Maven

Adaptive Evaluation Over Static Benchmarks

Measure AI robustness with attackers that learn, not with a frozen dataset of yesterday's attacks

Answer the Question Behind the Question

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

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

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

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

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

Async Priority Codes for Small Teams

Tag every Slack message with a response-window code so nobody has to monitor the channel.

Brand Personality via Five Dimensions

Spike in two of five personality dimensions, then write five 'we are X but not Y' attributes with built-in tension

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

Two gates block senior promotion: can you do the job, and does the job exist.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Burnout vs Depression Self-Diagnosis

Tell exhaustion apart from depression by checking whether the flatness spreads beyond work.

Leadership6 steps

Buying Life One Hour at a Time (Public Failure Recovery)

Own the failure, buy trust back one hour at a time, then get face-to-face.

CaMeL Permission Pre-Restriction

Grant an agent only the permissions its stated task needs, decided before it runs

CEDAF Delegation Framework

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

Context Loading (Additional Information)

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

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Strategy6 steps

Customer Job Prioritization Criteria

Five tests for choosing which customer job to lead with when research surfaces more than one.

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.

Define What Problem Matters

The single highest-leverage PM skill: get crystal clear on which problem you're solving, first

Diagnose Agent Failure as Structural, Not Stupidity

When an agent does the wrong thing, check its context, tools, and scope — not its intelligence.

Dictate-and-Template AI Story Scaling

Prime ChatGPT with your team's exact template, then dictate context naturally to generate an org's worth of specs.

Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

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

Draft-First LLM Augmentation

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

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

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

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

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

Innovation6 steps

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

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

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

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

Influence5 steps

Eyes Light Up

Track the moments faces change, then cut everything that doesn't produce them.

Fake the AI Before You Build It

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

Mindset4 steps

False Positive Risk and the Replication Protocol

A p<0.05 win can be 26% likely false when idea success rates are low — replicate borderline results

Few-Shot Prompting

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

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.

Hiring as Marketing, Sales and Product

Run recruiting like a business funnel — brand, discovery call, and an iterative role spec

Incremental OFAT Over Big-Bang Redesign

Decompose big redesigns into one-factor-at-a-time tested steps because ~80% of ideas fail

Institutional Memory of Experiments

Capture wins, losses, and surprises so the org keeps learning instead of relaunching old ideas

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

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

Mindset5 steps

Ladder vs Map

Choose career moves by what makes an interesting life, not by what climbs the next rung

Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

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

Marketing3 steps

Make the End User Feel Like a Winner

Design agents that don't just do tasks — they make the user look good and feel like a winner.

Strategy5 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

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

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

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

Managing Up by Calibrated Context

Proactively give your boss exactly enough context to weigh in — scaled to reversibility.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

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

Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

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

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

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

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

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

Morale Is Made of Progress

In a downturn, no speech and no bonus works — only visible shipping keeps a team alive

Nothing Is Above Them, In The Details, They Adapt

The three traits Shah observed in Bezos, Chesky and Sacks — humility, craft, and adaptation

One Agent Per Lane

Beat context overload by running many narrow, purpose-built agents instead of one do-everything agent.

Product Positioning with the Bar Test

Define audience via concentric circles, distill into the classic four-part statement, then validate it out loud at a bar

Product Scrapbooking

Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.

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

PSHE Career Growth Framework

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

Pull the Thread on New Tools

Judge a new AI tool by where it'll be in a week or a month, not where it is on day one.

Self-Mastery5 steps

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

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

Ramble-Mode Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent by voice-rambling everything you need, not by wiring up APIs and structured fields.

Communication5 steps

Recommendation-First Writing

Lead with the call, label the context, and never hide a point of view inside a neutral-looking pros-and-cons list.

Influence5 steps

Reframe, Don't Push Back

Win a disagreement with your CEO by finding the goal you already share, then renaming the problem

Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

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

Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM) Validity Check

Verify your traffic split matches its design before trusting any experiment result

Productivity5 steps

Saying No by Trading Off

Never say no. Say yes, name what it displaces, and hand the prioritisation back.

Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable

Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.

Self-Criticism Loop

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

Signposting

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

Marketing3 steps

Sizing and Time-Boxing a Channel Experiment

How much team and time to commit to a new channel, and what signal to look for before killing it.

Solve the Problem Behind the Problem

When an agent can't do a task, escalate API-to-browser, then reframe to the underlying need it can solve.

Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

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

Start Right Before You Get Eaten by the Bear

Open your story one beat before the juicy part — everything earlier is backstory scope creep.

Startup Launch PR Playbook

Fix your story, set realistic exclusive expectations, hang news on a bigger hook, and mine local press

Strategy Not Self-Expression

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

Street-Smart Decision-Making

Give the customer's perception as much weight as your logic — model the narrative, not just the numbers.

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

Be an expert, book two hours a month, and fuse two things that already exist.

The 200K-User Experimentation Readiness Rule

Below ~200K users detect only big effects; use the wait to build platform and culture

Influence4 steps

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 Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

The AI Deployment Risk Triage

Classify any AI deployment into one of three risk tiers before spending a dollar on defense

Self-Mastery5 steps

The AI PM Upskilling Path

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

Strategy5 steps

The AI Security Vendor Due-Diligence Test

Five questions that expose whether an AI guardrail vendor is selling real protection or theater

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

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

Mindset3 steps

The Angry-God Containment Lens

Assume the AI is a malicious agent trying to hurt you, then engineer so it structurally can't

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

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

The Best-Customer Research Survey

Survey only recent, happy, paying customers, with questions that reconstruct their decision.

The Content Hierarchy of BS

Rank formats by how much they let you get away with — then hold yourself to the top of the pyramid.

The Customer-Led Growth Loop

Understand best customers, map their value journey, measure it, fix what's misaligned.

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 Growth CMO Operating Model

Run marketing like agile product development — data-driven, iterative, and married to product.

The Hire-an-Agent Onboarding Model

Set up an AI agent exactly like you'd onboard a human EA: own identity, delegated access, earned trust.

Influence3 steps

The IC Compensation Anchor

Believe your IC worth, then neutralize the 'grow into management' pay dodge by naming your non-management intent up front.

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

Win interviews on presence and enthusiasm first, then on impact — never on how hard you worked.

The Magic Loop

A five-step, repeatable loop that converts helping your manager into leverage for your own goals.

The Messaging Guide That Rolls Up to the Job

A 5-7 page guardrail doc: value prop, competitive edge, ranked emotional and functional benefits.

The Model Launch Bar

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

The Nevertheless Close

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

The Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC)

Define one success metric with countervailing guardrails that predicts long-term lifetime value

Innovation8 steps

The PRFAQ Working Backwards Document

Write the launch press release before you build, so every word forces a real decision

The Purpose Statement (We Exist To)

Distill why you exist into one 10-year 'we exist to' sentence that makes people root for you

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

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

The Shiny Object Trap (Problem-First AI)

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

Marketing6 steps

The Six-Milestone Customer Journey Map

Struggle, evaluation, growth — six value milestones that replace the funnel as your growth model.

The Startup Naming Process

Position first, brief the intent, brainstorm hundreds of bad names, then score survivors against seven criteria

The State Change Method

Punctuate every monologue with something that shakes the audience awake, every 3-5 minutes.

Communication5 steps

The Super Specific How

Cut the what and the why; spend your word count on the how nobody else will teach.

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Swipe File

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

The Three B's of Behavior Change

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

The Two Departments That Matter Test

Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.

Marketing3 steps

Three-Ingredient Emerging Channel Evaluation Framework

Decide whether a hot new acquisition channel is worth your time using three lenses before you invest.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Treat Your Course Like a Product

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

Mindset4 steps

Twyman's Law: Investigate the Too-Good-to-Be-True Result

Any surprising or extreme experiment result is probably wrong until you've hunted for the flaw

Marketing6 steps

Value-Moment KPIs and the Win-Back Loop

Tie each milestone to a compound usage metric, then use it to catch people when they fall.