Google

$100 Voting for Prioritization

Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.

10x vs 10% Thinking

Deliberately reserve space for moonshot bets instead of settling for safe incremental improvements.

2x Activation Energy for Change

A new bet must grow at a multiple of your baseline to matter—don't dribble it in.

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

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

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

AI as Undermind Mirror

Use a structured five-days-of-questions prompt to make an LLM reflect back patterns you already sense but can't articulate.

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

Alpha Co-Creation Loop

Pick the users who are already pushing the boundary, build with them in a shared channel, ship only when they're thrilled.

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

Find the ceiling; a reflexive split leaves six figures on the table

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

Architect-Then-Delegate AI Product Building

Use AI to prototype and fill scoped sub-segments, but architect and lock the system yourself — don't cognitively surrender.

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

Peak Performance6 steps

Artifact Reverse-Engineering and Backstage Observation

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

Asking for Help Well

Ask for advice, not answers — the counterintuitive skill that separates who rises from who stalls.

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

Audience Is the Hero, Presenter Is the Mentor

You are not the hero of your presentation — the audience is; your job is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke.

Autonomy at the VP Level

Place decision autonomy at the VP layer — not the leaves, not the top — to maximize thinking without producing chaos.

Avoidance Reversal

Whatever emotion you avoid, you invite — in exactly the way you avoid it. Backward-engineer any problem.

Back-Channel Reference Digging

Trust peer back-channels over provided references, and probe harder than feels comfortable.

Baseline, Train, Practice, Level-Set

Turn hundreds of legacy product owners into real PMs by letting people self-select out

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.

Be Interested, Not Interesting

Play small talk like hacky sack: set the other person up to succeed and balance disclosure over time

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.

Be Someone's Favorite, Not Everyone's Okay

Aim to be a small group's absolute favorite rather than a large group's forgettable option — and measure it.

Best-for-the-Role, Not Best-in-Market

Hire for the specific mandate at this specific stage, not the most impressive resume available.

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

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.

Betterment Over Perfection (The Painful-Gap Method)

Don't craft a perfect strategy — close your single most painful gap, then the next, forever.

Be Your Own First Customer: Internal Tools to Product

Turn the ugly tools your team builds to serve customers into the product — most of the value is below the waterline

Black Loops and Blue Loops

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

Bob the Monster and the Two-Week Rule

Externalize the emotions of change into a monster, let it rage, and only act on what survives two weeks.

Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play

Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence

Brain-Dump, Group, Vote, Single-Author (Company Values Workshop)

Crowdsource the raw material for values, but never write the definitions by committee

Brand as a Promise

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

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

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

Two gates block senior promotion: can you do the job, and does the job exist.

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

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

Build Champions Before the Offer

The negotiation starts sooner than you think — plant reciprocity and recruit coaches across the org

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Build for Where the Models Are Going

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

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.

Building Toward a Portfolio Career

Engineer a narrow-but-deep expertise plus branded credibility so you can advise many companies, not one.

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software

Develop design intuition by watching real people use OTHER products, not your own.

Build the Company Only You Could Build

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

Burnout vs Depression Self-Diagnosis

Tell exhaustion apart from depression by checking whether the flatness spreads beyond work.

Buying Life One Hour at a Time (Public Failure Recovery)

Own the failure, buy trust back one hour at a time, then get face-to-face.

Candidate Market Fit

Position yourself as a narrow spear, not a net — three-to-four attributes the market actually wants.

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

Canonical Everything

One canonical doc, one vocabulary, one owner per stream — the source of extreme clarity.

Can They See What I'm Saying? (The Star Moment)

Make ideas visible — through a diagram, a drawn napkin, or one unforgettable star moment — so the whole room aligns on the same picture.

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Catalyst Review Forum

Replace the standing weekly review with parallel, role-based topic blocks anyone can join.

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.

Cathedrals Not Bricks

Make every team member see the whole cathedral, not just the brick they're laying.

Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor

Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.

Championing Big Bets Inside a Company

To win support for audacious product bets, repeat the vision relentlessly, state your intent, and optimize for impact.

Change the Rules of the Game

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

Channel Diversification Before the Drought

A one-channel growth company is always a no-no — turn on the second channel while the first still works.

Chaos Buffers: Planning Around Users Who Don't Owe You Time

Every plan carries a backup and a scope-sized buffer, because your users' real job always wins

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

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

Clarity and Conviction: Insights, Strategy, Big Rocks

The whole craft of PM in two words, expressed as a two-page narrative every team can recite.

Clarity Over Cleverness

Lean into understood standards instead of reinventing them, and you get leverage for free

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

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

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.

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

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

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.

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

Commit-and-Celebrate Weekly Cadence

Bookend every week with Monday commitments and Friday celebrations, tracked by a short weekly status.

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

Roadmap the phase, not the feature: Discovery, then Solutioning, then Build, then a ship date.

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

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

Competition-Aware, Not Competition-Focused

Stay aware of rivals but anchor on the customer job, because the real competitor is the default old way

Competitive Wargaming

Assign each squad one competitor for a quarter, then pool the intel on a presentation day.

Complaint Storms

A team ritual to see your own product with fresh, critical eyes — by first ripping apart someone else's.

Complementary Format Integration

Bring a proven new format into a mature product so it expands, not contorts, the core

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

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

Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)

Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Conservative Plan with Milestone Unlocks

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

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.

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Controllable Goals

Set goals inside your control (inputs), not outcomes you can't guarantee

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

Never negotiate over email; slow it down and pick the room where you win

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

Conviction-Building for Low-Volume Experiments

When you can't run a clean A/B test, stack alternative signals to raise conviction instead of faking precision

Conviction-Gated Team Scaling

Start tiny to earn conviction, then staff up enough to actually ship the best version

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

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

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

CORE Feedback Structure

Context, Observation, Result, Next Step — feedback about behavior, never personality

Creative vs Reactive Leadership Mindset

Lead from purpose and possibility instead of fear, and rewire the beliefs that keep you reactive.

