Microsoft Excel

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

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

Influence5 steps

Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play

Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence

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

Productivity4 steps

Chaos Buffers: Planning Around Users Who Don't Owe You Time

Every plan carries a backup and a scope-sized buffer, because your users' real job always wins

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

New leader's first move: earn trust before inflicting the change you were hired to make.

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Context Over Control: Debate Upstream of the Solution

Empower teams by aligning on goal, hypothesis, and data—never by prescribing the solution.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

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

Leadership7 steps

Culture as a Product

Every company builds two products: one for customers, one for the team. Culture is the second one.

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

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

Leadership6 steps

Debate, Decide, Unite: Systematic Decision-Making

Name the decider, list the factors, stack-rank them, then unite behind the call — with calories proportional to consequence.

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

Make robots soft, attentive, and telegraph intent before they move.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Designing Yourself Out of Your Weaknesses

Refuse to spend years becoming passably okay at something — negotiate the constraint at founding, in writing.

Strategy3 steps

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

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

Discover Pain by Watching, Not Asking

Find the real intensity of a problem by watching people work, because they can't self-report it

Marketing4 steps

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

When products in a category are basically interchangeable, an adequate product with superior distribution wins

Self-Mastery4 steps

Dive-In Career Strategy for a Platform Shift

Facing a disruptive technology, submerge yourself in it and aim to hold at least two of three career pillars

Engineers as Discovery Partners, Not Resources

Embed the tech lead in discovery so engineers own the why, not just the what

Self-Mastery4 steps

Equanimity as a Product Skill

Pause before reacting: manage your own reactions instead of trying to control the chaos

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.

Innovation5 steps

Fight for Simplicity: The Third-Order Cost of Complexity

Entropy always wins unless you fight it — price every feature at its dimensional cost, not its build cost.

Flash Tags: The Escalating Opinion Scale

Four hashtags that tell people exactly how much weight to put on your opinion.

Group Office Hours Accountability Loop

Peer accountability plus a two-week goal cadence that makes lonely founders execute

Productivity3 steps

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

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

Leadership6 steps

Little Hands Growth Hiring

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

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

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

Marketing4 steps

Market It in Their Words

Never invent positioning — put the exact words your reference customers used on the box

Productivity3 steps

Match the Medium to the Point

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

Communication6 steps

Mindful Communication: Converse in the Language of the Listener

Listening, not articulacy, is the core PM communication skill — and it has a method

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

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

Off-the-Shelf to Prove It, Custom to Ship It

Prototype with whatever works fastest; go custom only when KPIs demand it.

Payback-First Channel Measurement

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

Performance = Potential − Interference

Two levers only: raise the team's ceiling, or remove the weight sitting on top of it.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Pickup Games: Getting Reps Without a Coach

No good coach at work? Manufacture low-stakes arenas for collaborative problem solving

Practice Before the Promotion

Promote people to DO the job, never to learn it — coach the next role before the title arrives

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

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

Mindset4 steps

Presume Radical Uncertainty (The 1997 Lens)

Treat an emerging platform as if it were 1997 for the internet: assume most of it doesn't work and you can't yet name the winners

Price-Elasticity Three-Response Model

When a technology makes something cheaper, work out which of three demand responses your market will take

Productivity4 steps

Processing Over Memory: A Task System for the Overwhelmed Manager

Write everything down at the moment it's owed, groom into logical chunks, and free your head for thinking not remembering.

Product-Market Fit = Retention

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

Progress Cadence as the Success Signal

Judge a startup by whether each check-in has genuinely new progress, not by hype

Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case

Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.

Question-First Cheap Channel Playbook

Find where your buyers ask their questions, answer them honestly, and let the answer sell.

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

Sketch the ideal end-state journey, then work backwards and ship it in measurable pieces.

Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools

ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.

Innovation6 steps

Reference Customer Discovery

Build with a fixed number of real customers until they'll stake their reputation on your product

Strategy3 steps

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

Match robot form to the task; reserve humanoids for the long tail, not the line.

Skeleton Before the Makeup

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

Strategy3 steps

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

Rank every component by how catastrophic losing it is — then pre-buy the killers.

Task vs. Job Automation Test

Before predicting a role's automation, ask whether the automatable task IS the job or just one piece of it

Taste, Humility, Hutzpah: The Designer Hiring Lens

Hire for judgment, humility, and the courage to say 'not good enough' — tools and process you can teach.

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 Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

The Breaking News Dress Rehearsal

Script and run a fake crisis end-to-end to stress test your product and your people at once

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

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.

Innovation5 steps

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

Sales4 steps

The Early-Adopter Rejection Math

Reframe customer outreach: reach 10 to find 1, and indifference isn't rejection

The Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

Group effort, vision + alignment, an editor, and the courage to say 'almost, but no'.

The Four Phases of Focus

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

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

Sequence the work so hardware's un-updatable, one-shot nature can't sink you.

The Four Product Risks

Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Four P's: Potential, Probability, Passion, Prowess

Score any idea on four factors — and always compute potential before probability.

The Four-Touchpoint Stakeholder Intake System

Four standing rituals that turn chaotic user requests into a governed product intake pipeline

The Going Direct Playbook

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

The Gravity Model for Zero-to-One Products

Ship new products with tiny shielded teams, then let traction—not headcount—pull in resources.

Mindset5 steps

The Habit-Anchored Micro-Meditation

Attach full presence to something you already do daily instead of adding a new ritual

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

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

Innovation5 steps

The Levels of Quality Ladder

Rate every feature 1-5: works → error-free → usable → desirable → surprisingly great.

The Live Problem Interview

Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing

The Low-Maintenance Work-in-Progress Deck

One shared slide deck of screenshots, updated monthly, that kills redundant work and spreads patterns.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

Communication7 steps

The LPM Method: Engineering a High-Stakes Keynote

Decompose public speaking into subskills, then optimise humour with a measured laughs-per-minute score.

The N+1 Rule: Simplest Thing Until It Breaks

Start with the simplest possible policy, then prove by induction it still works at the next headcount.

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 Strategy Contract

A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.

Communication4 steps

The Trade-Off Menu: Turn a Velocity Demand Into Leverage

When leadership wants everything faster, hand them a menu of what you'll do and what you won't—and make them choose.

The Traffic Light Keyword System

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

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

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

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

Productivity3 steps

The "What's Holding You Back" Office Hour

Replace status updates with one question that surfaces the single true bottleneck

Mindset5 steps

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Think From First Principles by Writing

Close the laptop, write the question at the top of a blank page, and answer it before Googling anything.

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.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Value the Technical Co-Founder

Why engineering is the hard part, and how a non-technical founder should actually treat it

Value-Up-The-Stack Test

To find where the money accrues in a platform shift, test the infrastructure layer for network effects, differentiation, and pricing power

Productivity4 steps

Velocity Guardrails: Ship Freely Until the Metrics Go Red

Standardize a few quality metrics per team; below the line they ship anything, above it they fix before they ship.

Leadership7 steps

Walk the Store: The Essential Journeys Quality Program

Name your 15 critical user journeys, give each a cross-functional owner, and score them on a fixed cadence.

Marketing4 steps

Win the Early Majority with Simplicity

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

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

Treat every hardware build as one of a handful of irreversible compiles a year.

Zero-to-One Team Building

For brand-new categories, hire generalists, adjacent-domain experts, and AI-native new grads.

Zig While Others Zag: High-Conviction, Low-Consensus Bets

Pick a small number of contrarian bets, hold them for years, and build a heuristic that tells you when you have drifted.

Leadership3 steps

Zone Defense for Product Work

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