Stripe

Adjacent User Theory

Find growth by understanding and dogfooding the product as the next user just outside your current base.

AI as Undermind Mirror

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

AI Possibility-Space Mapping

Use AI to enumerate the full combinatorial space of a multi-dimensional decision and build intuition fast.

AI Rep-Loop Compression

Build AI tools that give you feedback 80% as good as an expert's, on demand, to get years of judgment-building reps in a fraction of the time.

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.

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.

Anger as a Secondary Emotion

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

Marketing5 steps

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

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

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

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

A Stable of Mentors

Keep three or four mentors on a rotating monthly schedule so you always have someone to talk to.

Automated User Research Pipeline

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

Balcony Rhythm for Co-Founder Relationships

Build shared self-awareness, then protect the relationship with vows and a real check-in cadence

Barrels and Ammunition

Adding headcount doesn't add output — only adding people who drive initiatives end-to-end does.

Behavioral Activation

Act first, then feel better — keep a pre-written list of small actions that reliably reverse a low mood.

Belsky's Founder Bet Checklist

Back mission-driven, pragmatically pessimistic founders building products with a clear object model.

Bet on the Founders, Not the Idea

At the seed stage the idea will change, so fund the people who will make something work no matter what.

Biggest-Bottleneck Prioritization

Solve the single biggest problem, then pick the next — don't dream up a long roadmap.

Bloom's Taxonomy as a Coaching Diagnostic

Pinpoint where a struggling PM or manager breaks down along the ladder of critical thinking, then fill that gap.

Bob the Monster and the Two-Week Rule

Externalize the emotions of change into a monster, let it rage, and only act on what survives two weeks.

Influence5 steps

Borrowed Trust: The Teach-Me / Help-You Play

Accelerate trust in a new org by making its most powerful person accountable for your competence

Broadcast How Leaders Think (Mental-Model Transparency)

Teach your team how key leaders think — not just what they decided — via weekly verbatim-plus-interpretation notes.

Build for Your Best User, Not Your Worst

In early product development, design for the user who gets it instantly, not the edge-case abuser

Influence5 steps

Building Your Own Social Radar

Turn people-reading from a mystery gift into a deliberate practice: checklist, conscious questions, and follow-up calibration.

Build Only at the Magic Intersection

Don't ship what anyone could build off the shelf — build only where model and product uniquely meet.

Build on Undiscovered Talent

Beat better-funded incumbents by hiring people the market's hiring machines systematically misprice.

Peak Performance4 steps

Build Taste by Watching Adjacent Software

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

Build the Company Only You Could Build

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

Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity

New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales

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.

Center of Gravity: Customer vs Employee vs Investor

Every company has one true center of gravity — know which, and re-engineer incentives to move it deliberately

Charter, Goals, Roadmap: The Three Documents

Every level of the org needs three docs — mission/strategy, goals, roadmap — written top-down

Clarity and Conviction: Insights, Strategy, Big Rocks

The whole craft of PM in two words, expressed as a two-page narrative every team can recite.

Coach vs. Advise Decision

Stop training your team to bring you every problem by knowing when to coach instead of solve

Cohort-and-Control Data Reading

Never trust pre/post dashboards — read behavior by cohort and judge changes by variant-vs-control so the macro can't fool you.

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

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

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

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

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

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

Competition-Aware, Not Competition-Focused

Stay aware of rivals but anchor on the customer job, because the real competitor is the default old way

Complaint Storms

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

Comprehension Over Friction

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

Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)

Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.

Context Loading (Additional Information)

Front-load all relevant task information — and put it at the top for caching

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

Conviction-Building for Low-Volume Experiments

When you can't run a clean A/B test, stack alternative signals to raise conviction instead of faking precision

Copy Comps' Zero-to-One, Not Their Growth Hacking

Ignore late-stage growth tactics with no users — study what your archetype did to get its first 1,000

Counterprogram the Narrative (Take a Punch)

When you fear someone thinks less of you, take one small action that proves the opposite instead of litigating the past.

