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8 recommend/use · 10 sourced episodes

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Innovation3 steps

Add a Zero (10x First-Principles Reframing)

Force a 10x version of the goal so the team must rethink the problem from first principles, not optimize the current process.

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Strategy4 steps

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

During an existential threat, assume the disruptor is playing an optimal game and respond with overreaction

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Leadership4 steps

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

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

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Peak Performance3 steps

Beating Pre-Talk Nerves

Almost all speaking anxiety is before you start — reframe it, then rehearse by passive listening and transition drills.

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Strategy3 steps

Build for the Future Model

Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Consumer Subscription Viability Test

Freemium-plus-paid-acquisition consumer subscriptions fail without ~60-70%+ retention or a network effect

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Innovation5 steps

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

Ship an AI feature by naming its 3-4 core behaviors and teaching them with model-generated data

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Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

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Communication4 steps

Emotional Journey Design for Content

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

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Innovation6 steps

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

Turn messy LLM logs into a prioritized list of failures before you write a single test.

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Productivity4 steps

Eval-First AI Product Development

Define what 'correct' looks like as evals first; the spec becomes the scorecard, not the build instructions

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Strategy3 steps

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.

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Leadership5 steps

Founder-in-the-Details Operating Model

Rebuild a company like a startup: functional teams, one road map, one shared consciousness, CEO in the work.

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Leadership4 steps

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

Delegate to hires only once they consistently make better calls than you would — and signal in both directions

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Innovation4 steps

Frustration-Log Micro-Tool Ideation

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

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Homework for Life

Capture one story-worthy moment every day to build an endless bank of stories and slow down time.

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Strategy4 steps

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

Build product-led sales as an evolution, not a revolution: intuition, then regression, then platforms.

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Strategy4 steps

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

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Communication3 steps

Location and Action Openers

Start every story with where you are and what's happening — it activates imagination and silences the room.

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Strategy5 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong

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Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

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Finance4 steps

Net Revenue Retention Above 100% (and Why NRR Lies)

Expansion revenue must beat churn, but NRR flatters you — watch logo churn too.

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Marketing4 steps

PQA Signal Detection

Find the exact usage signals that mean 'engage sales now' using users, volume, velocity, and behavior.

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Sales4 steps

Pricing Selects the Market (Sell Growth, Not Savings)

Price and positioning choose your market — reframe your product as growth to charge many times more.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Proactive Time Allocation (Kill Fake Work, Guard Relationships)

Stop letting your inbox set your agenda; allocate time from strategy and finite-life priorities instead of reacting.

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Leadership4 steps

Product Accountability for Pipeline

Make product — not marketing — own PQA pipeline, with leaders on revenue and PMs on the KPIs that feed it.

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Marketing4 steps

Product Marketing Fusion (Inbound + Outbound in One Function)

Merge product management with product marketing so the people who build the product also own how it's told and sold.

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Innovation3 steps

Prompting-as-Prototyping

Validate a product idea by prompting a model in a local browser before building anything

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

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Innovation5 steps

RAG Data Preparation Over Database Tuning

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

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Leadership3 steps

Randomized Tiered Trial for AI Productivity

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

SaaS-Marketplace Transition Test

A SaaS business can add a marketplace only if it touches its customer's customer and those customers need multiple suppliers

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Leadership4 steps

Scenario-Based PM Interviewing

Interview PMs by making them do the real job under real constraints, not recite prepared stories

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Productivity3 steps

Set the Pace Through Decisiveness (Bias for Action)

A company's speed is governed by how fast it decides, not how hard it works — so refuse to 'circle back.'

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Productivity3 steps

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

Reserve scarce user research for high-uncertainty, high-leverage problems; ship to learn everywhere else

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Marketing4 steps

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

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

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Communication4 steps

Speaking with Adjacency

To explain something dull, tell a story about something else, then snap it into place.

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Innovation3 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

The 51-49 Decision Rule

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

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Strategy5 steps

The 5-Question Stalled Growth Diagnostic

Diagnose why growth is slowing by asking five questions in strict priority order.

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Innovation4 steps

The AI Expertise Layer

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

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Innovation4 steps

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

Build a one-failure, pass/fail judge and align it to a human with a confusion matrix before you trust it.

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Leadership3 steps

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

Appoint one trusted domain expert to own eval judgments instead of running it by committee.

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Finance3 steps

The Cancellation Ceiling (Maximum Customer Cap)

New customers divided by cancellation rate is the hard ceiling on how big you can ever get.

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Innovation4 steps

The Design-Partner Pod Model

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

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Marketing3 steps

The Elephant Curve (Channels Saturate and Sag)

Every acquisition channel starts as an S-curve then sags — assume your winners will decline.

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Strategy3 steps

The Eval ROI Decision

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

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Communication3 steps

The Five-Second Moment

Build every story around one instant of transformation or realization, and start at the end.

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Communication5 steps

The Five Stakes Tools

Five devices — elephant, backpack, breadcrumb, hourglass, crystal ball — that make an audience wonder what happens next.

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Communication4 steps

The Four Engines of Attention

Stakes, surprise, suspense, and humor are the only four things keeping a business audience listening.

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Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

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Influence4 steps

The Personal Interest Inventory

Catalog the facts about yourself by reach and intensity, then weave them strategically into how you speak.

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Mindset3 steps

The Power of Yes

Say yes to what scares you — a yes can always become a no, but a no forecloses the door forever.

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Sales3 steps

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

Convert self-serve usage into large enterprise contracts by bridging individual, team, and enterprise value.

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Strategy4 steps

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones

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Productivity3 steps

The Research Coordinator Role

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

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

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

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Sales3 steps

The Three Lead-Attribution Channels (PQA / PQL / MQL)

Route leads by whether usage and a buyer exist, because each channel has different conversion rates and playbooks.

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Strategy4 steps

The Three Network Effects (and Why Social Products Must Evolve)

Classify defensibility as direct, cross-side, or data network effects — and know social products must add the latter two

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Pillars of Self-Serve Monetization

Lift free-to-paid conversion by fixing awareness first, then checkout friction, then the model itself.

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Communication3 steps

The Three-Point Story Test

A real story must contain change, pass the dinner test, and be about you.

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Marketing5 steps

The 'What Made You Cancel?' Rooter-Cause Diagnosis

Ask what made them cancel (not why), then dig past the surface reason to the real causes.

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Strategy3 steps

Two-Question New Technology Adoption Test

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

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Strategy3 steps

What Actually Improves AI Apps

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

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