LLenny's Podcast
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Slack

By Slack Technologies

68 recommend/use · 103 sourced episodes

Every sourced reference

Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

Related frameworks

Leadership4 steps

Additive Hiring

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

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Innovation3 steps

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

Force all your work through your own product even when it's the wrong tool, so it becomes the right tool

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Innovation4 steps

AI Computer Interfaces (ACI)

Give AI agents purpose-built text interfaces, not the human GUIs they were never designed for

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Innovation6 steps

Alpha Co-Creation Loop

Pick the users who are already pushing the boundary, build with them in a shared channel, ship only when they're thrilled.

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Influence4 steps

Anchor the Pitch to the Exec's Incentives

Find the metric, OKR, or board pressure they own, then show how your idea moves it.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Anger as a Secondary Emotion

Before reacting in anger, name the fear or hurt beneath it — connecting emotions replace the distancing one

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Communication3 steps

Answer the Question Behind the Question

When caught without a number, answer the adjacent question and surface the real concern.

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Productivity5 steps

Appetite Bracketing

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

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Productivity6 steps

Appetite-Driven Product Cycles (Shape Up)

Fix the time budget, not the scope: six-week appetites, two-person teams, and work that dies on time

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Marketing5 steps

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

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Leadership4 steps

Areas of Responsibility (AORs) for Cross-Functional Ownership

Publish a beyond-titles list of who's the DRI for what, so product and marketing always know who to go to.

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Peak Performance6 steps

Artifact Reverse-Engineering and Backstage Observation

Collect the best artifacts, reverse-engineer their questions, then go watch the sausage get made.

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Influence4 steps

Asking for Help Well

Ask for advice, not answers — the counterintuitive skill that separates who rises from who stalls.

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Marketing4 steps

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

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Productivity4 steps

Async Priority Codes for Small Teams

Tag every Slack message with a response-window code so nobody has to monitor the channel.

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Innovation6 steps

Automated User Research Pipeline

Wire sales-call keywords to Slack to email to your calendar so customer interviews book themselves.

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Marketing4 steps

B2B Channel Sequencing Ladder

Turn on growth channels in a fixed order, cheapest-and-least-scalable first, because each later channel needs the customer knowledge the earlier ones produce.

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Productivity3 steps

Bad vs Sad Quality Tiers

Classify every failure as bad (irrecoverable) or sad (recoverable pain) so teams triage quality across many surfaces.

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Peak Performance3 steps

Beating Pre-Talk Nerves

Almost all speaking anxiety is before you start — reframe it, then rehearse by passive listening and transition drills.

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Finance5 steps

Beat-Your-Plan Fundraising: Trade Dilution for Trust

Pitch numbers you'll hit, eat the lower valuation, and turn every passer into a future lead.

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Marketing2 steps

Beautifully Simple Pricing

In your early days, price so a customer can repeat it back and it tells a value story.

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Marketing3 steps

Become a Value-Added Advisor with Cross-Section Data

Turn the industry data only you can see into exclusive insight that keeps customers from churning.

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Mindset4 steps

Beginner's Mind Practice

Deliberately clear the expert's mind to keep every possibility open for the next decision.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Be Known For Something

Pick one thing to be excellent at, get a reputation for it, and let responsibility flow to you

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Strategy2 steps

Benefit = (Volume × Quality) / Time

Measure AI-building impact as experimentation volume times quality, divided by time to launch

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Marketing3 steps

Be The User Reset (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Zoom out and ask what the user hires your product for — then be that user and ask if you'd even buy what you made.

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Peak Performance4 steps

Binary Quality Calibration

Instead of documenting what 'quality' means, classify shipped work as high-quality or not — and let examples teach the bar.

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Strategy6 steps

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

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Strategy4 steps

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

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Influence3 steps

Bring the Insight to Win Over Skeptics

Earn trust from more-experienced people by owning customer insight, not by faking expertise

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Innovation3 steps

Build-and-Bake: Ship the Same Feature Until the Model Catches Up

Prototype ambitious features now, let them sit, and re-release the same shape each time models leap

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Strategy4 steps

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

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Strategy4 steps

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

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Strategy3 steps

Build for the Future Model

Design product ideas for the model capability that is coming, not the one you have today

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Strategy4 steps

Build for the Models Six Months Out

Ship for the AI capabilities that will land in ~6 months, not the ones available today

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Strategy4 steps

Build for Where the Models Are Going

Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.

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Strategy4 steps

Build Infrastructure, Not Features

Ask 'what has to be true so anyone could build this in an hour?' and build that instead.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Building Toward a Portfolio Career

Engineer a narrow-but-deep expertise plus branded credibility so you can advise many companies, not one.

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Productivity4 steps

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Build Your Own PM Toolbox (Learning Without Burnout)

Learn from execution, self-retrospect, deep-dive one skill gap at a time, and keep only what works for you.

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Innovation3 steps

Build Your Own Senior-Engineer Benchmark

Measure AI honestly by scoring new models against real human experts rewriting your actual broken work.

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Strategy4 steps

Bundling Strategy by Growth Motion

When to bundle products and when a single-product land wins

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Leadership4 steps

Calendar-Defended Proximity

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

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Influence5 steps

Calibrated Acceptance of No

Don't over-accept a no into a life verdict, or under-accept it into something you can override.

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Peak Performance3 steps

Calories Per Hour: Intensity Over Hours

Get more done per minute instead of working more minutes, then go home.

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Strategy4 steps

Candidate Market Fit

Position yourself as a narrow spear, not a net — three-to-four attributes the market actually wants.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Cap Table as a Growth Strategy

Recruit influential founders and operators onto your cap table so they become your earliest, most credible customers and evangelists.

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Leadership5 steps

Career-First Management: Help Them Find Their Next Job

Commit to helping reports leave, and win transparency, backfill lead time, and reputation.

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Strategy5 steps

Category-Attribute Fit

Don't pick a market then decide how to win. Work out what wins there, and only pick markets where that's who you are.

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Leadership5 steps

CEDAF Delegation Framework

A five-part checklist for delegating without lowering your standards — to humans or AI.

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Productivity5 steps

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

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Leadership3 steps

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

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

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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.

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Innovation4 steps

Change the Rules of the Game

When the game is rigged against you, don't optimize — invent a new model.

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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

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Mindset3 steps

Choose the Hard Path

When choosing between options, pick the harder one because it wins whether or not it works out.

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Strategy6 steps

Churn-Ranked Refocus Roadmap

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

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Strategy4 steps

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

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Marketing5 steps

Close the Loop: Intent-Signal Retention Engine

Turn every low-commitment user signal into a trigger you can legitimately fire later.

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Strategy3 steps

Code Quality Doesn't Equal Product Success

Solve the real problem for real users; architecture and code quality are nearly orthogonal to success

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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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Marketing4 steps

Comically-Narrow Bullseye Definition (Inclusion / Exclusion / Triggers)

Narrow your target to ~seven concrete attributes across three buckets so everyone agrees these people will say yes

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Leadership4 steps

Commit-and-Celebrate Weekly Cadence

Bookend every week with Monday commitments and Friday celebrations, tracked by a short weekly status.

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Productivity4 steps

Commit Only to Dates Within Your Control

Roadmap the phase, not the feature: Discovery, then Solutioning, then Build, then a ship date.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

Help your fans make a living from your product and their income becomes your distribution

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Marketing6 steps

Community-Led Growth: Equip the Champion

The salesperson is the designer inside the company — your job is to make them a superhero.

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Marketing6 steps

Company-Generated, Company-Distributed Content Loops

Build loops where your product creates branded content and distributes it into other people's workflows.

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Strategy4 steps

Competitive Wargaming

Assign each squad one competitor for a quarter, then pool the intel on a presentation day.

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Innovation4 steps

Complaint Storms

A team ritual to see your own product with fresh, critical eyes — by first ripping apart someone else's.

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Productivity4 steps

Compounding Urgency: Pull the Roadmap Up a Week

Ship a week earlier, start the next thing a week sooner, and the gap compounds into a lap.

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Marketing3 steps

Comprehension Over Friction

Removing friction only helps when intent is high; for most of your product the real problem is comprehension

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Concierge Manual Onboarding

Hand-onboard every early user one-to-one to manufacture superfans and dodge premature self-service engineering

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Leadership4 steps

Connect-Users-to-Value Journey Staffing

Growth's job is to connect users to your product's value — so staff teams around each stage of the user journey.

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Strategy4 steps

Conservative Plan with Milestone Unlocks

Plan for the downside, then let pre-agreed milestones unlock the budget to accelerate.

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Marketing5 steps

Content Market Fit

Treat content like a product: pick an audience, find their pain, and ship a painkiller

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Productivity4 steps

Context-First Agent Debugging

When a coding agent won't do what you want, treat it as a missing-context problem, not a model problem.

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Productivity5 steps

Context Is All You Need Prompting

Treat the model as a brilliant stranger with zero context, and supply what a colleague would already know.

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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.

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Leadership4 steps

Context Over Control: Debate Upstream of the Solution

Empower teams by aligning on goal, hypothesis, and data—never by prescribing the solution.

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Finance3 steps

Contribution-Margin Payback Period over CAC

Judge acquisition ROI by how many months of contribution-margin profit it takes to repay CAC, not by CAC or LTV:CAC.

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Sales4 steps

Conversation-Intelligence Deal Diagnosis (the Dealbot)

Run an AI agent over every call, email and Slack to find the real reason you win, lose, and stall

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Leadership4 steps

Conway's Law Reorg: Go Functional Before You Go AI

Restructure engineering into one functional org before expecting company-wide AI or technical depth

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Innovation5 steps

Core-Behavior Synthetic Training

Ship an AI feature by naming its 3-4 core behaviors and teaching them with model-generated data

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Communication4 steps

CORE Feedback Structure

Context, Observation, Result, Next Step — feedback about behavior, never personality

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Leadership3 steps

Crossing the Product Leader Canyon

Escape the manager death spiral by shifting from doer to editor and owning outcomes over output.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.

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Leadership5 steps

Customer-Insight Career Leverage

Grow your career by pulling ground-level customer insights up to executives instead of waiting to be promoted

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Strategy6 steps

Customer Job Prioritization Criteria

Five tests for choosing which customer job to lead with when research surfaces more than one.

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Innovation4 steps

Customer Research as a Documentarian

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

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Sales5 steps

Customer Zero Launch Motion

Deploy a breakthrough product on yourself first, then use your own results as the sales engine.

