Shrinking

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

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

Innovation4 steps

Customer Research as a Documentarian

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

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

The tell-tale signals that friction, not capability, is capping your team's speed

Performance = Potential − Interference

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

Leadership3 steps

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

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

Productivity3 steps

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

Know whether your metric is a recipe or a lens — and never misuse a recipe

Productivity4 steps

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

Front-load the architecture, fan out to agents, then step back and evaluate

Strategy5 steps

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.

Strategy5 steps

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

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

Communication5 steps

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

Pick two or three metrics that speak the exact word your leaders keep repeating

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

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 Career S-Curve for Attracting Talent

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

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

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

Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

A start-anywhere playbook to stand up a developer-experience initiative

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.

Innovation5 steps

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

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

Productivity4 steps

The SPACE Framework

Pick balanced developer productivity metrics across five dimensions — never rely on one.

Productivity5 steps

The Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

Force a top-three, weight by frequency, and never ask four questions at once

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