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AI Computer Interfaces (ACI)

Give AI agents purpose-built text interfaces, not the human GUIs they were never designed for

Innovation6 steps

Automated User Research Pipeline

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

B2C2B: Horizontal Wedge to Enterprise

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

Build for the Models Six Months Out

Ship for the AI capabilities that will land in ~6 months, not the ones available today

Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading

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

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.

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.

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

Controllable Goals

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

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

Cultural Erogenous Zones

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

Double Down on the Pull

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

Drawing the Perimeter

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

Influence3 steps

Earn the Right to Teach

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

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

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

Productivity5 steps

Flow-Preserving AI Assistance Design

Design AI suggestions around the user's flow state: no panel switches, no waiting, ephemeral by default

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

Generative-First Skill Stack for the AI Era

When making things gets cheap, your bottleneck becomes idea generation — train that muscle, plus just enough coding

Mindset5 steps

Identity Separation After a Layoff

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

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

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

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.

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

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

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.

Productivity3 steps

Manufactured Deadlines

Impose external constraints so solo creative work actually ships

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

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

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Packaging for Spread, Not for Revenue

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

Innovation5 steps

Persona-Framing for AI Product Behavior

Pick a human metaphor for your AI, then derive its behavioral guardrails from that role

Productivity4 steps

PM Prototype-to-Production Handoff

PMs build a working V1 with AI, validate it with real users, then hand a working artifact to engineering

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.

Pre-Sell Before You Build

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

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

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

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.

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.

Communication4 steps

Radical Trust Building

Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.

Innovation7 steps

Research-to-Product Graduation

Move an incubated moonshot from the research lab to a product team without killing it or trapping the researchers

Reset Through Better Abstractions

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

Roadmap-Less Agility for AI-Era Building

Drop the explicit roadmap and jump on capability drops the moment they land

Mindset3 steps

Robust-Across-Futures Action

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

Signal Over Metrics (Pre-PMF Decision Rule)

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

Systematic Customer Conversations

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

Systems Over Headcount (The Small Bus)

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

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

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

Productivity3 steps

The 20-Minute Focus Ignition

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

The 60/30/10 Portfolio Capacity Split

Allocate team capacity across incremental wins, operations, and audacious bets before priorities compete

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

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

The Bottom-Up Fit Checklist

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

The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy

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

Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

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

Influence4 steps

The Champion Amplification Flywheel

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

Leadership3 steps

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

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

Sales3 steps

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

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

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 D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Decision Log

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

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

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

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 Foundational Three Entry Path

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

The Four Keys to IC Love

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

The Going Direct Playbook

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

Strategy3 steps

The 'Going Home' Pivot

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

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

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

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

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

The 'If I Could Have Written It' Content Bar

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

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.

Sales5 steps

The Practitioner Advocate Role (The Tom Factor)

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

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 Sticky Engine of Growth

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

The Teach-Me-Something-In-One-Minute Interview

A 60-second timed teaching exercise scored on completeness, complexity, and clarity

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 Time-Boxed Leap Bet

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

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.

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-Year Publishing Cadence

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

The Unsell Email

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

Trust-by-Structure Governance

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

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.

Values as a Mirror

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