Scale AI

Adaptive Evaluation Over Static Benchmarks

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

Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

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

CaMeL Permission Pre-Restriction

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

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

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

Marketing5 steps

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.

Productivity4 steps

Chaos Buffers: Planning Around Users Who Don't Owe You Time

Every plan carries a backup and a scope-sized buffer, because your users' real job always wins

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

New leader's first move: earn trust before inflicting the change you were hired to make.

Customer Research as a Documentarian

Observe like a non-judgmental documentarian, find the pattern, then validate the truth with data

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

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

Elastic-Demand Career Bet

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

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

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

Engineers as Discovery Partners, Not Resources

Embed the tech lead in discovery so engineers own the why, not just the what

Self-Mastery4 steps

Equanimity as a Product Skill

Pause before reacting: manage your own reactions instead of trying to control the chaos

Mindset4 steps

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

Mindset3 steps

From Brick Layer To Architect

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

Hire an Organism of Strengths

Interview for three universal traits and compose a team of complementary strengths over hiring the most optimal individual stars

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Innovation5 steps

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

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.

Communication6 steps

Mindful Communication: Converse in the Language of the Listener

Listening, not articulacy, is the core PM communication skill — and it has a method

Mindset4 steps

Mission-Over-Minutiae Opportunity Choice

Choose your next big move by passion, mission, and team — not by optimizing every minor variable.

Strategy4 steps

Northstar Problem Commitment

Pick one foundational building-block problem and commit years to it, not a scatter of trendy ones.

Objective-Data Alignment Test

Before betting on an AI capability, check that your training data is the same shape as your desired output.

Marketing5 steps

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring

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

Performance = Potential − Interference

Two levers only: raise the team's ceiling, or remove the weight sitting on top of it.

Physical-System Reality Check

For anything embodied, budget for three things — a brain, a body, and real application scenarios.

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

Match the PM archetype you hire to the product's stage of maturity

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.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

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

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.

Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case

Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

Sketch the ideal end-state journey, then work backwards and ship it in measurable pieces.

RLAIF Reward Design

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

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

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

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

Standing Up a Product Discipline From Scratch

Turn an implicit PM function into a real one by writing the ladder first, then wiring hiring to it

Strategy4 steps

Stickiness Over Moats

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

Mindset3 steps

Survival Before Thriving

Make asymmetrically positive bets and protect the enterprise — you must survive long enough for timing and insight to arrive

Systematic Customer Conversations

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

Productivity4 steps

Tasks, Not Problems

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

Taste, Humility, Hutzpah: The Designer Hiring Lens

Hire for judgment, humility, and the courage to say 'not good enough' — tools and process you can teach.

The Access-to-an-Audience Moat

In human data the only durable moat is a trusted, targetable audience — not recruiters or ads

Productivity3 steps

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-Fit Accuracy Test

Deploy AI where the human baseline is low-accuracy — not where it's already near-perfect and you need the last 2%

The AI Security Vendor Due-Diligence Test

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

Mindset3 steps

The Angry-God Containment Lens

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

The Breaking News Dress Rehearsal

Script and run a fake crisis end-to-end to stress test your product and your people at once

The Career S-Curve for Attracting Talent

Map where a candidate sits on the ambiguity-vs-scale S-curve, then sell them their next step

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Company-Inside-a-Company Incubation Playbook

Spin a 0-to-1 business inside a mature company by ring-fencing it completely from the core

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 Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

Group effort, vision + alignment, an editor, and the courage to say 'almost, but no'.

Communication5 steps

The Four-Touchpoint Stakeholder Intake System

Four standing rituals that turn chaotic user requests into a governed product intake pipeline

Strategy4 steps

The Golden Recipe of Modern AI

Every AI breakthrough sits on three legs: big data, the right neural architecture, and enough compute.

Finance3 steps

The Gross-Margin Short-Circuit

Use high gross margin + healthy churn as a fast litmus test for whether a business is truly differentiated

Mindset5 steps

The Habit-Anchored Micro-Meditation

Attach full presence to something you already do daily instead of adding a new ritual

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Insight Test

Before founding anything, prove why YOU uniquely hold an insight others don't — and why you'll endure it for a decade

Communication3 steps

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

Innovation5 steps

The Levels of Quality Ladder

Rate every feature 1-5: works → error-free → usable → desirable → surprisingly great.

Communication5 steps

The Low-Maintenance Work-in-Progress Deck

One shared slide deck of screenshots, updated monthly, that kills redundant work and spreads patterns.

The Middleman-Signal Disintermediation Play

When middlemen and end-customers both come to you directly, that's the signal to build the business yourself

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

Productivity4 steps

The Parallel Agent Workflow

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

The Quality-Volume-Speed Priority Stack

What high-stakes data buyers actually rank: quality first, then volume, then speed

Innovation5 steps

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

Incubate new product lines as separate 'seed companies' with dedicated teams and adjacency-based selection

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

Communication4 steps

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

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

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

Three Tenets: Can-Do, High Standards, Intensity

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

Productivity3 steps

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

Triangulate the Customer's Truth

Don't take what customers say literally — reconstruct their economics and incentives independently, then find the urgent one

Value-Chain Eval

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

Leadership7 steps

Walk the Store: The Essential Journeys Quality Program

Name your 15 critical user journeys, give each a cross-functional owner, and score them on a fixed cadence.

When to Hire Your First PM

Stay founder-as-PM until bottlenecks, hijacked eng/design, or new customer segments force the hire

Wide Aperture, Then Coalesce

Keep considering many ideas — including ones that look bad — and test cheap versions until the signals converge on one