Criticize in Public

Deliver negative feedback in front of the team so the whole system learns the issue is seen and being handled.

Cross-Subgraph Resonance Testing (Metaphor Forging)

Test framings live across unconnected audiences; the ones that land in distant subgraphs will travel.

Cut Scope, Not Quality

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

CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy

Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it

Cycle-Time Is the Enemy (Ship Ship Ship)

The gap between knowing something is good and users seeing it is your biggest enemy — attack the decision time, not the work time.

Deadlines as P-Zero

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

De-Ambiguate Upstream: The Brief as a Prompt

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

Decompose-and-Ensemble

Break a broad problem into specific tasks, then solve each with a specialized model in an ensemble.

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

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

Defensible Moats for AI Startups

Four durable places to build in AI where foundation-model labs are least likely to squash you.

Delay the Primal Mark

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

Depth-Meets-Breadth Product Review

Run reviews to make the product better, not to interrogate — you bring breadth, the team brings depth

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

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

Design Tenants (Decision-Making Rules, Not Principles)

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

Design the Dream Objective Function

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

Disassemble the Lego Set

Don't digitize the old thing — reassemble the pieces into an experience native to the new platform.

Discovery-Led Selling: Ask, Don't Pitch

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

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

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

Do Half, Then Go on a Killing Spree

Build half the features, then remove things until the one core action runs at 10x velocity.

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

Drawing the Perimeter

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

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

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

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

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

The three-stage loop for developing a product vision: understand deeply, imagine the solved world, then sell it.

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

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

Energy Audit for Your Zone of Genius

Track what energizes and depletes you for two weeks, then redesign your role toward 80% in your gifts

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.

Ensembling (Mixture of Reasoning Experts)

Solve the same problem several ways and take the most common answer

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

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

Eval-Driven Product Development

Design the test for your AI product alongside the product, then hill-climb the model against it.

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Even-Keel Under Pressure

Don't reflect stress onto your team — mantras plus lived exposure keep your head clear when everything's on fire

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

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

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

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

Fairer Marketplace Rating System Design

Fight rating inflation and averaging bias with renormed labels, priors, blind reviews, and the sound of silence.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

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

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

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

Few-Shot Prompting

Show the model examples of what good looks like instead of describing it

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.

First-Principles Re-Derivation (Rerun the Decision Tree)

Rebuild any product decision from today's building blocks instead of copying path-dependent solutions.

Flash Tags: Labeling the Intent of Every CEO Message

As you scale, tag every message with its intent so an offhand comment isn't executed as a mandate

Follow the Breadcrumbs and Calibrate Urgency

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

Follow the Pull

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

Follow-the-Workflow Expansion

Find your next product by tracing the user's end-to-end journey and carving out the steps that overload your core tool.

Foundational Insight Over Customer Research

For consumer and SMB products, customer feedback is directionally wrong — build from your own insight instead.

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.

Productivity6 steps

Friction Logging

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

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Gardening Over Building (Farming for Miracles)

Plant many cheap compounding seeds instead of manufacturing outcomes with brute effort.

Generalist-With-A-Superpower Hiring

Hire people who care obsessively, have a generalist brain, and one absolute superpower — then trial them for a week.

Give Away Your Legos

In a scaling company, repeatedly hand off what you're good at to keep climbing the growing pile.

Give-It-Away Growth Engine

Reclassify free product and AI costs as marketing spend, then give the product away to your best distributors

Go From Strength to Strength (Don't Design by TAM)

Bet on the trend that expands the market, not the market size that exists today.

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

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Group UX Review and Walking the Store

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

GROW Model for Powerful Questions

Four question categories that let people solve their own problem and walk away with a concrete next step

Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)

Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.