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Finance3 steps

Day One vs Day 100 Feature Packaging

Free the features that create the aha moment; monetize the features whose value only emerges at scale.

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Leadership3 steps

Deadlines as P-Zero

Have few deadlines, but make each one a P0 that nothing else can touch — and cut scope to hit it

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Leadership5 steps

Deal Speed and Default Optimism

Codify the values you already have, not the ones you wish you had.

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Strategy4 steps

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

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Productivity4 steps

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.

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Leadership4 steps

Deliver Customer Value Faster with High Quality

One sentence, three measurable attributes — the motto that drives Miro's entire product reward and measurement system.

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Communication6 steps

Demand-Feedback-First (T3/B3)

Force your team to critique you before you critique them — then report back what you changed.

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Productivity3 steps

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

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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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Innovation7 steps

Design for the Most Complex Use Case First

Architect for the hardest customer you'll ever have, then choose what to ship first.

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Communication4 steps

Design For Tomorrow's Majority, Not The Vocal Minority

Optimize for the far larger future user base, then manage the unhappy few with authentic listening.

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Innovation3 steps

Design in the Material

PMs and designers should code — not to ship, but to master the material and truly understand what they're designing.

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Strategy4 steps

Design the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

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Productivity5 steps

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

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Strategy3 steps

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

The shorter the horizon, the more detail; keep long-range plans deliberately hazy to avoid false precision

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Productivity4 steps

Dictate-and-Template AI Story Scaling

Prime ChatGPT with your team's exact template, then dictate context naturally to generate an org's worth of specs.

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Strategy3 steps

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

Build your moat outside the LLM so your product gets better as the models get better.

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Influence5 steps

Disagree With the Founder Via the Spirit

Never say no to the idea — say yes to the spirit and come back with a better path

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Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

Only discussion belongs in the meeting; discovery and decision happen independently and asynchronously

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Sales3 steps

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

Great salespeople talk under half the time and answer a question with a question about the question

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Innovation3 steps

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

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Communication4 steps

Don't Make Me Think (Reduce Thinking, Not Clicks)

Optimize for the fewest decisions, not the fewest clicks — eight trivial taps beat two fraught ones

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Mindset4 steps

Don't Stop Until You Reach the End

Distrust expert answers and drive every problem to ground-truth yourself

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Mindset2 steps

Don't Wait for the Re-Org

If you're waiting for a formal declaration to build differently, you're already too late

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

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

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Strategy5 steps

Double Down on Why People Love You

Name the core reason users love you, keep investing in it, and build every new product off it

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Leadership5 steps

Drawing the Perimeter

The PM's job is to add constraints, not solutions — draw the box, then let engineers and designers fill it.

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Leadership4 steps

Drive AI Adoption By Using It Yourself On A Real Problem

Executives using the tool daily on their own real problems beats any top-down mandate or think-piece

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Leadership5 steps

Driving AI Adoption Through Hard Constraints

AI transformation moves when you impose hard constraints, sort people into three groups, and fix the slowest part of the system.

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Leadership5 steps

Dynamic North Star Metrics

Hold a North Star for at least six months, then be willing to abandon it

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Leadership3 steps

Earn The Next Role By Driving Impact In This One

Stop eyeing the next promotion; be judged on impact delivered in the job you already hold.

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Leadership4 steps

Earn the No: Try to Make Yes Work First

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

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Strategy3 steps

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

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Marketing3 steps

Elevate a Profession, Not a Category

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

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Leadership4 steps

Embodied Algorithm Offsite

Make the team physically become the system so nobody can leave without understanding it

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Innovation4 steps

Embrace-the-Next-Thing Mindset

Greet each new technology wave with 'I can't wait for the next thing' instead of resentment.

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Communication3 steps

Emotional Discovery: Feel Bad Like the Customer

On customer calls, dig until you feel the exact emotion the customer wants to avoid, then build to remove it

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Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

Write only what energises you, only what overlaps your job, and publish nearly all of it.

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Communication6 steps

Engineering Honest Feedback

People withhold feedback because it's risky — your job is to make it safe and rewarding.

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Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

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Leadership4 steps

Engineers as Discovery Partners, Not Resources

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

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Finance3 steps

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

Land enterprise deals at 75K-150K — a cheap land price poisons your expand.

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Sales3 steps

Enterprise Price-Ceiling Discovery

Keep asking for more until deals break; losing 20-30% to price is how you find the ceiling.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Equanimity as a Product Skill

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

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Productivity3 steps

Escape-Velocity Activation Metric

Identify the specific actions a user must take in their first window to become durably active, then make one team obsess over driving them.

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Productivity4 steps

Eval-First AI Product Development

Define what 'correct' looks like as evals first; the spec becomes the scorecard, not the build instructions

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Innovation4 steps

Evaluative User Research (Hunt for Reasons They Won't Use It)

Test prototypes to find every reason people won't use it — and never let the researcher go alone

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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.

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Strategy3 steps

Existing-User Retention & Resurrection Priority

As a consumer subscription matures, the biggest lever isn't new users — it's current-user retention and resurrecting the dormant.

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Leadership4 steps

Expectation, Gap, Fill

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

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Strategy5 steps

Experiment Only When You Need To

Treat A/B tests as risk mitigation, not as the default proof of impact

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Strategy4 steps

Explore & Exploit at the Insight Level

Oscillate between finding the right mountain and climbing it — but do it insight by insight, not just at strategy level.

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Strategy3 steps

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

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Communication4 steps

Exponential Feedback via the Competency Lens

Give feedback on root-cause behaviors, not surface symptoms, so it compounds — use a competency rubric as the diagnostic lens.

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Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

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Innovation4 steps

Fail-Fast Iterative Validation

Since ~80% of hypotheses fail, use cheap validation methods first and reserve A/B testing for pre-vetted ideas

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Leadership3 steps

Failure-as-Default Framing to Create Startup Scarcity

Openly declaring a new bet will most likely fail buys the autonomy and speed a big company otherwise smothers

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Mindset4 steps

Fear-to-Agency Reframe

When AI change triggers fear, lean in and ask what's within your control — turn it happening to you into happening for you.

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Leadership5 steps

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Tell in minutes whether your squad is handed features to ship or problems to solve

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Innovation3 steps

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

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Strategy4 steps

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

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Sales3 steps

First-Call Yes-or-No Qualification

On the first call it's yes or no, never maybe — a no is data that saves the relationship.

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Strategy4 steps

First-Principles Framework Method

Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.

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Innovation4 steps

First to Hit the Brick Wall

In innovation, speed is the biggest determinant of success because you learn what doesn't work before anyone else.

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Productivity5 steps

Focused Hours Over Long Hours

Overwork lets you skip the hard work of deciding what matters — force the constraint that makes you decide

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Follow People, Not Plans

Choose jobs by who you'll learn from, not by a five-year plan or a financial bet.

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Leadership3 steps

Follow the Breadcrumbs and Calibrate Urgency

Act fast on an exec's subtle hints, but ask how strongly they actually feel first.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Forest Time

Schedule intentional monthly time to leave the trees and survey the forest — because good aim precedes huge investment.

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Marketing4 steps

Founder-Led Marketing as a Goodwill Bank

Log what you learn, package it per platform, bank goodwill to spend later

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Marketing5 steps

Four Criteria for Choosing a Distribution Platform (Enter and Exit)

Score a new platform on retention, monetizability, value exchange, and scale — then plan your exit before you enter.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Four Paths Into Product Management

Two formal and two informal routes into PM — the informal ones convert most often.

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Marketing5 steps

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

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Sales6 steps

Freemium Plan Design by Motivations for Motion

Design plans by mapping what drives someone to move up a tier — and measure product-driven revenue.

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Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

Adopt a specific user's identity, walk your own product end-to-end, and log every point of friction.

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Mindset3 steps

From Brick Layer To Architect

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

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Productivity5 steps

Frontier of Understanding (Goal by Risk Type)

Before committing to an outcome goal, set the goal at the true edge of what your team knows — understanding, dependency, execution, or strategic risk.

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Mindset3 steps

Frozen Competence: Where Human Value Survives

Models commoditize yesterday's competence; your value is using that cheap competence to make something new.

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Marketing4 steps

Fuel and Engine Model of Marketing

Reduce all of marketing to two questions: do you lack valuable things to say, or a way to distribute them?

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Leadership4 steps

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

Replace support, success, research, PR and marketing with two teams that own a human relationship end to end.

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Marketing3 steps

Full-Value Free Sampling (Reverse Free Trial)

Make your free product a live, rationed taste of everything paid can do — not a walled-off basic tier.

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Leadership4 steps

Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org

Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours

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Innovation5 steps

Game Design, Not Gamification (Build Toys, Then Games)

Make software fun by designing real toys that reward playful exploration — not by bolting on points and badges

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Innovation3 steps

Gamification's Three Pillars: Core Loop, Metagame, Profile

Durable habit-forming products stand on three legs: a tight core loop, a long-horizon metagame, and an accumulating profile.

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Communication4 steps

Gauge How It Lands

Read the reaction in real time and adjust which axis you move on — sad/mad means move up on care

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Generative-First Skill Stack for the AI Era

When making things gets cheap, your bottleneck becomes idea generation — train that muscle, plus just enough coding

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Productivity3 steps

Give It Your Hardest Task

Evaluate a serious AI tool on your gnarliest real problem, not a dumbed-down toy.

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Mindset6 steps

Give Your Gut Credit: Judgment-First Decision Making

Every decision a human makes is a judgment call — so ask 'what do you think?' not 'what do you know?'

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Leadership6 steps

Go and See: Walking All the Way to Ground

Product leaders become the world's foremost expert in their domain by going to the source themselves.

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Innovation2 steps

Golden Samples Over Full Corpus

Curate a small set of gold examples for your AI, don't dump your whole knowledge base on it

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Marketing3 steps

Good Friction vs Bad Friction

Adding friction that addresses the user's psyche can increase conversion, because not all friction is bad

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Marketing3 steps

Go-to-Market as a Product

Design the buying journey as a sequence of experiences, and add value at every touch whether or not they buy

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Productivity3 steps

Grade for Learning, Not Precision

Hand-wave the OKR score; spend your energy on the retrospective 'why' behind it.

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Leadership6 steps

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

Taste the soup together — experience the product as a group, log issues live, then debate each one.

