Google Docs

$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.

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

Innovation7 steps

AI-First Product Leadership: Hold the Paddles

If AI steers your product, the product leader must own the objective, features, data and infra.

Anchor the Streak to Your Unit of Use

Tie a streak to the smallest genuinely-meaningful action, not the easiest possible tap.

Answer the Question Behind the Question

When caught without a number, answer the adjacent question and surface the real concern.

Automated User Research Pipeline

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

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

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

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.

Backwards From the Peak: Ambition Set by Potential, Not by Numbers

Derive goals from what the thing could be, then work backwards; today's numbers are not the anchor.

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

Staff each team from the gap, not from a fixed PM/EM/designer template

Bend-Not-Break Flexibility with a Sanctity Keeper

Add flexibility so users don't break a streak — but appoint someone to guard it from being cheapened.

Peak Performance4 steps

Binary Quality Calibration

Instead of documenting what 'quality' means, classify shipped work as high-quality or not — and let examples teach the bar.

Bridging-Based Agreement

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

Build for Where the Models Are Going

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

Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

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

Catalyst Review Forum

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

Cathedrals Not Bricks

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

CEDAF Delegation Framework

A five-part checklist for delegating without lowering your standards — to humans or AI.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

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

Marketing5 steps

Champions at Scale: Manual-to-Machine Word-of-Mouth Engine

Over-invest by hand in early product champions, learn their patterns, then productize those patterns into scalable content.

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.

Clarity Over Cleverness in Feature Design

Comprehensibility is a retention lever — make the design a plain distillation of what you're tracking.

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

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

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 Only to Dates Within Your Control

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

Competitive Wargaming

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

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

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.

Context Is All You Need Prompting

Treat the model as a brilliant stranger with zero context, and supply what a colleague would already know.

Mindset6 steps

Conviction-Over-Demand Career Navigation

Stop chasing the most in-demand role; chase the conviction where you can make a dent and learn.

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

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

Creative vs Reactive Leadership Mindset

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

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

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

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

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

Delete-First Lean Engineering

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

Deliver Customer Value Faster with High Quality

One sentence, three measurable attributes — the motto that drives Miro's entire product reward and measurement system.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

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

Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

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

Diverge-Then-Converge Roadmap Reset

On a platform shift: drop the roadmap, keep the objective, let teams go crazy, then pick 4-5 bets.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

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

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

Drawing the Perimeter

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

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

Instead of creating a software category, make a job into a meaningful identity people will fight for.

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.

Emotional Journey Design for Content

Content is predicting reader reactions: hook them, pace the emotion, make people likable.

Empowerment Without Anarchy

Leaders place the bets; teams figure out how to win them. Neither top-down nor bottom-up.

Evals as Articulating Success

An eval is just a clear spec of ideal behavior — the shared language of AI product work

Excitement-Signal Persona Discovery

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

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.

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

False Positive Risk and the Replication Protocol

A p<0.05 win can be 26% likely false when idea success rates are low — replicate borderline results

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

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

First-Step Onboarding (Lower Barriers, Raise Delight)

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

First to Hit the Brick Wall

In innovation, speed is the biggest determinant of success because you learn what doesn't work before anyone else.

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.

Follow the Heat

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

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

Frustration-Log Micro-Tool Ideation

Beat the idea crisis: log a week of frustrations, then build tiny AI tools to kill them.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

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

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

Strategy6 steps

Go-Go-Go Plus Long-Term Compounding

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

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.

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.

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

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

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

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

Identity Separation After a Layoff

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

Incremental OFAT Over Big-Bang Redesign

Decompose big redesigns into one-factor-at-a-time tested steps because ~80% of ideas fail

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

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

Institutional Memory of Experiments

Capture wins, losses, and surprises so the org keeps learning instead of relaunching old ideas

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Laughably Small MVP Under High Stakes

Ship the smallest possible thing even for high-stakes problems — it delivers impact and reveals what to actually build.

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

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

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

Bring your manager a recommendation to react to, not an open question to solve.

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

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

Sales4 steps

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.

Measure in Hundreds

If your unit of measurement is one hundred attempts, five failures means you have effectively tried zero times.

Metric-Owned Teams with Soft Feature Ownership

Give teams a metric to move, not a feature to own — anyone can touch any surface that helps their number.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

Spend two minutes pre-empting the objection you'll obviously get, and stop feeling blindsided.

