Notion

2x Activation Energy for Change

A new bet must grow at a multiple of your baseline to matter—don't dribble it in.

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

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

Aha Moment Discovery via Correlation-Then-Experiment

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

AI Possibility-Space Mapping

Use AI to enumerate the full combinatorial space of a multi-dimensional decision and build intuition fast.

Alpha-Beta People and Process Design

Borrow finance's alpha/beta to decide where you want upside and where you want boring reliability.

Answer the Question Behind the Question

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

Appetite Bracketing

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

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

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

Peak Performance6 steps

Artifact Reverse-Engineering and Backstage Observation

Collect the best artifacts, reverse-engineer their questions, then go watch the sausage get made.

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

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

Innovation6 steps

Automated User Research Pipeline

Wire sales-call keywords to Slack to email to your calendar so customer interviews book themselves.

B2C2B: Horizontal Wedge to Enterprise

Win a billion-user consumer use case first, then let personal users carry the product into their workplace.

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

Staff each team from the gap, not from a fixed PM/EM/designer template

Marketing2 steps

Beautifully Simple Pricing

In your early days, price so a customer can repeat it back and it tells a value story.

Be Interested, Not Interesting

Play small talk like hacky sack: set the other person up to succeed and balance disclosure over time

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Be Someone's Favorite, Not Everyone's Okay

Aim to be a small group's absolute favorite rather than a large group's forgettable option — and measure it.

Best-Rep Email Cloning

Feed the agent your single best rep's best email, then let it AB-test variants—that's how AI beats your mid-pack.

Be The User Reset (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Zoom out and ask what the user hires your product for — then be that user and ask if you'd even buy what you made.

Binding-Receptor Theory of Product-Market Fit

Your market's demand is a fixed fact like a drug receptor — you find it, you can't market it into existence.

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

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

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Bridging-Based Agreement

Surface content only when people who normally disagree agree — that's the signal of truth.

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

Build AND Buy

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

Build for Where the Models Are Going

Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.

Build for Your Best User, Not Your Worst

In early product development, design for the user who gets it instantly, not the edge-case abuser

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

Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

Learn from execution, self-retrospect, deep-dive one skill gap at a time, and keep only what works for you.

Build Your Own Senior-Engineer Benchmark

Measure AI honestly by scoring new models against real human experts rewriting your actual broken work.

Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading

Read where the market sits in the eternal bundle/unbundle cycle to decide vertical vs horizontal.

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.

Category-Attribute Fit

Don't pick a market then decide how to win. Work out what wins there, and only pick markets where that's who you are.

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

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

CEDAF Delegation Framework

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

CEO-Led AI Adoption Playbook

The single predictor of AI adoption is whether the CEO uses it daily — then amplify your 10% early adopters

Championing Big Bets Inside a Company

To win support for audacious product bets, repeat the vision relentlessly, state your intent, and optimize for impact.

Champions at Scale: Manual-to-Machine Word-of-Mouth Engine

Over-invest by hand in early product champions, learn their patterns, then productize those patterns into scalable content.

Charter, Goals, Roadmap: The Three Documents

Every level of the org needs three docs — mission/strategy, goals, roadmap — written top-down

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

Don't hand AI one giant spec — specify a little, review a little, repeat in tight loops.

Strategy6 steps

Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

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

Codify Your Judgment into Prompts (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Turn every piece of feedback you give into a reusable prompt so you never say it twice

Cohort-and-Control Data Reading

Never trust pre/post dashboards — read behavior by cohort and judge changes by variant-vs-control so the macro can't fool you.

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

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

Comically-Narrow Bullseye Definition (Inclusion / Exclusion / Triggers)

Narrow your target to ~seven concrete attributes across three buckets so everyone agrees these people will say yes

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

Don't rebuild foundation models — train small specialty models that attack their weaknesses in speed, cost, and niche tasks.

Compounding Engineering

Spend a little effort now so each repeat of a task is cheaper than the last

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

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

Concierge Manual Onboarding

Hand-onboard every early user one-to-one to manufacture superfans and dodge premature self-service engineering

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

Context-First Agent Debugging

When a coding agent won't do what you want, treat it as a missing-context problem, not a model problem.