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Strategy3 steps

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

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Strategy4 steps

Growth Team as a Rigor Forcing Function

Hire a growth leader early — the second-order effect is that it exposes everything you haven't measured.

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Marketing5 steps

Guided Onboarding Wizard

Replace tooltips with an immersive wizard that builds the user's first workflow with them

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Leadership5 steps

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

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Productivity3 steps

Hand the Toil to the Model First

Delegate the boring, repetitive parts of engineering to agents before anything else, and collapse the path to production.

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Strategy5 steps

Hard-Bar Activation Metric Selection

Pick the activation metric only 5-15% of users hit, then decompose it into levers

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Leadership4 steps

High Agency, High Accountability

Pair the freedom to solve problems your own way with clear ownership of the hypothesis and the outcome.

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Leadership4 steps

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.

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Leadership4 steps

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

For the first enterprise rep, hire someone who can cosplay the founder — vision, not scripts.

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Leadership6 steps

Hire for Autonomy: References, Real Work, and Default Trust

You'll be in none of the decisions that matter — so hire people you can hand autonomy to, and verify via references.

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Leadership3 steps

Hire Founders (Eyes Open to the Costs)

Recruit ex-founders for outsized output and truth-telling, budgeting for high attrition

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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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Leadership3 steps

Hire the People That People Pick

Win great hires over months by adding value first, long before there's a role

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Leadership4 steps

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

Evaluate people in three dimensions — skills, attributes, and values — not skills alone, which is only ~50% predictive.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Homework for Life

Capture one story-worthy moment every day to build an endless bank of stories and slow down time.

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Communication4 steps

Hook-Middle-End Story Structure

Package your message as a story with a hook, a middle that hides the message, and a celebratory end — then ask how to make it better.

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Mindset3 steps

How Might the Opposite Be True

Break a scarcity or false-tradeoff frame by forcing yourself to argue the reverse

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Communication3 steps

Humble Inquiry Interview Mode

Interview to learn, not to sell — lower your status, smile, and weight past behavior over stated intent

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Leadership4 steps

Hyperrealistic Work-Like Activities

As orgs grow, work supply runs out and people fill the gap with fake work that looks exactly like real work

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Mindset5 steps

Identity Separation After a Layoff

Sort what happened into 'not needed', 'wrong environment', and 'in my control' — only one of them is about you.

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Marketing4 steps

Impact Goals Over Activity Goals

Judge a marketing team by big bets and full-funnel conversion, not by how many blog posts they shipped.

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Strategy5 steps

Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List

A short force-ranked list every team must absorb — defined by what it excludes.

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Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

Report an imperfect engineering metric on purpose, then use every question about it to educate upward.

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Innovation3 steps

Incubate-Iterate-Integrate for Innovating Inside a Mature Product

Build the new experience beside your core product, perfect it, then fold it back in — so you don't break existing customers

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Strategy6 steps

Inflict Pain, With a Smile

Get acquired by becoming the competitor your buyer cannot ignore — while staying their friendliest partner

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Leadership4 steps

Inquiry Before Advice (Be a Thought Partner)

Resist giving advice — explore first, keep the monkey on their back, and develop the person instead of the answer

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Strategy4 steps

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

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Productivity6 steps

Internal Tools as a Product (The Crying Octopus)

Run your dev-productivity team like a product team: monthly surveys, hard metrics, and one-click paper cuts.

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Strategy7 steps

International Market Entry Stack Rank

Assume you'll need everywhere, order by demand, then re-rank by build cost, strategic value, and long poles.

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Influence4 steps

Interview as Discovery: Be the Solution to Their Burning Problem

Treat a job interview like product discovery — find the hiring manager's burning problem and position yourself as its solution

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Innovation5 steps

Intuition as Hypothesis Generator

Treat product taste as a hypothesis machine, not an oracle — then debate it down to a working hypothesis

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Strategy4 steps

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

Build product-led sales as an evolution, not a revolution: intuition, then regression, then platforms.

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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.

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Innovation5 steps

Irreducible Complexity — The Simplicity Audit

1 + 1 = 1.5, not 3 — every addition subtracts, so audit the system, not the local decisions

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Influence3 steps

Job Mission with OKRs (Play to Win)

Write your own version of the role with OKRs and share it with the hiring manager to win the offer.

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Leadership4 steps

Job Trials Over Interviews

Interviews don't predict performance; make the interview as close to the real job as possible.

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Strategy4 steps

Just-in-Time Planning

Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.

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Communication3 steps

Keep the Flame Alive: The High-Speed-Train Comms Cadence

Weekly bite-sized, honest updates and 3-minute customer snippets build momentum no one wants to step in front of

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Strategy4 steps

Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

A premortem only works if each predicted failure signal is bound to a pre-committed action

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Mindset4 steps

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

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Marketing4 steps

Kill NPS, Ask CSAT

NPS is the marketing industry marketing itself — a satisfaction question has better data properties.

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Communication3 steps

Kind and Candid

Reframe candor as an act of kindness so you actually deliver the hard message.

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Leadership5 steps

KPI + Narrative: The Two-Part Turnaround Drumbeat

Pair one north-star KPI with one relentlessly repeated narrative to reset how a company works.

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Productivity3 steps

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

A production-looking prototype no longer means it's production-ready — say the stage out loud

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Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

Latency Over Velocity: Conviction-Based Startup Decisions

A startup's edge isn't speed — it's a tight turning radius; swap experiment-driven decisions for informed conviction.

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Innovation4 steps

Latent Demand Mining

Watch for people jumping through hoops to make your product do something, then make that the smooth path.

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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.

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Leadership4 steps

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

Live and breathe your product as a real user (or meet customers) and trust the anecdote over the dashboard.

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Marketing3 steps

Lean-Into-Organic-Sharing Virality

Don't manufacture virality — instrument where users already share, then make those exact moments 5-10x more delightful.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

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Leadership5 steps

Lean Team by Design: Slow Hiring, Player-Coaches, Generalists

Hire painfully slowly, replicate your first-10 DNA, and bet big on the exceptional

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Innovation4 steps

Leap-of-Faith MVP Scoping

Scope the smallest build that tests your riskiest assumption, not a stripped-down product

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Learning Curve, Environment, Problem

Evaluate whether to stay in or leave a role using three questions, not job titles

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

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Leadership5 steps

Legibility, Actionability, Authenticity

Three tests any goal must pass, regardless of whether you call it an OKR.

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Leadership6 steps

Little Hands Growth Hiring

Hire on the KPI they'll commit to and their willingness to do the tiniest job.

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Innovation4 steps

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

Hold the far-future vision, but land with users where they already work today.

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Productivity5 steps

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

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Communication3 steps

Location and Action Openers

Start every story with where you are and what's happening — it activates imagination and silences the room.

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Marketing5 steps

Long-Tail Paid Diversification

After the big four ad platforms, buy the dozens of small ones nobody bothers to set up.

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Leadership5 steps

Low-Criticality Pilot for Changing How You Work

Never test a new way of working on something that matters — you get one shot at first impressions

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Strategy4 steps

Lower-Confidence, Higher-Volume Experimentation

Drop the 95% confidence bar to run more experiments, backstopped by qualitative corroboration and a pre-set game plan

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Strategy4 steps

Macro / Middle-Range / Micro Research Portfolio

Sort every research question into three altitudes and starve the middle one that eats your team's time.

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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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Strategy4 steps

Magic Lenses

Evaluate competing implementation paths by plotting each through the eyes of the advisers you wish you had

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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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Leadership4 steps

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

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Strategy5 steps

Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

Excavate your gut into a rubric, then score the rubric against reality to learn where your gut is wrong

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Productivity5 steps

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

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Leadership3 steps

Manager-as-IC Onboarding

New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.

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Leadership4 steps

Manager Visibility via an Always-On Agent

Enlist a standing AI session across all repos and channels to stay on top of 8x throughput and drive conversations.

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Leadership3 steps

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

Bring your manager a recommendation to react to, not an open question to solve.

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Productivity5 steps

Mandatory vs. Optional Onboarding Split

Split onboarding into a spare mandatory setup and a random-access optional layer — model the buyer's mind, not your features.

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Innovation5 steps

Manufactured Dogfooding

Invent internal reasons for every function to live in your product — quality follows hours logged.

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Sales6 steps

Mastering B2B Negotiations Through Value

Extract full value from every deal via gives-and-gets, value selling, and disciplined negotiation tactics.

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Leadership4 steps

Mastery Before Management

Get technical skill into your bones before you leave IC — then stay technical by listening, not coding

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Finance3 steps

Match Price to Value with a Value Metric

Pick the unit of value your customer gets, then charge against it so revenue scales as usage grows.

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Productivity3 steps

Match the Medium to the Point

When implementation is cheap, the skill is choosing document vs prototype for the point you're making

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Sales4 steps

Match the Sales Hire to the Motion and the Buyer (PLG to SLG)

Layering sales onto PLG: hire growers for inbound and department-head buyers, not CIO hunters.

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Innovation3 steps

Maximize the Treatment Effect to Fail Conclusively

In low-sample B2B tests, throw every tactic at a hypothesis at once so a failure kills the idea for good instead of resurfacing for years.

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Mindset3 steps

Measure in Hundreds

If your unit of measurement is one hundred attempts, five failures means you have effectively tried zero times.

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Strategy4 steps

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

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Strategy3 steps

MECE Problem Decomposition

Break any problem into buckets that are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive so you never miss a possible cause or solution.

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Productivity4 steps

Meeting Armageddon

Once a year, delete every recurring meeting and forbid new ones for two weeks.

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Productivity3 steps

Meeting Priming Before Decision-Making

Every meeting has a priming phase and a decision phase; skipping or reversing them guarantees dysfunction

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Mindset3 steps

Mental Time Travel

Ask how you'll feel about this in ten years to dissolve the focusing effect of right now

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Merge With the Unreasonable

Don't try to become a visionary; find one and connect your APIs to theirs.

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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

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Leadership3 steps

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

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Innovation4 steps

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

Surface AI help at the moment it's relevant instead of interrupting with notifications.

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Communication4 steps

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

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Innovation4 steps

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

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Communication3 steps

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

Spend two minutes pre-empting the objection you'll obviously get, and stop feeling blindsided.

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Leadership3 steps

Move Your Best Closers to Customer Success

In a downturn, patch the leaky bucket — put your top reps on keeping the customers you already have.

