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Adjacent User Theory

Find growth by understanding and dogfooding the product as the next user just outside your current base.

Self-Mastery3 steps

A Stable of Mentors

Keep three or four mentors on a rotating monthly schedule so you always have someone to talk to.

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

Leadership3 steps

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Coaching Diagnostic

Pinpoint where a struggling PM or manager breaks down along the ladder of critical thinking, then fill that gap.

Brand Personality via Five Dimensions

Spike in two of five personality dimensions, then write five 'we are X but not Y' attributes with built-in tension

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

Don't hand AI one giant spec — specify a little, review a little, repeat in tight loops.

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

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.

Comically-Narrow Bullseye Definition (Inclusion / Exclusion / Triggers)

Narrow your target to ~seven concrete attributes across three buckets so everyone agrees these people will say yes

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

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

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

Don't rebuild foundation models — train small specialty models that attack their weaknesses in speed, cost, and niche tasks.

Marketing3 steps

Comprehension Over Friction

Removing friction only helps when intent is high; for most of your product the real problem is comprehension

Concierge Manual Onboarding

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

Content Market Fit

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

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

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

Conversation-Intelligence Deal Diagnosis (the Dealbot)

Run an AI agent over every call, email and Slack to find the real reason you win, lose, and stall

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

Design the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

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

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

Great salespeople talk under half the time and answer a question with a question about the question

Dogfood-Driven Realism

Be the end user, use your product intensely daily, and never ship anything that isn't useful to you.

Dollar-Driven Discovery

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

Don't Make Me Think (Reduce Thinking, Not Clicks)

Optimize for the fewest decisions, not the fewest clicks — eight trivial taps beat two fraught ones

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

Influence3 steps

Dress to Signal Effort, Not Expense

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

Dynamic North Star Metrics

Hold a North Star for at least six months, then be willing to abandon it

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

Experiment Only When You Need To

Treat A/B tests as risk mitigation, not as the default proof of impact

Fall-On-Your-Face Taste Calibration

Deliberately push AI past its limits in a safe environment to build a gut feel for what it can do.

Innovation5 steps

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

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Marketing3 steps

Go-to-Market as a Product

Design the buying journey as a sequence of experiences, and add value at every touch whether or not they buy

Guided Onboarding Wizard

Replace tooltips with an immersive wizard that builds the user's first workflow with them

Guilty-Pleasure Career Bet

Find the thing you feel guilty getting paid for, do the hell out of it with intensity, and take non-linear risks.

Hard-Bar Activation Metric Selection

Pick the activation metric only 5-15% of users hit, then decompose it into levers

High-Ceiling Market Test

Attack markets with a high ceiling and easy switching; incumbents win only where there's little left to build.

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

Interview to learn, not to sell — lower your status, smile, and weight past behavior over stated intent

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.

Hyperrealistic Work-Like Activities

As orgs grow, work supply runs out and people fill the gap with fake work that looks exactly like real work

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

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

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

Productivity3 steps

ICE Prioritization (Impact, Confidence, Ease)

Score each idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to bubble the best ideas up without over-engineering the math

Impact = Environment × Skills

Audit your career by scoring the environment variables and skill variables that gate your impact.

Knowledge-Work End-State Idea Generation

Pick an area of knowledge work and reason forward to its end state as AI matures — then build for that.

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

Magic Lenses

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

Make the Implicit Explicit (Meetings and Decisions)

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

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

Managing Complex Change

Diagnose why a team is stuck by finding which of five change ingredients is missing.

Strategy3 steps

Metrics Trees

Decompose your North Star metric and top business KPI into a tree of sub-metrics to align teams and estimate impact

Leadership3 steps

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone

Multi-Prototype Comparison Testing

Show three distinct concepts instead of iterating one, so users can compare and you avoid over-commitment

Strategy3 steps

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

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

North Star Exploration

Turn aimless tech-tinkering into learning by chasing an arbitrary-but-real goal and being stubborn about reaching it.