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Crossing the Product Leader Canyon

Escape the manager death spiral by shifting from doer to editor and owning outcomes over output.

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

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

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

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

Culture as a Product

Every company builds two products: one for customers, one for the team. Culture is the second one.

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Cycle-Time Is the Enemy (Ship Ship Ship)

The gap between knowing something is good and users seeing it is your biggest enemy — attack the decision time, not the work time.

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

Stop fighting the critical voice in your head. Run a new response experiment on it every day.

Dare to Be Dull

Strive for connection over perfection to free up cognitive bandwidth when speaking spontaneously

Data-Driven Self-Story Rewriting

Debunk or validate the limiting stories you tell yourself by researching how people actually experience you.

De-Ambiguate Upstream: The Brief as a Prompt

Design is slow only when the brief is vague; remove variables upstream like you'd add context to an AI prompt.

Debate, Decide, Unite: Systematic Decision-Making

Name the decider, list the factors, stack-rank them, then unite behind the call — with calories proportional to consequence.

Finance4 steps

Decide-Today Runway Math

Cost cuts only buy runway if you make them now; every month you wait permanently destroys optionality

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

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

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Define the Mandate Before You Search

Get granular on the outcome, spike, and 90-day plan before opening a product-leader search.

Define What Problem Matters

The single highest-leverage PM skill: get crystal clear on which problem you're solving, first

Deflect the Number Question

Never name your figure first; make them reveal the range instead

Delay the Primal Mark

Stay in low-fidelity blocks and conversation as long as possible before drawing anything that looks real.

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

Depth-Meets-Breadth Product Review

Run reviews to make the product better, not to interrogate — you bring breadth, the team brings depth

De-Risk the Biggest Swings First

Run discovery and delivery in parallel — and put the top-right, riskiest bets into discovery first.

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

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

Design Capabilities So Rivals Say 'Life's Too Short'

Build capabilities and systems so nuanced that imitators choose a different battlefield instead of copying you.

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.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

Fix the incentive system and the time horizon first — everything else about internal incubation follows.

Designing Yourself Out of Your Weaknesses

Refuse to spend years becoming passably okay at something — negotiate the constraint at founding, in writing.

Design in the Material

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

Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)

Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.

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

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

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

Differentiation vs Table Stakes

Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Disassemble the Lego Set

Don't digitize the old thing — reassemble the pieces into an experience native to the new platform.

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

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

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

Dogfood-Driven Realism

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

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.

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

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

Do Power: Closing the Knowing-Doing Gap

Turn power principles into skill through goal-setting, staged practice, and coaching

Dory and Pulse

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

Do the Opposite

Study what everyone's doing not to copy it, but to find the 180 that stands out.

Double Down on the Pull

When something you made gets unexpected traction, drop the plan and lean all-in

Draft-First LLM Augmentation

Never ask the model to do your job — write your version first, then have it improve it.

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

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.

Dual-Track Category Building (Sell Into Today's Budget, Build Tomorrow's Category)

Rank in the funded category you already fit while running a long-tail campaign to shift the market to your new one

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.

Earn the Right to Teach

Build real depth and pedigree first — then your writing has something worth reading

Editorial SEO Operating Model

Split the work: SEO manager picks topics and outlines, a domain-expert writer writes, then analyze.

Eigen Questions

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

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

Embrace the Imposter: Act Despite Expecting to Fail

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

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

Unkink the hose: welcome, feel and physically express emotions instead of managing them.

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

The three-stage loop for developing a product vision: understand deeply, imagine the solved world, then sell it.

Communication6 steps

Engineering Honest Feedback

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

Engineers as Discovery Partners, Not Resources

Embed the tech lead in discovery so engineers own the why, not just the what

Envision-the-Ending Goal Discovery

Surface hidden goals by vividly imagining the finished future first, then reverse-engineering the journey to it.

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Equanimity as a Product Skill

Pause before reacting: manage your own reactions instead of trying to control the chaos

Eval-Driven Product Development

Design the test for your AI product alongside the product, then hill-climb the model against it.

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Even-Keel Under Pressure

Don't reflect stress onto your team — mantras plus lived exposure keep your head clear when everything's on fire

Evidence-First Intervention Design

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

Excitement-Signal Persona Discovery

Ship a broad tool, then let the segment with the most emotive joy tell you who to focus on

Finance4 steps

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Expected-Conversions Prioritization

Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.

Explain-It-to-Prove-You-Understand-It

Force yourself and others to explain decisions; if you can't articulate it, you probably don't understand it.

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.

Failure-as-Default Framing to Create Startup Scarcity

Openly declaring a new bet will most likely fail buys the autonomy and speed a big company otherwise smothers

Fake the AI Before You Build It

Never train a model for an MVP — prototype the AI's output and test demand first.

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.

Fault-Tolerant User Interfaces

Design your UI to match the real hit-rate of your machine learning, not a fantasy of 100% accuracy.

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

Products built from competitive fear fail; audit the motivation before you audit the roadmap.

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

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

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Fight for Simplicity: The Third-Order Cost of Complexity

Entropy always wins unless you fight it — price every feature at its dimensional cost, not its build cost.

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

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

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

Seek peers in the ring with you who'll throw real punches—not advice from the sidelines.

First-Principles Framework Method

Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.

First-Step Onboarding (Lower Barriers, Raise Delight)

Beat the blank page by walking users through tiny surprising steps until they surprise themselves

Five Principles to Live By

Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.

Five-Star Meetings

Make every meeting one people love leaving. The ones that stay bad are a map of your company's real problems.

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

Tag every piece of feedback FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, or Plea so teams know how hard to weigh it.

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale

Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.

