Sendbird

Additive Hiring

Stop hiring people who fit the box. Hire people who make the team stronger than it is today.

Calendar-Defended Proximity

Connection to the front line won't happen by accident as you rise — you have to fight your calendar for it.

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.

Communication4 steps

Context Not Control

Your job as a leader is to give people the context to decide well — including the context that isn't flattering.

Data-Driven Self-Story Rewriting

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

Mindset4 steps

Envision-the-Ending Goal Discovery

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

Productivity4 steps

Excellence Is the Outcome, Not the Artefact

Ask what the meeting is actually for, then spend the effort there — not on the last 20% of polish.

Expectation, Gap, Fill

Set the bar explicitly, name the exact gap, then jump in with both feet and close it with them.

Strategy5 steps

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.

Innovation5 steps

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

Products built from competitive fear fail; audit the motivation before you audit the roadmap.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Head-Heart-Hands Micro-Experiments

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

Inside-Out Leadership Circles

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

Innovation5 steps

Problem-First, Wheelhouse-Checked, Unit-Economics-Proven

Three gates a product idea must pass before you build the solution you already fell in love with.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Superpower Excavation from Peak Stories

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

Talent Density as Prerequisite

Freedom, low process and candour are not policies you adopt — they are dividends of talent density.

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

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

Mindset5 steps

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the B-side of your career so a bad season doesn't read as a verdict on your life.

Strategy5 steps

The Broken Equation Test

No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.

Communication5 steps

The Compelled Test (Storytelling as Product Signal)

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

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

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

The First Performance Review Reference Call

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

Strategy4 steps

The Full-Stack Centralized Insights Org

Keep data, research and engineering in one central team — objectivity is the asset you're protecting.

Leadership6 steps

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

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

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

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

Mindset4 steps

The Introspection Probe (Decoupling Decisions from Outcomes)

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

The Keeper Test

Ask monthly: if this person quit today, would I fight to keep them? If not, have the conversation now.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Kryptonite Reframe

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

Innovation5 steps

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

A lean test that strips out the mechanism doesn't test the idea — it buries it.

The Proudest Work Question (Taste Triangulation)

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

Leadership6 steps

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

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

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

One interview question that separates PMs with real reps from PMs with a clean résumé.