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

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

Curiosity Loops

Turn a hard decision into structured, contextual advice by asking the right people the right question.

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

Dare to Be Dull

Strive for connection over perfection to free up cognitive bandwidth when speaking spontaneously

Data-Driven Self-Story Rewriting

Debunk or validate the limiting stories you tell yourself by researching how people actually experience you.

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

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

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

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

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

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

Delete-First Lean Engineering

On a small team, deleting code beats writing it — audit for features whose maintenance cost exceeds their gain.

Deliberate Understaffing

You can't size a project right, so err toward too few people on purpose.

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

Peak Performance4 steps

Desensitization for Performance Fear

Neutralize public-speaking (or any) fear by exposing yourself in tiny, low-stakes, escalating doses

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

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

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.

Design in the Material

PMs and designers should code — not to ship, but to master the material and truly understand what they're designing.

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

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

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.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

Dogfood-Driven Realism

Be the end user, use your product intensely daily, and never ship anything that isn't useful to you.

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

Don't Be the Frog: The Learning Trajectory Test

Judge whether to stay in a job by the direction of your learning curve, not by inertia.

Do the Opposite

Study what everyone's doing not to copy it, but to find the 180 that stands out.

Drawing the Perimeter

The PM's job is to add constraints, not solutions — draw the box, then let engineers and designers fill it.

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Eating Your Vegetables: The 10-12 Exposure Rule

Do a hard, avoided skill 10-12 deliberate times before judging whether you actually dislike it.

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

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

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

Instead of creating a software category, make a job into a meaningful identity people will fight for.

Communication6 steps

Engineering Honest Feedback

People withhold feedback because it's risky — your job is to make it safe and rewarding.

Enterprise Price-Ceiling Discovery

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

Envision-the-Ending Goal Discovery

Surface hidden goals by vividly imagining the finished future first, then reverse-engineering the journey to it.

Eval-Driven Product Development

Design the test for your AI product alongside the product, then hill-climb the model against it.

Evals as Articulating Success

An eval is just a clear spec of ideal behavior — the shared language of AI product work

Explore and Exploit Career Strategy

Explore widely with a thesis early, then exploit a role for the specific learnings your next goal needs.

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

Fall-On-Your-Face Taste Calibration

Deliberately push AI past its limits in a safe environment to build a gut feel for what it can do.

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

Feedback and Escalations Are a Gift

Withholding feedback is the most selfish thing you can do — and escalations are a gift you chase to true root cause.

Find Sparring Partners, Not Mentors or Coaches

Seek peers in the ring with you who'll throw real punches—not advice from the sidelines.

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

Fixed Time, Variable Scope (Appetite-Based Planning)

Set the max time you'll spend first, then design a solution that fits it — instead of estimating a concept.

Follow People, Not Plans

Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.

Follow-the-Workflow Expansion

Find your next product by tracing the user's end-to-end journey and carving out the steps that overload your core tool.

Forest Time

Schedule intentional monthly time to leave the trees and survey the forest — because good aim precedes huge investment.

Founder-Led Marketing as a Goodwill Bank

Log what you learn, package it per platform, bank goodwill to spend later

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

Four Leverage Buckets: Where to Start Your PLG Motion

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

Framing (Setting the Boundaries)

Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.

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.

Frozen Competence: Where Human Value Survives

Models commoditize yesterday's competence; your value is using that cheap competence to make something new.

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

Replace support, success, research, PR and marketing with two teams that own a human relationship end to end.

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

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

Game Design, Not Gamification (Build Toys, Then Games)

Make software fun by designing real toys that reward playful exploration — not by bolting on points and badges

Go From Strength to Strength (Don't Design by TAM)

Bet on the trend that expands the market, not the market size that exists today.

Go Narrow to Grow Wide

Serve one narrow audience exceptionally well first; expansion opportunities reveal themselves later

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Growth Is a System (Acquisition–Retention–Monetization)

Change one part of the growth system and you change them all—so fix the true source.

