Mercury

Adjacent User Theory

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

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

Force all your work through your own product even when it's the wrong tool, so it becomes the right tool

AI at the Core vs AI at the Edge

Decide whether to sprinkle AI onto existing code or rebuild the workflow with the LLM as the core

Influence3 steps

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

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.

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-and-Bake: Ship the Same Feature Until the Model Catches Up

Prototype ambitious features now, let them sit, and re-release the same shape each time models leap

Influence4 steps

Build Champions Before the Offer

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

Onboard early users in small waves so each cohort surfaces new bugs instead of duplicating the last cohort's feedback.

Conditioned Response Interception

Spot the reflex, intercept it, choose differently: a 30-year narrative, rewritten daily

Communication4 steps

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

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

Customer Research as a Documentarian

Observe like a non-judgmental documentarian, find the pattern, then validate the truth with data

Deflect the Number Question

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

Marketing3 steps

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

The more crowded and mature a category, the more design and brand become the deciding differentiator.

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

The shorter the horizon, the more detail; keep long-range plans deliberately hazy to avoid false precision

Diagnose Agent Failure as Structural, Not Stupidity

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

Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

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

Mindset4 steps

Don't Stop Until You Reach the End

Distrust expert answers and drive every problem to ground-truth yourself

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.

Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference

Observe what customers do, not what they say — AI transcript-reading is not true customer insight

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.

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Fall in Love with the Problem

Start every venture with a validated problem, not a solution, so the problem becomes your North Star.

Mindset4 steps

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.

Float Down River (Surrender Over Summit)

Stop climbing mountains that only reveal more mountains: go mummy mode and follow the current

Leadership5 steps

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

The tell-tale signals that friction, not capability, is capping your team's speed

Strategy5 steps

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

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

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

High Agency, High Accountability

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

Hire an Organism of Strengths

Interview for three universal traits and compose a team of complementary strengths over hiring the most optimal individual stars

Hire Founders (Eyes Open to the Costs)

Recruit ex-founders for outsized output and truth-telling, budgeting for high attrition

Hire People Bigger Than Their Title

Build a small team of high-caliber people who each own more scope than their role, and screen for it with a paid work trial.

Hire the People That People Pick

Win great hires over months by adding value first, long before there's a role

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

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

Impact = Environment × Skills

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

Just-in-Time Planning

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

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

A production-looking prototype no longer means it's production-ready — say the stage out loud

Latent Demand Mining

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

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Lean Into Your Spike

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

Magic and Science Decision-Making

Replace A/B tests and metric goals with deep shared customer understanding, then decide by informed intuition.

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

Filter every opportunity by 'does this advance the main quest, and is it important now or later?'

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.

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.

Match the Medium to the Point

When implementation is cheap, the skill is choosing document vs prototype for the point you're making

Minimum Viable Experiment + The Dogfood Gate

Ship the cheapest version of an experiment — but use it yourself before you trust its null result

One Agent Per Lane

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

Opinionated Simplicity

Ship one compelling opinion instead of ten confusing options — you learn faster being wrong than being neutral

Opinionated Software: Good Defaults Over Flexibility

Ship the one best workflow as a strong default so users spend time on their work, not on configuring your tool.

Marketing7 steps

Optimize the Second Screen (Post-Click Leverage)

Everyone crowds the ad; the compounding wins sit on the page people land on after it

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

Passion-Project Learning (An Eval for Your Life)

Learn new tech by picking one passion project that forces you to touch everything you need to learn

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

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

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

Match the PM archetype you hire to the product's stage of maturity

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

Know whether your metric is a recipe or a lens — and never misuse a recipe

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

Front-load the architecture, fan out to agents, then step back and evaluate

Problems One and Two

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Fit as Segment Territory

Treat PMF not as a binary but as territory won segment by segment, and double down hard on whatever segment is pulling.

Product-Market Fit = Retention

There is one metric for product-market fit: do customers come back?

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.

Ramble-Mode Onboarding

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

Reflex Archaeology (Pen-and-Paper Truth Seeking)

List your most reactive moments, then ask why until it hurts or lands: every reflex has a root

Communication5 steps

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

Pick two or three metrics that speak the exact word your leaders keep repeating

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

Ship-Ugly-Then-Polish Craft Loop

Combine shipping fast with fixing fast: get rough builds in front of real users, reserve polish for general release.