Follow People, Not Plans

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

Follow the Heat

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

Forest Time

Schedule intentional monthly time to leave the trees and survey the forest — because good aim precedes huge investment.

Format Malleability: Any Input, Any Output

Stop shipping content in one format — give people the power to remix knowledge into the medium they're in the mood for

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.

Four Paths Into Product Management

Two formal and two informal routes into PM — the informal ones convert most often.

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

Friction Injection for Behavior Suppression

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

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

Adopt a specific user's identity, walk your own product end-to-end, and log every point of friction.

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

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

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

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

Gauge How It Lands

Read the reaction in real time and adjust which axis you move on — sad/mad means move up on care

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Give Away Your Legos

In a scaling company, repeatedly hand off what you're good at to keep climbing the growing pile.

Giving Away Your Legos

To let yourself and the company scale, hand off the work you're best at and find joy in enabling others

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

Golden Rituals (Named, Known by Friday, Templated)

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

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

Grade for Learning, Not Precision

Hand-wave the OKR score; spend your energy on the retrospective 'why' behind it.

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.

Growth Accounting

Measure net growth as new minus churned plus resurrected to find your real lever.

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

Change one part of the growth system and you change them all—so fix the true source.

Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function

Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.

Guardrails Before Control

Set the quality bar, coach to it, then buy control only for the gaps that remain.

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

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.

Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)

Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.

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.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

Hardest-Side-First (One-Player Mode)

Pre-PMF, ignore marketplace dynamics: own the hardest side and hack the other one.

Head-Heart-Hands Micro-Experiments

Change yourself by running the tiniest possible experiment and reading the result through head, heart, and body.

High-Ceiling Market Test

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

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 by Repelling: The Distinctive Bat Signal

The best talent magnets deliberately turn some people off — clarity on who you're NOT for is the point

Hire for Autonomy: References, Real Work, and Default Trust

You'll be in none of the decisions that matter — so hire people you can hand autonomy to, and verify via references.

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 Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product

Run recruiting like a business funnel — brand, discovery call, and an iterative role spec

Hiring for the Extra 20%

Skills are table stakes — screen for the people who'll chase the real outcome, using lateral personality signals

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

Evaluate people in three dimensions — skills, attributes, and values — not skills alone, which is only ~50% predictive.

Hook-Middle-End Story Structure

Package your message as a story with a hook, a middle that hides the message, and a celebratory end — then ask how to make it better.

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

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

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

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

Hypothesis-Driven SEO

Generate hypotheses by analyzing sites (and asking their SEO managers), then test to validate.

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

ICE Prioritization (Impact, Confidence, Ease)

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

Identify–Invent–Implement Naming Process

The three-phase discipline Lexicon uses to engineer names, not just brainstorm them.

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

Incentive Alignment Against the Dark Side

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

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Incubate-Iterate-Integrate for Innovating Inside a Mature Product

Build the new experience beside your core product, perfect it, then fold it back in — so you don't break existing customers

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

Inner Board of Directors (Parts Work for the Inner Critic)

Externalize your inner critic as a named board member you can appreciate, then ask to step aside.

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Inside-Out Leadership Circles

Lead from the center out — self first, then one-on-ones, teams, and the business — because external fuel cracks.

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

Judge people by their actual output, not by how they talk in a conversation.

Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization

Let retention curves and diminishing returns tell you when to optimize and when to bet on something new

Internal Link Spread Optimization

Most sites starve their own pages of internal links; fixing spread is SEO's biggest quick win.

Productivity6 steps

Internal Tools as a Product (The Crying Octopus)

Run your dev-productivity team like a product team: monthly surveys, hard metrics, and one-click paper cuts.

Interview for Design in the DNA

Before joining, verify the founders valued your function from the very beginning; it can't be grafted on later.

Invest in High Performers by Running Experiments

Stop babysitting low performers; grow your best people by testing theories about their potential.

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

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

Iterate-Then-Automate Scaling Ladder

Let ops manually iterate a process until it breaks at scale, then hand exactly that broken step to technology

J-Curve vs. Stairs Career Growth

Jump off career cliffs into jobs you're unqualified for; fall for 6-9 months, then climb far beyond the stairs.

Job Mission with OKRs (Play to Win)

Write your own version of the role with OKRs and share it with the hiring manager to win the offer.

Jobs-to-Be-Done Interrogation (The Big Hire)

Interrogate the moment someone first hired your product to find the real cause of usage

Keep the Flame Alive: The High-Speed-Train Comms Cadence

Weekly bite-sized, honest updates and 3-minute customer snippets build momentum no one wants to step in front of

Kernel-of-Truth Signal Triage

Product is finding the one thing that really matters in a sea of inputs — capture everything, then ruthlessly filter

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.

Ladder vs Map

Choose career moves by what makes an interesting life, not by what climbs the next rung

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

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

Leading a Team Through Crisis

Radical transparency plus generosity-first equity keeps your best people through the storm that needs them most

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

Stop debating consequential decisions — run the experiment that shows the upper and lower bounds now.

Leave It Better Than You Found It

Build career capital by making visible, others-verifiable impact — not by collecting logos.

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

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

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

Magic and Science Decision-Making

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

Magic Lenses

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

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

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

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

Mandatory vs. Optional Onboarding Split

Split onboarding into a spare mandatory setup and a random-access optional layer — model the buyer's mind, not your features.

Manufactured Deadlines

Impose external constraints so solo creative work actually ships

Manufactured Dogfooding

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

Manufacture Your Own Supply

Find the asset blocking non-suppliers from supplying, then rent it to them with strings attached.

Many Bets, Charge Early

Maximize the number of fast bets, then force a verdict by asking the customer to pay a lot — now

Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do

Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

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

Market It in Their Words

Never invent positioning — put the exact words your reference customers used on the box

Market Map, Then Go a Layer Deeper

Start from the best companies for a skill, but never assume a great logo means a great individual.