Multi-Prototype Comparison Testing

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

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.

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

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

Organizational Kayfabe

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

Packaging for Spread, Not for Revenue

Never gate the mechanism that grows you: limit files, not collaborators; charge editors, not viewers.

Patience vs Process Diagnostic

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

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

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.

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

PR and Launch Strategy: Credibility Over Leads

Treat PR as a credibility asset for hiring and cold outbound, and replace one big launch with a cadence of launches.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Principles-First Product Design

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

Problems One and Two

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

Marketing5 steps

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

Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout

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

Influence3 steps

Pseudonymity for Honest Contribution

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

P-Stage Cycle-Time Benchmarking

Stage-gate every initiative (PStrat→P0→P1→P2), size it S/M/L, and benchmark cycle time against yourself like golf.

Sales4 steps

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

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

Punch Above Your Weight: Trust Signaling for Small Startups

Use small, cheap signals of polish and legitimacy so large customers trust a tiny company with big contracts.

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

RAG Data Preparation Over Database Tuning

The biggest RAG quality wins come from preparing data for retrieval, not picking a database.

Randomized Tiered Trial for AI Productivity

Measure whether AI tools help by running a randomized trial split across performance tiers.

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

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

Revealed-Behavior Notification Timing

Trigger reminders off what users actually did, not what they said they'd do — 23.5 hours after last use.

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

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

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

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Ruthless Simplification for PM Writing

A set of concrete tools to strip PM documents down to only what's necessary.

Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

Sell the why before you explain the how, or your ask gets crickets.

Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM) Validity Check

Verify your traffic split matches its design before trusting any experiment result

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.

Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

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

Leadership6 steps

Shipping 0-to-1 Inside a Big Company

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

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

When product properties are emergent, launching is how you discover them

Signal Over Metrics (Pre-PMF Decision Rule)

You cannot optimize your way to product-market fit — hunt for pull, not conversion lifts.

Signposting

Use structural cue-words to guide the reader through your writing without heavy formatting.

Simplest-V1-Then-Amplify Experimentation

Ship the barest encapsulation of a hypothesis, confirm it has legs, then beat the heck out of it.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

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

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

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

Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

Match your stated confidence to your actual evidence — neither overreach nor over-hedge.

Influence3 steps

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

Stamina as the Kill Signal

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

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

Start-With-Why One-Pager

The PM's core artifact: define the thing by nailing the problem and why-now before anything else.

Step-Wise Eval Design for Multi-Step AI Apps

Don't evaluate agents end-to-end; put an eval on every step until you hit coverage.

Strategy-Led Planning

A real, pre-aligned product strategy collapses annual planning from six weeks to three days

Strategy Not Self-Expression

Feedback's goal is behavior change, so cut everything that doesn't serve it — usually 90%.

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.

Study Group

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

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

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

Systematic Customer Conversations

Build a lightweight, repeatable system to talk to customers by phone on a regular cadence.

Systems Not Goals

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

Taste as Shedding Social Proof

Real taste is recognizing what's great before results prove it — by evaluating ideas stripped of their social and authority proof

Peak Performance5 steps

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 200K-User Experimentation Readiness Rule

Below ~200K users detect only big effects; use the wait to build platform and culture

The 51-49 Decision Rule

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

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 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 AI Expertise Layer

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

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

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

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

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

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

Every model leap gets normalised within months — build for the boring future, not the euphoric one.

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

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

The Bottom-Up Fit Checklist

Four market conditions plus one leadership condition that decide whether an IC-led motion will work.

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

Strategy7 steps

The Carve-Out Cohort Turnaround

To fix a load-bearing product, secede from the metrics system with a small randomized cohort.

Influence4 steps

The Champion Amplification Flywheel

Grow your internal champions' careers, and their credibility becomes your credibility.

The Chess-Points Competitive Lens

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

The Coaching Model (Coaches, Not Managers)

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

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

The Community Node-Graph Channel Strategy

Map the influence graph of an existing community, then go to its centres — for feedback, not a pitch.

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

When the bottleneck isn't people, each new hire is a net productivity loss unless they uplevel everyone.

Communication6 steps

The Constructive Feedback Script

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

The Consultant With a Predilection

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

The Data-Driven Red Flag

When someone brags about being 'data-driven,' suspect weak product judgment, not strong analytics.

