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Gong

By Gong

10 recommend/use · 17 sourced episodes

Every sourced reference

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

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Productivity5 steps

Appetite Bracketing

Set a time budget, then ask what you'd do with more and less — the bracket reveals the efficient frontier.

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Sales3 steps

Arming the Champion

Win the champion first, then pre-load them to defeat every other stakeholder's objection

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Innovation6 steps

Automated User Research Pipeline

Wire sales-call keywords to Slack to email to your calendar so customer interviews book themselves.

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Leadership4 steps

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

Let people bring themselves to the work; you trade a little visibility for higher velocity, morale, and results.

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Innovation3 steps

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

Stand in the future you designed and look back — don't forecast forward from today's constraints.

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Marketing2 steps

Beautifully Simple Pricing

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

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy4 steps

Bowling Pin Market Entry

Dominate one underserved niche, then knock over adjacent segments until you can challenge the leader

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Strategy4 steps

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

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Strategy4 steps

Build AND Buy

Reframe build-vs-buy as build-and-buy: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% that differentiates.

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Strategy4 steps

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

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Strategy4 steps

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.

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Strategy4 steps

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

Choose a centralized CDP stack or a warehouse-plus-reverse-ETL stack based on your engineering resources.

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Strategy6 steps

Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

When you're bleeding to competitors, throw out the plan and build the churn list, sorted by ARR.

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Strategy4 steps

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

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

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Sales4 steps

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

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Strategy5 steps

Cross-Functional Voice-of-Customer Synthesis

Put sales, success and TAMs in one room, synthesise the signal, then have research validate or dispute it.

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Strategy3 steps

Damming the Demand

Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.

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Leadership3 steps

Deadlines as P-Zero

Have few deadlines, but make each one a P0 that nothing else can touch — and cut scope to hit it

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Productivity4 steps

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.

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Peak Performance4 steps

Desensitization for Performance Fear

Neutralize public-speaking (or any) fear by exposing yourself in tiny, low-stakes, escalating doses

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Communication4 steps

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.

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Productivity4 steps

Dictate-and-Template AI Story Scaling

Prime ChatGPT with your team's exact template, then dictate context naturally to generate an org's worth of specs.

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Strategy3 steps

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.

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Sales3 steps

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Do It End-to-End Before You Hire For It

If the core team can't crack a function once, a new hire won't rescue it.

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Innovation3 steps

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

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Leadership5 steps

Drawing the Perimeter

The PM's job is to add constraints, not solutions — draw the box, then let engineers and designers fill it.

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Leadership3 steps

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.

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Leadership4 steps

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

Before rejecting an idea, sincerely attempt to make it work — then say no with receipts.

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Mindset3 steps

Embrace the Imposter: Act Despite Expecting to Fail

Stop trying to feel confident; give yourself permission to fail and take the shot anyway.

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Communication3 steps

Emotional Discovery: Feel Bad Like the Customer

On customer calls, dig until you feel the exact emotion the customer wants to avoid, then build to remove it

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Innovation3 steps

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Follow People, Not Plans

Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.

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Leadership3 steps

Follow the Heat

The company's pressure point moves stage by stage; staff it as it moves.

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Marketing4 steps

Frame, Name, Claim the Problem (Languaging & Point of View)

Use new language to reframe a problem so people see it differently and want a new solution.

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Marketing4 steps

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

Instrument first and last UTMs on day one so you can move to multi-touch attribution without waiting.

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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

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Mindset5 steps

Identity Separation After a Layoff

Sort what happened into 'not needed', 'wrong environment', and 'in my control' — only one of them is about you.

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Influence4 steps

Interview as Discovery: Be the Solution to Their Burning Problem

Treat a job interview like product discovery — find the hiring manager's burning problem and position yourself as its solution

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Leadership4 steps

Introvert-Inclusive Meeting Design

Four manager tactics to surface the best ideas from quiet people, not just the loudest three

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Strategy5 steps

Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test

Fund new bets from the core's profits — never by moving engineers off the core.

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Marketing5 steps

Lightning Strike Go-to-Market (Supers, POV & Word of Mouth)

Concentrate firepower on super consumers with a reframing POV to ignite word of mouth.

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Marketing3 steps

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

Product changes are near-permanent; marketing changes cost nothing, so experiment relentlessly.

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Sales6 steps

Mastering B2B Negotiations Through Value

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

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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

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Innovation4 steps

Model Introspection Harness Repair

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

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Strategy4 steps

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

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

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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

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Productivity3 steps

Problem-People-System (PPS)

Diagnose a systems request by problem and people first, never jump straight to the tool.

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Productivity4 steps

Product Scrapbooking

Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.

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Sales4 steps

Pull, Not Praise: Reading Real Product-Market Fit Signals

Judge customer calls by the questions they ask, not the compliments they give.

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Mindset4 steps

Raising the Longer-Runway Child

Four principles for parenting introverted or shy kids without shaming their temperament

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Leadership5 steps

Respect the Hustle: Goal-Based Product Ops Allocation

Allocate ops support to goals, not headcount ratios — and deliberately under-process the teams still finding their way.

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Productivity4 steps

RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort

Score reach and impact first; sit with the innovative bets before letting C and E kill them.

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Leadership4 steps

Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable

Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.