Hand the Toil to the Model First

Delegate the boring, repetitive parts of engineering to agents before anything else, and collapse the path to production.

Head-Heart-Hands Micro-Experiments

Change yourself by running the tiniest possible experiment and reading the result through head, heart, and body.

High-Ceiling Market Test

Attack markets with a high ceiling and easy switching; incumbents win only where there's little left to build.

Hire an AI Operations Lead

Give one person the dedicated job of automating everyone else's repetitive work with AI

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 Raw Intellect Over Experience

Index on raw intellect and unquenched hunger to build, not years of experience or regalia

Hire the Deputy, Not the VP

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

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

Evaluate people in three dimensions — skills, attributes, and values — not skills alone, which is only ~50% predictive.

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Human-Voice Launch Copy

Write your tagline and launch page the way you'd describe the product to a friend, not like a PR person

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

Interview to learn, not to sell — lower your status, smile, and weight past behavior over stated intent

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

For most PMs, strategy is overrated — your real job is to shrink the time from hypothesis to data.

Mindset5 steps

Identity Separation After a Layoff

Sort what happened into 'not needed', 'wrong environment', and 'in my control' — only one of them is about you.

Inner vs Outer Scorecard Values Filter

Rank your real values, then test whether a decision optimizes for them instead of for status.

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Inside-Out Leadership Circles

Lead from the center out — self first, then one-on-ones, teams, and the business — because external fuel cracks.

Inspect the Work, Not the Person

Judge people by their actual output, not by how they talk in a conversation.

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Introvert-Inclusive Meeting Design

Four manager tactics to surface the best ideas from quiet people, not just the loudest three

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

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

Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test

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

Kill NPS, Ask CSAT

NPS is the marketing industry marketing itself — a satisfaction question has better data properties.

Knowledge-Work End-State Idea Generation

Pick an area of knowledge work and reason forward to its end state as AI matures — then build for that.

Know When to Quit (Anti-VC-Persistence)

Winners hit big fast; if year 4-5 isn't screaming growth after a pivot or two, reset the clock.

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

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

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

Laughably Small MVP Under High Stakes

Ship the smallest possible thing even for high-stakes problems — it delivers impact and reveals what to actually build.

Lean Team by Design: Slow Hiring, Player-Coaches, Generalists

Hire painfully slowly, replicate your first-10 DNA, and bet big on the exceptional

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

Lego Brick vs Lego Box (Selling Solutions Up-Market)

Sell ready-made solution boxes to move up-market while still building composable bricks behind the scenes.

Little Hands Growth Hiring

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

Live Shaping Session

Put product, a senior engineer, and a designer in a room to sketch and break ideas until one is clearly buildable in the appetite.

LNO Framework

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

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

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

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Macro / Middle-Range / Micro Research Portfolio

Sort every research question into three altitudes and starve the middle one that eats your team's time.

Magic and Science Decision-Making

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

Magic Lenses

Evaluate competing implementation paths by plotting each through the eyes of the advisers you wish you had

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

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

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

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

Mandatory vs. Optional Onboarding Split

Split onboarding into a spare mandatory setup and a random-access optional layer — model the buyer's mind, not your features.

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

Sales6 steps

Mastering B2B Negotiations Through Value

Extract full value from every deal via gives-and-gets, value selling, and disciplined negotiation tactics.

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.

Match the Medium to the Point

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

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

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

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

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

Minimum Awesome Product

Ship fast, but not naked: an MVP needs one awesome thing and a visible vision, not just adequacy.

Minimum Viable Process (MVP)

Introduce the least process that reduces variance, and give your best people escape hatches

Mirror the Founder's Intensity (Fight Entropy)

Every management layer leaks intensity; your job is to mirror the CEO's, not buffer it.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

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

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

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

Model Maximalism

Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

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

Multi-Prototype Comparison Testing

Show three distinct concepts instead of iterating one, so users can compare and you avoid over-commitment

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

Build products that make money in opposite macro conditions so troughs in one are peaks in another.

New Products as Internal Startups

Incubate new products like funded startups: tiny teams, prove ROI before funding, keep them separate

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

NLX: Designing the Natural-Language Interface

Conversation is an interface with real constructs — design it, don't just let the model lead

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.

