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Adjacent User Theory

Find growth by understanding and dogfooding the product as the next user just outside your current base.

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

Influence3 steps

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

Find the ceiling; a reflexive split leaves six figures on the table

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

Artificial Density Testing

Manually cram enough users into one cluster to get a clean yes/no on a social product

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

A Stable of Mentors

Keep three or four mentors on a rotating monthly schedule so you always have someone to talk to.

Bad vs Sad Quality Tiers

Classify every failure as bad (irrecoverable) or sad (recoverable pain) so teams triage quality across many surfaces.

Finance3 steps

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Be Someone's Favorite, Not Everyone's Okay

Aim to be a small group's absolute favorite rather than a large group's forgettable option — and measure it.

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

Best-Model-First Agent Workflow

Use the most capable model on max effort, start in plan mode, then auto-accept — counterintuitively cheaper.

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.

Build Champions Before the Offer

The negotiation starts sooner than you think — plant reciprocity and recruit coaches across the org

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

Build for the Model Six Months Out

Design your AI product for the model that ships in six months, not the one you have today.

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

Build Only at the Magic Intersection

Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Championing Big Bets Inside a Company

To win support for audacious product bets, repeat the vision relentlessly, state your intent, and optimize for impact.

Channel Diversification Before the Drought

A one-channel growth company is always a no-no — turn on the second channel while the first still works.

Clarity Over Cleverness

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

Close the Loop: Intent-Signal Retention Engine

Turn every low-commitment user signal into a trigger you can legitimately fire later.

Communication6 steps

Communication Is The Job

Impact happens only through artifacts and words — so map the mental model before you speak.

Complaint Storms

A team ritual to see your own product with fresh, critical eyes — by first ripping apart someone else's.

Complementary Format Integration

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

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

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

Conditional-Layer Validation

Reduce a consumer product to ~4 things that must be true and validate them one at a time

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

Never negotiate over email; slow it down and pick the room where you win

Conviction-Gated Team Scaling

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

Conviction Staffing

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

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

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

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

Cultural Erogenous Zones

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

Cut Scope, Not Quality

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

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

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

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Defensible Moats for AI Startups

Four durable places to build in AI where foundation-model labs are least likely to squash you.

Deflect the Number Question

Never name your figure first; make them reveal the range instead

De-Risk the Biggest Swings First

Run discovery and delivery in parallel — and put the top-right, riskiest bets into discovery first.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

Fix the incentive system and the time horizon first — everything else about internal incubation follows.

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Distribution-First Moat

Solve distribution before you obsess over product-market fit; it is the harder, more durable edge.

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

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

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Don't Box the Model In

Give the model tools and a goal, not a rigid workflow — scaffolding gains get wiped out by the next model.

Don't Compete With What You Bought

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

Draft-First LLM Augmentation

Never ask the model to do your job — write your version first, then have it improve it.

Earn the Secret by Savoring Surprises

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

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

Empathize-Then-Invent (The Stories Method)

Listen deeply to users for hours, then build something new — never the literal feature they asked for.

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

Excitement-Signal Persona Discovery

Ship a broad tool, then let the segment with the most emotive joy tell you who to focus on

Execution Beats Strategy

Perfect strategy with poor execution teaches you nothing. Good-enough strategy with perfect execution compounds.

Influence5 steps

Expand, Don't Shrink

Insert a step between receiving feedback and acting on it — then answer it by adding tools, never by getting smaller.

Finance4 steps

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Exponential Bet Allocation

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

Fake the AI Before You Build It

Never train a model for an MVP — prototype the AI's output and test demand first.

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

Fear-to-Agency Reframe

When AI change triggers fear, lean in and ask what's within your control — turn it happening to you into happening for you.

Communication6 steps

Feeling-First Product Metaphor

Pick the feeling, name where you last felt it, and let the metaphor make a thousand small decisions for you.

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

First-Step Onboarding (Lower Barriers, Raise Delight)

Beat the blank page by walking users through tiny surprising steps until they surprise themselves

Force a Choice, Not a Comparison

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

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

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

Giving Away Your Legos

To let yourself and the company scale, hand off the work you're best at and find joy in enabling others

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.

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

Happy GMV and Minimum Viable Happiness

Track only the GMV that produced a retained customer, and boil the thimble until it clears the bar

High Agency, High Accountability

Pair the freedom to solve problems your own way with clear ownership of the hypothesis and the outcome.

Hunting New Bottlenecks When AI Writes the Code

When AI removes the coding bottleneck, constraints shift up and downstream — go find them.

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.

Identity Threat to Curiosity

Your worst behaviour comes from identity threat — turn the clench into 'fascinating, tell me more'.