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Strategy4 steps

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

Plot customers on a graph of size plus the attributes that actually drive your revenue, not size alone

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Innovation3 steps

Multi-Prototype Comparison Testing

Show three distinct concepts instead of iterating one, so users can compare and you avoid over-commitment

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Strategy3 steps

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

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Mindset4 steps

No Linear Success Resilience

Expect the roller coaster: massive issues never stop coming, so build the skin to ride them.

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Strategy5 steps

North Star Translation Layer

Give every team a metric they can directly move, then convert each into a single company North Star using a shared translation factor.

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Strategy3 steps

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.

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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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Self-Mastery4 steps

Optimize for Learning: The Impedance-Match Career Test

Choose roles by where you'll learn most and whether the mission truly matches how humans are wired.

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Innovation4 steps

Optimizing for Feelings

Name the emotion the product must evoke, build to that, and use metrics only as an honesty check.

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Self-Mastery6 steps

Outcome-Backwards Skill Acquisition

Pick an outcome that would prove you learned the skill, then work backwards to the experts.

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Strategy4 steps

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.

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Innovation4 steps

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

Design partners guide the build — set the pricing frame up front and filter feedback 80/20.

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Leadership4 steps

Pair Programming as a Management Tool

Two people on one computer isn't half the code, it's the fastest path to the right code.

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Marketing5 steps

Payback-First Channel Measurement

Judge channels on closed-won revenue one year out, never on lead volume.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

People, Market, Product, Distribution

The four-lens screen for investing in — or joining — an early-stage company, with distribution weighted highest

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Strategy5 steps

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

Dream big, but chunk the bet into named learning phases with quarterly go/no-go gates

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Strategy5 steps

Pick a Lane and Write the Story

Master one of the five product ambiguities early, then write the paragraph your next employer needs to hear.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

Picking a Sharp Problem

Build on a problem so acute customers spontaneously ask to pay — it becomes a tailwind that carries your mistakes.

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Leadership4 steps

Pilot-With-Your-Best-Team Rollout

Don't roll OKRs out company-wide; hand the book to your strongest team, let them adapt it, then spread by twos.

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Communication3 steps

Pinch Before Crunch

Raise small irritations early, while they're still a pinch, before they compound into a relationship-damaging crunch

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Leadership3 steps

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

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

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Marketing5 steps

Pi-Shaped Marketer Hiring

Your first marketer needs two deep spikes plus strategy skills — not one spike, and not a generalist smear.

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Strategy4 steps

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

Late-stage companies spread chips across platforms; startups make one focused bet and go all in.

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Leadership5 steps

Platforms Are Products

When to start a platform team, who staffs it, and the impact metrics that keep it honest

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Productivity4 steps

PM Prototype-to-Production Handoff

PMs build a working V1 with AI, validate it with real users, then hand a working artifact to engineering

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Marketing4 steps

Positioning Before Pricing (The Single-Attribute Position)

Own one clear position that is unique, available, and reinforces your product strategy — then let it dictate price

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Marketing4 steps

PQA Signal Detection

Find the exact usage signals that mean 'engage sales now' using users, volume, velocity, and behavior.

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Peak Performance5 steps

Practice-Until-Your-Worst-Is-Good-Enough Interview Prep

Interviewing is the one skill with zero feedback — so run dozens of mocks in a small peer group.

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Strategy3 steps

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

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Marketing3 steps

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.

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Innovation2 steps

Press-Release-First Product Ideation

Write the launch press release before you build to keep products marketable

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Finance3 steps

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

Align price to where value and cost actually accrue, and kill defaulted freemium and mis-packed SKUs

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Finance3 steps

Price Your Product Like Your Roadmap

Treat pricing as a living system revisited every 6-12 months, not a set-and-forget decision.

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Innovation3 steps

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

Match UI confidence to data quality, be transparent about sources, and design virtuous data cycles.

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Productivity4 steps

Processing Over Memory: A Task System for the Overwhelmed Manager

Write everything down at the moment it's owed, groom into logical chunks, and free your head for thinking not remembering.

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Leadership4 steps

Product Accountability for Pipeline

Make product — not marketing — own PQA pipeline, with leaders on revenue and PMs on the KPIs that feed it.

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Productivity4 steps

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

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Influence4 steps

Product-Manage the Platform Team From the Side

Frustrated by a slow internal platform team? Supply the product management they don't have

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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

Product-Market Yourself as a Functional Angel Investor

Package your functional expertise into one clear, repeatable value-add so founders pull you into deals.

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Productivity4 steps

Product Scrapbooking

Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.

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Leadership4 steps

Project-Chosen Leads and the Mutt Hire

PM is a role on a project, not a department — and you staff it with multi-disciplinary makers, not title-holders.

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Innovation3 steps

Prompting-as-Prototyping

Validate a product idea by prompting a model in a local browser before building anything

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

Protect the Core Magic: Acquisition Integration

Freeze the loop users love, rebuild everything behind it, and narrate the seams honestly

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Innovation4 steps

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

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Leadership4 steps

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

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Productivity4 steps

P-Stage Cycle-Time Benchmarking

Stage-gate every initiative (PStrat→P0→P1→P2), size it S/M/L, and benchmark cycle time against yourself like golf.

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Marketing4 steps

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.

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Strategy5 steps

Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two

Every launch drops one of three; software lets you drop quality only if you plan to earn it back

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Marketing5 steps

Question-First Cheap Channel Playbook

Find where your buyers ask their questions, answer them honestly, and let the answer sell.

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Strategy4 steps

Question the Base Assumption Before Build-or-Buy

Before building OR buying a tool, ask whether the process needs to exist at all

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Quit Before You're Certain (Would I Start This Today?)

If you're thinking about quitting, you're probably already late — waste is prospective, not retrospective

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Communication4 steps

Radical Trust Building

Not radical transparency — let people know you as humans, so the permission dialog gets the benefit of the doubt.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

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Finance5 steps

Reactive Pricing After Demand Signal

Let users pull pricing out of you, then validate willingness-to-pay and margins

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Sales4 steps

Reading the Signals for Product-Led vs Sales-Led Growth

A decision tree for whether and when to hire your first salespeople

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Marketing3 steps

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

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Strategy5 steps

Re-establishing Product-Market Fit (Stacking S-Curves)

When growth plateaus, throw away the roadmap, sacrifice impact for learning, and rebuild PMF for the next audience.

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Mindset4 steps

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

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Innovation4 steps

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

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Communication4 steps

Repair: What Did You Hear Me Say?

When a response feels wildly off, ask 'what did you hear me say?' — then re-try from what they actually heard

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Communication5 steps

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

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Sales4 steps

Retention-Aligned Sales Compensation

Pay reps for customers who stay, renew, and expand — not just for the logo they closed.

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Innovation3 steps

Reverse Engineering to Build Openness

Two reverse-engineering habits that let a conscientious brain manufacture the openness it lacks

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Strategy3 steps

Rewrite vs. Restart: The Plane Decision

Never rewrite a live product with a big customer base; do shut down a small-traction acquisition and rebuild it

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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.

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Innovation4 steps

Ride the AI Value Wave

Treat today's AI capability as the worst it will ever be and expand where it's most efficacious

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Ride the Models

Stay valuable in AI by playfully applying each new model to your own work and re-testing what it couldn't do before.

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Innovation6 steps

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

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Leadership4 steps

Roadmap-Less Agility for AI-Era Building

Drop the explicit roadmap and jump on capability drops the moment they land

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Mindset3 steps

Robust-Across-Futures Action

When the future is unknowable, choose actions that are ethical across a wide range of scenarios

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Leadership3 steps

Role-Based Culture by Logical Deduction

Replace performative Mission-Vision-Values with a deduced 'role you play' that logically derives your standards

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Strategy4 steps

Rolling Roadmap with Precision Tiers

A six-month roadmap refreshed quarterly, with 80% commitment in months 1-3 and 50% in months 4-6.

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Communication5 steps

Ruthless Simplification for PM Writing

A set of concrete tools to strip PM documents down to only what's necessary.

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Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

Sell the why before you explain the how, or your ask gets crickets.

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Leadership4 steps

Scalable Leadership vs. Selective Micromanagement

When you lack confidence in your team's direction, don't go hands-off — micromanage tactically and temporarily to get them back on track.

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Innovation5 steps

Scaling Expert Judgment Through Algorithms

Structure your experts' judgment into a signal, train on that — not only on engagement

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Communication3 steps

Schedule Syncing (Managing Your Manager)

Never say no to your boss — show your timeboxed calendar and ask them to help you prioritize.

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Leadership4 steps

Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable

Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.

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Marketing5 steps

Segment by Learning and Building Style

Personalize onboarding by how someone builds and learns, not by their job title

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Sales4 steps

Selling to Developers via Self-Serve Proof

Developers must prove products themselves, so invest in self-serve — sales can't convert them at the build stage

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Sales4 steps

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

Sell leaders the opportunity to become a superhero, not a fix for a narrow problem.

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Sales3 steps

Sell to Reduce Risk, Not Increase Upside

Four of five buyers buy to avoid pain or reduce risk — anchor the sale there, not on the art of the possible

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Innovation5 steps

Server-Side Events as the Default

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

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Sales3 steps

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

Sell enterprises a service they already know how to buy, then migrate them to the product.

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Strategy4 steps

Setting Strategy From Data, Then Committing to a Choice

Gather internal data, customer research and company goals, make the best informed bet, then reevaluate and pivot.

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Self-Mastery5 steps

Shadows of Superpowers

Your plateau is almost always the shadow cast by the exact strength that got you here.

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Strategy6 steps

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

Reject the reliability/velocity trade-off: automated gauntlet, ramped exposure, and remediations ahead of roadmap.

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Innovation4 steps

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

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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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Communication5 steps

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

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Influence3 steps

Shrink the Change to Build Trust

De-risk a scary idea into a two-week experiment with a fixed check-in date.

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Marketing4 steps

Signals and Nudges for Choice Under Abundance

When every result is plausible, confidence beats relevance — surface glanceable signals, not more inventory.

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Communication3 steps

Signposting

Use structural cue-words to guide the reader through your writing without heavy formatting.

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Marketing4 steps

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

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Sales4 steps

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

Deliberately give away revenue to simplify pricing — it lifts retention and restores a customer-obsessed culture.

