OpenAI

Adaptive Evaluation Over Static Benchmarks

Measure AI robustness with attackers that learn, not with a frozen dataset of yesterday's attacks

Add a Zero (10x First-Principles Reframing)

Force a 10x version of the goal so the team must rethink the problem from first principles, not optimize the current process.

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

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

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

Ignore role boundaries — use AI tools to execute your own ideas end to end

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

AI at the Core vs AI at the Edge

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

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.

Alpha Co-Creation Loop

Pick the users who are already pushing the boundary, build with them in a shared channel, ship only when they're thrilled.

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

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

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

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

Architect-Then-Delegate AI Product Building

Use AI to prototype and fill scoped sub-segments, but architect and lock the system yourself — don't cognitively surrender.

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

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

Avoidance Reversal

Whatever emotion you avoid, you invite — in exactly the way you avoid it. Backward-engineer any problem.

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

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

Barrels and Ammunition

Adding headcount doesn't add output — only adding people who drive initiatives end-to-end does.

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

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

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

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.

Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea

At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.

Be Your Own First Customer: Internal Tools to Product

Turn the ugly tools your team builds to serve customers into the product — most of the value is below the waterline

Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization

Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.

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.

Bob the Monster and the Two-Week Rule

Externalize the emotions of change into a monster, let it rage, and only act on what survives two weeks.

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

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

Influence4 steps

Build Champions Before the Offer

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

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

Build for the Future Model

Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today

Build for Where the Models Are Going

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

Influence5 steps

Building Your Own Social Radar

Turn people-reading from a mystery gift into a deliberate practice: checklist, conscious questions, and follow-up calibration.

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

Build Only at the Magic Intersection

Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.

Build Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)

Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy

Build on Undiscovered Talent

Beat better-funded incumbents by hiring people the market's hiring machines systematically misprice.

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

Peak Performance3 steps

Build-With-The-Tools Assessment

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

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

When to bundle products and when a single-product land wins

CaMeL Permission Pre-Restriction

Grant an agent only the permissions its stated task needs, decided before it runs

Cannibalize Your Own Product Every 6-12 Months

Make your current product look silly on a fixed cadence instead of only shipping what users ask for

Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity

New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

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

Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor

Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

Choose Your Abstraction Layer Deliberately

Delegate the work you don't enjoy to a higher abstraction; keep the parts that make you good and happy.

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

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

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success

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.

Sales5 steps

Compelling Reason to Buy (Not to Sell)

In the bowling alley it is never about you — close the laptop and collect problem domain knowledge.

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

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

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

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

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.

Context Is All You Need Prompting

Treat the model as a brilliant stranger with zero context, and supply what a colleague would already know.

Context Loading (Additional Information)

Front-load all relevant task information — and put it at the top for caching

Context Over Models: The Data-Management Bet

AI products win on getting good, timely, well-structured data to the model — not on the model itself

Continuous Calibration, Continuous Development (CCCD)

A CI/CD-style loop for non-deterministic AI: scope, evaluate, deploy, then calibrate against surprises.

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

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

Conversation as Ping-Pong (Give-to-Get)

Index toward asking questions, but hit the ball back and forth instead of interrogating or monologuing.

Conversation-Intelligence Deal Diagnosis (the Dealbot)

Run an AI agent over every call, email and Slack to find the real reason you win, lose, and stall

Conway's Law Reorg: Go Functional Before You Go AI

Restructure engineering into one functional org before expecting company-wide AI or technical depth

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

Ship an AI feature by naming its 3-4 core behaviors and teaching them with model-generated data

Criticize in Public

Deliver negative feedback in front of the team so the whole system learns the issue is seen and being handled.

Critique in Public, Build Trust in Private

Invert the management-book rule: debate directly in public, lavish reassurance in private.

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Communication5 steps

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

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

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

Stop fighting the critical voice in your head. Run a new response experiment on it every day.

Damming the Demand

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

Data Is a Compass, Not a GPS

Data disproves the ridiculous — it rarely hands you the answer, so validate findings before you trust them

Decompose-and-Ensemble

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

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

Defensible Moats for AI Startups

Four durable places to build in AI where foundation-model labs are least likely to squash you.

