McKinsey &amp; Company

Audience Is the Hero, Presenter Is the Mentor

You are not the hero of your presentation — the audience is; your job is to be Obi-Wan, not Luke.

Leadership6 steps

Baseline, Train, Practice, Level-Set

Turn hundreds of legacy product owners into real PMs by letting people self-select out

Peak Performance3 steps

Build-With-The-Tools Assessment

Don't test people on doing work without AI — hand them the tools and score what they can build in an hour

Can They See What I'm Saying? (The Star Moment)

Make ideas visible — through a diagram, a drawn napkin, or one unforgettable star moment — so the whole room aligns on the same picture.

Leadership6 steps

Criticism Triage Under Public Controversy

Separate valid criticism from power-shift noise by going and being your own user.

Strategy3 steps

Elastic-Demand Career Bet

Invest in domains where making people 10x more productive increases demand rather than reducing it

Finance3 steps

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

Land enterprise deals at 75K-150K — a cheap land price poisons your expand.

Sales3 steps

First-Call Yes-or-No Qualification

On the first call it's yes or no, never maybe — a no is data that saves the relationship.

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

For the first enterprise rep, hire someone who can cosplay the founder — vision, not scripts.

Innovation6 steps

Human-in-the-Loop Algorithm Design

Decide explicitly what the algorithm owns, what the human owns, and how the handoff works.

Marketing3 steps

Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

Build a growing pool of aware, engaged leads — via freemium — and let them convert on their timing

Leadership5 steps

One Product Ladder (Kill the PO/PM Split)

Collapse product owner and product manager into a single APM → PM → Senior PM ladder

Innovation4 steps

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

Design partners guide the build — set the pricing frame up front and filter feedback 80/20.

Leadership3 steps

Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring

Be obsessively patient hiring the founding team; step on the gas the moment demand exceeds what you can handle

Strategy4 steps

Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework

You can't solve a problem directly — break it into ranked causes, then solve the biggest

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Pull-Based Product-Market Fit

Be stubborn on your thesis but open on its form — chase the customer who is surprisingly easy to sell, not the one you must force

Peak Performance3 steps

Rewiring Stage Fright (The Pre-Talk Ritual)

Treat nerves as fight-or-flight chemistry and deliberately reset your body and mental model before you walk on.

Innovation3 steps

RLAIF Reward Design

Have an expert define success criteria and a rubric once, then let AI reinforce the capability — more scalable than labeling examples

Sales4 steps

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

Sell leaders the opportunity to become a superhero, not a fix for a narrow problem.

Sales3 steps

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

Sell enterprises a service they already know how to buy, then migrate them to the product.

Strategy4 steps

Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

Fix the 25-40% of churn product teams ignore — payment failures, off-boarding, cancel flows

Influence5 steps

Take Your Own Shoes Off

Empathy fails at the removal step, not the entry step — drop your agenda before entering theirs.

Mindset6 steps

The Agile Industrial Complex Test

Before you adopt a methodology, ask how the people selling it make their money

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

Match funding to goal: bootstrap cash-flow businesses, fund only clear paths to $1B revenue

Strategy5 steps

The Cannonball / Lead Bullet Portfolio

Allocate growth energy between a few fundamental rebuilds and many small experiments — by product stage.

Leadership5 steps

The 'Can You See What Good Looks Like?' Staffing Test

If nobody in your org has done it before, no amount of training will produce it

Strategy6 steps

The Four-Pillar Product Operating Model

Build a product operating model on strategy, org design, product ops and incentives — not a dev framework

The Galvanizing Activation Metric

The activation number's job is organizational momentum, not statistical precision.

Strategy5 steps

The Marginal User Method

Find the user on the cusp of converting, then go watch the worst-case version of them.

The Most Charitable Interpretation

Hire for and enforce a norm of assuming good intent, and let the misfits leave

The Organ-Rejection Test for Innovation Teams

Three conditions that stop the core org from rejecting your new-bets team like a foreign body.

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Product Owner Escape Ladder

Five moves to climb out of the order-taker trap without quitting first

Finance4 steps

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

Stand up a pricing committee and do one small monetization thing every quarter, forever

The Slide Doc Spectrum (One Point, One Big Idea)

Match slide density to the medium — cinematic stage to circulated slide doc — while every slide makes one point serving one big idea.

Strategy3 steps

The SMB-or-Enterprise Binary (Mid-Market Doesn't Exist)

There is no mid-market — decide which of two distinct games you're playing and don't bleed them.

Leadership3 steps

The Tempo Framework

Align every team on what shipping cadence 'good' looks like, then close the gap

Leadership5 steps

The Torchbearer Five-Act Movement Structure

Lead change as a movement across five acts — Dream, Leap, Fight, Climb, Arrive — fueling the right emotion at each phase.

Communication5 steps

The Value-Framed Product Résumé

Rewrite every bullet from process to problem, decision, and metric moved

Finance3 steps

The Value Metric Pricing Model

Charge on a metric that scales with value so acquisition, retention, and expansion self-correct

Leadership3 steps

Three Tenets: Can-Do, High Standards, Intensity

The three cultural tenets Foody credits for the fastest revenue ascent in history

Sales4 steps

Tier-One Logo First

Chase the Walmarts and Nvidias first — the market leaders are your real early adopters.

Innovation3 steps

Value-Chain Eval

Before applying AI to your business, build a systematic test that measures how well it automates your core value chain

What Is / What Could Be (The Presentation Sparkline)

Alternate between current reality and a better future to create longing that moves an audience to act.