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.

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Optimizing for Feelings

Name the emotion the product must evoke, build to that, and use metrics only as an honesty check.

Self-Mastery6 steps

Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition

Pick an outcome that would prove you learned the skill, then work backwards to the experts.

Payback-First Channel Measurement

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Picking a Sharp Problem

Build on a problem so acute customers spontaneously ask to pay — it becomes a tailwind that carries your mistakes.

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

Players, Coaches, Captains

Split leadership into on-field captains and sideline coaches so top ICs never leave the game.

PLG Is Fundamentally DLG (Data-Led Growth)

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

Productivity2 steps

Poor Man's Fine-Tuning (Few-Shot + Role Priming)

Steer a model with in-prompt examples and a role identity instead of a full fine-tune.

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positioning Before Pricing (The Single-Attribute Position)

Own one clear position that is unique, available, and reinforces your product strategy — then let it dictate price

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

PQA Signal Detection

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

Peak Performance5 steps

Practice-Until-Your-Worst-Is-Good-Enough Interview Prep

Interviewing is the one skill with zero feedback — so run dozens of mocks in a small peer group.

PR and Launch Strategy: Credibility Over Leads

Treat PR as a credibility asset for hiring and cold outbound, and replace one big launch with a cadence of launches.

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

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

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

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

Principles-First Product Design

Set non-negotiable principles up front — voice of the people, no override button, full transparency — and never bend them.

Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework

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

Problem-People-System (PPS)

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

Problems Never End (Be a Problem-Solving Machine)

Stop hoping the next fix makes it easier; reframe success as earning harder problems.

Product Accountability for Pipeline

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

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

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 Scrapbooking

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

Project-Chosen Leads and the Mutt Hire

PM is a role on a project, not a department — and you staff it with multi-disciplinary makers, not title-holders.

Prompt Sets Are the New PRD

Communicate product ideas by building the prototype, not writing the doc — demos before memos

Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout

Never take the next expansion step until the data from the last one has already convinced you.

Influence3 steps

Pseudonymity for Honest Contribution

Let contributors stay anonymous — people cross partisan lines far more readily when their name isn't attached.

PSHE Career Growth Framework

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

Punch Above Your Weight: Trust Signaling for Small Startups

Use small, cheap signals of polish and legitimacy so large customers trust a tiny company with big contracts.

Question-First Cheap Channel Playbook

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

Radical Trust Building

Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.

Raising the Longer-Runway Child

Four principles for parenting introverted or shy kids without shaming their temperament

Finance5 steps

Reactive Pricing After Demand Signal

Let users pull pricing out of you, then validate willingness-to-pay and margins

Reason About It Like a Human

To design or debug AI behavior, ask what an equivalent human would do in the same situation.

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

Reframe Anxiety as Excitement

Relabel the identical arousal response from nervous to excited to calm yourself and speak better

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

Reset Through Better Abstractions

Don't fear throwing work away — a better abstraction compounds and recovers sunk cost fast.

Retention as Habit-Building Plus Expansion

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

Reverse-Engineer-Then-Formalize at Scale

Do one instance deep by hand, reverse-engineer the best process, then codify it into a scalable algorithm

RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort

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

Ride the Models

Stay valuable in AI by playfully applying each new model to your own work and re-testing what it couldn't do before.

Running Products via the Daily Meeting

Assign one owner to an urgent problem, give them unlimited resources except time, and force a daily report until it's solved.

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Ruthless Simplification for PM Writing

A set of concrete tools to strip PM documents down to only what's necessary.

Sales Then Logistics

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

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.

Selective Deep-Dive Leadership

Instead of skimming 100 projects, go bare-metal deep on the 7-10 that matter most

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

Server-Side Events as the Default

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

Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

Gather internal data, customer research and company goals, make the best informed bet, then reevaluate and pivot.

Ship-Fast Operating Model

Lightweight bottoms-up planning, PM-light teams, and iterative deployment in a fast-moving domain.