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Leadership4 steps

Single Decisive Reason (SDR)

For any important decision, isolate the one reason that alone justifies it — a pile of weak reasons is a red flag

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Productivity3 steps

Single-Owner Review Limits

Cap reviews, approvals, and meeting size so one accountable owner drives the pace

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Leadership3 steps

Situation-Behavior-Impact Feedback

Deliver hard feedback as an undeniable subjective observation, not a verdict

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Strategy6 steps

Six-Month Bets with a Collapsed W

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

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Strategy5 steps

Skeleton Before the Makeup

Sequence early growth investment from site fundamentals up to awareness — never the reverse.

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Leadership4 steps

Soliciting Feedback: The Order of Operations

Ask a go-to question, count to six, listen to understand, then reward the candor

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Strategy4 steps

Solution Deepening vs. Market Widening

Classify every build as deepening the product for current users or widening it to new ones — to diagnose 'why we feel slow'

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Innovation4 steps

Solution-Weighted Discovery

Spend a little time validating the problem; spend most of it winning on the solution

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Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

Match your stated confidence to your actual evidence — neither overreach nor over-hedge.

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Communication4 steps

Speaking with Adjacency

To explain something dull, tell a story about something else, then snap it into place.

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Productivity4 steps

Spec-as-What-Good-Looks-Like Verification

Check your definition of good into the repo so AI code review can automatically validate work against it.

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Influence3 steps

Spending Chips: Breaking Rules Without Breaking Trust

Treat accumulated social capital as chips you deliberately spend to break the specific rules that block a new bet

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Leadership5 steps

Spirit-First OKRs

Write down qualitatively what crushing it looks like before you pick any number

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Influence4 steps

Sponsorship Over Mentorship

Career inflection comes not from a coach but from a sponsor who trusts you with a bigger problem.

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Leadership4 steps

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

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

Start Small, Don't Boil the Ocean

Narrow scope to the achievable thing in front of you, then build momentum on top of it

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Leadership3 steps

Startup-Within-a-Company Team Design

Build new things inside big companies with small, senior, trusted teams and manufactured discipline

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Communication3 steps

Start-With-Why One-Pager

The PM's core artifact: define the thing by nailing the problem and why-now before anything else.

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Leadership4 steps

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

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Communication3 steps

Stewart Plus Two More

Never bring one option; show a Goldilocks three and hold the rest in the appendix.

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Strategy4 steps

Stickiness Over Moats

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

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Strategy5 steps

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

Model any org process as stocks and flows, then find where reality disagrees with the model.

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Strategy2 steps

Stop Churn Before It Happens

To stop churn, acquire customers who won't leave — churn is an acquisition problem, not a save problem.

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Marketing4 steps

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

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Leadership3 steps

Strategy Not Self-Expression

Feedback's goal is behavior change, so cut everything that doesn't serve it — usually 90%.

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Communication4 steps

Street-Smart Decision-Making

Give the customer's perception as much weight as your logic — model the narrative, not just the numbers.

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Leadership3 steps

Super Agent With a Forward-Deployed Human

Give the whole company one shared agent, owned by a human who keeps it working — not personal agents for everyone.

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Marketing3 steps

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

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

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Communication5 steps

Synthesis-to-Meme Storytelling

Turn scattered inputs into one distilled idea leaders can repeat from memory in a meeting.

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Marketing3 steps

Systematic Customer Conversations

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

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Innovation4 steps

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

Build the most extreme version along one attribute, feel it, repeat in the opposite direction, then find where they meet

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Strategy4 steps

Systems-First Scaling (One to 100)

Once you have product-market fit, go slow to go fast: build the systems before you hyperscale.

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Strategy4 steps

Tactic-to-Strategy Discovery

Run many small experiments in parallel, then scale the one that breaks through into your strategy.

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Leadership4 steps

Talent Density as Prerequisite

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

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Productivity4 steps

Tasks, Not Problems

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

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Taste as a Trainable Model

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts whether your in-group will like an idea — built by reps with feedback.

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Influence4 steps

Teach, Don't Pitch: The Buyer-Research Cold Open

Do research so good the buyer can't ignore it — give insight, not a sales pitch.

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Leadership4 steps

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

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Leadership4 steps

The 1,000-Experiments 'What Would Need To Be True' Goal

Set an audacious experiment-volume goal — not to hit it, but to force the conversations that unlock a whole experimentation culture.

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Productivity4 steps

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

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Leadership3 steps

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

Hire salespeople with enough product depth that engineers can't tell they aren't a PM

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The 10-Minute Rule (Surfing the Urge)

Beat any urge to get distracted by waiting ten minutes and riding the emotion until it subsides.

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Strategy7 steps

The 10-Point Company Quality Checklist

Ten hard metrics to judge whether a company is worth betting your career on

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Leadership6 steps

The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers

A definition of what the PM job actually is — facilitation, execution, and impact — not a career ladder.

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Productivity4 steps

The 10% Working-Version Rule

Have a testable working version by the time 10% of your time budget elapses, not at the halfway point

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Leadership4 steps

The 12 Product Management Competencies

Map every PM skill into four areas — execution, customer insight, product strategy, influence — and 12 competencies that hold from APM to CPO.

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Communication4 steps

The 15% Rule

Step just 15% beyond your comfort zone to deepen relationships without triggering the danger zone

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Strategy4 steps

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

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Communication3 steps

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

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Innovation3 steps

The 20/80 Willingness-to-Pay Axiom

20% of what you build drives 80% of willingness to pay — and it's usually the easiest 20% to build.

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Communication4 steps

The 60-Second Meeting Reset

Buy a context-starved exec 30 seconds of orientation before you pitch.

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Communication3 steps

The Ability-Trust-Appeal Relationship Model

Every professional relationship rests on ability, trust, and appeal; the experience you are matters most

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Productivity3 steps

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

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Communication3 steps

The AI-Document Slop Test

An AI-written document is fine — as long as you can stand behind every line and it took longer to make than to read.

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Innovation4 steps

The AI Startup Moat: Data Flywheel + Crafted Workflow

Defensibility for AI apps comes from a proprietary data flywheel and a deeply crafted vertical workflow.

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Peak Performance3 steps

The Alpha-Beta-Gamma Focus Grid

Map brain-wave states against motivation systems and deliberately spend ~25% of your year outside busy beta

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Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

Recruit the already-vocal, pay them in access not cash, and grow the cohort deliberately slowly

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Leadership5 steps

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

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

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Sales5 steps

The A+ Middler and the Next Step

Founders are already elite at the middle of a sale — the only skill to add is never leaving a meeting without a next step.

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Leadership4 steps

The AMPED Cross-Functional Product Org

Redefine 'product org' as Analytics, Marketing, Product, Engineering, Design — all embedded in every stream.

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Communication4 steps

The Articulate-Ask-Accept Loop

Treat wanting as an iterative dev cycle: articulate, ask intentionally, accept the response, try again.

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Communication3 steps

The Art of Inquiry

Ask genuine what/when/where/how questions from real curiosity — never 'why', never to confirm a hypothesis

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Strategy4 steps

The Ask-Every-Team Test (Diagnosing a Missing Strategy)

Interview teams and leaders to reveal whether a real, aligned strategy exists — or just lives unspoken in people's heads.

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Leadership6 steps

The Assumption-Break PM Interview

Give a case study too big to solve, break one assumption, and watch whether they rattle off the implications.

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Marketing4 steps

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

Decide whether community-led growth will work for you before spending a dollar on it

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Finance4 steps

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

Pick your AI pricing model by plotting value attribution against product autonomy, then climb toward outcome-based.

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Innovation5 steps

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

Break growth experimentation into four evaluable stages an AI can hill-climb, keeping humans on alignment

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Strategy5 steps

The Balanced Feedback Portfolio

Treat every feedback channel as a biased sensor, then hold a portfolio so you have no blind spots.

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Strategy5 steps

The BD-Product Operating Contract

Test deals with hacky ops before code, build platforms not bespoke, time product's entry.

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Strategy3 steps

The Believability Spectrum for Vision & Strategy

Every idea lands as believed, believable, conceivable, or inconceivable; your openness sets where the lines fall

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Marketing5 steps

The Best-Customer Research Survey

Survey only recent, happy, paying customers, with questions that reconstruct their decision.

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Communication2 steps

The Best-Practice Inversion Interview

Ask a candidate for a best practice, then for when it would not apply

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Mindset4 steps

The Best-Teams Adoption Heuristic

Adopt a practice only if several of the best teams already use it — then strip the culture from the technique

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Innovation4 steps

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

Every model leap gets normalised within months — build for the boring future, not the euphoric one.

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Bootstrapper's Constraint Discipline

Costs are the only thing you control — so stay small, do it yourself, and practice making money

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Strategy5 steps

The Boring Engineering Strategy

Write the strategy down, get the diagnosis honest, then constrain options so energy goes to what matters.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Brain's Three Systems (Safety, Reward, Purpose)

Diagnose which of three motivational systems is driving someone's behavior before you try to change it

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Strategy5 steps

The Breaking News Dress Rehearsal

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

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Innovation6 steps

The Bullseye Customer Sprint (5 + 3 in 1)

Interview five hand-picked customers against three prototypes in one team-watched day to learn who to build for

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Influence4 steps

The Business-Fluency Scalpel for Researchers

Learn the company's financial language so your insights land in the funnel, not in a deck.

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Strategy5 steps

The Buyer Set of a Dozen

Run a real sale process: build a 12-name list, disqualify against the sit-out criteria, then call it

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Leadership4 steps

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

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Strategy4 steps

The Chess-Points Competitive Lens

Every release is a move against your competitor in the customer's mind — positive or negative, never neutral.

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Leadership3 steps

The Chief Engineer Trade-off Owner

Give one person moral authority over a whole product to keep design coherence in one head

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Coldly Rational Pivot Decision

Pivot only after you've exhausted the good ideas — and force emotional distance so the call is rational, not humiliating

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Innovation3 steps

The Cold-Pattern Positivity Flip

Find the moments where users feel bad, and flip the product to reinforce progress instead of failure.

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Leadership3 steps

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

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

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Strategy6 steps

The Commodity Generic Play (ONCE)

Find commodity software still charging luxury subscription prices, then sell a beautiful generic once

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Strategy4 steps

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

A two-by-two that tells you which kind of community to build given your PMF and buyer

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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?

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Leadership4 steps

The Compelled-to-Work-on-It PM Interview

Hire PMs by testing whether their story makes YOU want to go work on their boring old problem.

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Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

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Leadership4 steps

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

When the bottleneck isn't people, each new hire is a net productivity loss unless they uplevel everyone.

