Runway

Build AND Buy

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

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

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

Productivity5 steps

Context Is All You Need Prompting

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

Mindset3 steps

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.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

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

Marketing4 steps

Future-Proof MTA Data Collection

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

Productivity3 steps

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.

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

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

Mindset3 steps

Measure in Hundreds

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

Innovation4 steps

Play-First AI Fluency

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

Productivity3 steps

Problem-People-System (PPS)

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

Marketing11 steps

The 11 Zero-Day Marketing Exploits

Eleven recurring meta-patterns for engineering an unfair go-to-market advantage.

Marketing5 steps

The Attributed Influencer Launch Sequence

Stagger tracked influencer shares over days, then weaponize the leaderboard.

Innovation4 steps

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

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

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

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

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.

Mindset5 steps

The 'Just Evil Enough' Ethics Test

An Occam's-razor line between subversive-and-clever and actually evil.

Strategy5 steps

The Platform Encroachment Test

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

The Proxy Goal Ladder

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

Marketing3 steps

The Recon Canvas

An 18-square grid for scanning product, medium, and market for subversive openings.

The Refounding Test

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

Innovation3 steps

The Subversive Mindset (System Awareness → Novelty → Disagreeability)

Get a system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend, in three learnable steps.

Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

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

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

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

Innovation3 steps

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.

When to Centralize a Martech Function

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