Mixpanel

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

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

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

Brainstorm high-value actions, correlate them with conversion and retention, then experiment to prove causation

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

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

Productivity5 steps

Appetite Bracketing

Set a time budget, then ask what you'd do with more and less — the bracket reveals the efficient frontier.

Artificial Density Testing

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

Innovation3 steps

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

Stand in the future you designed and look back — don't forecast forward from today's constraints.

Become a Value-Added Advisor with Cross-Section Data

Turn the industry data only you can see into exclusive insight that keeps customers from churning.

Influence5 steps

Behavioral Pricing: Compromise, Decoy and Framing

Raise revenue 30%+ by reframing tiers and framing prices — without touching the product.

Bezos's Three Tests for a New Bet

Big idea, right owner, legitimate plan — an idea needs all three or it dies

Build AND Buy

Reframe build-vs-buy as build-and-buy: buy 90% off the shelf, build the 10% that differentiates.

Building the PLG Team and Org

Start with a growth PM and an analyst, then formalize into a cross-functional PLG org with three growth heads

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

Choose a centralized CDP stack or a warehouse-plus-reverse-ETL stack based on your engineering resources.

Change the Rules of the Game

When the game is rigged against you, don't optimize — invent a new model.

Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

When you're bleeding to competitors, throw out the plan and build the churn list, sorted by ARR.

Community of Practice as People Development

Build and evaluate a product community that scales growth cheaper than courses or coaches

Conditional-Layer Validation

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

Conservative Plan with Milestone Unlocks

Plan for the downside, then let pre-agreed milestones unlock the budget to accelerate.

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

Damming the Demand

Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

Free the features that create the aha moment; monetize the features whose value only emerges at scale.

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

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

De-Risking the High-Stakes Meeting

Turn important meetings from big-reveal gambles into pre-worked, question-proof conversations.

Innovation7 steps

Design for the Most Complex Use Case First

Architect for the hardest customer you'll ever have, then choose what to ship first.

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.

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

Before rejecting an idea, sincerely attempt to make it work — then say no with receipts.

Editorial SEO Operating Model

Split the work: SEO manager picks topics and outlines, a domain-expert writer writes, then analyze.

Enterprise Price-Ceiling Discovery

Keep asking for more until deals break; losing 20-30% to price is how you find the ceiling.

Expected-Conversions Prioritization

Rank topics by search volume x topical authority x conversion intent, not by volume alone.

Experiment at 30: Trend Over Precision

You can run meaningful experiments with as few as 30 users — more data buys precision, not different trends.

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

Familiarity-Anchor Copy for New Concepts

When users land but don't act, the product isn't wrong — anchor unfamiliar concepts to something they already know.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

Choose your first PLG investment among acquisition, activation, conversion, and retention by fit and leverage

Frame, Name, Claim the Problem (Languaging & Point of View)

Use new language to reframe a problem so people see it differently and want a new solution.

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

Instrument first and last UTMs on day one so you can move to multi-touch attribution without waiting.

Leadership6 steps

Go and See: Walking All the Way to Ground

Product leaders become the world's foremost expert in their domain by going to the source themselves.

Growing Into Public Speaking

Start with tiny friendly audiences, grow the room, and mine feedback from strangers and peers

Growth-as-Cleanup-Crew Team Design

Point your first growth hire at known gaps, don't ask them to discover strategy from scratch.

Influence4 steps

Guild Nights

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

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

Hire two gritty early-stage sellers from an analogous company, not a professionally rich VP.

How You Charge Beats How Much: Pricing-Model Design

Pick the monetization model, then the price metric, then the structure — the number comes last.

Hypothesis-Driven SEO

Generate hypotheses by analyzing sites (and asking their SEO managers), then test to validate.

Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List

A short force-ranked list every team must absorb — defined by what it excludes.

Incremental OFAT Over Big-Bang Redesign

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

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

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

Institutional Memory of Experiments

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

Internal Link Spread Optimization

Most sites starve their own pages of internal links; fixing spread is SEO's biggest quick win.

Strategy7 steps

International Market Entry Stack Rank

Assume you'll need everywhere, order by demand, then re-rank by build cost, strategic value, and long poles.

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

Build product-led sales as an evolution, not a revolution: intuition, then regression, then platforms.

Inverted Time-to-Value

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

Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test

Fund new bets from the core's profits — never by moving engineers off the core.

Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments

Fund performance, UX and velocity work by making the invisible measurable and the downside of neglect concrete.