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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.

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Sales4 steps

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

Treat a cold email like a growth funnel: open, then read, then reply — optimize each stage separately

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Finance3 steps

The Cross-Functional Pricing Process

Stand up a pricing committee, mine demand and willingness-to-pay with structured surveys, then set price.

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Marketing5 steps

The Customer-Led Growth Loop

Understand best customers, map their value journey, measure it, fix what's misaligned.

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Strategy5 steps

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

One metric that fuses retention, engagement and growth — tracked as growth rate and cohort slope, never absolutes.

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Productivity5 steps

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

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Mindset3 steps

The Data-Driven Red Flag

When someone brags about being 'data-driven,' suspect weak product judgment, not strong analytics.

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Marketing4 steps

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

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

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Decision Log

Build product sense by logging decisions you'd make, the reasoning, and later the actual outcome.

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Leadership7 steps

The Decision Tempo System

Never leave a decision in the room: decide now, pull in whoever is missing, and let deadlines actually bite.

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Leadership5 steps

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

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Innovation5 steps

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.

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Innovation4 steps

The Design Sprint Scorecard

Break your founding hypothesis into rows and grade each one red/yellow/green after head-to-head customer tests

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Strategy4 steps

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

Plot two customer-facing differentiators you can prove and own the top-right; the other three quadrants are Loserville

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Strategy4 steps

The Differentiation Stack

Four ordered tests a product must pass to matter, not just exist

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Strategy4 steps

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

Four diagnosable diseases that turn a great product company into a feature factory

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Strategy4 steps

The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

Treat a product roadmap like an investment portfolio, balanced across three axes of risk and intent.

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Strategy3 steps

The Dogfooding Boundary Rule

Use your own product walkthrough to generate the issue list — never to prioritize it.

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Innovation4 steps

The Double Diamond Product Process

Alternate broad exploration and narrow selection across customer, problem, and solution

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Marketing3 steps

The Double Triangle: PM as Go-To-Market Discipline

Sit the PM between two triangles — build (eng/product/design) and sell (sales/marketing/PM) — and originate the customer's language

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Self-Mastery5 steps

The Dream Behind the Complaint

You're bad at dreaming and great at complaining. Mine the complaint for the dream it implies.

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Durable Wrapper Test

Own a workflow you care about for a decade, then orchestrate 20 models beneath it

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Finance5 steps

The Early-Stage Sales Comp Ramp

Pay 50/50, give away 100% of quarter-one bookings, then hold reps to closing 3-5x their take-home.

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Marketing4 steps

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

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Productivity3 steps

The Effort Metric (Measure Attention, Not Completion)

Track 'did I do what I said for as long as I said without distraction' instead of whether you finished.

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Leadership5 steps

The Embedded Insights Partner Model

Success metric: they won't have the meeting without you.

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Leadership6 steps

The Empathy Steel-Man Decision Framework

Make each side argue the other's case, then name the tiebreaker and the deadline before debating.

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Leadership6 steps

The Engineer-cation

Leaders clear 3-4 days, join a team as an IC, ship one small feature to production, and log the friction.

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Innovation3 steps

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

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Strategy5 steps

The Ex-Growth Company Test

Two questions that tell you whether your well-funded employer is quietly a dead-equity trap.

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Communication3 steps

The Expectations-Reality Delta

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

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Marketing4 steps

The First 30 Seconds Onboarding Bet

Earn the next 30 seconds by making one thing feel magical fast

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Leadership4 steps

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.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Fish-and-Water Strength Test

Your real strength is the thing others praise that you think is no big deal.

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Innovation5 steps

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

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Leadership5 steps

The Five-Legged Stool

Product, eng, design, insights, and marketing as one leadership team — with the PM accountable, not king.

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Leadership6 steps

The Five PM Archetypes

Hire and compose product teams by five distinct thinking styles, not one generic ideal PM.

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Communication3 steps

The Five-Second Moment

Build every story around one instant of transformation or realization, and start at the end.

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Communication5 steps

The Five Stakes Tools

Five devices — elephant, backpack, breadcrumb, hourglass, crystal ball — that make an audience wonder what happens next.

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Leadership4 steps

The Five Tools Researcher

A modern researcher carries five methods, not one — and you hire for the Swiss army knife.

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Leadership2 steps

The Five Traits to Keep, Automate the Rest

Protect where humans shine — vision, empathy, communication, creativity, judgment — and automate everything else

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Strategy4 steps

The Fixed-Window Pivot Decision

Time-box a full-focus test on the one thing that matters, then let the team name the next bet

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Strategy4 steps

The Foundational Three Entry Path

Don't start in PM. Start as the person you'd be taking PM responsibilities from — engineer, designer, or seller.

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

A 10-hour, 3-phase team sprint that turns a vague startup idea into one testable founding hypothesis

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Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Founding Hypothesis (Mad Libs Strategy Sentence)

Compress your entire startup strategy into one testable fill-in-the-blank sentence — then go prove it

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Communication4 steps

The Four Engines of Attention

Stakes, surprise, suspense, and humor are the only four things keeping a business audience listening.

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Influence4 steps

The Four Legs of the Negotiation Stool

Negotiate the resources you need to hit your OKRs before salary, then ask 'are you open to?'

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Productivity5 steps

The Four Levers of Velocity at Scale

Small missions, a real platform, leaders in the trenches, and a team you keep recalibrating.

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Communication4 steps

The Four PM Annoyances

The four PM behaviours that quietly destroy engineering trust — and the fix for each

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Innovation4 steps

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

Valuable, usable, feasible, viable — any one fails and the product fails

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Leadership4 steps

The Four Reasons You're Not Getting Promoted

A diagnostic that separates 'the system can't promote you' from 'you're not ready' — because the fix differs.

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Strategy4 steps

The Four-Step Distribution Platform Cycle

Every new growth channel opens then closes in the same four predictable steps — learn to see where you are.

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Leadership4 steps

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

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Communication5 steps

The Four-Touchpoint Stakeholder Intake System

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

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Strategy4 steps

The Four Types of Product Work

Feature, growth, PMF-expansion, and scaling work — the portfolio a product leader must learn to balance.

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Innovation4 steps

The Full-Stack Builder Model

Empower one builder to take an idea to market end-to-end, regardless of role or team

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Strategy4 steps

The Full-Stack Centralized Insights Org

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

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Marketing5 steps

The GACCS Marketing Brief

A five-part brief — Goals, Audience, Creative, Channels, Stakeholders — to align before you make anything big.

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Leadership5 steps

The Generalist Placement Play

Put a non-expert in charge to unlock 10x thinking, then hire the expert and get out of the way.

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Innovation4 steps

The Gravity Model for Zero-to-One Products

Ship new products with tiny shielded teams, then let traction—not headcount—pull in resources.

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Communication5 steps

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

Formal feedback is noise. Pull the real signal, prove you heard it, and publicly reward whoever gave it.

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Leadership7 steps

The Growth Org Triad: People & Process, Strategy, Data

A growth org only works when all three of people/process, strategy and data are healthy at once.

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Sales5 steps

The GTM Engineer Agent-Deployment Loop

Turn a sales function into an AI agent by shadowing your best rep, then redeploy the humans up-market

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Gut-Check Protocol

Intuition is pattern matching and bias in the same organ — check it with System 2 and diverse guts.

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Mindset5 steps

The Habit-Anchored Micro-Meditation

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

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Sales4 steps

The Harder-to-Sell Heuristic

Only hire reps whose last product was harder to sell than yours — never easier.

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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.

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Leadership4 steps

The Hell Yes Standard

Anything short of a hell yes is a no. Don't settle for it — negotiate toward it.

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Leadership4 steps

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

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

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Leadership4 steps

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

Three tests that separate values which drive decisions from values that just describe your self-image.

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Leadership5 steps

The 'How to Work With Me' Document

Scale culture through one written doc: expectations, your real flaws, your commitments.

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Influence5 steps

The Humble Ask (Influence Without Authority)

State the want clearly, disclaim the authority explicitly, then ask them to reconsider.

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Influence3 steps

The IC Compensation Anchor

Believe your IC worth, then neutralize the 'grow into management' pay dodge by naming your non-management intent up front.

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Innovation3 steps

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

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Communication5 steps

The Impacts & Learnings Review

The one meeting a growth team can't skip: discuss learnings and implications, never status.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Indistractable Model

The four-step system for controlling your attention: master triggers, make time, hack back, and pre-commit.

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Leadership3 steps

The Indistractable Workplace (Three Traits)

Distraction is a symptom of dysfunction — fix it with psychological safety, a forum, and leaders who model it.

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Marketing5 steps

The Influence-Graph Fanboy Loop

Run PageRank on your community's network, then approach the central nodes for feedback — not distribution

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Entrepreneurship3 steps

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

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Entrepreneurship8 steps

The Internal Founder Pod

One entrepreneurial engineer, one designer, a platform apprenticeship, and a new product line in 6-9 months.

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Communication3 steps

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

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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.

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Strategy6 steps

The Inverted W Planning Process

Teams propose, leaders synthesise, teams adjust, leaders resynthesise, orgs distribute with context.

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Marketing5 steps

The 'Is The Search Over?' Content Standard

Judge every article by one question: after reading it, does the reader go back to Google?

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Strategy5 steps

The JEUE PLG Funnel (Join, Evaluate, Upgrade, Expand)

Four stages that map the PLG customer lifecycle and, loosely, your growth org

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Job Search Council

Run your job hunt as a committed 6-8 person peer group that flips anxiety into accountability.

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Leadership4 steps

The Keeper Test

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

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Strategy8 steps

The Landscape-First Product Strategy Doc

A bullet-driven Google Doc that builds an unbroken logic chain from company mission down to a single team priority.

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Strategy3 steps

The Lighthouse Users Program (10 → 100 → 1,000)

Deliberately serve a tiny, named set of customers through defined stages instead of chasing MAU too early

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Mindset3 steps

The Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

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Strategy6 steps

The Loop-Based Growth Strategy Model

Document how you actually grow as connected loops, then let the biggest constraint pick your quarter.

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Innovation4 steps

The Made-Up Name Reset

Give a team or feature a name nobody recognizes, so nobody can skip the argument about what it should be.

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Strategy4 steps

The Manukan Two-Pager & Listening Tour

Draft what you want and don't want, then run structured listening-tour conversations to find your fit.