Match Go-To-Market to Buyer-User Alignment

Pick developer-led, PLG, or direct sales by asking one thing: are the buyer and the user the same person?

Match the Sales Hire to the Motion and the Buyer (PLG to SLG)

Layering sales onto PLG: hire growers for inbound and department-head buyers, not CIO hunters.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

Meet-The-Customer-Where-They-Are Marketing

Put your product into the customer's context and re-tune the message for each adopter tier and market.

Metrics Trees

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

Micro and Macro Barrier Removal

Grow by systematically removing both structural (macro) and friction (micro) barriers.

Micromanage the Decision, Not the Operation

Sweat only the few details that matter for the customer — control the decision, delegate the doing.

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Communication6 steps

Mindful Communication: Converse in the Language of the Listener

Listening, not articulacy, is the core PM communication skill — and it has a method

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

Model Maximalism

Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.

Morale Is Made of Progress

In a downturn, no speech and no bonus works — only visible shipping keeps a team alive

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.

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

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

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

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

Networking as Brokerage

Build power by generously connecting people and cultivating weak ties

NLX: Designing the Natural-Language Interface

Conversation is an interface with real constructs — design it, don't just let the model lead

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.

North Star Exploration

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

Nothing Is Above Them, In The Details, They Adapt

The three traits Shah observed in Bezos, Chesky and Sacks — humility, craft, and adaptation

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

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

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

Measure growth by counting the moments you felt underqualified and stretched.

One Product Ladder (Kill the PO/PM Split)

Collapse product owner and product manager into a single APM → PM → Senior PM ladder

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.

Opinion-Based Decisions for 1.0 Products

For a first-of-its-kind product, empower a tiny 'tastemaker' team to make gut calls — data can't yet exist.

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Organizational Kayfabe

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

Self-Mastery6 steps

Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition

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

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

If the work is autonomous and the result is measurable, price the outcome — not the tokens.

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Pain-Plus-New-Technology Idea Selection

Judge what's worth building by pairing a habituated pain with a newly-arrived technology that can finally solve it.

Patience vs Process Diagnostic

When something's stalling, know whether it needs more patience or a process intervention

Perfect Execution Before Judging Strategy

Diagnose people/process first, and only re-evaluate strategy once execution is perfect.

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

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

Pick a Lane and Write the Story

Master one of the five product ambiguities early, then write the paragraph your next employer needs to hear.

Picking a Sharp Problem

Build on a problem so acute customers spontaneously ask to pay — it becomes a tailwind that carries your mistakes.

Pickup Games: Getting Reps Without a Coach

No good coach at work? Manufacture low-stakes arenas for collaborative problem solving

Pilot-With-Your-Best-Team Rollout

Don't roll OKRs out company-wide; hand the book to your strongest team, let them adapt it, then spread by twos.

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

Pivot to the Burning Problem

Founders are usually too anchored to their own product vision — index to the customer's real fire instead

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

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

Players, Coaches, Captains

Split leadership into on-field captains and sideline coaches so top ICs never leave the game.

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.

Polarization as a Naming Signal

If the team is comfortable with the name, you don't have the name yet — look for tension.

Productivity2 steps

Poor Man's Fine-Tuning (Few-Shot + Role Priming)

Steer a model with in-prompt examples and a role identity instead of a full fine-tune.

Practice Before the Promotion

Promote people to DO the job, never to learn it — coach the next role before the title arrives

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.

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

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

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

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

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

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

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

Match UI confidence to data quality, be transparent about sources, and design virtuous data cycles.

Problem-First, Wheelhouse-Checked, Unit-Economics-Proven

Three gates a product idea must pass before you build the solution you already fell in love with.

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

Stop hoping the next fix makes it easier; reframe success as earning harder problems.

Product-Led SEO (Jobs-to-be-Done, End-to-End)

Map real user jobs to search queries and follow the experience all the way to the magic moment

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.

Product-Market-Story Fit

Great product in a great market still fails if the story is wrong or missing — add the third leg

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

Product Operations Feedback Loop

A function that reports to Ops but sits with Product to close the two-way gap between HQ builders and field teams

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

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.

Prompt Sets Are the New PRD

Communicate product ideas by building the prototype, not writing the doc — demos before memos

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

PSHE — Problem, Solution, How, Execution

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

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

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

Query Fan-Out Content Strategy (AEO/GEO)

Win AI answers by understanding that a machine, not a person, is doing the searching behind every response

Question the Assumption

Every problem rests on hidden assumptions. Surface them and the problem often dissolves.

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.

Rank, Don't Filter

Every user-facing filter silently carves out your supply — turn preferences into ranking signals.

Read Before You Retract: AI Incident Triage

When your AI product goes viral for something alarming, diagnose the audience's reaction before you touch the product

Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools

ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Reason About It Like a Human

To design or debug AI behavior, ask what an equivalent human would do in the same situation.

Marketing6 steps

Rebrand as a Product Development Process

Run a rebrand with sprint teams, owners, and transparency — not as a marketing reveal

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

Match interface density to user intent: dense grids for recall, low-density sound-rich feeds for discovery.

Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)

When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.

Reference Customer Discovery

Build with a fixed number of real customers until they'll stake their reputation on your product

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

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

Reframe Anxiety as Excitement

Relabel the identical arousal response from nervous to excited to calm yourself and speak better

Reframe, Don't Push Back

Win a disagreement with your CEO by finding the goal you already share, then renaming the problem

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

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

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

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

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Reps-to-Judgment (Building Product Sense)

Product sense isn't taught — it's earned through thousands of shipped micro-decisions with the shortest possible cycle time.

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

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

Retention-Aligned Sales Compensation

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

Rewiring Stage Fright (The Pre-Talk Ritual)

Treat nerves as fight-or-flight chemistry and deliberately reset your body and mental model before you walk on.

Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision

Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it

Ride the AI Value Wave

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

Right for Wrong

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

Robust-Across-Futures Action

When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios

Root-Cause Context Engineering for AI Coding

Don't just fix the AI's bad code — root-cause the missing context so it's right next time.

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

Schedule Syncing (Managing Your Manager)

Never say no to your boss — show your timeboxed calendar and ask them to help you prioritize.

Seeing the System

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

Sell-Ready From Day One

Acquisitions rarely just happen — seed acquirer relationships early, then run the sale like a fundraise.

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

SEO Readiness Assessment

Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

Separating Change-Aversion from Real Problems in a Redesign

After a redesign, split 'upset because it changed' from 'upset because it's worse' before you react.

SERP Reverse-Engineering

To learn what page to build, read what Google already ranks for your target keywords.

Serve the Business, Not the People

Strip emotion out of hard calls by asking what you'd do if the person had no negative reaction.

Shadows of Superpowers

Your plateau is almost always the shadow cast by the exact strength that got you here.

Ship-Fast Operating Model

Lightweight bottoms-up planning, PM-light teams, and iterative deployment in a fast-moving domain.

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.

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.

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

Deliberately give away revenue to simplify pricing — it lifts retention and restores a customer-obsessed culture.

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Six Rules for Goals and Alignment

Goals are a communication tool: three max, one that wins, intern-legible, painful, single-owned, and followed up.

Sizing and Time-Boxing a Channel Experiment

How much team and time to commit to a new channel, and what signal to look for before killing it.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

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

Slow vs Fast Decisions

For any reversible decision there's no right or wrong — only slow and fast — so decide fast and correct fast.

Soliciting Feedback: The Order of Operations

Ask a go-to question, count to six, listen to understand, then reward the candor

Solution-Weighted Discovery

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

Solve Before Scale

Run in a distinct 'solve' mode before you ever switch to 'scale' mode

Solving for Everyone Is Solving for No One

Get specific about who you're NOT for—that guardrail is stronger than defining who you are.

Sound Symbolism Letter Selection

Choose a name's letters for the feelings their sounds evoke, not just their meaning.

Speaking Visualization Rehearsal

Mentally rehearse the whole speaking event in advance to desensitize yourself and gain a sense of agency

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust

Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

Sponsorship Over Mentorship

Career inflection comes not from a coach but from a sponsor who trusts you with a bigger problem.

Stamina as the Kill Signal

Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

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

Startup Launch PR Playbook

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

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

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

Stretch With an Anchor

Take the role that will hurt you into growth — but only if one or two things in it are already in your wheelhouse.

Superpower Excavation from Peak Stories

Find your true strengths by overlaying three peak-experience stories and spotting the theme that recurs.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

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

Supply-First Marketplace Building

Marketplaces aren't chicken-and-egg — they're two-sided, and you always start with supply.

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them

Swinging the Pendulum

Spot an undesirable state, correct it — but know you'll overcorrect, so aim for the middle

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

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

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

Be an expert, book two hours a month, and fuse two things that already exist.

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

Systems Not Goals

Build a default-on repeatable system instead of chasing a one-off target.

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

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.

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.

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.

Technology-First Discovery with a Shape Hypothesis

When you start from a capability instead of a problem, form a hypothesis about its shape before you ship it

Tell Me What It Takes to Win, Then Tell Me the Costs

Ask for the un-watered-down plan to win first; negotiate the costs down second.

Tension at the Center of Strategy

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

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 10-Minute Rule (Surfing the Urge)

Beat any urge to get distracted by waiting ten minutes and riding the emotion until it subsides.

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

Enjoyment is a measure of efficiency. Enjoy the work 10% more and you are 10% more efficient.

The 10% Planning Rule

Never spend more than 10% of an execution period planning it.

The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers

A definition of what the PM job actually is — facilitation, execution, and impact — not a career ladder.

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 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

The 20-Minute Focus Ignition

Beat the hardest part of deep work — starting — by force-blocking distractions for 20 minutes

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

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

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

Seven minutes of felt (not listed) gratitude with another person daily — then aim it at where you feel lack.

The Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

The ADD Answer Structure

Answer, Detailed example, Describe relevance: give complete, value-adding responses in Q&A

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.

The Adjacent-Precedent De-Risk Pitch

Win leadership buy-in for a big AI bet by anchoring it to a past bet that already worked.

The Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

Mindset6 steps

The Agile Industrial Complex Test

Before you adopt a methodology, ask how the people selling it make their money

The Agreeable/Giver Hiring Matrix

Prize the disagreeable giver; beware the agreeable taker on your team.

The AI PM Upskilling Path

Learn the fundamentals, shadow a research scientist an hour a week, and build one model end to end.

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

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 Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

The Appear-Powerful Playbook

Concrete body-language and presence tactics that signal power, all learnable

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the B-side of your career so a bad season doesn't read as a verdict on your life.

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

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

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Behavioral Diagnosis

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

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply

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 Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

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

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

The Breaking News Dress Rehearsal

Script and run a fake crisis end-to-end to stress test your product and your people at once

The Broken Equation Test

No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.

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

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

The Calibration Test for Recruiters

Vet a recruiter by testing whether they can play back your brief and name candidates on the spot.

The 'Can You See What Good Looks Like?' Staffing Test

If nobody in your org has done it before, no amount of training will produce it

The Category Creation Go/No-Go Test

Four checks — budget, buyer language, competition, and vision scope — decide whether to invent a category or win an existing one

The Cheap-Ad Funnel Diagnostic

Use a small paid ad to isolate whether your packaging or your content is the problem, via click-through vs subscribe.

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head

The Clip-Distribution Flywheel

Podcasts have no built-in discovery engine — borrow one by seeding high-quality clips on TikTok, YouTube, and Reels.