Impact = Environment × Skills

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

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

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

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization

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

Internal Virality for Alignment

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

Inverted Time-to-Value

Engineer the aha moment into the first 3 seconds using non-obvious platform mechanics

Jobs-to-Be-Done Agent Mapping

Bring order to AI chaos by listing every stakeholder's jobs-to-be-done, then mapping agents onto them.

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

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

Just-in-Time Planning

Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

KPI + Narrative: The Two-Part Turnaround Drumbeat

Pair one north-star KPI with one relentlessly repeated narrative to reset how a company works.

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

Latent Demand Detection

Find product ideas where people already fight through a distorted process to get a value

Latent Demand Mining

Watch for people jumping through hoops to make your product do something, then make that the smooth path.

Latent Demand Product Discovery

Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

Live and breathe your product as a real user (or meet customers) and trust the anecdote over the dashboard.

Mindset5 steps

Leader Emulators

Build runnable models of the sharpest people you've worked with, then boot the right one when you're stuck.

Lean Into Your Spike

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

Leverage Your Leaders

Stop proving you can do it alone — make it cheap for your manager to unblock you.

Little Hands Growth Hiring

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

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

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

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

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

Make the Other Mistake (Prompting for Brutal Feedback)

To get honest AI critique, over-correct toward brutal — the model won't actually overshoot.

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

Manager-as-IC Onboarding

New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.

Manager Visibility via an Always-On Agent

Enlist a standing AI session across all repos and channels to stay on top of 8x throughput and drive conversations.

Managing Complex Change

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

Manufacture the Story You Belong In

When you're too boring to cover directly, create the news, trend, or data others must cover — and live inside it.

Markets as Currents, Not Bodies of Water

Chase the change dynamic pulling the market, not the size of the market

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

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

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

Model Maximalism

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

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.

Onboarding as a Retention Lever

Treat onboarding as a habit-and-retention engine, not a conversion funnel — and accept lower conversion to weed out the wrong users.

Opinionated Defaults for Onboarding

Encode what you've learned works into product defaults — make the right choice easy and the wrong choice hard, without removing choice.

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.

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Organizational Kayfabe

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

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Leadership2 steps

Painter, Architect, Surgeon Hiring Archetypes

Match your growth hire to your stage — a versatile painter, a structural architect, or a precision surgeon.

Pattern-Breaking Inside a Big Company

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

Payback-First Channel Measurement

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

Pitch the Freelancer, Not the Editor

The hungriest, most reachable writer at an outlet is usually the freelancer — target them, not the busy staff editor.

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.

PMF for Candidates (People, Mission, Financials)

Evaluate a company you might join like an investor evaluates a deal — across People, Mission, and Financials.

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.

Portfolio Hiring: Range Over Style

Hire designers on portfolio alone; wide range proves a designer, a signature style reveals an artist.

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

Pre-Sell Before You Build

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

Press as a Trophy, Not a Megaphone

The value of coverage is often the 'as seen in' validation you deploy yourself — not the readership.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

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

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

Match UI confidence to data quality, be transparent about sources, and design virtuous data cycles.

Problem-Solving Story Over Success Story

Editors reject polished wins — lead with the challenge you faced and how you got through it.

Product-Led SEO (Jobs-to-be-Done, End-to-End)

Map real user jobs to search queries and follow the experience all the way to the magic moment

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

Putting On the Coat of the Job

Run the spreadsheet, then tear it up — and simulate a Tuesday in the job instead.

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.

Mindset5 steps

Reading Your Own Critics

Read every criticism carefully, believe none of it blindly — you know more than the critics do.

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Reason About It Like a Human

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

Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)

When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

Reverse-Engineer the Publication's Mission

Editors serve their audience, not you — decode who each outlet serves, then fit your story to that mission.

Sacred Cows as Your Roadmap

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

Schedule Syncing (Managing Your Manager)

Never say no to your boss — show your timeboxed calendar and ask them to help you prioritize.

Sell-Ready From Day One

Acquisitions rarely just happen — seed acquirer relationships early, then run the sale like a fundraise.

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

Ship-Fast Operating Model

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

Signals and Nudges for Choice Under Abundance

When every result is plausible, confidence beats relevance — surface glanceable signals, not more inventory.

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Skeleton Before the Makeup

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

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

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

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

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

Software Is Not a Moat

Any feature you ship can be cloned; build ecosystems, platforms, and hardware that can't be copied.

Spec-as-What-Good-Looks-Like Verification

Check your definition of good into the repo so AI code review can automatically validate work against it.