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Productivity5 steps

The Meeting Operating System

Version your team's meetings like a product — ship a new rev every 90 days.

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Communication3 steps

Themes for Discussion at the Top of the Doc

Bubble up the spiciest 3 topics live; answer the hundred nitpicks offline.

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Marketing5 steps

The Messaging Guide That Rolls Up to the Job

A 5-7 page guardrail doc: value prop, competitive edge, ranked emotional and functional benefits.

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Marketing5 steps

The Micro-Influencer Wide-Net Playbook

Skip the big creators; onboard thousands of trusted micro-influencers like teammates

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Strategy3 steps

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

Automatically say no to customization features that ease manager reporting at the cost of IC workflow

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Innovation5 steps

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

Ship five things people love, not fifteen things that merely work

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Strategy4 steps

The Mission-to-Monday Cascade

Translate a 5-year mission down through strategy and quarterly OKRs into what you actually do this week.

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Strategy5 steps

The Narrow-and-Deep Community Wedge

Win one persona, one context, one use case in a community you can meaningfully influence — then widen.

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Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

Let people be fully heard, then decide anyway — the word that separates listening from agreeing

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Leadership5 steps

The Nirvana Vision / Relentless Mission Framework

Vision = the customer's Nirvana state, with your company deleted from it. Mission = how you'll get them there.

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Leadership5 steps

The Non-Fatal Override

If it isn't fatal, let them run it — but log your skepticism first so the outcome teaches both of you

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Productivity4 steps

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

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Productivity4 steps

The One-on-One Diet

Hold direct-report 1:1s sacred; cut nearly all the rest — relationship-by-1:1 doesn't scale

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Leadership5 steps

The One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

Convert a single feature team into an empowered product team in one low-risk quarter

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Peak Performance4 steps

The One-Skill Six-Month Block

Go all in on one skill for 3-6 months: study one example a week, practise it an hour a day.

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Innovation4 steps

The Open Core Line: State and Collaboration

Open-source the standard where logic is written; charge for stateful and cross-team work

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Leadership4 steps

The OPPA — Leaderless Peer Review of Problems and Opportunities

A recurring PM-only forum to spar on problems and opportunities — with the CPO deliberately absent.

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Leadership3 steps

The Orchestra Leader Model

A great founder conducts every function at once, not just the instrument they love to play.

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Mindset3 steps

The Owner's Delusion (and the Audience's Illusion)

You overrate your own product because you built it; your users arrive distracted, barely-intending, and ready to bounce

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Leadership3 steps

The Painful-Mistake Growth-Mindset Interview

Screen only for growth mindset by asking for the most painful mistake and what changed because of it.

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Productivity4 steps

The Parallel Agent Workflow

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Path to the C-Suite

Five career levers plus a work ethic that compound you into an executive

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Influence4 steps

The Personal Interest Inventory

Catalog the facts about yourself by reach and intensity, then weave them strategically into how you speak.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Personal Values Framework for Career Decisions

Write down what you actually care about, then reject anything that violates it, no matter how shiny.

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Marketing5 steps

The Pill-in-the-Hot-Dog Onboarding

Bury the intimidating-but-necessary onboarding step inside familiar, exciting content instead of leading with it

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Innovation4 steps

The Pilot Program for De-Risking Launches

Build a diverse champion network of real customers to test new features in the wild before you ever launch.

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Strategy5 steps

The Platform Encroachment Test

Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.

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Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

Run product and engineering as one leadership unit with clear ownership and async, iterated reviews.

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Leadership6 steps

The PM Framework Wrapper

A PM's real output is a framework that wraps strategy plus a point of view — and gets everyone to the same destination

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Leadership5 steps

The PM Owns the Why

Don't spec the what — distribute the why so hundreds of local decisions come out right.

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Sales3 steps

The POC as Business Case

Frame every pilot as co-creating an ROI model, charge for it smartly, and never anchor the commercial deal.

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Leadership6 steps

The Post-Interview Culture Probe

Give a strong-but-culturally-questionable candidate blunt feedback and hire on how they react.

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Mindset3 steps

The Power of Yes

Say yes to what scares you — a yes can always become a no, but a no forecloses the door forever.

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Leadership4 steps

The Product Career Learning Loop

A four-stage loop — execute, generalize, communicate, scale — that compounds a PM's ability over a career.

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Sales3 steps

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

Convert self-serve usage into large enterprise contracts by bridging individual, team, and enterprise value.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

The Product Manager's Four Areas of Homework

The four knowledge domains a PM must own because nobody else on the team can bring them

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Strategy4 steps

The Product/Market Fit Engine

Turn PMF into a number you can raise: focus only on the 'somewhat disappointed' users whose reason for loving you matches the mass market's

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Strategy5 steps

The Product Strategy Stack

Separate mission, strategy, product strategy, roadmap, and goals into five layers you can define top-down and debug bottom-up.

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Leadership5 steps

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.

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Strategy5 steps

The Provenance Gate: Scaling Supply Without Diluting the Brand

Let sellers scale by outsourcing production — but only to a partner whose process they actually know.

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Strategy4 steps

The Proxy Goal Ladder

Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.

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Leadership3 steps

The Radical Candor 2x2

Care personally AND challenge directly — the two axes that place every act of feedback

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Productivity3 steps

The Reach Test

Judge whether an AI tool is truly useful by whether you reach for it unprompted each morning.

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Strategy4 steps

There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

Feedback loops are as long as you choose — shorten them with necessary-but-not-sufficient milestones

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Leadership6 steps

The Relationship Design Conversation

Design how you'll work together before you need to — and assume your founder is terrified.

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Communication4 steps

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

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Leadership5 steps

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

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Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Reverse Trial

Run a premium trial on top of freemium: showcase everything, then fall back to free forever

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Strategy5 steps

The Rewrite Trap and the Staged Evolution Plan

Never go away for a year to rebuild — uplift well-contained pieces of the system instead

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Leadership5 steps

The Riff Test: Hiring for Gut Instinct

Pay finalists to build something, then critique it and ask what they'd do with two more days

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Strategy5 steps

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

Lead with themes and a narrative; link out to the systems for the granular how

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Strategy5 steps

The Sales Roadmap Budget

Give sales a fixed quarterly slice of the roadmap — say 10% of story points — and make them force-rank it.

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Innovation4 steps

The Same-Day Prototype Validation Loop

Idea in the morning, real users testing by afternoon, decision by evening

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Communication3 steps

The Say-Do-Said Loop

Say you'll do the thing, say you're doing it, say you did it — to align, adjust, and close the loop.

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Productivity5 steps

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

Put proactive agents on a schedule to watch your metrics, surface misalignment, and coach you weekly

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Innovation5 steps

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

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

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Sales5 steps

The Sell-Me-This-App Interview

Make every sales candidate demo your actual product before you hire them — no exceptions.

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Leadership5 steps

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

Give the eng manager and PM the same performance rating, and make them understand before they argue.

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Leadership5 steps

The Sidecar Model of Management

You don't take the wheel or hand it over — you ride attached, and you have to be invited in first.

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Communication6 steps

The Six Characteristics of Exceptional Relationships

A diagnostic checklist of six qualities that mark how far a relationship sits along the contact-to-exceptional continuum

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Marketing6 steps

The Six-Milestone Customer Journey Map

Struggle, evaluation, growth — six value milestones that replace the funnel as your growth model.

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Leadership3 steps

The Six-Month Autonomy Razor

If you're still telling a hire what to do six months in, you hired the wrong person.

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Leadership4 steps

The Six-Week Review Operating Cadence

Short, frequent check-ins where leaders pair on problems, not catch you slacking, create velocity.

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Strategy5 steps

The Skip: Career as a Product

Plan for the job after next, not the next job — and treat promotion as a means, not the goal.

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Influence6 steps

The Smallest-Ask Mentor Ladder

Never ask 'will you mentor me?' — ask a two-minute question, then earn the next rung.

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Strategy3 steps

The SMB-or-Enterprise Binary (Mid-Market Doesn't Exist)

There is no mid-market — decide which of two distinct games you're playing and don't bleed them.

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Strategy5 steps

The Solar System Bundle

Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA

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Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Stay-Up Scorecard

One number (profit) and one question (would I do it again) instead of OKRs, KPIs and a five-year plan

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Marketing4 steps

The Sticky Engine of Growth

Model retention by the three, and only three, reasons a customer returns to your product

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Strategy5 steps

The Strategy Contract

A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.

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Communication3 steps

The Strategy-Isn't-Done-Without-Wireframes Rule

Treat a strategy doc like a house blueprint: it isn't complete until wireframes show what the product looks like when the strategy is built.

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Strategy4 steps

The Strategy Tree (Deploying Strategy Through the Missing Middle)

Connect team-level work to business outcomes through three linked layers so no one asks why they're building something.

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Leadership4 steps

The Surgeon Management Model

Spend over half your time making your top 10% feel like a supported surgeon who can't be blocked.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Swipe File

Capture examples of communication that work — the act of collecting trains your eye.

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Productivity4 steps

The Switch Log

Log every task-switch in real time so your actual work trail — not your calendar — reveals where your time really goes

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Strategy6 steps

The Team-Based Activation Ladder (Setup → Aha → Habit)

Find the habit moment that predicts retention, then work backwards to the aha and setup moments.

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Leadership5 steps

The Team Is the Product

Choose the company you want to build first, pick a problem worthy of it, then treat every hire as a product launch.

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Productivity4 steps

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

Adopt a coding agent the way you'd onboard a new intern — pair first, then delegate.

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Leadership5 steps

The Team Watch Party

Whole team watches interviews live, predicts first and debriefs after, replacing the research report with instant alignment

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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.

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Mindset5 steps

The Three Acts and the Next North Star

The greyhound that catches the rabbit never runs again — pick your second North Star before you catch the first.

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Innovation3 steps

The Three B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

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Leadership3 steps

The Three Career Conversations

Past, dreams, and action plan — three 45-minute conversations to show you care and grow people

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Cs of Accelerating Word-of-Mouth

Right people, right content, right communities to amplify organic growth

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Three E's of Career Growth

Grow faster by deliberately balancing experience, exposure, and education

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Strategy3 steps

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

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Strategy3 steps

The Three Ingredients of Hypergrowth

Beloved product, viral word-of-mouth, and the ability to ride the lightning

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Sales3 steps

The Three Lead-Attribution Channels (PQA / PQL / MQL)

Route leads by whether usage and a buyer exist, because each channel has different conversion rates and playbooks.

