Google Search

Blow Their Socks Off: The 10x Word-of-Mouth Bar

To earn recommendation, give users an experience they didn't know was previously possible

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build the Company Only You Could Build

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

Communication3 steps

Clarity Over Cleverness

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

Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

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

Complementary Format Integration

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Conviction-Gated Team Scaling

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

Conviction-Led Product Management

You can't split-test your way to love — build conviction on what matters, then make one big change

Conviction Staffing

Staff speculative projects with people obsessed with the idea, not with whoever happens to be free.

Finance4 steps

Cost-Allocation Pricing to Fuel Word-of-Mouth

Allocate every real cost to the customer who caused it, raise heavy users, cut everyone else's price

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

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

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

Codify the values you already have, not the ones you wish you had.

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

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

Communication4 steps

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

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

Design the Dream Objective Function

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

Strategy3 steps

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

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

Don't Compete With What You Bought

The classic acquisition killer: building a rival in-house version of the thing you just acquired.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do the Unscalable to Get Customers to Lobby For You

Deliver a painful manual experience so good that customers complain to the regulator, not to you

Leadership3 steps

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

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

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Fall in Love with the Problem

Start every venture with a validated problem, not a solution, so the problem becomes your North Star.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Follow People, Not Plans

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

Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

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

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

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

Head vs Tail in Answer Engines

Why AEO rewards citation frequency and hyper-specific long-tail questions

Help Center Optimization for the Tail

Turn your support docs into the citation source for obscure use-case questions

Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization

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

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

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

Leadership6 steps

Little Hands Growth Hiring

Hire on the KPI they'll commit to and their willingness to do the tiniest job.

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

After the big four ad platforms, buy the dozens of small ones nobody bothers to set up.

Mission Authenticity as an Emotional Referral Engine

An authentic mission that customers genuinely believe becomes a word-of-mouth channel money can't buy

Organizational Kayfabe

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

Payback-First Channel Measurement

Judge channels on closed-won revenue one year out, never on lead volume.

Self-Mastery5 steps

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

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

Product-Led SEO

Treat SEO as a product you build for the search user, not content you optimize for a keyword.

Product-Market Fit = Retention

There is one metric for product-market fit: do customers come back?

Product Marketing: Closing the Perception Delta

Make users perceive the value you actually delivered — close the gap between done and perceived

Programmatic vs Editorial Decision Rule

Go programmatic only where scale meets a real use case — otherwise you scale nothing.

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-First Cheap Channel Playbook

Find where your buyers ask their questions, answer them honestly, and let the answer sell.

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

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

Leadership6 steps

Sacred Cows as Your Roadmap

In a calcified org, the list of things nobody is allowed to touch IS the product roadmap.

SEO Conversion-Metric Rigor

Rankings and traffic are not results. Hold SEO to the same efficiency standard as paid.

Skeleton Before the Makeup

Sequence early growth investment from site fundamentals up to awareness — never the reverse.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

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

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

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

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

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

The 30-Day Keeper Test

Calendar every new hire 30 days out and ask: knowing what I know now, would I hire this person?

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

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

Marketing7 steps

The 7-Step AEO Execution Plan

A repeatable pipeline to make your product show up in LLM answers

Innovation5 steps

The Acqui-Hire Silo

Buy a founder, hand them the riskiest bet, and spend your capital shielding them from the org.

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 Asynchronous Scaffolding Test

A synchronous-only consumer product can't retain. Surround it with async, or pick a vertical.

The Authentic Reddit Citation Strategy

Win Reddit citations by being a real, disclosed user — not a spam farm

Productivity5 steps

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

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

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

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

Communication4 steps

The Dance of 100 Nos — Fundraising Storytelling

Investors decide in seconds and 1% say yes — so lead with your strongest point and tell an emotional, detailed story.

The Four Phases of Focus

Do one thing at a time — idea, PMF, then either growth or business model — and shift gears cleanly.

The Framework Limit Test

Two tripwires that tell you your product framework (JTBD, OKRs, DAU) has become the enemy.

The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews

AI answers eat top-of-funnel search. Move your SEO to where intent and conversion live.

Leadership7 steps

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

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

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

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

Communication3 steps

The Information-Gain Content Heuristic

Judge content by what new it adds, not how typical it is

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

Judge every article by one question: after reading it, does the reader go back to Google?

Strategy6 steps

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

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

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

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

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

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

The NPS Doubling Curve for Viral Growth

Optimize NPS instead of conversion, because each promoter tier doubles how many people they tell

Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

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

Strategy3 steps

The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test

SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

Strategy6 steps

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

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

The Traffic Light Keyword System

Rank every keyword by buying intent, not volume — then work greens down before touching yellows.

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

Shared audience is not enough — partner only where your buyer already goes for this specific advice.

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

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

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

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

Top-Down TAM SEO Forecast

Forecast SEO from market size down, not from keyword-tool volumes up.

Understand Users by Watching Failures in the Funnel

Watch real users, and interview the ones who failed in your funnel — they know what you need to fix.

Productivity4 steps

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

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

Win the Early Majority with Simplicity

Market leaders are won in the change-averse early majority — and the only lever is simplicity.