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

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

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

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

Finance3 steps

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

Product Positioning with the Bar Test

Define audience via concentric circles, distill into the classic four-part statement, then validate it out loud at a bar

Qualification-First Diagnosis

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

Reading the Invisible Language of the To/CC Line

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

Mindset4 steps

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

Communication5 steps

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

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.

Say the Thing You Think You Cannot Say

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

Scheduling by Deference

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

Segment by Learning and Building Style

Personalize onboarding by how someone builds and learns, not by their job title

Sell to Reduce Risk, Not Increase Upside

Four of five buyers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — anchor the sale there, not on the art of the possible

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

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

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

Have senior candidates rank themselves against the exact skills the role needs to reveal fit and self-awareness.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

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.

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

Startup Launch PR Playbook

Fix your story, set realistic exclusive expectations, hang news on a bigger hook, and mine local press

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

Leadership3 steps

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

Hire salespeople with enough product depth that engineers can't tell they aren't a PM

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.

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 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

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

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

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

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

Innovation6 steps

The Bullseye Customer Sprint (5 + 3 in 1)

Interview five hand-picked customers against three prototypes in one team-watched day to learn who to build for

Influence3 steps

The Business-Meal Deference Protocol

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

The Coldly Rational Pivot Decision

Pivot only after you've exhausted the good ideas — and force emotional distance so the call is rational, not humiliating

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

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

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

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

Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

The Confidence Meter

Score how much evidence actually backs an idea, from a shiny pitch deck (0.1) to a live A/B test (10)

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

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

Innovation5 steps

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

The Forgotten-Name Recovery Playbook

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

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

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

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 Filters for Career Acceleration

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

The Four Levels of Product-Market Fit

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

Strategy3 steps

The Four Ps of Pivoting

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

The Friend-Zone Test

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

The GIST Board and Outcome Roadmaps

Replace release roadmaps with a living board of goals, ideas, and validation steps that the whole team owns

The GIST Model

Split product work into Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks so evidence — not opinion — drives what gets built

The GTM Engineer Agent-Deployment Loop

Turn a sales function into an AI agent by shadowing your best rep, then redeploy the humans up-market

The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)

Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org

The Love-Hate Disruption Test

Gauge whether an idea is truly disruptive by how polarized the reactions are, not how positive.

Influence3 steps

The Low-Heart-Rate Abundance Posture

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

Innovation5 steps

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

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

Mindset3 steps

The Owner's Delusion (and the Audience's Illusion)

You overrate your own product because you built it; your users arrive distracted, barely-intending, and ready to bounce

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 Purpose Statement (We Exist To)

Distill why you exist into one 10-year 'we exist to' sentence that makes people root for you

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Reverse Trial

Run a premium trial on top of freemium: showcase everything, then fall back to free forever

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

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

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

The Startup Naming Process

Position first, brief the intent, brainstorm hundreds of bad names, then score survivors against seven criteria

Self-Mastery3 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 Team Watch Party

Whole team watches interviews live, predicts first and debriefs after, replacing the research report with instant alignment

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 Two Onboarding Traps

Stop naming features and stop mapping onboarding to your pricing tiers

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

The Utility Curve

Use the S-curve of effort-to-value to decide whether a feature is under-invested or already maxed out

The Validation Gamut (Assessment, Data, Tests, Experiments, Release)

Validate an idea's assumptions cheaply first — assessment and data before you ever build, fakes before you build for real

Productivity3 steps

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

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

Two-Day Work-Test Hire

Bring finalists on-site for two days to do a real end-to-end project — it screens skill and fit at once.

Understand Work (Understand → Identify → Execute)

Budget intentional time to understand a problem first, so your team ships fewer things with a far higher win rate.

User-Value Thermodynamics

Users are lazy; adoption only happens when total value delivered exceeds total effort spent, ideally by 10x.

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

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

We Don't Sell Saddles Here (Sell the Outcome, Create the Market)

Don't sell the product — instill the yearning for what it makes possible, and build the market as you build the product

What-If Before Why-Not

Evaluate a disruptive idea by imagining its upside first, then treat the objections as your build list.

Win-Rate-First Funnel Math

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

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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