Habit-Formation Model for Team Behavior Change

Drive team adoption (e.g. of AI) with behavioral psychology, not education: consistency, low friction, and a powerful reward loop.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

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

Hire-Experienced vs. Train-Up Decision Matrix

Decide whether to hire an experienced product ops person or train one, based on time and coaching capacity

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.

Hire for Clarity-from-Chaos

Screen for fire-in-the-belly, high agency, and the ability to create clarity out of chaos — proven by work trials

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.

Hire Raw Intellect Over Experience

Index on raw intellect and unquenched hunger to build, not years of experience or regalia

Hire Slow, Fire Fast: The Spiky-Hire Executive Playbook

Beat the 50% executive-failure rate by hiring spiky over well-rounded and running real blind references

Hiring Profiles by Product Ops Pillar

Match each product ops pillar to a distinct candidate background and skillset

Hunting New Bottlenecks When AI Writes the Code

When AI removes the coding bottleneck, constraints shift up and downstream — go find them.

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

Hypothesis-Based Coaching (Explorer, Not Lecturer)

Coach by exploring a well-informed hunch with someone, not lecturing them from data

Hypothesis-Driven Experimentation: Learning as a Win

Reframe experiments from winners/losers to hypotheses; run more, run shorter, and carry priors forward.

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

For most PMs, strategy is overrated — your real job is to shrink the time from hypothesis to data.

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.

If You Want to Kill a Plant, Have Two People Water It (The DRI Rule)

Every important cross-functional outcome needs one Directly Responsible Individual with real power

Impact = Environment × Skills

Audit your career by scoring the environment variables and skill variables that gate your impact.

Imperfect Metrics as Education

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

Information-Diet Idea Divergence

Same inputs produce same ideas — mine your unique experience and starve the herd feed

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

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.

Internal Virality for Alignment

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

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

Interview for Design in the DNA

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

Invest in High Performers by Running Experiments

Stop babysitting low performers; grow your best people by testing theories about their potential.

Iterate-Then-Automate Scaling Ladder

Let ops manually iterate a process until it breaks at scale, then hand exactly that broken step to technology

J-Curve vs. Stairs Career Growth

Jump off career cliffs into jobs you're unqualified for; fall for 6-9 months, then climb far beyond the stairs.

Keep vs. Offload: The PM Decision-Rights Boundary

A clear line for what a PM keeps versus hands to product ops — decision rights never move

Kernel-of-Truth Signal Triage

Product is finding the one thing that really matters in a sea of inputs — capture everything, then ruthlessly filter

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

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

LNO Framework

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

Lower the Courage Required

The scarcest resource is courage, not genius — so design products and decisions to need less of it.

Magic and Science Decision-Making

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

Magic Questions (Statements That End in 'Do You Agree?')

To understand how someone thinks, feed them statements ending in 'is that right?' rather than asking open-ended questions.

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

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

Maintain Noise in the Market

Ship every day and talk about it constantly so the product feels alive — with tiered big launches on top

Make the Implicit Explicit (Meetings and Decisions)

Force every meeting and decision to declare its purpose, owner, and method out loud

Make the Other Mistake (Prompting for Brutal Feedback)

To get honest AI critique, over-correct toward brutal — the model won't actually overshoot.

Managing Complex Change

Diagnose why a team is stuck by finding which of five change ingredients is missing.

Market It in Their Words

Never invent positioning — put the exact words your reference customers used on the box

Marketplace Whack-a-Mole: Managing Winners and Losers

Most consequential marketplace changes create winners and losers; manage the trade, don't chase a metric.

Match Go-To-Market to Buyer-User Alignment

Pick developer-led, PLG, or direct sales by asking one thing: are the buyer and the user the same person?

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

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

Meeting Priming Before Decision-Making

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

Merchandise Progress Through the Messy Middle

Short-circuit the human reward system with agreed micro-goals and a narrated sense of progress.

Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

Build a growing pool of aware, engaged leads — via freemium — and let them convert on their timing

Minimum Awesome Product

Ship fast, but not naked: an MVP needs one awesome thing and a visible vision, not just adequacy.