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

When product properties are emergent, launching is how you discover them

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.

Signposting

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

Single Decisive Reason (SDR)

For any important decision, isolate the one reason that alone justifies it — a pile of weak reasons is a red flag

Strategy6 steps

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

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

Skeleton Before the Makeup

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

Slow vs Fast Decisions

For any reversible decision there's no right or wrong — only slow and fast — so decide fast and correct fast.

Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening

Classify every build as deepening the product for current users or widening it to new ones — to diagnose 'why we feel slow'

Solve Before Scale

Run in a distinct 'solve' mode before you ever switch to 'scale' mode

Solving for Everyone Is Solving for No One

Get specific about who you're NOT for—that guardrail is stronger than defining who you are.

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

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

Speak Early, Speak From Conviction

Two tactics to get an introvert's ideas heard and acted on in loud meetings

Peak Performance3 steps

Speaking Visualization Rehearsal

Mentally rehearse the whole speaking event in advance to desensitize yourself and gain a sense of agency

SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition

Trust your gut on candidates, then use six traits to translate that gut into words others can act on.

Start-With-Why One-Pager

The PM's core artifact: define the thing by nailing the problem and why-now before anything else.

Strategy2 steps

Stop Churn Before It Happens

To stop churn, acquire customers who won't leave — churn is an acquisition problem, not a save problem.

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

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.

Strike Down the Blockers (Time to Value)

Removing what stops adoption beats adding shiny features; hunt blockers and watch the retention graph move.

Super Agent With a Forward-Deployed Human

Give the whole company one shared agent, owned by a human who keeps it working — not personal agents for everyone.

Superpower Excavation from Peak Stories

Find your true strengths by overlaying three peak-experience stories and spotting the theme that recurs.

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

Systematic Customer Conversations

Build a lightweight, repeatable system to talk to customers by phone on a regular cadence.

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

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

Systems Over Headcount (The Small Bus)

Solve with better systems and talent density instead of adding people; a smaller bus turns faster.

Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

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

Taste as a Trainable Model

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts whether your in-group will like an idea — built by reps with feedback.

Tell Me What It Takes to Win, Then Tell Me the Costs

Ask for the un-watered-down plan to win first; negotiate the costs down second.

The 10x Leverage Desk

Spend your finite time only on problems with 10x positive or negative impact — and physically move yourself into the details until they're solved.

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

The 20/80 Willingness-to-Pay Axiom

20% of what you build drives 80% of willingness to pay — and it's usually the easiest 20% to build.

The 30-Day Agent Training Loop

Ingest your docs, then correct the agent an hour a day for 30 days until it performs like your best rep.

The 70/20/10 Investment Split

Allocate product building time 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% bets to balance stability and innovation

The ADD Answer Structure

Answer, Detailed example, Describe relevance: give complete, value-adding responses in Q&A

The AI-Document Slop Test

An AI-written document is fine — as long as you can stand behind every line and it took longer to make than to read.

The Allocation Economy: Manage Models Like a First-Time Manager

AI turns everyone into a manager — the valuable skills become the ones first-time managers must learn

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

Score behavioural answers on three axes: did they impose structure, seek inputs, and define milestones?

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

The Anti-Sell Coach Decision Framework

Most people don't need a coach — test the goal against cheaper alternatives, then select for vibe over credentials.

The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)

Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

Finance4 steps

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

Pick your AI pricing model by plotting value attribution against product autonomy, then climb toward outcome-based.

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

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

The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy

Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.

Innovation6 steps

The Bullseye Customer Sprint (5 + 3 in 1)

Interview five hand-picked customers against three prototypes in one team-watched day to learn who to build for

The Business-Fluency Scalpel for Researchers

Learn the company's financial language so your insights land in the funnel, not in a deck.

The Cheap-Ad Funnel Diagnostic

Use a small paid ad to isolate whether your packaging or your content is the problem, via click-through vs subscribe.

The Chief Agentic GTM Officer Play

Pick one painful problem, one leading vendor, and deploy an agent yourself—50 hours later you're hyper-employable.