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Deflect the Number Question

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

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.

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.

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

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

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 the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

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

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

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

Differentiation vs Table Stakes

Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Disassemble the Lego Set

Don't digitize the old thing — reassemble the pieces into an experience native to the new platform.

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

Great salespeople talk under half the time and answer a question with a question about the question

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

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

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

Dogfood-Driven Realism

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

Don't Be Stingy With Words

People can't read your mind — make appreciation explicit, and never fake it.

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Dress to Signal Effort, Not Expense

Fit beats brand, dress one level up, and ask when you don't know the code.

Drive AI Adoption By Using It Yourself On A Real Problem

Executives using the tool daily on their own real problems beats any top-down mandate or think-piece

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.

Dual-Motion Growth: PLG and Sales That Feed Each Other

Win by having both many customers and lots of revenue — with PLG and sales feeding each other

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.

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

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

Elastic-Demand Career Bet

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

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

Unkink the hose: welcome, feel and physically express emotions instead of managing them.

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

Solve the same problem several ways and take the most common answer

Finance3 steps

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

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

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Error Analysis: Open Coding to Axial Coding to Count

Turn messy LLM logs into a prioritized list of failures before you write a single test.

Ethnographic Insight Over Stated Preference

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

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

Eval-First AI Product Development

Define what 'correct' looks like as evals first; the spec becomes the scorecard, not the build instructions

Evals as Articulating Success

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

Evals-Plus-Production-Monitoring Dual Feedback Loop

Reject the false dichotomy: evals catch what you know, production monitoring catches what you don't.

Eval Triage: Decide What Actually Deserves an Eval

After counting failures, route each one to a prompt fix, a code check, or an LLM judge — not all three.

Finance4 steps

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Exponential Feedback via the Competency Lens

Give feedback on root-cause behaviors, not surface symptoms, so it compounds — use a competency rubric as the diagnostic lens.

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

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

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fairer Marketplace Rating System Design

Fight rating inflation and averaging bias with renormed labels, priors, blind reviews, and the sound of silence.

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.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

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.

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Few-Shot Prompting

Show the model examples of what good looks like instead of describing it

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

First-Call Yes-or-No Qualification

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

Five Principles to Live By

Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.

Five-Star Meetings

Make every meeting one people love leaving. The ones that stay bad are a map of your company's real problems.

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

Follow People, Not Plans

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

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

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.

Foundational Insight Over Customer Research

For consumer and SMB products, customer feedback is directionally wrong — build from your own insight instead.

Founder-in-the-Details Operating Model

Rebuild a company like a startup: functional teams, one road map, one shared consciousness, CEO in the work.

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.

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.

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.

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

Adopt a specific user's identity, walk your own product end-to-end, and log every point of friction.

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

Frontier of Understanding (Goal by Risk Type)

Before committing to an outcome goal, set the goal at the true edge of what your team knows — understanding, dependency, execution, or strategic risk.

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Generalist-With-A-Superpower Hiring

Hire people who care obsessively, have a generalist brain, and one absolute superpower — then trial them for a week.

Give Away Your Legos

In a scaling company, repeatedly hand off what you're good at to keep climbing the growing pile.

Give-It-Away Growth Engine

Reclassify free product and AI costs as marketing spend, then give the product away to your best distributors

Give It Your Hardest Task

Evaluate a serious AI tool on your gnarliest real problem, not a dumbed-down toy.

Go All-In When the Experiment Works

Big companies experiment plenty — they fail by hedging instead of doubling down on what works.

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

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-to-Market as a Product

Design the buying journey as a sequence of experiences, and add value at every touch whether or not they buy

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.

Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function

Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.

Guilty-Pleasure Career Bet

Find the thing you feel guilty getting paid for, do the hell out of it with intensity, and take non-linear risks.

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.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.

High-Ceiling Market Test

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

Hills-and-Valleys: Getting Value From Probabilistic AI Tools

Be patient and explicit, start small, and learn where the model is strong vs weak

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

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

Hire by Repelling: The Distinctive Bat Signal

The best talent magnets deliberately turn some people off — clarity on who you're NOT for is the point

Hire-Experienced vs. Train-Up Decision Matrix

Decide whether to hire an experienced product ops person or train one, based on time and coaching capacity

Hire for Autonomy: References, Real Work, and Default Trust

You'll be in none of the decisions that matter — so hire people you can hand autonomy to, and verify via references.