Minimum Lovable Product

Viability is no longer enough — the bar is a product people love and want to talk about

Minimum Lovable Product Ladder

Replace the MVP with a three-rung ladder: minimum lovable, lovable, absolutely lovable.

Minimum Viable Process (MVP)

Introduce the least process that reduces variance, and give your best people escape hatches

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

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

Model Maximalism

Build at the edge of what models can barely do — the next model will make it sing.

Multi-Axis Revenue Segmentation

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

Nail the First Three Sentences

Spend a disproportionate share of your time framing the opening — get it right and the rest writes itself.

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

Build products that make money in opposite macro conditions so troughs in one are peaks in another.

New Products as Internal Startups

Incubate new products like funded startups: tiny teams, prove ROI before funding, keep them separate

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

Non-Violent Communication (OFNR) for Difficult Conversations

Observation, feeling, need, request — get mutual understanding instead of trying to win the argument

One-Page Plan and Operating Rhythm

Put vision through quarterly goals on one page, then meet in a rhythm to reflect on it

One-Week Top-1% AI Fluency Sprint

Pick a real problem and spend one full week taking it end-to-end with AI — that alone puts you in the global top 1%.

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.

Optimize for the Problems You Want to Have

Only build features that stop people from reaching the point where they'd ask you for more.

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Organizational Kayfabe

Diagnose the shared fiction everyone knows is false — then route around it without detonating it.

Outcome-Based Pricing Qualifier

If the work is autonomous and the result is measurable, price the outcome — not the tokens.

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

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

Performance = Potential − Interference

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

Personal Operating Principles Discovery

Derive how you lead by forcing your values down to three, then plotting your work style

Pickup Games: Getting Reps Without a Coach

No good coach at work? Manufacture low-stakes arenas for collaborative problem solving

Pinch Before Crunch

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

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Play Yourself Like a Fiddle (Activation Energy + Always-Rules)

Beat activation energy with tight time boxes and an escalating task ladder; hold habits with always-rules.

Productivity2 steps

Poor Man's Fine-Tuning (Few-Shot + Role Priming)

Steer a model with in-prompt examples and a role identity instead of a full fine-tune.

Positional vs. Tactical Game

Don't die, then pour your energy into board position — tactics are the drawdown of value you've already earned.

Positive-Sum Dials (Levers You Don't Pull)

Build every monetization lever you can, then refuse to pull them — coordinate on the iterated game instead of defecting for short-term profit.

Practice Before the Promotion

Promote people to DO the job, never to learn it — coach the next role before the title arrives

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

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

Precision Prompting for AI Builders

Never tell the AI 'it doesn't work' — state exactly what you expected and which parts do and don't.

Predict vs. Decide: Think in Differentials

Prediction finds correlations; decisions need causal differences. Optimize the lift, not the level.

Pre-Sell Before You Build

Do customer validation and line up buyers before writing code or raising money

Price Like a Product (and Unbundle Deliberately)

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

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

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

Problem-Cause-Solution First-Principles Framework

You can't solve a problem directly — break it into ranked causes, then solve the biggest

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

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

Product-First, Add-AI-Later

Design the end-to-end product experience first, then add AI to solve specific problems — never retrofit AI into a broken flow.

Product-First AI Prompting

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

Product-Lens Metrics: Monitoring Product Health vs. Business Health

Segment company metrics through a product lens so leaders can actually monitor their strategy

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.

Product Operations Feedback Loop

A function that reports to Ops but sits with Product to close the two-way gap between HQ builders and field teams

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.

Prompt Decomposition

Make the model list the sub-problems first, then solve each before the whole

Prompt Injection Defense Stack

Stop trying to fix injection with prompts and guardrails — mitigate at the model level

PSHE Career Growth Framework

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

Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case

Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.