The Circuit Breaker (Back to Shaping)

When a project overruns its appetite, don't extend it or gut the agreed value — pull it back into shaping mode.

The Clip-Distribution Flywheel

Podcasts have no built-in discovery engine — borrow one by seeding high-quality clips on TikTok, YouTube, and Reels.

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

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

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

After they describe a big problem, measure your own reaction — do you feel compelled to go work on it?

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

Remove the humble answer, borrow someone else's eyes, or jump three years forward — self-awareness can't hide.

The Consultant With a Predilection

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

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

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

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

The Data-Driven Red Flag

When someone brags about being 'data-driven,' suspect weak product judgment, not strong analytics.

The De-Buzzword Test

Ask people to explain their idea without using the buzzword — if they can't, they haven't thought it through.

The Decade Litmus Test

Before starting a company, ask if you can see yourself working on it for a decade — and start it as an experiment

The Decision Log

Build product sense by logging decisions you'd make, the reasoning, and later the actual outcome.

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.

The Design Sprint Scorecard

Break your founding hypothesis into rows and grade each one red/yellow/green after head-to-head customer tests

The Detail Dial

Calibrate how prescriptive a shaped plan is to the builder's seniority — more detail lifts juniors, less frees seniors.

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville

The Dinner-Table Topic Test

Find your podcast's niche by noticing what makes people lean in at dinner — then force the decision with a deadline.

The Dogfooding Boundary Rule

Use your own product walkthrough to generate the issue list — never to prioritize it.

The Durable Wrapper Test

Own a workflow you care about for a decade, then orchestrate 20 models beneath it

Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The Embedded Insights Partner Model

Success metric: they won't have the meeting without you.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The First 30 Seconds Onboarding Bet

Earn the next 30 seconds by making one thing feel magical fast

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

The First Performance Review Reference Call

Ask a cherry-picked referee what feedback you'll give the candidate at their first review — they can't dodge it.

The Fish-and-Water Strength Test

Your real strength is the thing others praise that you think is no big deal.

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

Finance5 steps

The Five Doors Into Investing

Angel, scout, SPV, fund, or fantasy portfolio — pick your entry into investing by autonomy vs. effort tradeoff

The Five PLG Readiness Components

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

The Five Tools Researcher

A modern researcher carries five methods, not one — and you hire for the Swiss army knife.

The Fork-in-the-Road Reset

After a shock, offer a graceful, reversible exit to re-establish who is truly bought in.

The Forward-Deployed Engineer Vendor Column

Don't buy AI GTM tools on features—buy on who will actually get on the phone and deploy it with you.

The Foundational Three Entry Path

Don't start in PM. Start as the person you'd be taking PM responsibilities from — engineer, designer, or seller.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

A 10-hour, 3-phase team sprint that turns a vague startup idea into one testable founding hypothesis

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

The Founding Hypothesis (Mad Libs Strategy Sentence)

Compress your entire startup strategy into one testable fill-in-the-blank sentence — then go prove it

The Four Filters for Career Acceleration

Growth rate, strength-fit, deferred comp, and the C-suite question — pick jobs on these, not on salary.

The Four I's Feedback Structure

Information, Impact, Invitation, Implications: package feedback so it lands as collaborative problem-solving

The Four Springs of Startup Ideas

Generate startup ideas from a problem journal, niche communities, behavior shifts, and tech shifts — then justify why now

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

The Full PLG Funnel Audit

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

The Going Direct Playbook

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

The GTM Agent Deployment Sequence

Roll out AI sales agents in the order of lowest effort and highest ROI: start with support, end with reactivation.

The Gut-Check Protocol

Intuition is pattern matching and bias in the same organ — check it with System 2 and diverse guts.

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

Ask what's the hardest thing they've ever done, then extract their difficulty bar and how much agency they had.

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

Ask what conventional wisdom is inaccurate — it's unanswerable without genuine opinion, so it exposes authenticity.

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

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 Impossible Shared Case Study

Give every candidate the same unsolvable problem and grade how far they drill and how they react.

The Incognito Cry Test

Go through your own product as an anonymous customer, find what makes you cry, and buy an agent to fix that.