Hire for Clarity-from-Chaos

Screen for fire-in-the-belly, high agency, and the ability to create clarity out of chaos — proven by work trials

Hire Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

Hiring for the Extra 20%

Skills are table stakes — screen for the people who'll chase the real outcome, using lateral personality signals

Hiring Profiles by Product Ops Pillar

Match each product ops pillar to a distinct candidate background and skillset

Hoard What You Know How To Do

Keep a searchable backlog of verified, working experiments so agents can recombine them into new solutions.

Humor as a Calibrated Mastery Signal

A joke landed right up the line proves you own the room; keep a ranked joke file to do it on demand.

Hunting New Bottlenecks When AI Writes the Code

When AI removes the coding bottleneck, constraints shift up and downstream — go find them.

Hypothesis-Driven Experimentation: Learning as a Win

Reframe experiments from winners/losers to hypotheses; run more, run shorter, and carry priors forward.

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

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

Productivity6 steps

Internal Tools as a Product (The Crying Octopus)

Run your dev-productivity team like a product team: monthly surveys, hard metrics, and one-click paper cuts.

Invest in High Performers by Running Experiments

Stop babysitting low performers; grow your best people by testing theories about their potential.

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

Push hard toward a future you believe in while killing your own hypotheses as data arrives

J-Curve vs. Stairs Career Growth

Jump off career cliffs into jobs you're unqualified for; fall for 6-9 months, then climb far beyond the stairs.

Keep vs. Offload: The PM Decision-Rights Boundary

A clear line for what a PM keeps versus hands to product ops — decision rights never move

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

Kind and Candid

Reframe candor as an act of kindness so you actually deliver the hard message.

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

Latency Over Velocity: Conviction-Based Startup Decisions

A startup's edge isn't speed — it's a tight turning radius; swap experiment-driven decisions for informed conviction.

Lean Into Your Spike

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

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

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

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

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

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

Hold the far-future vision, but land with users where they already work today.

LLM as Disconfirmation Engine

Point the model at where your strategy does NOT fit — and reverse-engineer competitors from their public docs

LNO Framework

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

Magic Lenses

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

Maintain Noise in the Market

Ship every day and talk about it constantly so the product feels alive — with tiered big launches on top

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

Make the Other Mistake (Prompting for Brutal Feedback)

To get honest AI critique, over-correct toward brutal — the model won't actually overshoot.

Many Bets, Charge Early

Maximize the number of fast bets, then force a verdict by asking the customer to pay a lot — now

Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do

Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet

Marketplace Whack-a-Mole: Managing Winners and Losers

Most consequential marketplace changes create winners and losers; manage the trade, don't chase a metric.

Match Go-To-Market to Buyer-User Alignment

Pick developer-led, PLG, or direct sales by asking one thing: are the buyer and the user the same person?

Match the Medium to the Point

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

Measure in Hundreds

If your unit of measurement is one hundred attempts, five failures means you have effectively tried zero times.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

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

Meet the Bar and Be Different

Incumbents overshoot average utility — win by meeting the bar while being materially different

Meet-The-Customer-Where-They-Are Marketing

Put your product into the customer's context and re-tune the message for each adopter tier and market.

Mega Trend vs Hype Cycle — The PhD Test

If you need a PhD to understand it, it's not a mega trend. Don't fight mega trends.

Micromanage the Decision, Not the Operation

Sweat only the few details that matter for the customer — control the decision, delegate the doing.

Minimum Awesome Product

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

Minimum Lovable Product

Viability is no longer enough — the bar is a product people love and want to talk about

Minimum Lovable Product Ladder

Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.

Mirror the Founder's Intensity (Fight Entropy)

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

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

Surface AI help at the moment it's relevant instead of interrupting with notifications.

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

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

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

Model Maximalism

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

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone

Nail the First Three Sentences

Spend a disproportionate share of your time framing the opening — get it right and the rest writes itself.