Radical Trust Building

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

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

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

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

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

Reason About It Like a Human

To design or debug AI behavior, ask what an equivalent human would do in the same situation.

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.

Reference Customer Discovery

Build with a fixed number of real customers until they'll stake their reputation on your product

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

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

Relentless Application of Force

The CEO's core job is offsetting the complacency that success naturally breeds — push hardest when winning.

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

Reps-to-Judgment (Building Product Sense)

Product sense isn't taught — it's earned through thousands of shipped micro-decisions with the shortest possible cycle time.

Reverse Engineering to Build Openness

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

Reverse-Engineer-Then-Formalize at Scale

Do one instance deep by hand, reverse-engineer the best process, then codify it into a scalable algorithm

Role-Based Culture by Logical Deduction

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

Root-Cause Context Engineering for AI Coding

Don't just fix the AI's bad code — root-cause the missing context so it's right next time.

Running Products via the Daily Meeting

Assign one owner to an urgent problem, give them unlimited resources except time, and force a daily report until it's solved.

Ruthless Referencing

Diagnose talent by extracting the right information from many references, not by trusting a 45-minute interview.

Say the Thing You Think You Cannot Say

Voice the hard observation by detoxifying it into a question you own

Selective Deep-Dive Leadership

Instead of skimming 100 projects, go bare-metal deep on the 7-10 that matter most

Self-Criticism Loop

Get the model to critique its own answer, then implement its own critique

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

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

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

Serve the Business, Not the People

Strip emotion out of hard calls by asking what you'd do if the person had no negative reaction.

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

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

Ship-Fast Operating Model

Lightweight bottoms-up planning, PM-light teams, and iterative deployment in a fast-moving domain.

Strategy6 steps

Ship Fast Without Breaking Money

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

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.

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Influence3 steps

Shrink the Change to Build Trust

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

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

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

Strategy6 steps

Six Rules for Goals and Alignment

Goals are a communication tool: three max, one that wins, intern-legible, painful, single-owned, and followed up.

Skill Stack-Rank Interview

Have senior candidates rank themselves against the exact skills the role needs to reveal fit and self-awareness.

Slime Mold Org Design (Sports Car vs Big Rig)

Coordination cost grows with the square of headcount — drive the vehicle you actually have.

Slow vs Fast Decisions

For any reversible decision there's no right or wrong — only slow and fast — so decide fast and correct fast.

Solution-Weighted Discovery

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

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

Start Bespoke, Become a Marketplace Later

A marketplace never starts as a marketplace; win with a pre-liquidity value prop first.

Stewart Plus Two More

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

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

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

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

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

Strategy Salons (Nerd Clubs)

Seed a small, opt-in, yes-and idea group that spins off strategy insights as a side effect.

Strike Down the Blockers (Time to Value)

Removing what stops adoption beats adding shiny features; hunt blockers and watch the retention graph move.

Stuck-Point Scaling Law

Reliably improve an AI system by hunting where it gets stuck and tuning those spots with a fast feedback loop.

Superpower Naming (Be More, Not Different)

Name someone's superpower early, then frame every nudge as 'be more' rather than 'be different'.

Support-Rotation Content Backlog

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

Systematized Creativity by Extremes

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

Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

Fix the 25-40% of churn product teams ignore — payment failures, off-boarding, cancel flows

Innovation2 steps

Tar Pit Idea Detection

Spot the seductive ideas that draw everyone in and trap them — they validate but never work

Taste, Humility, Hutzpah: The Designer Hiring Lens

Hire for judgment, humility, and the courage to say 'not good enough' — tools and process you can teach.

The 10-Minute PM Test for GTM-Product Partnership

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

The 10-to-1 Input/Output Kill Test

When you pour 10 units of effort in for 1 unit of output, the project has run its course.

The 10 Traits of Great Product Managers

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

The 10% Working-Version Rule

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

The 10x Leverage Desk

Spend your finite time only on problems with 10x positive or negative impact — and physically move yourself into the details until they're solved.

