DX

Adapt the Model, Don't Build One

Post-training is the new pre-training — steer an off-the-shelf model to your outcome instead of pre-training your own

Marketing2 steps

Beautifully Simple Pricing

In your early days, price so a customer can repeat it back and it tells a value story.

Best-Model-First Agent Workflow

Use the most capable model on max effort, start in plan mode, then auto-accept — counterintuitively cheaper.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

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

Marketing3 steps

Brand as a Promise

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

Break the Chain of Bad Decisions

Disasters are chains of small bad decisions; eat the sunk cost to break the chain and start a chain of good ones

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build for the Model Six Months Out

Design your AI product for the model that ships in six months, not the one you have today.

Build for Where the Models Are Going

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

Build Infrastructure, Not Features

Ask 'what has to be true so anyone could build this in an hour?' and build that instead.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Building the Network Effect Into the Product

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

Peak Performance3 steps

Calories Per Hour: Intensity Over Hours

Get more done per minute instead of working more minutes, then go home.

CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook

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

Choose the Hard Path

When choosing between options, pick the harder one because it wins whether or not it works out.

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

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

Compounding Engineering

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

Context-First Agent Debugging

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

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

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Deliberate Team Scaling

Build the senior team paced to your ability to integrate and manage them, avoiding both fast-scaling and never-hiring-experience

Don't Box the Model In

Give the model tools and a goal, not a rigid workflow — scaffolding gains get wiped out by the next model.

Dress to Signal Effort, Not Expense

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

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

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

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of 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.

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

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

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

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

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

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

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.

Marketing5 steps

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

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

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

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

Productivity3 steps

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

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

Productivity3 steps

Hand the Toil to the Model First

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

Hire an AI Operations Lead

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

Humor as a Calibrated Mastery Signal

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

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Invest in Strength, Not Lack of Weakness

Judge people by what they do best, not their worst mistake; back the world-class strength and manage around the flaws

Job Trials Over Interviews

Interviews don't predict performance; make the interview as close to the real job as possible.

Latent Demand Product Discovery

Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.

Leadership3 steps

Managerial Leverage Test

You don't make reports great; you hire people who make you great, and you replace those you have to push

Sales6 steps

Mastering B2B Negotiations Through Value

Extract full value from every deal via gives-and-gets, value selling, and disciplined negotiation tactics.

Mastery Before Management

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

Meeting Armageddon

Once a year, delete every recurring meeting and forbid new ones for two weeks.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Merge With the Unreasonable

Don't try to become a visionary; find one and connect your APIs to theirs.

Pair Programming as a Management Tool

Two people on one computer isn't half the code, it's the fastest path to the right code.

Planning in Seasons

Replace rigid roadmaps with secular 'seasons', loose quarterly OKRs, and deliberate slack

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

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

Platforms Are Products

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

Play-First AI Fluency

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

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

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

Productivity3 steps

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

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

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

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

Innovation5 steps

Product as Organism: the metabolic loop

Treat an AI product as a living system that ingests signals, tunes on rewards, and improves with every interaction

Leadership3 steps

Product Manager as Leader Without Authority

The PM job isn't specs or interviews; it's leading via influence so the product wins in the market

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

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

Reading the Invisible Language of the To/CC Line

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

Communication5 steps

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

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

Leadership3 steps

Run Toward Fear

When both choices are horrible, decide fast toward the slightly-better one instead of avoiding the decision

Scheduling by Deference

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

Seeing the System

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

Marketing4 steps

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

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

Specific-Behavior Feedback

Never label the person; name the specific behavior, the role gap it creates, and offer to help fix it

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

Strategy2 steps

Stop Churn Before It Happens

To stop churn, acquire customers who won't leave — churn is an acquisition problem, not a save problem.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Taste and Standards as Meeting Spec

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

Innovation3 steps

Tension at the Center of Strategy

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

Innovation3 steps

The 20/80 Willingness-to-Pay Axiom

20% of what you build drives 80% of willingness to pay — and it's usually the easiest 20% to build.

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

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

Mindset4 steps

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

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

Finance4 steps

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

Pick your AI pricing model by plotting value attribution against product autonomy, then climb toward outcome-based.

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

The Business-Meal Deference Protocol

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

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

The Confidence-Competency Curve

Founders fail by losing confidence after costly mistakes; normalize D-minuses and just never take the F

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The DORA Four Keys

Measure software delivery with two speed and two stability metrics that move in tandem.

The Enterprise AI Adoption Ladder

Three sequential stages that separate companies winning with AI from those spinning their wheels

Communication4 steps

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

Fix every piece of user feedback within minutes so people feel heard and give you even more.

The Forgotten-Name Recovery Playbook

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

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

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

The Four-Box Framework

Write your hypothesis in words before you touch data, so you can debug the idea and the measurement separately.

Communication4 steps

The Four PM Annoyances

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

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

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

The Four Strategic Choices

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

Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

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

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

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

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

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

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

The Incognito Cry Test

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

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

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

The Lead-Rich Audit

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

The Lindy Commitment Test

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

The Low-Heart-Rate Abundance Posture

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

The Measurement Journey

Start measuring from words and people, then scale into system data — don't wait for perfect.

The One-on-One Diet

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Personal Values Framework for Career Decisions

Write down what you actually care about, then reject anything that violates it, no matter how shiny.

Sales3 steps

The POC as Business Case

Frame every pilot as co-creating an ROI model, charge for it smartly, and never anchor the commercial deal.

Marketing3 steps

The Purple Cow: Building Customer Traction

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

The Refounding Test

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

Communication4 steps

The Relentless Iteration Loop

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

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

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

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

Finance4 steps

The Sip Seed Round

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

The Six-Week Review Operating Cadence

Short, frequent check-ins where leaders pair on problems, not catch you slacking, create velocity.

The SPACE Framework

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

The Surgeon Management Model

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

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

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

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

Master market share and wallet share together — equal attention, not equal effort — to avoid the single-engine trap.

Finance3 steps

The Unit-Economics Bubble Test

A real bubble is when the businesses don't work, not when prices are high; and if everyone calls it a bubble, it isn't one

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Weighted Decision Spreadsheet

List your options, weight your criteria to 100%, score and multiply — then let the reaction tell you the answer.

Two-Sided AI Adoption

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

Unbundle Expensive Services into AI Apps

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

Under-Resource to Force Automation

Deliberately under-staff projects and hand out unlimited tokens so people are forced to automate with AI.

Innovation3 steps

Vibes Before Evals

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

Win on the Platform, Not the Features

Durable products win on invisible infrastructure — reliability, reach, privacy — not on the feature list