Severance

10x vs 10% Thinking

Deliberately reserve space for moonshot bets instead of settling for safe incremental improvements.

Innovation4 steps

Adversarial Multi-Model Peer Review

Have rival LLMs review each other's code and fight it out until no issues remain

Self-Mastery4 steps

AI as Undermind Mirror

Use a structured five-days-of-questions prompt to make an LLM reflect back patterns you already sense but can't articulate.

Productivity5 steps

Appetite Bracketing

Set a time budget, then ask what you'd do with more and less — the bracket reveals the efficient frontier.

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

During an existential threat, assume the disruptor is playing an optimal game and respond with overreaction

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software

Develop design intuition by watching real people use OTHER products, not your own.

Leadership3 steps

Cater to the Individual, Not the Average

Ask each teammate how involved they want to be, then run decisions to fit their motivation.

Strategy6 steps

Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

When you're bleeding to competitors, throw out the plan and build the churn list, sorted by ARR.

Confidence-Calibrated Directness

State how strongly you hold each opinion so strong views don't silence the room.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Consumer Subscription Viability Test

Freemium-plus-paid-acquisition consumer subscriptions fail without ~60-70%+ retention or a network effect

Creative vs Reactive Leadership Mindset

Lead from purpose and possibility instead of fear, and rewire the beliefs that keep you reactive.

Innovation4 steps

Customer Research as a Documentarian

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

Productivity3 steps

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

Communication4 steps

De-Ambiguate Upstream: The Brief as a Prompt

Design is slow only when the brief is vague; remove variables upstream like you'd add context to an AI prompt.

Finance3 steps

Deferred-Buyout Creative Pricing

Keep the exploration phase cheap by billing rights separately, so a late pivot doesn't mean you already paid to own dead work.

Innovation4 steps

Delay the Primal Mark

Stay in low-fidelity blocks and conversation as long as possible before drawing anything that looks real.

Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)

Replace feel-good design principles with 3-4 opinionated tenants that settle recurring debates for good.

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

Before rejecting an idea, sincerely attempt to make it work — then say no with receipts.

Communication4 steps

Evals as Articulating Success

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

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

Delegate to hires only once they consistently make better calls than you would — and signal in both directions

Influence4 steps

Hacking Hype (Internal and External)

Manufacture momentum by forcing visibility moments and tying launches to emotion.

Mindset3 steps

Inner Board of Directors (Parts Work for the Inner Critic)

Externalize your inner critic as a named board member you can appreciate, then ask to step aside.

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Interview for Design in the DNA

Before joining, verify the founders valued your function from the very beginning; it can't be grafted on later.

Strategy5 steps

Invest Profits, Not People: The Core Expansion Test

Fund new bets from the core's profits — never by moving engineers off the core.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Keeper of the Flame: The Zero-to-One Trio

Three moves to carry a new idea from spark to company-wide launch: right idea, buy-in, spread.

Model Casting by Personality

Route each task to the model whose 'personality' matches, and split plans to fit

Optical Correction X-Ray

Blow a single letter up huge and probe its joints to see where a real type designer breaks geometry to look perfect.

Communication4 steps

Pain-Solution-Proof-Point Vision Pitch

Sell a vision by looping pain, solution, and a real user proof point instead of describing it in words.

Leadership3 steps

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

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

Productivity4 steps

RICE with Deferred Confidence and Effort

Score reach and impact first; sit with the innovative bets before letting C and E kill them.

Productivity4 steps

Root-Cause Tooling Post-Mortem

When AI botches something, ask what in its prompt caused it — then patch the tooling

Strategy5 steps

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Entrepreneurship4 steps

SaaS-Marketplace Transition Test

A SaaS business can add a marketplace only if it touches its customer's customer and those customers need multiple suppliers

Scenario-Based PM Interviewing

Interview PMs by making them do the real job under real constraints, not recite prepared stories

Server-Side Events as the Default

Track events from your servers, not your clients — logs with a user ID are already events.

Productivity3 steps

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

Reserve scarce user research for high-uncertainty, high-leverage problems; ship to learn everywhere else

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

Strategy6 steps

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

Leaders ideate inside the teams' jam sessions instead of reviewing their output from outside.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Song Exploder Your Intuition

Turn a gut reaction to a design into a reusable, articulable design rule by reverse-justifying why you feel it.

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

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

Marketing3 steps

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

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

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 AI-as-CTO Persona Project

Cast the AI as an opinionated technical co-founder to kill sycophancy and premature coding

Peak Performance5 steps

The AI Interview-Prep Coach System

Build an AI coach, mine the real question bank, drill weak spots — then mock with humans

Mindset4 steps

The A-Minus Idea: Conviction as a Catalyst

Put out an opinionated idea to react to — people respond to an idea far more than to nothing.

The Blur Test

Take your glasses off and squint at a brand to judge its cohesion, color story, and overall feeling.

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

Leadership3 steps

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

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

Marketing4 steps

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

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

The Design-Led Architecture Stream

Give design a protected block to define the product's building blocks — or it will smuggle scope in at the end.

The Expectations-Reality Delta

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Exposure-Therapy Tool On-Ramp

Ease into coding tools in graduated steps so code stops being terrifying

The Goals-First Refresh Cascade

Set the scope of a rebrand by naming the goal first, then let every later round cascade from broad to narrow.

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Learning-Opportunity Command

Turn every confusing moment into an 80/20 lesson aimed at your current skill level

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

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

Productivity7 steps

The Seven-Command Build Loop

Six slash-commands turn vibe-coding into disciplined software delivery for non-coders

The Three Network Effects (and Why Social Products Must Evolve)

Classify defensibility as direct, cross-side, or data network effects — and know social products must add the latter two

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Three Reactive Postures

Identify which fear-driven posture you retreat into (complying, protecting, controlling) so you can redirect the gift beneath it.

Communication5 steps

The Ungated Customer Feed

Pipe raw customer feedback into Slack with no gatekeeper — and let engineers email the customer directly.

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

Top-Down Design Diagnosis

Before touching any detail, spend days naming the one big-picture reason a design bothers you.

Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

User Immersion to Roadmap Loop

Turn constant user and non-user conversations into a prioritized roadmap and sales evangelism.

Values, Not Behaviors: The Culture Car Wash

When you change companies, keep the values that got you hired but recalibrate the behaviors to the new culture.

Peak Performance3 steps

Variety-as-Rest Anti-Burnout

Beat burnout by switching to a different kind of work when you lose steam, instead of stopping.

When to Hire Your First PM

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