The 15% Rule

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

The 2004 Red Sox Team-Composition Model

Build your leadership bench mostly from homegrown talent, seasoned with a few marquee outside hires

The 20/80 Marketing Review Checkpoints

Two aligned checkpoints — strategy at 20%, execution at 80% — so process speeds you up instead of slowing you down

The 60-Second Meeting Reset

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

The 70/20/10 Investment Split

Allocate product building time 70% core, 20% strategic, 10% bets to balance stability and innovation

The 70/30 Cover Fire Allocation

Spend 70% earning the right to exist so the other 30% can plant seeds nobody will kill.

The 95/5 Growth Inversion

In fast-moving AI markets, spend 95% inventing new growth loops and 5% optimizing existing ones

The Ability-Trust-Appeal Relationship Model

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

The Adjacent Possible + Low-Resolution North Star

Take only safe next steps — but always the one with the steepest gradient toward a 3-5 year North Star.

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

The Ambiguity Navigation Rubric

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

The Art of Inquiry

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

Mindset5 steps

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

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

The Believability Spectrum for Vision & Strategy

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

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

The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

Match funding to goal: bootstrap cash-flow businesses, fund only clear paths to $1B revenue

The Bits and Bobs Idea Distillation Loop

Capture everything, filter weekly by resonance, distil, publish — a compounding personal insight engine.

The Boring Engineering Strategy

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

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

The Broken Equation Test

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

The Calendar Customer-Contact Audit

20-30% of your calendar should say 'customer meeting' — in person, not behind a keyboard

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

The Collison Install (Last-Mile Close)

A 'yes' isn't a sale — hand-hold implementation until the customer is fully live

The Comb-Shaped (Chameleon) Marketer

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

The Company Operating System (House Metaphor)

Build a company like a house: founding documents, operating system, and operating cadence

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?

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.

Self-Mastery6 steps

The Constrained Self-Awareness Probe

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

The Conviction Test for Whether to Quit

Compare your conviction now versus at the start to decide whether to persevere or pivot.

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

The DATE Framework for Marketing Strategy

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

The Decision Log

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

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

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

The Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

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

The Don't-Die Keep-Going / Give-Up Decision

Deciding whether to persist or shut down by testing love, energy, and remaining moves

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

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.

The Engineer-cation

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

The Enthusiastic Rehire Test

One binary question that cuts through months of avoided talent decisions

The Escape Hatch Principle

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

The Expectations-Reality Delta

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

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

Use your own product at scale, document every flaw with screenshots, then personally drive the fixes to closure.

The First Mile: Lazy, Vain, and Selfish

Design onboarding for the first 30 seconds, when every new user is lazy, vain, and selfish.

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.

The Fixit OKR

Put a hard number on fixing known-broken issues and fund it alongside growth, so quality work never gets zero resources.

The Fork-in-the-Road Reset

After a shock, offer a graceful, reversible exit to re-establish who is truly bought in.

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.

The Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

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

The Four Filters for Career Acceleration

Growth rate, strength-fit, deferred comp, and the C-suite question — pick jobs on these, not on salary.

The Four Product Risks

Value, usability, feasibility, viability — and the PM owns the first and the last

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

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

The Four Tests of a Compelling Product Vision

A vision must be lofty, realistic, free of today's constraints, and anchored to a potent problem.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

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

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Future Headline

Write the tech-press headline your launch would earn, mocked into the real publication's page.

The 'Going Home' Pivot

A good pivot moves warmer — toward your existing expertise and what your last idea taught you

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

The Hardest Thing Test (Calibrating Difficulty and Agency)

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

The Hated-Incumbent Idea Prompt

Find a big incumbent customers hate with terrible software, then build the replacement

The Hogwash Question (Breaking the Interview Mindset)

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

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

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

The Human Behind the Role

Optimise for being loved, not liked — earn the right to give raw feedback by proving you care first.