The Coaching Model (Coaches, Not Managers)

Replace managers with same-specialty coaches whose only job is your skills and your next level

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

Move from T-shaped to comb-shaped — multiple deep skills you deploy on-demand via diagnosis

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

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

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.

The Competitor-Launch Name Probe

Test a name by pretending a rival just launched it and watching what it makes people imagine.

The Complementary-Axis PM Skill Development Framework

Level up (or transition into) PM by picking the skill axis opposite your background, then strategy

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)

Communication6 steps

The Constructive Feedback Script

Deliver hard feedback with observable facts, shared-knowledge framing, and one clear leave-with action

The Consultative Interview Flip (Sell the Vacation)

Run the interview like an enterprise sale so there is no competition when the offer comes

The Creator Growth Triad

Consistency, collaboration, and curator association — the three levers that have made creators since 2010.

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.

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 DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

Diagnose, Analyze, Take a different path, Experiment — an engineer's anti-playbook for marketing

The Decision Meeting Operating System

Pre-read 24h before, three options plus a recommendation, a traffic-light table, notes 24h after.

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

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

The Delight-First MVP Test

Don't launch until the product sparks joy in your first users, because they are your only growth channel

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

The Design Sprint Scorecard

Break your founding hypothesis into rows and grade each one red/yellow/green after head-to-head customer tests

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville

The Dinner-Table Topic Test

Find your podcast's niche by noticing what makes people lean in at dinner — then force the decision with a deadline.

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

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

The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

Treat a product roadmap like an investment portfolio, balanced across three axes of risk and intent.

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

The DORA Four Keys

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

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

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

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 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.

The Effort Metric (Measure Attention, Not Completion)

Track 'did I do what I said for as long as I said without distraction' instead of whether you finished.

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Engineer-cation

Leaders clear 3-4 days, join a team as an IC, ship one small feature to production, and log the friction.

The Ex-Growth Company Test

Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.

The Expectations-Reality Delta

Unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality — and expectations are far easier to change

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

Use your own product at scale, document every flaw with screenshots, then personally drive the fixes to closure.

The Fish-and-Water Strength Test

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

The Five-Day Design Sprint

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

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision

Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet

The Fixit OKR

Put a hard number on fixing known-broken issues and fund it alongside growth, so quality work never gets zero resources.

The Forward Deployed Engineer Loop

Embed a real engineer inside the customer's building and run a build-show-iterate cycle every single day

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

The Foundation Sprint

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

The Founder Prenup

Talk through values, vision, conflict, decisions, and culture before you co-found

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-Box Framework

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

The Four Challenges of AI Product Management

Uncertainty, pivots, data scarcity and a broken promo path — the four taxes of the AI PM role.

The Four-Channel Category Rollout

Customer language, PR testing, analyst/directory validation, and content — the mechanics of making a category real

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 Forces of Switching

Understand any adoption decision as a tug-of-war between attraction, anxiety, habit, and inertia

The Four I's Feedback Structure

Information, Impact, Invitation, Implications: package feedback so it lands as collaborative problem-solving

The Four Legs of the Negotiation Stool

Negotiate the resources you need to hit your OKRs before salary, then ask 'are you open to?'

The Four-Pillar Product Operating Model

Build a product operating model on strategy, org design, product ops and incentives — not a dev framework

The Four Product Risks

Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

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

The Four P's: Potential, Probability, Passion, Prowess

Score any idea on four factors — and always compute potential before probability.

The Four Reasons You're Not Getting Promoted

A diagnostic that separates 'the system can't promote you' from 'you're not ready' — because the fix differs.

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.

The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision

A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

The Four-Touchpoint Stakeholder Intake System

Four standing rituals that turn chaotic user requests into a governed product intake pipeline

The Four Types of Product Work

Feature, growth, PMF-expansion, and scaling work — the portfolio a product leader must learn to balance.

Mindset2 steps

The Fresh-Start Test

Ask 'if I started today, would I do this?' — and if the answer is different, change now, not next life

The Friction Commitment Test

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

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

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

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The Future Headline

Write the tech-press headline your launch would earn, mocked into the real publication's page.

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

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 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

Formal feedback is noise. Pull the real signal, prove you heard it, and publicly reward whoever gave it.

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

The Growth CMO Operating Model

Run marketing like agile product development — data-driven, iterative, and married to product.

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 Habit-Anchored Micro-Meditation

Attach full presence to something you already do daily instead of adding a new ritual

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

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

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

Leadership8 steps

The Hiring Signal Stack Rank

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

The Human Behind the Role

Optimise for being loved, not liked — earn the right to give raw feedback by proving you care first.

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

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

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

Win interviews on presence and enthusiasm first, then on impact — never on how hard you worked.

The Indistractable Model

The four-step system for controlling your attention: master triggers, make time, hack back, and pre-commit.

The Indistractable Workplace (Three Traits)

Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction — fix it with psychological safety, a forum, and leaders who model it.

The Inverted W Planning Process

Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

The Job Search Council

Run your job hunt as a committed 6-8 person peer group that flips anxiety into accountability.

The Kryptonite Reframe

Ask 'how does this serve me?' to convert a perceived weakness into a functional advantage — or decide to route around it.

The Launch Momentum Playbook

Podcast charts reward subscriber velocity, not downloads — stockpile episodes, spike the launch, then bank the rank.

The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)

Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early

The Live Problem Interview

Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

The Love-Hate Disruption Test

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

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

Communication7 steps

The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote

Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.

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 Magic Loop

A five-step, repeatable loop that converts helping your manager into leverage for your own goals.

The Magic Test for Control Surfaces

Users ask for knobs and sliders; shipping them literally is how a magical product becomes an ordinary one

The Manukan Two-Pager & Listening Tour

Draft what you want and don't want, then run structured listening-tour conversations to find your fit.

The Market Health Metric

Find the leading proxy that predicts liquidity, then find the threshold where it plateaus.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.