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

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

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.

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.

Standing Up a Product Discipline From Scratch

Turn an implicit PM function into a real one by writing the ladder first, then wiring hiring to it

Startup-Within-a-Company Team Design

Build new things inside big companies with small, senior, trusted teams and manufactured discipline

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

Strategy Activation via Crossing the Chasm

Treat internal strategy rollout as an adoption curve — over-communicate the why and manage early adopters vs laggards

Innovation6 steps

Study Group

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

Mindset3 steps

Survival Before Thriving

Make asymmetrically positive bets and protect the enterprise — you must survive long enough for timing and insight to arrive

The 30-Day Keeper Test

Calendar every new hire 30 days out and ask: knowing what I know now, would I hire this person?

The Adaptation That Overshoots

The strategy that saved you as a child is the one wrecking your life as an adult

The AI-Fit Accuracy Test

Deploy AI where the human baseline is low-accuracy — not where it's already near-perfect and you need the last 2%

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.

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the failures between your highlights so setbacks read as moments, not verdicts

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

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

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

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

The Career S-Curve for Attracting Talent

Map where a candidate sits on the ambiguity-vs-scale S-curve, then sell them their next step

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

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

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

Peak Performance4 steps

The Core-Functions Red Alarm (Burnout Triage)

Sleep, diet, exercise, play, socialisation: when the fundamentals break, your body is the scoreboard

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

Communication4 steps

The Dance of 100 Nos — Fundraising Storytelling

Investors decide in seconds and 1% say yes — so lead with your strongest point and tell an emotional, detailed story.

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Differentiation Stack

Four ordered tests a product must pass to matter, not just exist

The Four Phases of Focus

Do one thing at a time — idea, PMF, then either growth or business model — and shift gears cleanly.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Four Steps of Deep Personal Transformation

Suffer, seek truth, self-compassion, compassion for others: the order real change follows

Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

A start-anywhere playbook to stand up a developer-experience initiative

Finance3 steps

The Gross-Margin Short-Circuit

Use high gross margin + healthy churn as a fast litmus test for whether a business is truly differentiated

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.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Inertia of Society (Why Transformation Stalls)

You traded individuality for acceptance before you could speak; reclaiming it is the fear

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Insight Test

Before founding anything, prove why YOU uniquely hold an insight others don't — and why you'll endure it for a decade

The Leakable Metric

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

Leadership5 steps

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

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

The Pod + Product Staff Team Model

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Therapist Speed-Dating: Safety, Intellect, Router

Pick for felt safety first, intellect second; the rest is implementation detail

Productivity5 steps

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 Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

Incubate new product lines as separate 'seed companies' with dedicated teams and adjacency-based selection

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Sharp Problem

Build for old, enduring needs re-imagined with new tech so the improvement is 3-10x undeniable

The Shipyard Team

Organize product work as a six-capability pod of controlled chaos with sensory 'tendrils' to customers

The Soft Pushback

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

The SPACE Framework

Pick balanced developer productivity metrics across five dimensions — never rely on one.

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

Productivity5 steps

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

Force a top-three, weight by frequency, and never ask four questions at once

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

Leadership5 steps

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

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

Communication7 steps

The Unique Voice Test

Ask of every line: could any other company have written this? If yes, rewrite it

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

The World-Class Proof Interview

Two questions: why here, and what are you world-class at — plus how do you know?

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Zero-CAC Consumer Subscription Engine

Mission, no paid ads, retention-as-value, and data rigor — why Duolingo survived where B2C subs die

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

Treat the World as One Market

Default to one global version; localize only where law or platform forces you to

Triangulate the Customer's Truth

Don't take what customers say literally — reconstruct their economics and incentives independently, then find the urgent one

Understand Users by Watching Failures in the Funnel

Watch real users, and interview the ones who failed in your funnel — they know what you need to fix.

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.

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

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

When-It-Leaks Communications Pre-Mortem

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

When to Hire Your First PM

Stay founder-as-PM until bottlenecks, hijacked eng/design, or new customer segments force the hire

Wide Aperture, Then Coalesce

Keep considering many ideas — including ones that look bad — and test cheap versions until the signals converge on one

Win the Early Majority with Simplicity

Market leaders are won in the change-averse early majority — and the only lever is simplicity.

Zone Defense for Product Work

Spread taste-makers out to cover the whole field instead of clustering on the same problem