Granola

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

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

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

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

AI Rep-Loop Compression

Build AI tools that give you feedback 80% as good as an expert's, on demand, to get years of judgment-building reps in a fraction of the time.

Answer the Question Behind the Question

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

B2C2B: Horizontal Wedge to Enterprise

Win a billion-user consumer use case first, then let personal users carry the product into their workplace.

Balcony Rhythm for Co-Founder Relationships

Build shared self-awareness, then protect the relationship with vows and a real check-in cadence

Behavioral Activation

Act first, then feel better — keep a pre-written list of small actions that reliably reverse a low mood.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Bridging-Based Agreement

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

Broadcast How Leaders Think (Mental-Model Transparency)

Teach your team how key leaders think — not just what they decided — via weekly verbatim-plus-interpretation notes.

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

Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading

Read where the market sits in the eternal bundle/unbundle cycle to decide vertical vs horizontal.

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

Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity

New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales

CEDAF Delegation Framework

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

Strategy5 steps

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

CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook

The single predictor of AI adoption is whether the CEO uses it daily — then amplify your 10% early adopters

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

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

Coach vs. Advise Decision

Stop training your team to bring you every problem by knowing when to coach instead of solve

Codify Your Judgment into Prompts (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Turn every piece of feedback you give into a reusable prompt so you never say it twice

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.

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

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

Compounding Engineering

Spend a little effort now so each repeat of a task is cheaper than the last

Context Loading (Additional Information)

Front-load all relevant task information — and put it at the top for caching

Counterprogram the Narrative (Take a Punch)

When you fear someone thinks less of you, take one small action that proves the opposite instead of litigating the past.

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

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

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.

Define Success Before You Prompt

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

Delete-First Lean Engineering

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

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

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

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

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

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

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

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Dogfood-Driven Realism

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Energy Audit for Your Zone of Genius

Track what energizes and depletes you for two weeks, then redesign your role toward 80% in your gifts

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

Solve the same problem several ways and take the most common answer

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

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.

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.

Few-Shot Prompting

Show the model examples of what good looks like instead of describing it

Fixed Time, Variable Scope (Appetite-Based Planning)

Set the max time you'll spend first, then design a solution that fits it — instead of estimating a concept.

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

Framing (Setting the Boundaries)

Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.

Give-It-Away Growth Engine

Reclassify free product and AI costs as marketing spend, then give the product away to your best distributors

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

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

GROW Model for Powerful Questions

Four question categories that let people solve their own problem and walk away with a concrete next step

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.

Habit-Formation Model for Team Behavior Change

Drive team adoption (e.g. of AI) with behavioral psychology, not education: consistency, low friction, and a powerful reward loop.

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 an AI Operations Lead

Give one person the dedicated job of automating everyone else's repetitive work with AI

Hire for Clarity-from-Chaos

Screen for fire-in-the-belly, high agency, and the ability to create clarity out of chaos — proven by work trials

Hire Raw Intellect Over Experience

Index on raw intellect and unquenched hunger to build, not years of experience or regalia

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

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

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

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

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

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.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

Lego Brick vs Lego Box (Selling Solutions Up-Market)

Sell ready-made solution boxes to move up-market while still building composable bricks behind the scenes.

Live Shaping Session

Put product, a senior engineer, and a designer in a room to sketch and break ideas until one is clearly buildable in the appetite.

Magic Lenses

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

Magic Questions (Statements That End in 'Do You Agree?')

To understand how someone thinks, feed them statements ending in 'is that right?' rather than asking open-ended questions.

Maintain Noise in the Market

Ship every day and talk about it constantly so the product feels alive — with tiered big launches on top

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

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

Minimum Lovable Product

Viability is no longer enough — the bar is a product people love and want to talk about

Model Maximalism

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

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

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

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

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

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

Non-Violent Communication (OFNR) for Difficult Conversations

Observation, feeling, need, request — get mutual understanding instead of trying to win the argument

One-Page Plan and Operating Rhythm

Put vision through quarterly goals on one page, then meet in a rhythm to reflect on it

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.

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.

Principles-First Product Design

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

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

Prompt Decomposition

Make the model list the sub-problems first, then solve each before the whole

Strategy5 steps

Prompt Injection Defense Stack

Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level

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.

Reason About It Like a Human

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

Reset Through Better Abstractions

Don't fear throwing work away — a better abstraction compounds and recovers sunk cost fast.

Reverse-Engineer-Then-Formalize at Scale

Do one instance deep by hand, reverse-engineer the best process, then codify it into a scalable algorithm

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.

Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

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

Selective Deep-Dive Leadership

Instead of skimming 100 projects, go bare-metal deep on the 7-10 that matter most

Self-Criticism Loop

Get the model to critique its own answer, then implement its own critique

Ship-Fast Operating Model

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

Signposting

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

Mindset3 steps

Slow vs Fast Decisions

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

Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

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

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

Strategy Not Self-Expression

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

Marketing3 steps

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

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

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

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

Systems Over Headcount (The Small Bus)

Solve with better systems and talent density instead of adding people; a smaller bus turns faster.

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 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

The 95/5 Growth Inversion

In fast-moving AI markets, spend 95% inventing new growth loops and 5% optimizing existing ones

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 Allocation Economy: Manage Models Like a First-Time Manager

AI turns everyone into a manager — the valuable skills become the ones first-time managers must learn

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

Break growth experimentation into four evaluable stages an AI can hill-climb, keeping humans on alignment

The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy

Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

The Circuit Breaker (Back to Shaping)

When a project overruns its appetite, don't extend it or gut the agreed value — pull it back into shaping mode.

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

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

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

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

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

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

The Design Sprint Scorecard

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

The Detail Dial

Calibrate how prescriptive a shaped plan is to the builder's seniority — more detail lifts juniors, less frees seniors.

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 Enthusiastic Rehire Test

One binary question that cuts through months of avoided talent decisions

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The Expectations-Reality Delta

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

Leadership6 steps

The Five PM Archetypes

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

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

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 Filters for Career Acceleration

Growth rate, strength-fit, deferred comp, and the C-suite question — pick jobs on these, not on salary.

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

The Incognito Cry Test

Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

The Local CEO Operating Model

Give each product owner a lean cross-functional team and end-to-end ownership, backed by a dual line/functional matrix

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 Nine-Scopes Kickoff

At kickoff, have the builders translate the shaped idea into nine-or-fewer implementation chunks to test scope and build clarity.

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

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

The Product-Market Fit Treadmill

In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

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.

Productivity5 steps

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

Finance4 steps

The Sip Seed Round

Get capital committed but pull it down only when needed, so you keep optionality and psychological freedom

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

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

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 Swipe File

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

The Thermal Team

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

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

Three Levels of Listening

Drop from your own inner monologue into hearing what people communicate beneath their words

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.

Unbundle Expensive Services into AI Apps

Find a service only the rich could afford, do it with a general chatbot, then spin the working ones into apps

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

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

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

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

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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

Wow-First MVP

Cut scope to the critical few features, but never compromise quality — so a flop can only mean the idea was wrong

You Are Not the Protagonist (Operationalize, Don't Impose)

Your job isn't to convince everyone of your vision — it's to understand the leader's vision and find the spiky places you can shape it.