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Sales3 steps

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

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Innovation5 steps

Server-Side Events as the Default

Track events from your servers, not your clients — logs with a user ID are already events.

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Innovation4 steps

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

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Strategy6 steps

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.

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Marketing4 steps

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

Constrain your first ICP so tightly that customers talk to each other — then let word of mouth light the fire.

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Communication3 steps

Speak Early, Speak From Conviction

Two tactics to get an introvert's ideas heard and acted on in loud meetings

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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.

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Communication4 steps

Street-Smart Decision-Making

Give the customer's perception as much weight as your logic — model the narrative, not just the numbers.

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Innovation4 steps

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

Build the most extreme version along one attribute, feel it, repeat in the opposite direction, then find where they meet

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Strategy5 steps

System-First Product Ops (Build It, Then Get Out of the Way)

Product ops is first a system you build, only second a team you hire — and the system should outlive the role.

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Sales4 steps

Teaching the Customer How to Buy

Beat indecision by de-risking the buyer's decision, not by piling on FOMO

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Productivity4 steps

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

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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

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Productivity4 steps

The 10% Working-Version Rule

Have a testable working version by the time 10% of your time budget elapses, not at the halfway point

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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.

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

The 51-49 Decision Rule

When options are near-even, just pick one fast — more data won't meaningfully improve a close call.

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Influence5 steps

The Accountability Question (Selling Product Ops Internally)

Don't argue scope with defensive PMs — ask leaders what they hold PMs accountable to, then show what's crowding it out.

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Innovation4 steps

The AI Expertise Layer

Don't outsource all AI to foundation models — keep expertise and measurement to break the quality glass ceiling.

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Finance4 steps

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

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

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Sales5 steps

The Best-Rep Pitch Pilot

Roll out a new sales pitch by piloting it with your best rep, then let sales sell sales

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Marketing3 steps

The Better Trap

A 'better' copy of an existing solution to a well-understood problem almost always fails.

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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.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Decision Log

Build product sense by logging decisions you'd make, the reasoning, and later the actual outcome.

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Innovation5 steps

The Design-Led Architecture Stream

Give design a protected block to define the product's building blocks — or it will smuggle scope in at the end.

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Innovation4 steps

The Design-Partner Pod Model

Give each cross-functional pod 6-12 real customers to co-build with, so features ship pre-validated.

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Marketing3 steps

The Double Triangle: PM as Go-To-Market Discipline

Sit the PM between two triangles — build (eng/product/design) and sell (sales/marketing/PM) — and originate the customer's language

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Marketing3 steps

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

Write every message as if the reader knows nothing about you, your product, or your market.

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy4 steps

The Foundational Three Entry Path

Don't start in PM. Start as the person you'd be taking PM responsibilities from — engineer, designer, or seller.

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Sales3 steps

The Friction Commitment Test

Deliberately make the next step hard to filter for buyers who truly want it.

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Sales5 steps

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

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Influence3 steps

The IC Compensation Anchor

Believe your IC worth, then neutralize the 'grow into management' pay dodge by naming your non-management intent up front.

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Innovation3 steps

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

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Strategy4 steps

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.

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Leadership5 steps

The Introvert's Career Visibility Playbook

Five moves to get your value seen and your ambition known without becoming someone you're not

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Sales4 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow

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Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.

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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.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Product Ops Fit Test (and Job-Description Red Flag)

Three questions to know if product ops is your lane — and one line whose absence kills any product ops JD.

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Communication6 steps

The Readiness Gap: Transparency Survey to Product Digest

Knowing something is coming isn't readiness. Survey the time drain, then ship a digest that says what to do with it.

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Productivity3 steps

The Research Coordinator Role

Borrow the recruiting-coordinator role to schedule all customer research, so PMs never lose time to logistics.

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Sales5 steps

The Setup-and-Follow-Through Sales Pitch

Structure a sales pitch as market setup then differentiated value, not a feature walk-through

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Marketing4 steps

The 'So What?' Ladder to Differentiated Value

Ladder a differentiated feature up through repeated 'so what?' until you reach value rivals can't match

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

Chain expert-to-expert referrals until you hear only repeats — that's how you know you've hit the bullseye.

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Strategy3 steps

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

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Productivity3 steps

The Tomorrow Test for Saying No

Decide whether to accept a distant commitment by imagining you had to do it tomorrow

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Communication5 steps

The Tuning Fork Silent Read

Don't ask what people think — put something concrete in front of them and force a live, in-room read.

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Strategy4 steps

The Two Departments That Matter Test

Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.

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Strategy4 steps

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

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

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Two-Question Introvert Diagnostic

Two thought experiments that reveal your true temperament preference, cutting through learned behavior

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Communication5 steps

The Ungated Customer Feed

Pipe raw customer feedback into Slack with no gatekeeper — and let engineers email the customer directly.

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Leadership5 steps

The Unsell Email

At offer stage, email the candidate the eight worst truths about the job — then see if they still say yes.

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Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

Defer black-or-white judgments about decisions and people until the last responsible moment.

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Productivity3 steps

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

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

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Innovation4 steps

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.

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Leadership4 steps

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

Screen martech candidates for curiosity, engineering scrappiness, and freedom from tool bias.

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Productivity4 steps

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.

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Leadership4 steps

When to Centralize a Martech Function

Use the 100-150 person threshold and b2c/b2b axis to decide when and where to own martech.

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