Turn on growth channels in a fixed order, cheapest-and-least-scalable first, because each later channel needs the customer knowledge the earlier ones produce.

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Leadership4 steps

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

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

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Strategy3 steps

Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea

At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.

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Leadership3 steps

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Coaching Diagnostic

Pinpoint where a struggling PM or manager breaks down along the ladder of critical thinking, then fill that gap.

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Strategy4 steps

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Building Toward a Portfolio Career

Engineer a narrow-but-deep expertise plus branded credibility so you can advise many companies, not one.

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Influence5 steps

Building Your Own Social Radar

Turn people-reading from a mystery gift into a deliberate practice: checklist, conscious questions, and follow-up calibration.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

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.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cap Table as a Growth Strategy

Recruit influential founders and operators onto your cap table so they become your earliest, most credible customers and evangelists.

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Finance3 steps

Contribution-Margin Payback Period over CAC

Judge acquisition ROI by how many months of contribution-margin profit it takes to repay CAC, not by CAC or LTV:CAC.

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Leadership3 steps

Crossing the Product Leader Canyon

Escape the manager death spiral by shifting from doer to editor and owning outcomes over output.

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Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

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

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Innovation3 steps

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

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Finance3 steps

Dual-Sided ROI Equation

Price each acquisition to include the cost of acquiring the other side it needs, then push to your payback threshold

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Innovation4 steps

Earn the Secret by Savoring Surprises

There's no recipe for a breakthrough — hunt surprises at the edge instead of validation

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Productivity3 steps

Escape-Velocity Activation Metric

Identify the specific actions a user must take in their first window to become durably active, then make one team obsess over driving them.

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Communication4 steps

Evals as Articulating Success

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

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Innovation3 steps

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

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Strategy4 steps

Force a Choice, Not a Comparison

Be the world's first banana, not a 10x better apple

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Leadership4 steps

Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org

Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours

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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

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Productivity3 steps

Homogenize the Early Experience for Retention

Move retention by fixing unlucky bad first experiences, not by nudging people about to churn

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Leadership4 steps

Impact = Environment × Skills

Audit your career by scoring the environment variables and skill variables that gate your impact.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Live in the Future and Notice What's Missing

Don't try to think of a startup idea — get out of the present so ideas find you

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Leadership4 steps

Managing Complex Change

Diagnose why a team is stuck by finding which of five change ingredients is missing.

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Innovation3 steps

Maximize the Treatment Effect to Fail Conclusively

In low-sample B2B tests, throw every tactic at a hypothesis at once so a failure kills the idea for good instead of resurfacing for years.

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Strategy3 steps

MECE Problem Decomposition

Break any problem into buckets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so you never miss a possible cause or solution.

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Strategy5 steps

North Star Translation Layer

Give every team a metric they can directly move, then convert each into a single company North Star using a shared translation factor.

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Innovation4 steps

Pattern-Breaking Inside a Big Company

Make small bets that can fail a lot — and hide them from the mother ship

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

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

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Strategy4 steps

Planning in Seasons

Replace rigid roadmaps with secular 'seasons', loose quarterly OKRs, and deliberate slack

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Productivity3 steps

Problems One and Two

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

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Innovation5 steps

Product as Organism: the metabolic loop

Treat an AI product as a living system that ingests signals, tunes on rewards, and improves with every interaction

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

Protect the Core Magic: Acquisition Integration

Freeze the loop users love, rebuild everything behind it, and narrate the seams honestly

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Strategy5 steps

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

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

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Innovation5 steps

Scaling Expert Judgment Through Algorithms

Structure your experts' judgment into a signal, train on that — not only on engagement

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Strategy4 steps

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.

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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

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Innovation5 steps

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

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Leadership4 steps

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

Have senior candidates rank themselves against the exact skills the role needs to reveal fit and self-awareness.

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Influence4 steps

Sponsorship Over Mentorship

Career inflection comes not from a coach but from a sponsor who trusts you with a bigger problem.

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Innovation6 steps

Study Group

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

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Strategy4 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

The Enterprise AI Adoption Ladder

Three sequential stages that separate companies winning with AI from those spinning their wheels

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Strategy4 steps

The Four Marketplace Health Metrics

Track GMV, unit economics, liquidity, and share of wallet to know if a marketplace is truly healthy

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Strategy4 steps

The Four Types of Product Work

Feature, growth, PMF-expansion, and scaling work — the portfolio a product leader must learn to balance.

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Mindset3 steps

The Gardener Mindset for Marketplaces

Run a marketplace like a gardener with a light touch, not a construction worker building linear features

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Strategy6 steps

The Growth Model Building Blocks

Build a spreadsheet formula of how your business grows, layer by layer, to find your real levers

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Innovation3 steps

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

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Innovation4 steps

The Inflection Stress Test

Four questions that separate a real inflection from a vague 'why now'

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Strategy6 steps

The Leakable Metric

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

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Strategy3 steps

The Marketplace Fragmentation Test

A marketplace only works if the market is fragmented and the per-transaction dollars are small enough to keep it in the middle

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Leadership4 steps

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

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Leadership4 steps

The Product Career Learning Loop

A four-stage loop — execute, generalize, communicate, scale — that compounds a PM's ability over a career.

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Social Radar Founder-Read

Read the human signals in a founder interview to catch red flags the idea-focused people miss.

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Strategy5 steps

The Solar System Bundle

Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA

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Strategy4 steps

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.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Three Elements of a Breakthrough Idea

Grade any startup idea on inflections, insight, and founder-future fit — not the implementation

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Strategy3 steps

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

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Leadership3 steps

The Three Pattern-Breaking Actions

Movements, storytelling, and disagreeableness — how you get people to move to your future

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Productivity3 steps

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

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

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Communication3 steps

The Three-Slide Believer Pitch

What you do, your non-obvious insight, then proof — built for believers, not objectors

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Communication4 steps

The Trust-First Interview Method

Talk less, promise review before publishing, and follow the tangents — so guests open up and the conversation goes somewhere real.

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Innovation5 steps

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

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Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

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Innovation5 steps

Two-Mode Product Teams

One team, two clocks: ship at the speed of the moment, and build the system between moments

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Leadership3 steps

Two-Path Talent Sourcing (Network + Data)

Find the companies best at the skill you're hiring for, then find the best person there - via referral chains or via public performance data.

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Productivity4 steps

Understand Work (Understand → Identify → Execute)

Budget intentional time to understand a problem first, so your team ships fewer things with a far higher win rate.

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Strategy3 steps

Vertical Unbundling Criteria

Only carve a vertical out of a horizontal marketplace if it has high value or frequency and a self-contained network

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.

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Leadership6 steps

Wartime Product Management

In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission

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Leadership4 steps

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.

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Strategy3 steps

Win on the Platform, Not the Features

Durable products win on invisible infrastructure — reliability, reach, privacy — not on the feature list

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Strategy3 steps

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.

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