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Silo

By Hugh Howey

3 recommend/use · 5 sourced episodes

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Leadership5 steps

Assemble Spikes, Not Well-Rounded People

Hire sharp, complementary spikes instead of developing everyone into generalists

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Strategy4 steps

Build AND Buy

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

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Strategy4 steps

CDP vs Reverse-ETL Stack Decision

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

Onboard early users in small waves so each cohort surfaces new bugs instead of duplicating the last cohort's feedback.

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Productivity3 steps

Cut Scope, Not Quality

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

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Innovation5 steps

De-Risk the Biggest Swings First

Run discovery and delivery in parallel — and put the top-right, riskiest bets into discovery first.

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Marketing3 steps

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

The more crowded and mature a category, the more design and brand become the deciding differentiator.

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Innovation3 steps

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

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

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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.

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Leadership4 steps

Hire People Bigger Than Their Title

Build a small team of high-caliber people who each own more scope than their role, and screen for it with a paid work trial.

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Strategy5 steps

Impact Above All Else: The Two-Question Priority Loop

Two daily questions, driver-mapping, and back-of-envelope math before any project earns your time

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Communication4 steps

Inquiry Over Advocacy

Dial up questions, dial down your case — then check if you still disagree

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Leadership4 steps

Internal Virality for Alignment

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

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Leadership5 steps

Let Fires Burn (with Three Never-Burn Exceptions)

Agree which problems you let burn this week — and the three that never can

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Strategy3 steps

Magic and Science Decision-Making

Replace A/B tests and metric goals with deep shared customer understanding, then decide by informed intuition.

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Productivity3 steps

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

Filter every opportunity by 'does this advance the main quest, and is it important now or later?'

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Innovation5 steps

Manufactured Chaos: The Artificial Time Constraint

When things feel too calm, inject an absurd deadline to force intuition and creative leaps

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Innovation3 steps

Opinionated Software: Good Defaults Over Flexibility

Ship the one best workflow as a strong default so users spend time on their work, not on configuring your tool.

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Influence5 steps

Poke the Bear

Never self-censor — but poke only after the homework, and only with data

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Productivity3 steps

Problem-People-System (PPS)

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

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Product-Market Fit as Segment Territory

Treat PMF not as a binary but as territory won segment by segment, and double down hard on whatever segment is pulling.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Sell-Ready From Day One

Acquisitions rarely just happen — seed acquirer relationships early, then run the sale like a fundraise.

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Innovation3 steps

Ship-Ugly-Then-Polish Craft Loop

Combine shipping fast with fixing fast: get rough builds in front of real users, reserve polish for general release.

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Strategy4 steps

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

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

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Strategy5 steps

Supply-First Marketplace Building

Marketplaces aren't chicken-and-egg — they're two-sided, and you always start with supply.

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Leadership5 steps

The Anti-Sell: Hiring by Describing the Worst Day

Tell candidates the worst day at your company in full detail — then ask if they still want to join

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Marketing4 steps

The Creator Growth Triad

Consistency, collaboration, and curator association — the three levers that have made creators since 2010.

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Strategy4 steps

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

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Self-Mastery6 steps

The Serenity Prayer and the Discard Bucket

Two rituals for perfectionists: the Serenity Prayer, and a bucket you cannot un-bin

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Innovation5 steps

The Weekly Marketable Feature

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

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Mindset3 steps

Thinking Gray

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

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Leadership4 steps

Tool-Agnostic Hiring Test

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

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Leadership4 steps

When to Centralize a Martech Function

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

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