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Adjacency-and-Network Expansion Test

Prioritize marketplace expansion by adjacency and network reinforcement, not by the size of the adjacent TAM

Marketing3 steps

Become a Value-Added Advisor with Cross-Section Data

Turn the industry data only you can see into exclusive insight that keeps customers from churning.

Benefit-Priming Questions (Good Friction)

Add a step to your signup flow — a question that makes users think about the benefit — and conversion goes up.

Strategy6 steps

Black Loops and Blue Loops

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

Change the Rules of the Game

When the game is rigged against you, don't optimize — invent a new model.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

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

Community of Practice as People Development

Build and evaluate a product community that scales growth cheaper than courses or coaches

Conservative Plan with Milestone Unlocks

Plan for the downside, then let pre-agreed milestones unlock the budget to accelerate.

Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

Leadership6 steps

Criticism Triage Under Public Controversy

Separate valid criticism from power-shift noise by going and being your own user.

Dory and Pulse

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

Finance3 steps

Dual-Sided ROI Equation

Price each acquisition to include the cost of acquiring the other side it needs, then push to your payback threshold

Strategy6 steps

Eigen Questions

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

Evaluative User Research (Hunt for Reasons They Won't Use It)

Test prototypes to find every reason people won't use it — and never let the researcher go alone

Evidence-First Intervention Design

Literature review, then hypothesis, then 30 variants, then relative testing — never show users one design.

Experiment at 30: Trend Over Precision

You can run meaningful experiments with as few as 30 users — more data buys precision, not different trends.

Marketing4 steps

Familiarity-Anchor Copy for New Concepts

When users land but don't act, the product isn't wrong — anchor unfamiliar concepts to something they already know.

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Tell in minutes whether your squad is handed features to ship or problems to solve

Friction Injection for Behavior Suppression

To make people do less of something, add logistical AND cognitive friction at the moment of the hot decision.

Leadership7 steps

Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)

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

Go Narrow to Grow Wide

Serve one narrow audience exceptionally well first; expansion opportunities reveal themselves later

Communication4 steps

Growing Into Public Speaking

Start with tiny friendly audiences, grow the room, and mine feedback from strangers and peers

Growth-as-Cleanup-Crew Team Design

Point your first growth hire at known gaps, don't ask them to discover strategy from scratch.

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

Hire two gritty early-stage sellers from an analogous company, not a professionally rich VP.

Productivity3 steps

Homogenize the Early Experience for Retention

Move retention by fixing unlucky bad first experiences, not by nudging people about to churn

Innovation6 steps

Human-in-the-Loop Algorithm Design

Decide explicitly what the algorithm owns, what the human owns, and how the handoff works.

Marketing3 steps

Human-Voice Launch Copy

Write your tagline and launch page the way you'd describe the product to a friend, not like a PR person

Incentive Alignment Against the Dark Side

We are what we measure. Set the team's incentive on the behavior, and lengthen its time horizon.

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

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

Innovation5 steps

Manufactured Dogfooding

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

Productivity4 steps

Measurements vs. Insights Instrumentation

A measurement is an observed fact; an insight answers 'why' and changes what you do — instrument for the latter.

Leadership3 steps

Move Your Best Closers to Customer Success

In a downturn, patch the leaky bucket — put your top reps on keeping the customers you already have.

Physics-Then-Loops Growth Modeling

Map the fixed physics of your business first, then find the one underused lever inside them to change.

PSHE — Problem, Solution, How, Execution

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

Sales4 steps

Retention-Aligned Sales Compensation

Pay reps for customers who stay, renew, and expand — not just for the logo they closed.

Retention Benchmark Ladder

Concrete week-one cohort retention floors: ~80% friends/family, 60% free at scale, 20-30% paid.

Right for Wrong

Get people to do the thing they already want to do — by giving them a shallower, more immediate reason.

Solution-Weighted Discovery

Spend a little time validating the problem; spend most of it winning on the solution

Story as a Design Tool

Draft, test, and package a leadership story across three lengths and three formats

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

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

Influence5 steps

Take Your Own Shoes Off

Empathy fails at the removal step, not the entry step — drop your agenda before entering theirs.

