Dropbox

AI Introspection Rubric

Point an AI agent at a folder of your own notes to surface criteria you hold implicitly and turn them into a rubric.

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.

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

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

Behavioral Activation

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Be Known For Something

Pick one thing to be excellent at, get a reputation for it, and let responsibility flow to you

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

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

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.

Peak Performance4 steps

Binary Quality Calibration

Instead of documenting what 'quality' means, classify shipped work as high-quality or not — and let examples teach the bar.

Broadcast How Leaders Think (Mental-Model Transparency)

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

Build for the Future Model

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

Building Trust Through Speed

Ship an honest 'research preview' early, then visibly iterate on feedback so speed builds trust instead of eroding it.

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.

Care Deeply, Challenge Directly — The Feedback Script

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

Category-Attribute Fit

Don't pick a market then decide how to win. Work out what wins there, and only pick markets where that's who you are.

Close the Loop: Intent-Signal Retention Engine

Turn every low-commitment user signal into a trigger you can legitimately fire later.

Cohort-and-Control Data Reading

Never trust pre/post dashboards — read behavior by cohort and judge changes by variant-vs-control so the macro can't fool you.

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Concierge Manual Onboarding

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

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

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

CORE Feedback Structure

Context, Observation, Result, Next Step — feedback about behavior, never personality

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.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

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

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

Free the features that create the aha moment; monetize the features whose value only emerges at scale.

Finance4 steps

Decide-Today Runway Math

Cost cuts only buy runway if you make them now; every month you wait permanently destroys optionality

Deliberate Low-Leverage Leadership

Choose the nitty-gritty tasks 'anyone could do' — because when a senior leader does them, they become high leverage.

Deliver Customer Value Faster with High Quality

One sentence, three measurable attributes — the motto that drives Miro's entire product reward and measurement system.

Demos Not Memos

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

Design in the Material

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

Influence5 steps

Disagree With the Founder Via the Spirit

Never say no to the idea — say yes to the spirit and come back with a better path

Sales3 steps

Dollar-Driven Discovery

Test the dollar potential of a hypothesis, not just whether customers 'like' the idea

Double Down on Why People Love You

Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Sales3 steps

Enterprise Price-Ceiling Discovery

Keep asking for more until deals break; losing 20-30% to price is how you find the ceiling.

Eval-First AI Product Development

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

Evals as Articulating Success

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

Mindset4 steps

First-Principles Thinking as a Hiring Filter

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

First to Hit the Brick Wall

In innovation, speed is the biggest determinant of success because you learn what doesn't work before anyone else.

Flying Formation

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

Strategy2 steps

Freemium Two-Product Rule

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

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

Replace support, success, research, PR and marketing with two teams that own a human relationship end to end.

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

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

Gauge How It Lands

Read the reaction in real time and adjust which axis you move on — sad/mad means move up on care

Give It Your Hardest Task

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

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

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.

Hoard What You Know How To Do

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

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

For most PMs, strategy is overrated — your real job is to shrink the time from hypothesis to data.

ICE Prioritization

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

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Intuition as Hypothesis Generator

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

Irreducible Complexity — The Simplicity Audit

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

Kind and Candid

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

KPI + Narrative: The Two-Part Turnaround Drumbeat

Pair one north-star KPI with one relentlessly repeated narrative to reset how a company works.

Leading a Team Through Crisis

Radical transparency plus generosity-first equity keeps your best people through the storm that needs them most

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

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

Legibility Framework for Spotting Frontier Ideas

Hunt for illegible ideas — the ones with real energy that nobody can quite articulate yet — and translate them.

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

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

Magic Lenses

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

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.

Manufactured Dogfooding

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

Match Price to Value with a Value Metric

Pick the unit of value your customer gets, then charge against it so revenue scales as usage grows.

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

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

Move the PMF Score: Reposition + Speed to Value

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

Must-Have Benefit Excavation

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

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

Build products that make money in opposite macro conditions so troughs in one are peaks in another.

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

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

Optimizing for Feelings

Name the emotion the product must evoke, build to that, and use metrics only as an honesty check.

Influence5 steps

Organic Mentorship Sourcing

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

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

Dream big, but chunk the bet into named learning phases with quarterly go/no-go gates

Positioning Before Pricing (The Single-Attribute Position)

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

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

Treat pricing as a living system revisited every 6-12 months, not a set-and-forget decision.

Project-Chosen Leads and the Mutt Hire

PM is a role on a project, not a department — and you staff it with multi-disciplinary makers, not title-holders.

Prompting-as-Prototyping

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

P-Stage Cycle-Time Benchmarking

Stage-gate every initiative (PStrat→P0→P1→P2), size it S/M/L, and benchmark cycle time against yourself like golf.

Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two

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

Radical Trust Building

Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Red/Green TDD for Coding Agents

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

Roasting Plus High Standards

Let the team feel safe enough to roast you, then apply high standards without fear — safety makes rigor easier.

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

A six-month roadmap refreshed quarterly, with 80% commitment in months 1-3 and 50% in months 4-6.

Running Products via the Daily Meeting

Assign one owner to an urgent problem, give them unlimited resources except time, and force a daily report until it's solved.

