GitHub

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

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

Ignore role boundaries — use AI tools to execute your own ideas end to end

Peak Performance6 steps

Artifact Reverse-Engineering and Backstage Observation

Collect the best artifacts, reverse-engineer their questions, then go watch the sausage get made.

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.

Marketing3 steps

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.

Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization

Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.

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.

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

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

Bridging-Based Agreement

Surface content only when people who normally disagree agree — that's the signal of truth.

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 Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)

Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy

Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

Learn from execution, self-retrospect, deep-dive one skill gap at a time, and keep only what works for you.

Cannibalize Your Own Product Every 6-12 Months

Make your current product look silly on a fixed cadence instead of only shipping what users ask for

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.

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

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

CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook

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

Leadership3 steps

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Choose Your Abstraction Layer Deliberately

Delegate the work you don't enjoy to a higher abstraction; keep the parts that make you good and happy.

Clear Is Kind: The Three-Sentence Correction

State the failure, state your belief in them, hand them the responsibility — starting tomorrow

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success

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

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

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

Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

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.

Conway's Law Reorg: Go Functional Before You Go AI

Restructure engineering into one functional org before expecting company-wide AI or technical depth

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

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

Delete-First Lean Engineering

On a small team, deleting code beats writing it — audit for features whose maintenance cost exceeds their gain.

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.

Marketing3 steps

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

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

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

Make robots soft, attentive, and telegraph intent before they move.

Design in the Material

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

Discover Pain by Watching, Not Asking

Find the real intensity of a problem by watching people work, because they can't self-report it

Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

Stop pitching, ask an open question about their whole life, then say nothing until the roadmap falls out

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.

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Drive AI Adoption By Using It Yourself On A Real Problem

Executives using the tool daily on their own real problems beats any top-down mandate or think-piece

Communication6 steps

Engineering Honest Feedback

People withhold feedback because it's risky — your job is to make it safe and rewarding.

Enterprise Procurement Navigation

Do procurement's work for them, define exactly what you do, and split contracts so deals don't die on the vine

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

Exposure Time for Taste

Deliberately spend more time learning than building to develop the judgment AI can't give you.

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.

Flow-Preserving AI Assistance Design

Design AI suggestions around the user's flow state: no panel switches, no waiting, ephemeral by default

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

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

Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

Mindset3 steps

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org

Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours

Generalist-With-A-Superpower Hiring

Hire people who care obsessively, have a generalist brain, and one absolute superpower — then trial them for a week.

Go-Go-Go Plus Long-Term Compounding

Sprint to a proof of existence today; slow down to build the thing you will never regret owning

Group Office Hours Accountability Loop

Peer accountability plus a two-week goal cadence that makes lonely founders execute

Handbook-as-Code

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

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.

Hills-and-Valleys: Getting Value From Probabilistic AI Tools

Be patient and explicit, start small, and learn where the model is strong vs weak

Hire an AI Operations Lead

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

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.

Hire Yourself First (Build in Public)

Do the job professionally in public before anyone hires you — then the hire is just changing the vehicle.

Hoard What You Know How To Do

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

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

Coach by exploring a well-informed hunch with someone, not lecturing them from data

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

Push hard toward a future you believe in while killing your own hypotheses as data arrives

Latent Demand Product Discovery

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

Lowercase-c vs Capital-C: AI-Proofing Your Skill Stack

Sort every task into what AI does 80% well and what only a human can do — then invest accordingly

Magic and Science Decision-Making

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

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

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

Make the Implicit Explicit (Meetings and Decisions)

Force every meeting and decision to declare its purpose, owner, and method out loud

Influence5 steps

Manufacture the Room (Bending the Universe)

Decide which room you must be in, then engineer a legitimate reason to be standing in it

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

Minimum Lovable Product Ladder

Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

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

Off-the-Shelf to Prove It, Custom to Ship It

Prototype with whatever works fastest; go custom only when KPIs demand it.

Onboarding as a Retention Lever

Treat onboarding as a habit-and-retention engine, not a conversion funnel — and accept lower conversion to weed out the wrong users.

One Click Faster (Clock Speed Management)

Three tactics to raise an organization's pace without lowering its bar

One-Week Top-1% AI Fluency Sprint

Pick a real problem and spend one full week taking it end-to-end with AI — that alone puts you in the global top 1%.