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

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

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

North Star Exploration

Turn aimless tech-tinkering into learning by chasing an arbitrary-but-real goal and being stubborn about reaching it.

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

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

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

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

One-Week Top-1% AI Fluency Sprint

Pick a real problem and spend one full week taking it end-to-end with AI — that alone puts you in the global top 1%.

Opinionated Simplicity

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

Opinion-Based Decisions for 1.0 Products

For a first-of-its-kind product, empower a tiny 'tastemaker' team to make gut calls — data can't yet exist.

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

If the work is autonomous and the result is measurable, price the outcome — not the tokens.

Outside-the-Building Product Management

Spend 80% of your time thinking outside the building and argue every case from the market's point of view

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

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

Own the Story — No Packet Loss

The leader is the custodian of the message — deliver it to the front line yourself, never via cascade.

Pain-Plus-New-Technology Idea Selection

Judge what's worth building by pairing a habituated pain with a newly-arrived technology that can finally solve it.

Passion-Project Learning (An Eval for Your Life)

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

Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring

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

Pick a Lane and Write the Story

Master one of the five product ambiguities early, then write the paragraph your next employer needs to hear.

Pick Hard Problems to Attract the Best Team

Hard, important problems attract the best people — and business is a team sport.

Pivot to the Burning Problem

Founders are usually too anchored to their own product vision — index to the customer's real fire instead

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

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

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

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.

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Precision Prompting for AI Builders

Never tell the AI 'it doesn't work' — state exactly what you expected and which parts do and don't.

Predict vs. Decide: Think in Differentials

Prediction finds correlations; decisions need causal differences. Optimize the lift, not the level.

Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

Write the launch press release before you build to keep products marketable

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

Finance3 steps

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

Proactive Time Allocation (Kill Fake Work, Guard Relationships)

Stop letting your inbox set your agenda; allocate time from strategy and finite-life priorities instead of reacting.

Problem-First AI Adoption

Start from the customer problem and ask where AI helps — never from 'what do we do with AI?'

Product-First, Add-AI-Later

Design the end-to-end product experience first, then add AI to solve specific problems — never retrofit AI into a broken flow.

Product-First AI Prompting

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

Product-Led SEO

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

Product-Lens Metrics: Monitoring Product Health vs. Business Health

Segment company metrics through a product lens so leaders can actually monitor their strategy

Product Marketing Fusion (Inbound + Outbound in One Function)

Merge product management with product marketing so the people who build the product also own how it's told and sold.

Product-Market-Story Fit

Great product in a great market still fails if the story is wrong or missing — add the third leg

Programmatic vs Editorial Decision Rule

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

Prompt Decomposition

Make the model list the sub-problems first, then solve each before the whole

Prompting-as-Prototyping

Validate a product idea by prompting a model in a local browser before building anything

Prompt Injection Defense Stack

Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

PSHE Career Growth Framework

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

Pull-Based Product-Market Fit

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

Question the Assumption

Every problem rests on hidden assumptions. Surface them and the problem often dissolves.

Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy

Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

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.

Reading the Invisible Language of the To/CC Line

Recipient order, To vs CC, and reply order all send signals people quietly read.

Reading the Signals for Product-Led vs Sales-Led Growth

A decision tree for whether and when to hire your first salespeople

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Reason About It Like a Human

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

Red/Green TDD for Coding Agents

Force agents to write the test first, watch it fail, then pass — the compressed prompt is just 'red/green TDD'.

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

Relentless Application of Force

The CEO's core job is offsetting the complacency that success naturally breeds — push hardest when winning.

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Ride the AI Value Wave

Treat today's AI capability as the worst it will ever be and expand where it's most efficacious

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

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

Right to Win via Permission to Play

Before building, ask if it's logical that YOU built it — and whether you have a route to market.

RLAIF Reward Design

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

Robust-Across-Futures Action

When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios

Root-Cause Context Engineering for AI Coding

Don't just fix the AI's bad code — root-cause the missing context so it's right next time.

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 Referencing

Diagnose talent by extracting the right information from many references, not by trusting a 45-minute interview.

Scalable Leadership vs. Selective Micromanagement

When you lack confidence in your team's direction, don't go hands-off — micromanage tactically and temporarily to get them back on track.