The Decision Log

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

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 Design-Partner Pod Model

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

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

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

Peak Performance5 steps

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 Eval ROI Decision

Build evals where failure is catastrophic or you must win; vibe-check the rest.

The Feature Team vs Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Diagnose whether your team ships output or owns outcomes — and what that means for the PM role.

The Foundational Three Entry Path

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Founder Prenup

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder's First-PM Timing Rule

The founder IS the product manager until scale forces the handoff — around 20 to 25 engineers.

The Four Keys to IC Love

Credibility, build-with-users, go where they already are, and radical transparency.

The Four Questions Career Self-Audit

Four honest questions that surface the root causes of a stalled, stressed, or frustrating product career

Sales3 steps

The Friction Commitment Test

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

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

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

The 'If I Could Have Written It' Content Bar

A one-question filter for whether technical content will earn credibility or be ignored.

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

Strategy8 steps

The Landscape-First Product Strategy Doc

A bullet-driven Google Doc that builds an unbroken logic chain from company mission down to a single team priority.

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

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

Strategy6 steps

The Leakable Metric

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

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 Love-Hate Disruption Test

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

The Marketplace Priority Stack

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

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

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

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 Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC)

Define one success metric with countervailing guardrails that predicts long-term lifetime value

The Personal Operating Manual

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

The Platform Encroachment Test

Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.

The Practitioner Advocate Role (The Tom Factor)

Hire a passionate user from your community into marketing and sales — no quota, no CRM.

The Pre-Firing 'Crystal Clear' Conversation

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

The Product Operating Model

Three dimensions and four competencies that separate companies that consistently innovate from the rest.

The Promotion-Denial Conversation

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

The Proxy Goal Ladder

Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.

Communication6 steps

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

The Research Coordinator Role

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

The Sales Motion as Source Code

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

The Second-Date Funnel

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

Sales6 steps

The Selling While Loop

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

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

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

The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

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

The Surgeon Management Model

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

The Swipe File

Capture examples of communication that work — the act of collecting trains your eye.

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Team Watch Party

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

The Thermal Team

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

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

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

The Three Levels of Product Work

Align your role with your default level — impact, execution, or optics — instead of climbing into frustration

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 Pillars of Product Operations

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

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 Threads of Great PMs

The three durable behaviors that separate great product managers from good ones, in any company type.

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Tuning Fork Silent Read

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

The Two-Persona Product Leader

Every product leader wears two hats: as a leadership-team member drive accountability; as a stream leader drive improvement.

Marketing5 steps

The Two-Step Bottom-Up GTM Motion

Make individual contributors love you, then arm them to spread you inside their company.

The Two-Way Door Reality Check

Most decisions that look reversible are one-way doors at your level — pause before you commit

The Unblock Virtuous Cycle

Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.

The Unsell Email

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

The Users Having a Bad Day Chart

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

The Value and Viability Skill Ladder

Climb from backlog administrator to real product manager by owning the two risks nobody else can.

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 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 Written Screen Job Simulation

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

The Zero-to-Seven-Day Retention Sprint

Concentrate experiments and flexibility on the first 7 days, where loss aversion actually locks in.

Think First, Then Challenge with AI

Reverse the default AI workflow: form your own answer, then use the model to attack it.

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-Model Triangulation

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

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

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

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

Turn Your Biggest Blocker Into Your Upgrade Wedge

Find the single thing stopping adoption, go deeper on it than anyone, and make it the reason to upgrade.

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Two-Question New Technology Adoption Test

Before adopting any new AI tool, ask: how big is the gain, and how painful is the exit?

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.

Twyman's Law: Investigate the Too-Good-to-Be-True Result

Any surprising or extreme experiment result is probably wrong until you've hunted for the flaw

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

User-Value Thermodynamics

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

Visibility Signals Importance

Users care about a feature in proportion to how much the product visibly cares about it.

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

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

Leadership6 steps

We Might Be Wrong, But We Are Not Confused

Make being wrong cheap and being confused unacceptable, in both thought and execution.

What Actually Improves AI Apps

Stop chasing AI news and vector DBs; the real levers are users, data, and prompts.

What-If Before Why-Not

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

When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

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

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.

Writing a Compelling Product Vision

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