Opinionated Defaults for Onboarding

Encode what you've learned works into product defaults — make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard, without removing choice.

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.

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Self-Mastery6 steps

Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition

Pick an outcome that would prove you learned the skill, then work backwards to the experts.

Leadership2 steps

Painter, Architect, Surgeon Hiring Archetypes

Match your growth hire to your stage — a versatile painter, a structural architect, or a precision surgeon.

Parallel Draft Divergence

Start one idea 4-5 times in parallel, each with more precision, then pick the obvious winner.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

Discount friends' feedback to zero, and convert 'willing to pay' into money actually moving — refundable

Persona-Framing for AI Product Behavior

Pick a human metaphor for your AI, then derive its behavioral guardrails from that role

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

Derive how you lead by forcing your values down to three, then plotting your work style

Planning in Seasons

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

Platforms Are Products

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

PMF for Candidates (People, Mission, Financials)

Evaluate a company you might join like an investor evaluates a deal — across People, Mission, and Financials.

Positive Delusion, Bounded by Learning

Assume everything is possible until proven wrong — but keep learning what's actually possible.

Peak Performance5 steps

Practice-Until-Your-Worst-Is-Good-Enough Interview Prep

Interviewing is the one skill with zero feedback — so run dozens of mocks in a small peer group.

Precision Prompting for AI Builders

Never tell the AI 'it doesn't work' — state exactly what you expected and which parts do and don't.

Principles-First Product Design

Set non-negotiable principles up front — voice of the people, no override button, full transparency — and never bend them.

Problem-First AI Adoption

Start from the customer problem and ask where AI helps — never from 'what do we do with AI?'

Problems One and Two

Stop reporting your productivity on problems 3-100; get stuck on the two hardest ones

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

Product-First, Add-AI-Later

Design the end-to-end product experience first, then add AI to solve specific problems — never retrofit AI into a broken flow.

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

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

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.

Progress Cadence as the Success Signal

Judge a startup by whether each check-in has genuinely new progress, not by hype

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.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Protect the Core Magic: Acquisition Integration

Freeze the loop users love, rebuild everything behind it, and narrate the seams honestly

Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout

Never take the next expansion step until the data from the last one has already convinced you.

Influence3 steps

Pseudonymity for Honest Contribution

Let contributors stay anonymous — people cross partisan lines far more readily when their name isn't attached.

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.

Sales3 steps

Qualification-First Diagnosis

There is no bottom-of-funnel problem — slow deals trace back to qualifying the wrong people, message, or problem

Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy

Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all

Radical Trust Building

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

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'.

Innovation7 steps

Research-to-Product Graduation

Move an incubated moonshot from the research lab to a product team without killing it or trapping the researchers

Ride the AI Value Wave

Treat today's AI capability as the worst it will ever be and expand where it's most efficacious

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

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

Match robot form to the task; reserve humanoids for the long tail, not the line.

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

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

Say the Thing You Think You Cannot Say

Voice the hard observation by detoxifying it into a question you own

Scaling Expert Judgment Through Algorithms

Structure your experts' judgment into a signal, train on that — not only on engagement

Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

Gather internal data, customer research and company goals, make the best informed bet, then reevaluate and pivot.

Leadership6 steps

Shipping 0-to-1 Inside a Big Company

Make it the customer's idea, storyboard it in Sharpie, prove it once, and show the economics

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.

Short Toes

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

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

Narrow scope to the achievable thing in front of you, then build momentum on top of it

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

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.

Stuck-Point Scaling Law

Reliably improve an AI system by hunting where it gets stuck and tuning those spots with a fast feedback loop.

Innovation6 steps

Study Group

A one-hour role-play where employees forget they work at your company and try to use your product

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

Rank every component by how catastrophic losing it is — then pre-buy the killers.

Take People With You Before You Fix Anything

A new leader's toolbox is worthless until the team agrees a problem exists — build the why first.

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

Self-Mastery3 steps

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 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-Prospect Manual Discovery Experiment

Before buying any sales tool, hand-pick 30 prospects, write each a real note, and let the response rate reveal your ICP parameters

The 4x4 Debugging Framework

Four escalating ways to unstick a broken build, each tried exactly once, ending by teaching the agent.

The 60/30/10 Portfolio Capacity Split

Allocate team capacity across incremental wins, operations, and audacious bets before priorities compete

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

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

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

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

The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)

Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.