Teach, Don't Pitch: The Buyer-Research Cold Open

Do research so good the buyer can't ignore it — give insight, not a sales pitch.

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

Marketing4 steps

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

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

Innovation5 steps

The Behavioral Diagnosis

A journey map on steroids: every micro-step to the behavior, with the blocking psychology named at each one.

Mindset4 steps

The Best-Teams Adoption Heuristic

Adopt a practice only if several of the best teams already use it — then strip the culture from the technique

The Cannonball / Lead Bullet Portfolio

Allocate growth energy between a few fundamental rebuilds and many small experiments — by product stage.

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

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.

Sales5 steps

The Consultant With a Predilection

Be a consultant who favours one solution: yours. Disqualify hard, let discovery persuade.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Decade Litmus Test

Before starting a company, ask if you can see yourself working on it for a decade — and start it as an experiment

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

Four diagnosable diseases that turn a great product company into a feature factory

The Easiness Ladder: Default, Then Rule of Thumb, Then Decision

First line of defence is always a default. If you can't default it, give people a heuristic — never a calculation.

Finance5 steps

The Five Doors Into Investing

Angel, scout, SPV, fund, or fantasy portfolio — pick your entry into investing by autonomy vs. effort tradeoff

The Five Ingredients of Coaching Product People

A five-step loop for developing the product managers who report to you

The Four Marketplace Health Metrics

Track GMV, unit economics, liquidity, and share of wallet to know if a marketplace is truly healthy

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

Valuable, usable, feasible, viable — any one fails and the product fails

The Four Springs of Startup Ideas

Generate startup ideas from a problem journal, niche communities, behavior shifts, and tech shifts — then justify why now

The Galvanizing Activation Metric

The activation number's job is organizational momentum, not statistical precision.

Mindset3 steps

The Gardener Mindset for Marketplaces

Run a marketplace like a gardener with a light touch, not a construction worker building linear features

Strategy6 steps

The Growth Model Building Blocks

Build a spreadsheet formula of how your business grows, layer by layer, to find your real levers

Leadership8 steps

The Hiring Signal Stack Rank

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

Marketing3 steps

The Launch-Goal Audit

Decide why you're launching before you launch — the goal dictates whether a launch is even worth it

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

Judge a new seller each month on the indicator due that month, not on bookings.

The Marginal User Method

Find the user on the cusp of converting, then go watch the worst-case version of them.

The Marketplace Fragmentation Test

A marketplace only works if the market is fragmented and the per-transaction dollars are small enough to keep it in the middle

The One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

Convert a single feature team into an empowered product team in one low-risk quarter

The Organ-Rejection Test for Innovation Teams

Three conditions that stop the core org from rejecting your new-bets team like a foreign body.

The PM Owns the Why

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

Leadership3 steps

The PM Wheel

An eight-bucket self-assessment for locating a product manager's strengths and gaps

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Product Manager's Four Areas of Homework

The four knowledge domains a PM must own because nobody else on the team can bring them

Sales5 steps

The Sales Motion as Source Code

Treat the pitch like a codebase: run cohorts of 10, patch the bug the prospect found, redeploy.

Sales5 steps

The Second-Date Funnel

Win rate is a lagging indicator. Manage the meeting-to-meeting conversions like dates.

Sales6 steps

The Selling While Loop

Sell it yourself until it reliably runs on your local, then package it and ship it to other brains.

The Three B's (Behavior, Barriers, Benefits)

Pick an uncomfortably specific behavior, strip its barriers, then engineer an immediate benefit.

The Three Sacred Accesses

Delegate anything off the PM's plate except direct access to customers, engineers, and stakeholders

The Wizard of Oz Validation Method

Validate a feature's value and conversion rate before building anything by faking the backend manually.

The Written Screen Job Simulation

Send a shared doc of a dozen easy questions. Half the candidates disqualify themselves.

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

Sales is a set of drills, not a birthright — practise your scales on baristas and bartenders.

Vertical Unbundling Criteria

Only carve a vertical out of a horizontal marketplace if it has high value or frequency and a self-contained network

Sales4 steps

Warm-Intro-via-Text Closing Play

Host a customers-only event, harvest referrals, and convert them over text — not email.