The Marquee Mock Exercise

Hand everyone blank App Store screenshot panels and make them draw the world where the problems are solved.

The Measurement Journey

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

The Meeting Operating System

Version your team's meetings like a product — ship a new rev every 90 days.

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

A lean test that strips out the mechanism doesn't test the idea — it buries it.

The Mission-to-Monday Cascade

Translate a 5-year mission down through strategy and quarterly OKRs into what you actually do this week.

The Model Launch Bar

With probabilistic products, the PM — not the scientist — decides what accuracy is good enough to ship.

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

Wake up asking what maximizes impact — then interrogate your answer for skill-set bias.

The Murder Board

Before starting a project, invite smart outsiders whose only job is to tear your two-page plan apart

The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks

Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.

The Naming Diamond Exercise

A four-corner worksheet that turns a naming problem into a behavior-and-experience brief.

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.

The Once Upon a Time Vision Story

A five-blank Mad Libs template that turns a product vision into a story anyone can retell.

The One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

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

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 OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities

A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

Marketing6 steps

The Peer Supply Engine

Pay your best suppliers to onboard and recruit the next ones, at a tenth of the cost.

The Personal Operating Manual

A working-style 'read me' so teammates know how to work with you before friction starts

The Person Is the Product

Find one person with an extraordinary workflow, shadow them, then compress their expertise into software

The Pilot Program for De-Risking Launches

Build a diverse champion network of real customers to test new features in the wild before you ever launch.

The Pivot Decision Algorithm

Five ordered gates — problem, assets, energy, team, capital — that decide whether to pivot or shut down after losing PMF

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

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

The PM Owns the Why

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

The Power–Autonomy Trade-off

You can have power or autonomy, but not both — choose deliberately

The Pre-Firing 'Crystal Clear' Conversation

Before you fire anyone, have the deal-breaker conversation that makes firing never a surprise

The Pre-Need Talent Pipeline

Build relationships with great people long before you have a role open, with no agenda.

Innovation8 steps

The PRFAQ Working Backwards Document

Write the launch press release before you build, so every word forces a real decision

The Product Career Learning Loop

A four-stage loop — execute, generalize, communicate, scale — that compounds a PM's ability over a career.

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

The Product Owner Escape Ladder

Five moves to climb out of the order-taker trap without quitting first

The Promotion-Denial Conversation

Deliver the no upfront, give the reasons, then paint hope for the future

The Purple Cow: Building Customer Traction

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

The Purpose Statement (We Exist To)

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

The Radical Candor 2x2

Care personally AND challenge directly — the two axes that place every act of feedback

The Rallying Activation Metric

The value of an activation metric is shared clarity, not statistical precision.

The Rule of Lung

Make your exhale twice as long as your inhale to trigger the relaxation response before speaking

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 Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

The School Pyramid Simplification Method

Build a curriculum from kindergarten to PhD to make a gnarly project comprehensible.

The Sean Ellis Scale Gate

Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

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

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

Influence7 steps

The Seven Rules of Power

Seven learnable skills for building influence and advancing a career, whether you like it or not

The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)

A regular PM ships the right product; an AI PM solves the right problem.

The Should-You-Start Reality Test

Before launching a podcast, prove to yourself you'd do it for free forever — then commit to a finite season.

The Sidecar Model of Management

You don't take the wheel or hand it over — you ride attached, and you have to be invited in first.

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

The Skip: Career as a Product

Plan for the job after next, not the next job — and treat promotion as a means, not the goal.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

The Slide Doc Spectrum (One Point, One Big Idea)

Match slide density to the medium — cinematic stage to circulated slide doc — while every slide makes one point serving one big idea.

Influence6 steps

The Smallest-Ask Mentor Ladder

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

The Soft Pushback

The one-line, zero-aggression ask that recovers ~20% of comp almost every time

The SPACE Framework

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

The Startup Naming Process

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

The Sticky Engine of Growth

Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product

The Strategy Choice Cascade

Five interlocking questions that force a strategy into an integrated, reinforcing whole.

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

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 Surgeon Management Model

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

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 Team Watch Party

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

The Three Acts and the Next North Star

The greyhound that catches the rabbit never runs again — pick your second North Star before you catch the first.

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

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

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

The Three Career Conversations

Past, dreams, and action plan — three 45-minute conversations to show you care and grow people

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

The Three Concentric Circles of Evangelism

Socialise a vision outward: core team, then stakeholders, then leadership as high as you can reach.

The Three Dimensions of an Agent

Score any 'agent' on autonomy, complexity, and natural interaction — each a spectrum

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

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

The Three Generations Rule

Make the product, fix the product, then fix the business — innovation almost never lands in one generation.

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

The Three Mindset Shifts That Stall or Restart PM Growth

Fix the three stories — control, change, and self-image — that quietly stall product careers

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

Separate targeted Discovery, always-on Continuous Conversations, and passive Customer Listening — each needs its own machinery.

The Three Pacts (Pre-Commitment Firewall)

Lock in your intentions ahead of time with an effort pact, a price pact, or an identity pact.

The Three-Peer 24-Hour Approval

Replace slow top-down OKR sign-off with three peers who sanity-check your goals in a 24-hour turnaround.

The Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

No OKRs, then siloed team OKRs, then company OKRs with cross-org dependency mapping.

The Three-Pillar AI Integration Model

Build where you have data advantage, partner for commodities, and open an app ecosystem for the rest

The Three Questions to End Every Meeting

Close every meeting with: what did we decide, who does what by when, and who else needs to know

The Three Reactive Postures

Identify which fear-driven posture you retreat into (complying, protecting, controlling) so you can redirect the gift beneath it.

The Three Sacred Accesses

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

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.

The Three-Signal Marketplace Screen

Fragmentation, uniform needs, high matchmaking barrier — no marketplace works without all three.