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 Chess-Points Competitive Lens

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

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

Build a company like a house: founding documents, operating system, and operating cadence

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 Deep Dive PM Interview

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

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

Only hire when a function is underwater, so headcount forces ruthless prioritization

The DORA Four Keys

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

The Early-Adopter Rejection Math

Reframe customer outreach: reach 10 to find 1, and indifference isn't rejection

Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

The Enterprise AI Adoption Ladder

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

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

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

The Fish-and-Water Strength Test

Your real strength is the thing others praise that you think is no big deal.

The Four-Box Framework

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

The Four-Component Cold Outreach Message

Open cold with relevancy + a counterintuitive hook + a problem (never the solution), kept short enough not to scroll

The Four PM Annoyances

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

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

Sequence the work so hardware's un-updatable, one-shot nature can't sink you.

The Growth Competency Model

Four competency buckets for hiring, evaluating, and balancing a growth team without chasing a unicorn.

Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

Innovation6 steps

The Horizon-3 Research Team That Ships

Fund a 3-5 year research team, then bolt it to product so ideas actually reach production.

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

The Input-Metrics Stack for Developer Productivity

No single metric rules them all — combine per-component input metrics that ladder up to time-to-value.

The Leakable Metric

Pick the one metric your customer would be delighted to discover you'd been measuring all along

The Lethal Trifecta

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

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

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 Measurement Journey

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

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

The One-on-One Diet

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

Peak Performance4 steps

The One-Skill Six-Month Block

Go all in on one skill for 3-6 months: study one example a week, practise it an hour a day.

The Org Chart With Your Name On It

Win the promotion by solving your boss's org problem, not by asking for your next title

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

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.

The Remote-First Operating Stack

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

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 Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

The Service-First Wedge

When the buyer has no process to buy your tech, sell a time-boxed service that gets you the logo, revenue, and the pen

Finance4 steps

The Sip Seed Round

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

Influence6 steps

The Smallest-Ask Mentor Ladder

Never ask 'will you mentor me?' — ask a two-minute question, then earn the next rung.

The Solar System Bundle

Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA

Productivity6 steps

The Source-of-Truth PRD Cascade

Spend a day writing five layered docs so the agent, not you, carries the context on every build.

The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.

The Surgeon Management Model

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

The Teach-Me-Something-In-One-Minute Interview

A 60-second timed teaching exercise scored on completeness, complexity, and clarity

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

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 Technology Wave Specialization Ladder

Ratchet down on a new technology while it's still weird — teardown, no-code, then fun build

The Thermal Team

Run a startup inside the company: one owner, one senior sponsor, total focus, self-set pace.

The Thin Skeleton Template

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

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Scale product management with internal data & insights, customer research at scale, and standardized strategy cadences.

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 Transparency Ramp

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

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

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

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.

The Users Having a Bad Day Chart

Emit a log line every time a user hits pain, stack them in a bar chart, and burn the bars down

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 VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

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.

The "What's Holding You Back" Office Hour

Replace status updates with one question that surfaces the single true bottleneck

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

The Zero-Ask Assistant (Copilot Design Philosophy)

If the user has to ask for it or wait for it, they won't adopt it — build assistance that infers.

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Zone of Genius Calendar Audit

Bucket last quarter's calendar by joy, then ask what only you can do

Three-Prototype Ideation

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

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

Set review rhythm by two signals: too fast if no progress, too slow if content is stale

Two-Mode Product Teams

One team, two clocks: ship at the speed of the moment, and build the system between moments

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

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.

Values as a Mirror

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

Value the Technical Co-Founder

Why engineering is the hard part, and how a non-technical founder should actually treat it

Vulnerability-Based Customer Discovery

Admit you're early and unfinished (even if you're not) to get raw feedback, then gate-check whether the problem is real

Leadership6 steps

Wartime Product Management

In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission

When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

Use portfolio complexity, revenue scale, PM headcount and trigger events — not a title chart — to know it's CPO time.

Win on the Platform, Not the Features

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

Sales3 steps

Win-Rate-First Funnel Math

Stop obsessing over conversion rate — a high win rate means you need far less top-of-funnel throughput

Writing a Compelling Product Vision

A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

Treat every hardware build as one of a handful of irreversible compiles a year.

Zero-to-One Team Building

For brand-new categories, hire generalists, adjacent-domain experts, and AI-native new grads.