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Strategy5 steps

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

Separate targeted Discovery, always-on Continuous Conversations, and passive Customer Listening — each needs its own machinery.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

The Three Pacts (Pre-Commitment Firewall)

Lock in your intentions ahead of time with an effort pact, a price pact, or an identity pact.

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Leadership3 steps

The Three-Peer 24-Hour Approval

Replace slow top-down OKR sign-off with three peers who sanity-check your goals in a 24-hour turnaround.

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Leadership5 steps

The Three-Phase OKR Maturity Ladder

No OKRs, then siloed team OKRs, then company OKRs with cross-org dependency mapping.

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Strategy4 steps

The Three-Pillar Competition Philosophy

Hold true to your vision, grow the pie, lean into strengths — and name the two things you defend

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Productivity3 steps

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Scale product management with internal data & insights, customer research at scale, and standardized strategy cadences.

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Marketing3 steps

The Three Pillars of Self-Serve Monetization

Lift free-to-paid conversion by fixing awareness first, then checkout friction, then the model itself.

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Communication3 steps

The Three-Point Story Test

A real story must contain change, pass the dinner test, and be about you.

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Communication4 steps

The Three Realities and the Net

Stay on your side of the net — speak only to behavior and your own reaction, never the other person's motives

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Leadership5 steps

The Three Sacred Accesses

Delegate anything off the PM's plate except direct access to customers, engineers, and stakeholders

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Leadership3 steps

The Three Threads of Great PMs

The three durable behaviors that separate great product managers from good ones, in any company type.

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Leadership6 steps

The Time-Boxed First 90 Days

Build context 5x faster, leave a plan behind, and don't spend trust you haven't banked

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Innovation3 steps

The Tiny Core Principle

Every enduring product has one tiny thing that is a superpower — find it, protect it, and stop bolting on features.

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Communication4 steps

The Trade-Off Menu: Turn a Velocity Demand Into Leverage

When leadership wants everything faster, hand them a menu of what you'll do and what you won't—and make them choose.

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Marketing5 steps

The Traffic Light Keyword System

Rank every keyword by buying intent, not volume — then work greens down before touching yellows.

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Strategy5 steps

The Transaction Tiebreaker for Marketplace Prioritization

Stop arguing supply vs demand — make the transaction itself the thing every team is accountable to.

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Leadership5 steps

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

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Strategy4 steps

The Trusted-Advisor Partner Test

Shared audience is not enough — partner only where your buyer already goes for this specific advice.

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Influence4 steps

The Trust Equation

Trust = (credibility + reliability + authenticity) / perception of self-interest

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Communication5 steps

The Tuning Fork Silent Read

Don't ask what people think — put something concrete in front of them and force a live, in-room read.

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Strategy4 steps

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

Sort every risky experiment into a red-line 'never run' bucket or a 'run it if the return justifies the cringe' bucket

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Strategy4 steps

The Two Departments That Matter Test

Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.

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Strategy4 steps

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

Master market share and wallet share together — equal attention, not equal effort — to avoid the single-engine trap.

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Marketing5 steps

The Two Onboarding Traps

Stop naming features and stop mapping onboarding to your pricing tiers

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Leadership4 steps

The Two-Persona Product Leader

Every product leader wears two hats: as a leadership-team member drive accountability; as a stream leader drive improvement.

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Innovation4 steps

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

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Leadership5 steps

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

Under two engineering weeks, the engineer is the PM; over two weeks, the PM owns it

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Leadership3 steps

The U-Curve of Founder Involvement

Involve a product-minded founder heavily at the start and end of a project, but give the team space to run in the middle.

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Leadership4 steps

The Unblock Virtuous Cycle

Teams don't want to move slow — they hit roadblocks; make leadership's job to clear them and speed compounds.

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Communication5 steps

The Ungated Customer Feed

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Unsell Email

At offer stage, email the candidate the eight worst truths about the job — then see if they still say yes.

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Innovation4 steps

The Utility Curve

Use the S-curve of effort-to-value to decide whether a feature is under-invested or already maxed out

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Strategy5 steps

The VP of Free

Somebody must be the champion of the users who never pay — and it can only be product and the founders.

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Productivity4 steps

The Weekly Focus Ritual

Post what you're focused on this week, and whether last week's focus actually landed.

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Communication3 steps

The 'Why Now' Perishability Test for Internal Pitches

A good business case that lacks a strong 'why now' trigger gets parked; make the opportunity feel perishable

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Innovation4 steps

The Wonder-Explore-Make-Impact Incubation Gate

A four-stage vocabulary with 6-pager gates that lets a big company incubate new bets without prematurely scaling them

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Strategy4 steps

The Word-of-Mouth Machine PMF Test

Real product-market fit is organic pull, not award-winning launch spikes

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Sales5 steps

The "Would I Buy From Them?" First-Rep Test

Hire your first two sales reps on one gut criterion: would you buy your own product from them?

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Innovation4 steps

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

A product must make the customer at least 3x better before they notice enough to switch and pay.

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Self-Mastery4 steps

Think From First Principles by Writing

Close the laptop, write the question at the top of a blank page, and answer it before Googling anything.

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Strategy4 steps

Three-Horizon Resource Allocation Shift

Express multi-year strategy as a yearly percentage split of resources across three horizons.

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Productivity3 steps

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

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Influence3 steps

Three Speeds of Influence + Choose Your Character

Pick an influence character that fits your personality, then choose slow, moderate, or fast based on the situation

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Innovation4 steps

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

Build disposable prototypes on real data to feel what works before writing any production code.

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Sales4 steps

Tier-One Logo First

Chase the Walmarts and Nvidias first — the market leaders are your real early adopters.

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Productivity4 steps

Timeboxing Your Values (Make Time for Traction)

Replace the to-do list with a weekly timeboxed calendar built from your values across three life domains.

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Influence4 steps

Treat the Executive as Your Key User

Run stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews, not approval requests.

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Strategy4 steps

Triangulated Key Results

Measure one quarterly objective from three angles — a hard number, a squishy quality metric, and a dollar figure.

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Leadership4 steps

Trust-by-Structure Governance

Embed your promises into the company's structure so they hold even when you're gone

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Innovation5 steps

Two-Mode Product Teams

One team, two clocks: ship at the speed of the moment, and build the system between moments

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Leadership3 steps

Two-Path Talent Sourcing (Network + Data)

Find the companies best at the skill you're hiring for, then find the best person there - via referral chains or via public performance data.

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Leadership5 steps

Two-Reps-Then-VP (The 3-to-300 Rule)

Never hire a VP of Sales until two reps are hitting quota — and never hire one who won't carry a bag.

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Leadership4 steps

Two-Sided AI Adoption

Pair top-down executive buy-in with a bottom-up tiger team of excited power users.

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Strategy4 steps

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.

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Productivity4 steps

Use AI As Leverage On Your PM Time

Assign the model a role, feed it more context than you could read, and iterate the prompt until it works.

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Mindset4 steps

User-Centered Performance Detector

Spot the rituals where a team signals customer obsession without any intent to change the decision.

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Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

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Marketing6 steps

Value-Moment KPIs and the Win-Back Loop

Tie each milestone to a compound usage metric, then use it to catch people when they fall.

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Leadership5 steps

Values as a Mirror

Don't author values. Interview the whole team, harvest their exact words, and write them back as a story.

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Leadership4 steps

Values as a Sharp Knife

Rewrite company values as deliberate filters, then hardcode a scoring formula that removes people who don't fit.

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Sales4 steps

Van Westendorp Premium Pricing (Price at the Third Question)

For a best-in-class position, price at the 'starting to feel expensive' point, not the 'bargain' point

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Productivity4 steps

Velocity Guardrails: Ship Freely Until the Metrics Go Red

Standardize a few quality metrics per team; below the line they ship anything, above it they fix before they ship.

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Marketing5 steps

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

Real virality is high-quality word of mouth from a great product — not synthetic referral traps bolted on top.

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Peak Performance5 steps

Vision Over Fear (There's No Tiger in the Room)

Fear and discipline are short-term coping strategies. Sustainable drive comes from vision.

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Self-Mastery3 steps

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.

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Sales4 steps

Warm-Intro-via-Text Closing Play

Host a customers-only event, harvest referrals, and convert them over text — not email.

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Leadership4 steps

Wartime Company Reset

When a platform shift threatens your core business, declare wartime and go all-in rather than hedge.

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Leadership6 steps

Wartime Product Management

In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission

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Leadership5 steps

WeDash: Mandatory Dogfooding as a Culture Governor

Make every employee do frontline work, then advertise it in interviews to self-select hires.

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Marketing4 steps

We Don't Sell Saddles Here (Sell the Outcome, Create the Market)

Don't sell the product — instill the yearning for what it makes possible, and build the market as you build the product

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Leadership4 steps

When to Hire a Chief Product Officer

Use portfolio complexity, revenue scale, PM headcount and trigger events — not a title chart — to know it's CPO time.

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Leadership4 steps

When to Hire Your First PM

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

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Strategy5 steps

Where to Fish for a Unicorn: The Workflow Quadrant

Score a B2B SaaS idea on two axes — workflow breadth and frequency — to predict billion-dollar potential.

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Strategy5 steps

Where-to-Play Product Strategy as the Prioritization Engine

Turn an integrated set of strategic choices into the filter that decides every roadmap trade-off.

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Finance6 steps

Willingness-to-Pay Before You Build

You don't choose whether to have the pricing conversation — only when. Have it before you ship.

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Communication4 steps

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

Replace group brainstorms with silent individual idea generation, a quiet vote, and one designated decider

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Mindset5 steps

Working the Resistance by Parts

The part of you that's scared to ask won't go away by being ignored — interview it instead.

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Leadership4 steps

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

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Productivity4 steps

Worse Is Better, Tech Debt Is a Champagne Problem

Ship the embarrassing version — you only earn tech debt if people actually use the thing

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Strategy3 steps

Writing a Compelling Product Vision

A vision people can picture, that's lofty but not yet achieved, and that says what you won't do.

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Strategy4 steps

Year-Horizon Growth Portfolio

Protect growth teams from weekly-win pressure by committing to low/medium/high bets over a year-long horizon

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Productivity4 steps

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.

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Leadership3 steps

Zone Defense for Product Work

Spread taste-makers out to cover the whole field instead of clustering on the same problem

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