The Three Tenets of PM Stakeholder Collaboration

A mantra for working with stakeholders: surface issues, not yourself; drive decisions, don't hoard them

The Three Types of SEO

Programmatic, editorial and technical SEO are different games; pick the one your queries reward.

The Three Ws of PM Career Growth

Rise faster by performing on all three axes: what you produce, what you bring, and how you operate

The Time-Boxed Leap Bet

De-risk a scary career leap by treating it as a fixed-length experiment with a fallback

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 Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

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

The Torchbearer Five-Act Movement Structure

Lead change as a movement across five acts — Dream, Leap, Fight, Climb, Arrive — fueling the right emotion at each phase.

The Triple-A Apology

Acknowledge, Appreciate, Amend: apologize for the transgression, not for how someone feels

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

The Two-Crisis Triage

Classify every founder crisis as cash or product-market-fit, then run three diagnostic questions before acting

The Two-of-Three Inflection Test

Only build a new zero-to-one product when at least two of three inflections line up

The Two Paths to Opinionated Software

Either encode a best practice that already exists without technology, or teach a better way and enforce it in the product

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

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

The Two-Year Publishing Cadence

Write a post several times a week for two years and an audience will find you

The U-Curve of Founder Involvement

Involve a product-minded founder heavily at the start and end of a project, but give the team space to run in the middle.

The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)

Define what to build and how to grow from the use case, not the persona.

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

The Value-Framed Product Résumé

Rewrite every bullet from process to problem, decision, and metric moved

The Values-Encoded Brand System

Build the brand as a system whose elements each encode a company value, so every touchpoint stays on-brand without training

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

The VP of Free

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

The Waterline Model (Snorkel Before You Scuba)

Diagnose team problems from the top down: structure and dynamics, not the people, cause 80% of issues.

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 Toast Structure

Why we're here, How you're connected, Anecdote, Thank you: a GPS for any toast or tribute

The 'Why Now' Perishability Test for Internal Pitches

A good business case that lacks a strong 'why now' trigger gets parked; make the opportunity feel perishable

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact Incubation Gate

A four-stage vocabulary with 6-pager gates that lets a big company incubate new bets without prematurely scaling them

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

One interview question that separates PMs with real reps from PMs with a clean résumé.

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 Year Is Made in the First Six Months

Because buying cycles lag, your annual number is set by what you ship in H1, not H2.

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

The Zero-to-One Enclave

Conditions that let a startup-shaped team actually ship inside a big company

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

A product must make the customer at least 3x better before they notice enough to switch and pay.

Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

Four product phases where spend rises stage by stage — so you must retire risk before the money starts.

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

Express multi-year strategy as a yearly percentage split of resources across three horizons.

Three-Ingredient Emerging Channel Evaluation Framework

Decide whether a hot new acquisition channel is worth your time using three lenses before you invest.

Three-Model Triangulation

Apply three different mental models to a problem; agreement across them sharply raises your odds of being right.

Three-Team Blind Briefing

Disguise the real assignment across parallel teams so creatives are free to make useful mistakes.

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

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

Timeboxing Your Values (Make Time for Traction)

Replace the to-do list with a weekly timeboxed calendar built from your values across three life domains.

Top 10 Things You Should Know

A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Topical Authority Adjacency

Rank by starting where you're already known, then expand into semantically adjacent topics.

Topics Over Keywords

Modern Google ranks one page for a cluster of 200-2,000 keywords; target the topic, not the keyword.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Treat Your Course Like a Product

Hypothesise the audience, interview them, iterate the ICP, and run three weeks — not one.

Triangulated Key Results

Measure one quarterly objective from three angles — a hard number, a squishy quality metric, and a dollar figure.

Trust-by-Structure Governance

Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone

Truthful Storytelling Through Relentless Refinement

Sell the why, not the what — and refine the story out loud on real listeners until it comes off effortlessly.

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

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

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

Don't collect rules — ask why, triangulate three people, and rebuild the reasoning underneath.

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.

Two Product-Market Fits

A marketplace must pass the disappointment test independently on each side.

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 Routes to Win: Differentiation or Low Cost

You must be the differentiated choice or the lowest-cost provider — anything in between gets bullied.

Two-Sided AI Adoption

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

Two-Way Write-Ups

Make written docs conversational with done-reading, Dory questions, and a sentiment table.

Understand, Identify, Execute

Instrument the data first, find the drop-offs, then build products to fix them.

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

Update Your Priors: The AI Capability Arbitrage

Re-test what AI can do today and demand more of it — old scar tissue is leaving alpha on the table

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.

User-Value Thermodynamics

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

Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

Values as a Mirror

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

Values as a Sharp Knife

Rewrite company values as deliberate filters, then hardcode a scoring formula that removes people who don't fit.

Values, Not Behaviors: The Culture Car Wash

When you change companies, keep the values that got you hired but recalibrate the behaviors to the new culture.

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

Build where the winning data is locked behind a company or industry's walls — foundation models won't go there.

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

Real virality is high-quality word of mouth from a great product — not synthetic referral traps bolted on top.

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

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

Want Over Should (Self-Discovery, Not Self-Improvement)

Replace shoulds with wants and experiments — self-improvement encodes 'I'm broken' and slows evolution.

Warm-Intro-via-Text Closing Play

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

Wartime Company Reset

When a platform shift threatens your core business, declare wartime and go all-in rather than hedge.

What-If Before Why-Not

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

What Is / What Could Be (The Presentation Sparkline)

Alternate between current reality and a better future to create longing that moves an audience to act.

What / So What / Now What

A three-part structure that turns any on-the-spot update or answer into a memorable, digestible message

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant

Score a B2B SaaS idea on two axes — workflow breadth and frequency — to predict billion-dollar potential.

Where-to-Play Product Strategy as the Prioritization Engine

Turn an integrated set of strategic choices into the filter that decides every roadmap trade-off.

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.

Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets

Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.