fast — more data won't meaningfully improve a close call.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

The 5-Question Stalled Growth Diagnostic

Diagnose why growth is slowing by asking five questions in strict priority order.

Read →
Innovation4 steps

The AI Expertise Layer

Don't outsource all AI to foundation models — keep expertise and measurement to break the quality glass ceiling.

Read →
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.

Read →
Strategy4 steps

The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion

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

Read →
Finance3 steps

The Cancellation Ceiling (Maximum Customer Cap)

New customers divided by cancellation rate is the hard ceiling on how big you can ever get.

Read →
Marketing3 steps

The Chasm Positioning Formula

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

Read →
Communication7 steps

The Conference Talk Prep Loop

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

Read →
Leadership5 steps

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

Read →
Innovation4 steps

The Design-Partner Pod Model

Give each cross-functional pod 6-12 real customers to co-build with, so features ship pre-validated.

Read →
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

Read →
Marketing3 steps

The Elephant Curve (Channels Saturate and Sag)

Every acquisition channel starts as an S-curve then sags — assume your winners will decline.

Read →
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.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

The Ex-Growth Company Test

Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.

Read →
Marketing5 steps

The Four Go-To-Market Playbooks

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

Read →
Leadership4 steps

The Four Reasons You're Not Getting Promoted

A diagnostic that separates 'the system can't promote you' from 'you're not ready' — because the fix differs.

Read →
Marketing5 steps

The GACCS Marketing Brief

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

Read →
Communication5 steps

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

Formal feedback is noise. Pull the real signal, prove you heard it, and publicly reward whoever gave it.

Read →
Marketing4 steps

The Growth CMO Operating Model

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

Read →
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.

Read →
Productivity5 steps

The Meeting Operating System

Version your team's meetings like a product — ship a new rev every 90 days.

Read →
Strategy3 steps

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

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

Read →
Strategy6 steps

The Now-Next-Later Roadmap

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

Read →
Leadership5 steps

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

Read →
Productivity3 steps

The Research Coordinator Role

Borrow the recruiting-coordinator role to schedule all customer research, so PMs never lose time to logistics.

Read →
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.

Read →
Influence4 steps

The Sales Team Parity Argument

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

Read →
Leadership5 steps

The Sidecar Model of Management

You don't take the wheel or hand it over — you ride attached, and you have to be invited in first.

Read →
Strategy5 steps

The Skip: Career as a Product

Plan for the job after next, not the next job — and treat promotion as a means, not the goal.

Read →
Self-Mastery3 steps

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

Chain expert-to-expert referrals until you hear only repeats — that's how you know you've hit the bullseye.

Read →
Mindset5 steps

The Three Acts and the Next North Star

The greyhound that catches the rabbit never runs again — pick your second North Star before you catch the first.

Read →
Leadership5 steps

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

Read →
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.

Read →
Marketing5 steps

The 'What Made You Cancel?' Rooter-Cause Diagnosis

Ask what made them cancel (not why), then dig past the surface reason to the real causes.

Read →
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.

Read →
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.

Read →

People in these episodes

Related resources

Spot an error or want this page removed? Request a correction or removal.