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

Ask for a win that worked for the wrong reason, or a good call that failed — outcome-blind introspection tests.

The Introvert's Career Visibility Playbook

Five moves to get your value seen and your ambition known without becoming someone you're not

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

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

The Kryptonite Reframe

Ask 'how does this serve me?' to convert a perceived weakness into a functional advantage — or decide to route around it.

Strategy8 steps

The Landscape-First Product Strategy Doc

A bullet-driven Google Doc that builds an unbroken logic chain from company mission down to a single team priority.

The Launch-Goal Audit

Decide why you're launching before you launch — the goal dictates whether a launch is even worth it

The Launch Momentum Playbook

Podcast charts reward subscriber velocity, not downloads — stockpile episodes, spike the launch, then bank the rank.

The Leading-Indicator Ramp Scorecard

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

The Lead-Rich Audit

You don't need SaaStr's scale—count your website visitors and untouched CRM leads to see you're already lead-rich.

The Local CEO Operating Model

Give each product owner a lean cross-functional team and end-to-end ownership, backed by a dual line/functional matrix

The Made-Up Name Reset

Give a team or feature a name nobody recognizes, so nobody can skip the argument about what it should be.

The Magic Loop

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

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Micro-Influencer Wide-Net Playbook

Skip the big creators; onboard thousands of trusted micro-influencers like teammates

The Most Charitable Interpretation

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

The Nine-Scopes Kickoff

At kickoff, have the builders translate the shaped idea into nine-or-fewer implementation chunks to test scope and build clarity.

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

Peak Performance4 steps

The One-Skill Six-Month Block

Go all in on one skill for 3-6 months: study one example a week, practise it an hour a day.

The Pickle: Iterated Product Quality List

A lightweight, memorably-named ship checklist you grow one line at a time from every miss.

The PLG Data & Infrastructure Stack

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

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

The POC as Business Case

Frame every pilot as co-creating an ROI model, charge for it smartly, and never anchor the commercial deal.

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

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

The Product/Market Fit Engine

Turn PMF into a number you can raise: focus only on the 'somewhat disappointed' users whose reason for loving you matches the mass market's

The Product Talent Portfolio

Build a team of complementary spikes instead of clones of yourself, and hire specifically for your gaps

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

Ask what work they're proudest of and why — it exposes taste, standards, motivation, and where their gravity pulls.

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

Finance4 steps

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

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

The Reach Test

Judge whether an AI tool is truly useful by whether you reach for it unprompted each morning.

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

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.

Peak Performance3 steps

The Rule of Lung

Make your exhale twice as long as your inhale to trigger the relaxation response before speaking

The Sales Motion as Source Code

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

The Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

The Same-Day Prototype Validation Loop

Idea in the morning, real users testing by afternoon, decision by evening

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 Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

The Should-You-Start Reality Test

Before launching a podcast, prove to yourself you'd do it for free forever — then commit to a finite season.

Finance4 steps

The Sip Seed Round

Get capital committed but pull it down only when needed, so you keep optionality and psychological freedom

Influence6 steps

The Smallest-Ask Mentor Ladder

Never ask 'will you mentor me?' — ask a two-minute question, then earn the next rung.

The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.

The Superpower Overlap Test

Find your true strengths via a two-layer self-plus-peer assessment, then only take roles where your superpower meets the company's.

The Surgeon Management Model

Spend over half your time making your top 10% feel like a supported surgeon who can't be blocked.

The Swipe File

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

The Switch Log

Log every task-switch in real time so your actual work trail — not your calendar — reveals where your time really goes

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Taste-Development Loop

Taste isn't innate; it's a repeatable loop of reacting, interrogating, and building a point of view.

The Team Is the Product

Choose the company you want to build first, pick a problem worthy of it, then treat every hire as a product launch.

The Team Watch Party

Whole team watches interviews live, predicts first and debriefs after, replacing the research report with instant alignment

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

Cap a candidate to two questions on a fictional problem to reveal whether they can find the decision-driving question.

The Tempo Framework

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

The Thermal Team

Run a startup inside the company: one owner, one senior sponsor, total focus, self-set pace.