Kindle and Fire Growth Strategies

Non-scalable kindle hacks exist only to unlock the scalable fire strategy worth hiring for.

Latent Demand Detection

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

Leaders, Fillers and Killers

Sort every feature into leader, filler or killer to configure packages that unlock segments.

Lightning Strike Go-to-Market (Supers, POV & Word of Mouth)

Concentrate firepower on super consumers with a reframing POV to ignite word of mouth.

Match Price to Value with a Value Metric

Pick the unit of value your customer gets, then charge against it so revenue scales as usage grows.

Measurements vs. Insights Instrumentation

A measurement is an observed fact; an insight answers 'why' and changes what you do — instrument for the latter.

Minimum Viable Experiment + The Dogfood Gate

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

Leadership3 steps

Move Your Best Closers to Customer Success

In a downturn, patch the leaky bucket — put your top reps on keeping the customers you already have.

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

Perceived Simplicity

Keep advanced power in the product but discoverable only to those who go looking — invisible to everyone else.

Physics-Then-Loops Growth Modeling

Map the fixed physics of your business first, then find the one underused lever inside them to change.

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

Giving away a free product only pays off if you capture and analyze its usage data

PQA Signal Detection

Find the exact usage signals that mean 'engage sales now' using users, volume, velocity, and behavior.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Pre-Sell Before You Build

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

Price Before Product: The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation

Have the pricing conversation months before launch and use it to prioritize what you build.

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

Treat pricing as a living system revisited every 6-12 months, not a set-and-forget decision.

Productivity3 steps

Problem-People-System (PPS)

Diagnose a systems request by problem and people first, never jump straight to the tool.

Product Accountability for Pipeline

Make product — not marketing — own PQA pipeline, with leaders on revenue and PMs on the KPIs that feed it.

Productize to Segments (the 'You Can Act Differently' Test)

Segments are defined by needs and willingness to pay — and only count if you can act differently on them.

Product-Led SEO

Treat SEO as a product you build for the search user, not content you optimize for a keyword.

Product Scrapbooking

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

Programmatic vs Editorial Decision Rule

Go programmatic only where scale meets a real use case — otherwise you scale nothing.

Sales4 steps

Retention-Aligned Sales Compensation

Pay reps for customers who stay, renew, and expand — not just for the logo they closed.

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

Retain by baking high-frequency habits into the product, then convert steady usage into expansion revenue

Retention Benchmark Ladder

Concrete week-one cohort retention floors: ~80% friends/family, 60% free at scale, 20-30% paid.

RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort

Score reach and impact first; sit with the innovative bets before letting C and E kill them.

Sample Ratio Mismatch (SRM) Validity Check

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

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.

SEO Conversion-Metric Rigor

Rankings and traffic are not results. Hold SEO to the same efficiency standard as paid.

SEO Readiness Assessment

Two questions decide if SEO is worth investing in: is the market big, and do you have authority?

SERP Reverse-Engineering

To learn what page to build, read what Google already ranks for your target keywords.

Server-Side Events as the Default

Track events from your servers, not your clients — logs with a user ID are already events.

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.

Story as a Design Tool

Draft, test, and package a leadership story across three lengths and three formats

Street-Smart Decision-Making

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

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

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

Influence4 steps

Teach, Don't Pitch: The Buyer-Research Cold Open

Do research so good the buyer can't ignore it — give insight, not a sales pitch.

The 200K-User Experimentation Readiness Rule

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

The Acceptable / Expensive / Prohibitively Expensive Price Ladder

Three questions that reveal both a price range and the psychological cliffs you must hide behind.

The Age-Invitation Curve

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

Mindset5 steps

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

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

Leadership6 steps

The Assumption-Break PM Interview

Give a case study too big to solve, break one assumption, and watch whether they rattle off the implications.

The Better Trap

A 'better' copy of an existing solution to a well-understood problem almost always fails.

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

The Break-Even Indifference Test

Offer economically identical pricing models and see which one people irrationally prefer.

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

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

The Career-Stage PM Skill Stack

Master three skills as a junior PM, three different ones as a senior — not all twelve at once

The Cascading Metrics Review

One hour a week of public metric probing that forces every leader to actually know their business

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

Sales5 steps

The Consultant With a Predilection

Be a consultant who favours one solution: yours. Disqualify hard, let discovery persuade.

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

Stand up a pricing committee, mine demand and willingness-to-pay with structured surveys, then set price.

Leadership7 steps

The Decision Tempo System

Never leave a decision in the room: decide now, pull in whoever is missing, and let deadlines actually bite.