Scheduling by Deference

The one asking does the work: let the busier person set the time, and give real options.

Seek the Counterfactual, Not Confirmation

The competitive edge lives in the data you're trying to prove yourself wrong with, not the data you hoped to see

Self-Criticism Loop

Get the model to critique its own answer, then implement its own critique

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

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

Sell to Reduce Risk, Not Increase Upside

Four of five buyers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — anchor the sale there, not on the art of the possible

SEO Conversion-Metric Rigor

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

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

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

Serve the Business, Not the People

Strip emotion out of hard calls by asking what you'd do if the person had no negative reaction.

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

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

Set the Pace Through Decisiveness (Bias for Action)

A company's speed is governed by how fast it decides, not how hard it works — so refuse to 'circle back.'

Shadows of Superpowers

Your plateau is almost always the shadow cast by the exact strength that got you here.

Ship-Fast Operating Model

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

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Six Rules for Goals and Alignment

Goals are a communication tool: three max, one that wins, intern-legible, painful, single-owned, and followed up.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

Slow vs Fast Decisions

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

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

SPOTAK: Decoding Hiring Intuition

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

Start Bespoke, Become a Marketplace Later

A marketplace never starts as a marketplace; win with a pre-liquidity value prop first.

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

Narrow scope to the achievable thing in front of you, then build momentum on top of it

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

Steering AI to a Non-Obvious Strategy

AI gives predictable strategy when asked lazily — enumerate every input first, then make it argue back

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Strategy Activation via Crossing the Chasm

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

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Strike Down the Blockers (Time to Value)

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

Stuck-Point Scaling Law

Reliably improve an AI system by hunting where it gets stuck and tuning those spots with a fast feedback loop.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

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

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

Mine support tickets for recurring confusion, then rank-order self-serve landing pages that answer them

Swinging the Pendulum

Spot an undesirable state, correct it — but know you'll overcorrect, so aim for the middle

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

Take People With You Before You Fix Anything

A new leader's toolbox is worthless until the team agrees a problem exists — build the why first.

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

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 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.

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

Hire salespeople with enough product depth that engineers can't tell they aren't a PM

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

Enjoyment is a measure of efficiency. Enjoy the work 10% more and you are 10% more efficient.

Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

Ten hard metrics to judge whether a company is worth betting your career on

The 10-to-1 Input/Output Kill Test

When you pour 10 units of effort in for 1 unit of output, the project has run its course.

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 12 Product Management Competencies

Map every PM skill into four areas — execution, customer insight, product strategy, influence — and 12 competencies that hold from APM to CPO.

The 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

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 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

Seven minutes of felt (not listed) gratitude with another person daily — then aim it at where you feel lack.

The 95/5 Growth Inversion

In fast-moving AI markets, spend 95% inventing new growth loops and 5% optimizing existing ones

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

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

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

The Agency-Control Autonomy Ladder

Ship AI in graduated versions, trading human control for machine agency only as trust is earned.

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

The AI Deployment Risk Triage

Classify any AI deployment into one of three risk tiers before spending a dollar on defense

The AI Security Vendor Due-Diligence Test

Five questions that expose whether an AI guardrail vendor is selling real protection or theater

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

The AI Success Triangle

Successful AI adoption is a people problem first: great leaders, good culture, and technical progress.

The Aligned Binary LLM-as-Judge

Build a one-failure, pass/fail judge and align it to a human with a confusion matrix before you trust it.

The Angry-God Containment Lens

Assume the AI is a malicious agent trying to hurt you, then engineer so it structurally can't

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

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

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

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

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

The Beachhead Segment Formula

Pick a first market that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and fits your crown jewels.

The Benevolent Dictator Labeling Model

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

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

Every model leap gets normalised within months — build for the boring future, not the euphoric one.

The Better Trap

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

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion

Grow segment by segment along adjacencies — same customer new use case, or same use case new customer.

The Business-Meal Deference Protocol

Order middle-to-last, never the priciest dish, always offer to pay, and keep your tip invisible.