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

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

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

Signals and Nudges for Choice Under Abundance

When every result is plausible, confidence beats relevance — surface glanceable signals, not more inventory.

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Single Decisive Reason (SDR)

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

Mindset3 steps

Slow vs Fast Decisions

For any reversible decision there's no right or wrong — only slow and fast — so decide fast and correct fast.

Soliciting Feedback: The Order of Operations

Ask a go-to question, count to six, listen to understand, then reward the candor

Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening

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

Spirit-First OKRs

Write down qualitatively what crushing it looks like before you pick any number

Stratified Design Work

Split your time between supporting engineers' execution and setting a 3-6 month vision, not polishing mocks.

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

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

Communication5 steps

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

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

Taste as a Trainable Model

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

The 10x Leverage Desk

Spend your finite time only on problems with 10x positive or negative impact — and physically move yourself into the details until they're solved.

Marketing11 steps

The 11 Zero-Day Marketing Exploits

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

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

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

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

Redefine 'product org' as Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design — all embedded in every stream.

The Attributed Influencer Launch Sequence

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

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

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

The Chess-Points Competitive Lens

Every release is a move against your competitor in the customer's mind — positive or negative, never neutral.

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

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

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.

The Complementary-Axis PM Skill Development Framework

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

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

Stand up a pricing committee, mine demand and willingness-to-pay with structured surveys, then set price.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.

The Dark Factory Software Model

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

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

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

The Design Sprint Scorecard

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

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

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

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The Expectations-Reality Delta

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The First Growth Hire as Portfolio Manager

Hire acquisition first, and hire for attributes over channel expertise — expertise causes false precision

The Five Ingredients of a High-Performing Team

Clear goals + a why, results culture, team-first, ownership, and fun — in that order

The Five-Legged Stool

Product, eng, design, insights, and marketing as one leadership team — with the PM accountable, not king.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Four Filters for Career Acceleration

Growth rate, strength-fit, deferred comp, and the C-suite question — pick jobs on these, not on salary.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Four Levels of Product-Market Fit

Sequence PMF as four levels, optimizing satisfaction, then demand, then efficiency in turn

The Four Ps of Pivoting

Persona, Problem, Promise, Product — the four levers to change when you're stuck

Mindset2 steps

The Fresh-Start Test

Ask 'if I started today, would I do this?' — and if the answer is different, change now, not next life

Sales3 steps

The Friend-Zone Test

Sit customers down and force the truth: do you need me, or do you just like me?

The Influence-Graph Fanboy Loop

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

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

Mindset5 steps

The 'Just Evil Enough' Ethics Test

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

The Lethal Trifecta

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

Mindset3 steps

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

The Made-Up Name Reset

Give a team or feature a name nobody recognizes, so nobody can skip the argument about what it should be.

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

Ship five things people love, not fifteen things that merely work

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

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

The Ownership Engine

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

The Pivot Decision Algorithm

Five ordered gates — problem, assets, energy, team, capital — that decide whether to pivot or shut down after losing PMF

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

The PM Owns the Why

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

The Prep-Call PM Interview Loop

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

The Product/Market Fit Engine

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

The Provenance Gate: Scaling Supply Without Diluting the Brand

Let sellers scale by outsourcing production — but only to a partner whose process they actually know.

The Radical Candor 2x2

Care personally AND challenge directly — the two axes that place every act of feedback

The Recon Canvas

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

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

Lead with themes and a narrative; link out to the systems for the granular how

The Sean Ellis Test

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

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.

The Superpower Overlap Test

Find your true strengths via a two-layer self-plus-peer assessment, then only take roles where your superpower meets the company's.

The Switch Log

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

The Talent Development Lifecycle

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

The Team Is the Product

Choose the company you want to build first, pick a problem worthy of it, then treat every hire as a product launch.

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

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

The Thin Skeleton Template

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

The Three Career Conversations

Past, dreams, and action plan — three 45-minute conversations to show you care and grow people

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

The Three Tenets of PM Stakeholder Collaboration

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

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

Leadership6 steps

The Time-Boxed First 90 Days

Build context 5x faster, leave a plan behind, and don't spend trust you haven't banked

The Tiny Core Principle

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

The Transaction Tiebreaker for Marketplace Prioritization

Stop arguing supply vs demand — make the transaction itself the thing every team is accountable to.

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 Two-Crisis Triage

Classify every founder crisis as cash or product-market-fit, then run three diagnostic questions before acting

The Two-Persona Product Leader

Every product leader wears two hats: as a leadership-team member drive accountability; as a stream leader drive improvement.

The Unblock Virtuous Cycle

Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.

Mindset4 steps

The Vibe-Coding Blast-Radius Rule

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

The Weekly Focus Ritual

Post what you're focused on this week, and whether last week's focus actually landed.

Three Designer Hiring Archetypes

Hire for one of three profiles — block-shaped generalist, deep-T specialist, or the crack new grad.

Three-Prototype Ideation

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

Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

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

Value Delivery Engine: Activation-First Growth Sequence

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

Values as a Mirror

Don't author values. Interview the whole team, harvest their exact words, and write them back as a story.

Sales4 steps

Van Westendorp Premium Pricing (Price at the Third Question)

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

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

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.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.