Stamina as the Kill Signal

Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

Stated vs Revealed Preferences: Holding Conviction Through User Outrage

When users scream and keep refreshing, believe the behaviour — then debug details, not vision.

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

Steering AI to a Non-Obvious Strategy

AI gives predictable strategy when asked lazily — enumerate every input first, then make it argue back

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

Innovation6 steps

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

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

Stretch With an Anchor

Take the role that will hurt you into growth — but only if one or two things in it are already in your wheelhouse.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

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

Supply-First Marketplace Building

Marketplaces aren't chicken-and-egg — they're two-sided, and you always start with supply.

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

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

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

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

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

The 10-Minute Rule (Surfing the Urge)

Beat any urge to get distracted by waiting ten minutes and riding the emotion until it subsides.

The 10-to-1 Input/Output Kill Test

When you pour 10 units of effort in for 1 unit of output, the project has run its course.

The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers

A definition of what the PM job actually is — facilitation, execution, and impact — not a career ladder.

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

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

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 Adjacent-Precedent De-Risk Pitch

Win leadership buy-in for a big AI bet by anchoring it to a past bet that already worked.

The Age-Invitation Curve

Target the age band still adding social connections, or plan to buy every user with ads

The AI PM Upskilling Path

Learn the fundamentals, shadow a research scientist an hour a week, and build one model end to end.

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 Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

The Asynchronous Scaffolding Test

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

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

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

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

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

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

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

The Cheap-Ad Funnel Diagnostic

Use a small paid ad to isolate whether your packaging or your content is the problem, via click-through vs subscribe.

The Clip-Distribution Flywheel

Podcasts have no built-in discovery engine — borrow one by seeding high-quality clips on TikTok, YouTube, and Reels.

The Coaching Model (Coaches, Not Managers)

Replace managers with same-specialty coaches whose only job is your skills and your next level

Strategy6 steps

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.

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 Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

The Complementary-Axis PM Skill Development Framework

Level up (or transition into) PM by picking the skill axis opposite your background, then strategy

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

Influence5 steps

The Consultative Interview Flip (Sell the Vacation)

Run the interview like an enterprise sale so there is no competition when the offer comes

Sales4 steps

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

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

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The Creator Growth Triad

Consistency, collaboration, and curator association — the three levers that have made creators since 2010.

The Curator Leader (Not the Visionary)

The best product leaders don't own the ideas — they build environments where great ideas bubble up and get chosen

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

The Delight-First MVP Test

Don't launch until the product sparks joy in your first users, because they are your only growth channel

The Dinner-Table Topic Test

Find your podcast's niche by noticing what makes people lean in at dinner — then force the decision with a deadline.

The Dinosaur Brain Product Review

Executives hold three facts. Bring a recommendation, not a catalogue — and leave with principles, not answers.

The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

Treat a product roadmap like an investment portfolio, balanced across three axes of risk and intent.

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

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

The Effort Metric (Measure Attention, Not Completion)

Track 'did I do what I said for as long as I said without distraction' instead of whether you finished.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Eye of Sauron: Calibrating Leader Depth

Go pixel-deep only on what hinges success — and tell people exactly where their space begins.

The Fascinating Reframe

Convert the visceral urge to be right into a question that harvests the information you're missing.

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

Fix every piece of user feedback within minutes so people feel heard and give you even more.

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

The Five-Legged Stool

Product, eng, design, insights, and marketing as one leadership team — with the PM accountable, not king.

The Five PM Archetypes

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

The Forge and the Dam

Two career positions compound: the company's hottest fire, or the critical thing nobody watches.

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

The Four Challenges of AI Product Management

Uncertainty, pivots, data scarcity and a broken promo path — the four taxes of the AI PM role.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

The Framework Limit Test

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

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The Going Direct Playbook

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

The 'Going Home' Pivot

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

The Growth Competency Model

Four competency buckets for hiring, evaluating, and balancing a growth team without chasing a unicorn.

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

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

The Hierarchy of Engagement

Three stacked levels — core action, accruing benefits, self-perpetuation — that decide if a consumer product endures

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Hierarchy of Marketplaces

Focus, tip, dominate — the only sequence that produces a marketplace worth owning

The Hill Climb

Name whether you're optimising a local hill or crossing the valley to a bigger mountain — then price the valley.

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

The Human Customized Pitch Email

A short, human, story-first email that proves it was written for this one person — not a mass blast.

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

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

The Indistractable Model

The four-step system for controlling your attention: master triggers, make time, hack back, and pre-commit.

The Indistractable Workplace (Three Traits)

Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction — fix it with psychological safety, a forum, and leaders who model it.

The Inflection Stress Test

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

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

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

The Launch Momentum Playbook

Podcast charts reward subscriber velocity, not downloads — stockpile episodes, spike the launch, then bank the rank.