The Business-Rules Moat: Why 'Forms on Databases' Are Unclonable

B2B SaaS lock-in isn't the UI or data model — it's years of accreted, configured business rules

The Career Bingo Card

Deliberately take adjacent-but-different roles to fill in squares and become 'scribble-shaped'

The Chasm Positioning Formula

Technology leaders who have specialised and committed to THIS problem — respect the incumbent, outclass the peers.

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 Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

Move from T-shaped to comb-shaped — multiple deep skills you deploy on-demand via diagnosis

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

When the bottleneck isn't people, each new hire is a net productivity loss unless they uplevel everyone.

Influence5 steps

The Consultative Interview Flip (Sell the Vacation)

Run the interview like an enterprise sale so there is no competition when the offer comes

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

The Curator Leader (Not the Visionary)

The best product leaders don't own the ideas — they build environments where great ideas bubble up and get chosen

The Dark Factory Software Model

Ship production software no human writes or reads — replace review with simulated-user QA swarms.

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

Diagnose, Analyze, Take a different path, Experiment — an engineer's anti-playbook for marketing

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 Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

Only hire when a function is underwater, so headcount forces ruthless prioritization

The Delta 4 Framework

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

The Design Sprint Scorecard

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

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 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 Engineer-cation

Leaders clear 3-4 days, join a team as an IC, ship one small feature to production, and log the friction.

The Escape Hatch Principle

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

The Ex-Growth Company Test

Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.

The Expectations-Reality Delta

Unhappiness is the gap between expectation and reality — and expectations are far easier to change

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision

Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet

The Forgotten-Name Recovery Playbook

Tactical moves to survive not remembering names or whether you've met someone before.

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 Loop

Embed a real engineer inside the customer's building and run a build-show-iterate cycle every single day

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 Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

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

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 Forces of Switching

Understand any adoption decision as a tug-of-war between attraction, anxiety, habit, and inertia

The Four Go-To-Market Playbooks

Early Market, Bowling Alley, Tornado, Main Street — each has its own playbook, and mixing them backfires.

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

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

The Four Reasons You're Not Getting Promoted

A diagnostic that separates 'the system can't promote you' from 'you're not ready' — because the fix differs.

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-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Funnel-Position Defense Against AI Overviews

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

Communication5 steps

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

Formal feedback is noise. Pull the real signal, prove you heard it, and publicly reward whoever gave 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.

Sales5 steps

The GTM Engineer Agent-Deployment Loop

Turn a sales function into an AI agent by shadowing your best rep, then redeploy the humans up-market

The Horizon-3 Research Team That Ships

Fund a 3-5 year research team, then bolt it to product so ideas actually reach production.

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

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 Input-Metrics Stack for Developer Productivity

No single metric rules them all — combine per-component input metrics that ladder up to time-to-value.

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

The Inverted W Planning Process

Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.

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 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 Lethal Trifecta

Any AI agent that combines three capabilities can be tricked into stealing your data — cut one leg.

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

The Love-Hate Disruption Test

Gauge whether an idea is truly disruptive by how polarized the reactions are, not how positive.

The Low-Heart-Rate Abundance Posture

Enter high-stakes rooms calm by treating every meeting as one of many, not your one shot.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

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

The Marquee Customer and the 10th Executive Sponsor

Before you cross the chasm, win one famous logo — by finding the one exec in ten who wants to leapfrog.

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Meeting Operating System

Version your team's meetings like a product — ship a new rev every 90 days.

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

Wake up asking what maximizes impact — then interrogate your answer for skill-set bias.

The Murder Board

Before starting a project, invite smart outsiders whose only job is to tear your two-page plan apart

The Nielsen Number: Right-Size Your Research

Interview 7-14 people — fewer teaches too little, more teaches nothing new

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

The Path to the C-Suite

Five career levers plus a work ethic that compound you into an executive

The Pickle: Iterated Product Quality List

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

The Platform Encroachment Test

Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

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

The Pod + Product Staff Team Model

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

The Product-Market Fit Treadmill

In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you

The Product Strategy Stack

Separate mission, strategy, product strategy, roadmap, and goals into five layers you can define top-down and debug bottom-up.

The Proxy Goal Ladder

Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

The Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

The Scaled-Liquidity Smell Test

Before calling yourself a marketplace, prove you have scaled liquidity on both sides.

