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Barrels and Ammunition

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

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.

Bias Interrupters for Introvert-Safe Decisions

Design meetings so the loudest 20% can't take 80% of the air — vote offline, then go round the circle.

Blow Their Socks Off: The 10x Word-of-Mouth Bar

To earn recommendation, give users an experience they didn't know was previously possible

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

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

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.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build on Undiscovered Talent

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

Innovation6 steps

Build Zero-to-One in the Dark

Inside a big company, new products die of attention. Ask for less scrutiny, fewer resources, and room to fail.

Leadership6 steps

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.

Cascade the Vision, Delegate the Work

Run a huge org on high-level objectives and tight feedback loops instead of cascading OKRs

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.

Productivity4 steps

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

Roadmap the phase, not the feature: Discovery, then Solutioning, then Build, then a ship date.

Competitive Wargaming

Assign each squad one competitor for a quarter, then pool the intel on a presentation day.

Conviction-Led Product Management

You can't split-test your way to love — build conviction on what matters, then make one big change

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

Finance4 steps

Cost-Allocation Pricing to Fuel Word-of-Mouth

Allocate every real cost to the customer who caused it, raise heavy users, cut everyone else's price

Criticize in Public

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

Culture Is What You Do

Make failure genuinely safe by rewarding bold-but-wrong bets in public, not by writing it on the wall

Communication4 steps

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.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do the Unscalable to Get Customers to Lobby For You

Deliver a painful manual experience so good that customers complain to the regulator, not to you

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.

Engineer-Owned Product

Collapse the product/engineering divide by giving ownership to whoever is closest to the problem

First-Principles Future Visualization

Build vision by vividly imagining the far future, then extracting what must be true

Self-Mastery5 steps

Follow People, Not Plans

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

Foundational Insight Over Customer Research

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

Two formal and two informal routes into PM — the informal ones convert most often.

From Victim Consciousness to Radical Responsibility

Shift from 'life happens to me' to 'I author my response' to reclaim agency

Fundamentals-First Hype Filter

Engage the technology, run the real-world numbers, then reject the totalizing claim, not the tech

Growth Is a Game of Inches

Don't chase the step function. Ship 20 bets at 20% instead of 4 perfect ones — then raise the hit rate.

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

Innovation3 steps

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

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

Leading Without Fear: Allow, Come Home, Reframe

Break the cognitive-emotive fear loop in high-stakes moments instead of suppressing it

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

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

Sales4 steps

Match the Sales Hire to the Motion and the Buyer (PLG to SLG)

Layering sales onto PLG: hire growers for inbound and department-head buyers, not CIO hunters.

Mission Authenticity as an Emotional Referral Engine

An authentic mission that customers genuinely believe becomes a word-of-mouth channel money can't buy

Communication4 steps

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.

Strategy2 steps

Observe Users, Don't Just Ask Them

Watch what users actually do, because watching your assumptions get crushed beats any interview

PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product

Write a spec for your career: destination, metrics, milestones, and a measuring stick for every offer.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Pre-Sell Before You Build

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

Product Marketing: Closing the Perception Delta

Make users perceive the value you actually delivered — close the gap between done and perceived

Communication5 steps

Reframe Self-Promotion as Education

You make the light bulb but you sell light. Rename the act and the resistance disappears.

Relentless Application of Force

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

Robust-Across-Futures Action

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

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.

Ruthless Referencing

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

Slow vs Fast Decisions

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

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

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

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

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

Productivity4 steps

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.

Leadership6 steps

The 30-60-90 Day Landing Plan

Listen for 30, align for 30, execute for 30 — and negotiate the listening time with your manager up front.

Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

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

Sales3 steps

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

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

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

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

Sales3 steps

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

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

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

The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

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 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

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

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

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

Communication3 steps

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

Win interviews on presence and enthusiasm first, then on impact — never on how hard you worked.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Learning-Impact Ladder

Alternate between roles where you have mastery and roles where you're the newbie — zigzag, don't climb.

The Magic Loop

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

The NPS Doubling Curve for Viral Growth

Optimize NPS instead of conversion, because each promoter tier doubles how many people they tell

The OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities

A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.

Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

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

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 Sticky Engine of Growth

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

Self-Mastery3 steps

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 Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

No OKRs, then siloed team OKRs, then company OKRs with cross-org dependency mapping.

Communication4 steps

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 Ugly Baby Test

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

Productivity3 steps

The Weekly State-of-Me Email

Write a self-initiated weekly note of what worked, what didn't, and what's blocked

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Whole-Body Yes: Decoding Emotions as Signals

Read fear, sadness, anger, joy, and creative energy as actionable workplace data

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

Express multi-year strategy as a yearly percentage split of resources across three horizons.

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

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

Trust-by-Structure Governance

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

Productivity4 steps

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.

Vision-Execution Polarity Balance

Diagnose whether you're over-theorizing or over-running-walls, and dynamically retune

Where-to-Play Product Strategy as the Prioritization Engine

Turn an integrated set of strategic choices into the filter that decides every roadmap trade-off.

Influence5 steps

Write What You Repeat

If you say it more than once, write it down — then get an accountability partner to enforce a monthly cadence.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Your Life's Objective Function

Make your implicit life values explicit and test daily choices against future-you