The Three B's of Behavior Change

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

The Three Dimensions of an Agent

Score any 'agent' on autonomy, complexity, and natural interaction — each a spectrum

The Three Innovation Blockers

Diagnose why a team plays it safe by checking the three specific things that quietly kill big thinking

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 Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

Separate targeted Discovery, always-on Continuous Conversations, and passive Customer Listening — each needs its own machinery.

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Scale product management with internal data & insights, customer research at scale, and standardized strategy cadences.

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 Threads of Great PMs

The three durable behaviors that separate great product managers from good ones, in any company type.

The Tiny Core Principle

Every enduring product has one tiny thing that is a superpower — find it, protect it, and stop bolting on features.

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Tomorrow Test for Saying No

Decide whether to accept a distant commitment by imagining you had to do it tomorrow

The Traffic Light Keyword System

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

The Triple-A Apology

Acknowledge, Appreciate, Amend: apologize for the transgression, not for how someone feels

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

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

The Tuning Fork Silent Read

Don't ask what people think — put something concrete in front of them and force a live, in-room read.

The Two Departments That Matter Test

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

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

Master market share and wallet share together — equal attention, not equal effort — to avoid the single-engine trap.

The Two-of-Three Inflection Test

Only build a new zero-to-one product when at least two of three inflections line up

The Two-Question Introvert Diagnostic

Two thought experiments that reveal your true temperament preference, cutting through learned behavior

The Ungated Customer Feed

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

The Unsell Email

At offer stage, email the candidate the eight worst truths about the job — then see if they still say yes.

The Use Case Map (Use Cases, Not Personas)

Define what to build and how to grow from the use case, not the persona.

The Value Metric Pricing Model

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

The VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

The WHAT Toast Structure

Why we're here, How you're connected, Anecdote, Thank you: a GPS for any toast or tribute

The Word-of-Mouth Machine PMF Test

Real product-market fit is organic pull, not award-winning launch spikes

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

The Written Screen Job Simulation

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

The Year Is Made in the First Six Months

Because buying cycles lag, your annual number is set by what you ship in H1, not H2.

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

A product must make the customer at least 3x better before they notice enough to switch and pay.

Thinking Gray

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

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.

Timeline Padding Audit

Keep startup pace by curiously separating real constraints from padding, and killing projects that won't converge.

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

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

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Turbo Rapport and Sales Scales

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

Two-Day Work-Test Hire

Bring finalists on-site for two days to do a real end-to-end project — it screens skill and fit at once.

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

Two-Sided AI Adoption

Pair top-down executive buy-in with a bottom-up tiger team of excited power users.

Unbundle Expensive Services into AI Apps

Find a service only the rich could afford, do it with a general chatbot, then spin the working ones into apps

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

Update Your Priors: The AI Capability Arbitrage

Re-test what AI can do today and demand more of it — old scar tissue is leaving alpha on the table

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.

User-Centered Performance Detector

Spot the rituals where a team signals customer obsession without any intent to change the decision.

Values as a Mirror

Don't author values. Interview the whole team, harvest their exact words, and write them back as a story.

Van Westendorp Premium Pricing (Price at the Third Question)

For a best-in-class position, price at the 'starting to feel expensive' point, not the 'bargain' point

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

Build where the winning data is locked behind a company or industry's walls — foundation models won't go there.

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

Real virality is high-quality word of mouth from a great product — not synthetic referral traps bolted on top.

What / So What / Now What

A three-part structure that turns any on-the-spot update or answer into a memorable, digestible message

When to Centralize a Martech Function

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

When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

Use portfolio complexity, revenue scale, PM headcount and trigger events — not a title chart — to know it's CPO time.

Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant

Score a B2B SaaS idea on two axes — workflow breadth and frequency — to predict billion-dollar potential.

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

Replace group brainstorms with silent individual idea generation, a quiet vote, and one designated decider

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Wow-First MVP

Cut scope to the critical few features, but never compromise quality — so a flop can only mean the idea was wrong

Writing a Compelling Product Vision

A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

Zone Defense for Product Work

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