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

The SEO Go/No-Go Investment Test

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

The Sharp Problem

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

The Shipyard Team

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

The Sidecar Model of Management

You don't take the wheel or hand it over — you ride attached, and you have to be invited in first.

The Six-Factor Company Stack Rank

Timing > market > team > product > brand > distribution — you need all six, ranked.

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

The Skip: Career as a Product

Plan for the job after next, not the next job — and treat promotion as a means, not the goal.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

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

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

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Social Radar Founder-Read

Read the human signals in a founder interview to catch red flags the idea-focused people miss.

The Soft Pushback

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

The Sticky Engine of Growth

Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product

The Strategy-Isn't-Done-Without-Wireframes Rule

Treat a strategy doc like a house blueprint: it isn't complete until wireframes show what the product looks like when the strategy is built.

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

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 Taste-Development Loop

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

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

Adopt a coding agent the way you'd onboard a new intern — pair first, then delegate.

The Thin Skeleton Template

Start every project from a minimal template — agents copy its style far better than they follow prose instructions.

The Three Acts and the Next North Star

The greyhound that catches the rabbit never runs again — pick your second North Star before you catch the first.

The Three B's of Behavior Change

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

The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth

Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth

The Three Generations Rule

Make the product, fix the product, then fix the business — innovation almost never lands in one generation.

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

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

The Three-Part AI Product Utility Equation

A useful AI product needs model intelligence, context/memory, and application/UI to all converge.

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Structure a product ops function around data insights, customer insights, and process to free PMs for strategic work

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.

The Three-Trait Hire Plus Two AI-Era Premiums

Grit, quick-learning, self-awareness get you hired anywhere — curiosity and putting yourself out there keep you relevant

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 Trust-First Interview Method

Talk less, promise review before publishing, and follow the tangents — so guests open up and the conversation goes somewhere real.

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

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

The Ugly Baby Test

Seek ideas that make smart peers laugh — real alpha lives in the ugly babies everyone dismisses.

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.

Finance4 steps

The Value-State Test for Crossing the Chasm

VC money buys a change in your company's value state — you have crossed when you no longer need the next round.

The Vibe-Coding Blast-Radius Rule

Vibe-code freely when only you get hurt by bugs; stop and take responsibility the moment others could.

The Waterline Model (Snorkel Before You Scuba)

Diagnose team problems from the top down: structure and dynamics, not the people, cause 80% of issues.

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

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

The Zero-Ask Assistant (Copilot Design Philosophy)

If the user has to ask for it or wait for it, they won't adopt it — build assistance that infers.

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

Three-Prototype Ideation

Since prototypes are now free, build a feature three ways and let real use pick the winner.

Three Tenets: Can-Do, High Standards, Intensity

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

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

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

Tier-One Logo First

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

Timeline Padding Audit

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

Finance3 steps

Token Budgets as a Trust-Proportional Resource

Kill the token-spend leaderboard; cap AI spend like any resource, sized to trust in someone's ROI judgment

Top-Down TAM SEO Forecast

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

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

Trapped Value and the 10% Capture Rule

Find the pool of value your technology unlocks — you keep roughly 10% of what you release.

Trust-by-Structure Governance

Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone

Truthful Storytelling Through Relentless Refinement

Sell the why, not the what — and refine the story out loud on real listeners until it comes off effortlessly.

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

Don't collect rules — ask why, triangulate three people, and rebuild the reasoning underneath.

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-Sided AI Adoption

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

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

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-Value Thermodynamics

Users are lazy; adoption only happens when total value delivered exceeds total effort spent, ideally by 10x.

Value-Chain Eval

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

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

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

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

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

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

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

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

Want Over Should (Self-Discovery, Not Self-Improvement)

Replace shoulds with wants and experiments — self-improvement encodes 'I'm broken' and slows evolution.

What-If Before Why-Not

Evaluate a disruptive idea by imagining its upside first, then treat the objections as your build list.

When-It-Leaks Communications Pre-Mortem

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

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Which Product Ops Pillar to Start With

Choose your first product ops investment by company stage and where your biggest fire is

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

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

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.

Zero-to-One Team Building

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

Zone Defense for Product Work

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