The Loonshots Two-Structure Organization

Run a big rigorous org and a tiny flat innovation team side by side; the leader's job is the bridge.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.

The Model Launch Bar

With probabilistic products, the PM — not the scientist — decides what accuracy is good enough to ship.

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.

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 Pilot Program for De-Risking Launches

Build a diverse champion network of real customers to test new features in the wild before you ever launch.

The Pod + Product Staff Team Model

Replace the 13-person specialist team with a 6-person generalist pod plus one summoned specialist

The Press-as-Fundraising Filter

Only pursue press when you can name a specific business job it will do — same discipline as raising money.

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

The Provenance Gate: Scaling Supply Without Diluting the Brand

Let sellers scale by outsourcing production — but only to a partner whose process they actually know.

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

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 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.

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

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

Innovation6 steps

The Sean Ellis Scale Gate

Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)

A regular PM ships the right product; an AI PM solves the right problem.

The Should-You-Start Reality Test

Before launching a podcast, prove to yourself you'd do it for free forever — then commit to a finite season.

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

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

Peak Performance5 steps

The Six-Month Passion Test

Don't trust your identity about what you'll love — give the unfamiliar job six months, then judge.

The Soft Pushback

The one-line, zero-aggression ask that recovers ~20% of comp almost every time

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

Leadership7 steps

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

The Three Elements of a Breakthrough Idea

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

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

The Three Mindset Shifts That Stall or Restart PM Growth

Fix the three stories — control, change, and self-image — that quietly stall product careers

The Three Pacts (Pre-Commitment Firewall)

Lock in your intentions ahead of time with an effort pact, a price pact, or an identity pact.

The Three-Part AI Product Utility Equation

A useful AI product needs model intelligence, context/memory, and application/UI to all converge.

The Three Pattern-Breaking Actions

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

The Three-Pillar AI Integration Model

Build where you have data advantage, partner for commodities, and open an app ecosystem for the rest

The Three-Slide Believer Pitch

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

The Three Tenets of PM Stakeholder Collaboration

A mantra for working with stakeholders: surface issues, not yourself; drive decisions, don't hoard them

The Three-Trait Hire Plus Two AI-Era Premiums

Grit, quick-learning, self-awareness get you hired anywhere — curiosity and putting yourself out there keep you relevant

The Three Ws of PM Career Growth

Rise faster by performing on all three axes: what you produce, what you bring, and how you operate

The Tippability Test

Check supply fragmentation, supply heterogeneity and incumbent competition before you fund a marketplace

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Traffic Light Keyword System

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

The Transaction Tiebreaker for Marketplace Prioritization

Stop arguing supply vs demand — make the transaction itself the thing every team is accountable to.

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

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

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-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

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

The U-Curve of Founder Involvement

Involve a product-minded founder heavily at the start and end of a project, but give the team space to run in the middle.

The Weekly Focus Ritual

Post what you're focused on this week, and whether last week's focus actually landed.

The Weekly Marketable Feature

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

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

Three Ways to Find Marketplace Whitespace

Unbundle a low-NPS segment, own an ignored niche, or change the atomic unit of supply

Timeboxing Your Values (Make Time for Traction)

Replace the to-do list with a weekly timeboxed calendar built from your values across three life domains.

Tipping Loops: Growth Loops and Happiness Loops

Two symbiotic loop types — one grows the marketplace, one keeps it happy as it grows

Toddler Soccer Goal Detangling

Goal every team on the same output metric and they swarm the ball. Detangle the customer journey into lanes.

Finance3 steps

Token Budgets as a Trust-Proportional Resource

Kill the token-spend leaderboard; cap AI spend like any resource, sized to trust in someone's ROI judgment

Top-Down / Bottoms-Up Core Action Analysis

Cross two analyses — return-propensity ranking and product purpose — to find the one action worth optimising

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Treat Your Course Like a Product

Hypothesise the audience, interview them, iterate the ICP, and run three weeks — not one.

Under-Resource to Force Automation

Deliberately under-staff projects and hand out unlimited tokens so people are forced to automate with AI.

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

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.

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

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

Viral Hoax Counter-Attack

When a hoax threatens your app, treat it as a growth problem and out-viral it on every vector

Vision-Strategy-Execution Split (and the Controversy Test)

Vision is the destination, strategy is an opinionated path — and a real strategy must be disagreeable

Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity

Great ideas come from many ideas; build a high-velocity, no-gate, ego-free making-and-critique culture.

When-It-Leaks Communications Pre-Mortem

At scale you can't test quietly — decide the message before you even know you want to launch

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.