The Design-Led Architecture Stream

Give design a protected block to define the product's building blocks — or it will smuggle scope in at the end.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

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

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

The Downturn Pricing Playbook (Never Drop the Price)

Three moves that protect price integrity in a recession: de-feature, non-pricing actions, change the model.

The Five Ingredients of Coaching Product People

A five-step loop for developing the product managers who report to you

The Five PLG Readiness Components

The five things a product must have before a product-led motion can work

Productivity5 steps

The Four Levers of Velocity at Scale

Small missions, a real platform, leaders in the trenches, and a team you keep recalibrating.

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 Full PLG Funnel Audit

Walk your own funnel as a confused buyer, then overlay the data to find your highest-leverage fix

The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews

AI answers eat top-of-funnel search. Move your SEO to where intent and conversion live.

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

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

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.

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

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

Entrepreneurship8 steps

The Internal Founder Pod

One entrepreneurial engineer, one designer, a platform apprenticeship, and a new product line in 6-9 months.

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

Judge a new seller each month on the indicator due that month, not on bookings.

Communication6 steps

The Operator's Manual (Answer First)

Answer the question, then explain — or shut up. The tactical checklist for PM communication

The Overall Evaluation Criterion (OEC)

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

Influence3 steps

The Panini Effect

Show your product line as an unfinished puzzle and attach rates jump from 20% to 40-50%.

The Pantry Test

If the idea starts with the ingredients you already have, you are not working backwards

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

The three infrastructure layers plus per-funnel-stage tools every PLG motion needs

Leadership3 steps

The PM Wheel

An eight-bucket self-assessment for locating a product manager's strengths and gaps

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

Convert self-serve usage into large enterprise contracts by bridging individual, team, and enterprise value.

The Product People Spectrum: Innovators to Executors

Great product careers get filtered at strategy — deliberately move executors toward the strategic middle.

Sales5 steps

The Sales Motion as Source Code

Treat the pitch like a codebase: run cohorts of 10, patch the bug the prospect found, redeploy.

Sales5 steps

The Second-Date Funnel

Win rate is a lagging indicator. Manage the meeting-to-meeting conversions like dates.

Sales6 steps

The Selling While Loop

Sell it yourself until it reliably runs on your local, then package it and ship it to other brains.

The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test

SEO is not free. Price it fully, then compare it against every other growth channel.

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 Story Chapters Framework for Executive Communication

Find the last obvious point for your audience, then build from there — skip neither the setup nor the basics.

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 Lead-Attribution Channels (PQA / PQL / MQL)

Route leads by whether usage and a buyer exist, because each channel has different conversion rates and playbooks.

The Three Pillars of Self-Serve Monetization

Lift free-to-paid conversion by fixing awareness first, then checkout friction, then the model itself.

The Three Types of SEO

Programmatic, editorial and technical SEO are different games; pick the one your queries reward.

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

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

The Two Departments That Matter Test

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

The Ungated Customer Feed

Pipe raw customer feedback into Slack with no gatekeeper — and let engineers email the customer directly.

Communication7 steps

The Unique Voice Test

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

The Wizard of Oz Validation Method

Validate a feature's value and conversion rate before building anything by faking the backend manually.

Leadership3 steps

The World-Class Proof Interview

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

The Written Screen Job Simulation

Send a shared doc of a dozen easy questions. Half the candidates disqualify themselves.

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

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

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

Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

Defer black-or-white judgments about decisions and people until the last responsible moment.

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

Screen martech candidates for curiosity, engineering scrappiness, and freedom from tool bias.

Top-Down TAM SEO Forecast

Forecast SEO from market size down, not from keyword-tool volumes up.

Topical Authority Adjacency

Rank by starting where you're already known, then expand into semantically adjacent topics.

Topics Over Keywords

Modern Google ranks one page for a cluster of 200-2,000 keywords; target the topic, not the keyword.

Treat the World as One Market

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

Influence5 steps

Trust as Currency

Trust is built by repeatedly setting and meeting expectations — and it buys you resources

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

Sales is a set of drills, not a birthright — practise your scales on baristas and bartenders.

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

Viral Hoax Counter-Attack

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

Sales4 steps

Warm-Intro-via-Text Closing Play

Host a customers-only event, harvest referrals, and convert them over text — not email.

When to Centralize a Martech Function

Use the 100-150 person threshold and b2c/b2b axis to decide when and where to own martech.

Working Backwards (Problem-First Product Development)

Start from the customer problem, not the ingredients you happen to have in the pantry