Strategy2 steps

The Ideas-Left Pivot Timing Test

Pivot when you're out of credible growth ideas, not just because growth is slow

The In-Product Feedback Loop

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

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

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

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.

Strategy6 steps

The Inverted W Planning Process

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

The Levels of Quality Ladder

Rate every feature 1-5: works → error-free → usable → desirable → surprisingly great.

The Lindy Commitment Test

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

The Live Problem Interview

Hand a candidate an unsolvable-looking problem live and watch how they handle not knowing

The Local CEO Operating Model

Give each product owner a lean cross-functional team and end-to-end ownership, backed by a dual line/functional matrix

The LOCKS Algorithm for Evaluating Founder-CEOs

Five traits that predict whether a founder can actually scale a company: Lovable, Obsessed, Chip, Knowledgeable, Student

The Low-Maintenance Work-in-Progress Deck

One shared slide deck of screenshots, updated monthly, that kills redundant work and spreads patterns.

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.

The Marquee Mock Exercise

Hand everyone blank App Store screenshot panels and make them draw the world where the problems are solved.

Themes for Discussion at the Top of the Doc

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

The Middle-Manager Reporting Veto

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

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

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

The Most Charitable Interpretation

Hire for and enforce a norm of assuming good intent, and let the misfits leave

The Most Impactful Thing Today (with the Honesty Test)

Wake up asking what maximizes impact — then interrogate your answer for skill-set bias.

The Object Model: Three Questions Every Screen Must Answer

On every screen, a user should know how they got here, what to do now, and what to do next.

The Once Upon a Time Vision Story

A five-blank Mad Libs template that turns a product vision into a story anyone can retell.

The One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

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

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

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.

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

The Product-Market Fit Treadmill

In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you

The Product Talent Portfolio

Build a team of complementary spikes instead of clones of yourself, and hire specifically for your gaps

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.

The Public and Secret Roadmap

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

Finance4 steps

The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

Stand up a pricing committee and do one small monetization thing every quarter, forever

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Relentless Iteration Loop

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

The Scaled-Liquidity Smell Test

Before calling yourself a marketplace, prove you have scaled liquidity on both sides.

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

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

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

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.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Social Radar Founder-Read

Read the human signals in a founder interview to catch red flags the idea-focused people miss.

The Superpower Overlap Test

Find your true strengths via a two-layer self-plus-peer assessment, then only take roles where your superpower meets the company's.

The Talent Stack (Intersection of Uniqueness)

Stack three-to-five things you're uniquely good at and curious about so you know more than everyone else in that tiny space.

The Taste-Development Loop

Taste isn't innate; it's a repeatable loop of reacting, interrogating, and building a point of view.

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.

The Teleportation Device Test (Finding the Important Question)

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

The Tempo Framework

Align every team on what shipping cadence 'good' looks like, then close the gap

The Three B's of Behavior Change

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

Influence5 steps

The Three Concentric Circles of Evangelism

Socialise a vision outward: core team, then stakeholders, then leadership as high as you can reach.

The Three Innovation Blockers

Diagnose why a team plays it safe by checking the three specific things that quietly kill big thinking

The Three-Part AI Product Utility Equation

A useful AI product needs model intelligence, context/memory, and application/UI to all converge.

The Three Pillars of Product Operations

Structure a product ops function around data insights, customer insights, and process to free PMs for strategic work

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

The Three Sacred Accesses

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

The Three-Segment AI Market Map

Frontier models, tooling, or applied agents — pick the layer that fits your capital and your edge.

The Toby Tornado (Compressed Change Management)

When you sense a project is wrong, compress the conflict into a short window, kill it, and reconstitute the team as founders of the next version.

The Trust-First Interview Method

Talk less, promise review before publishing, and follow the tangents — so guests open up and the conversation goes somewhere real.

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.

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

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

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.

The Ugly Baby Test

Seek ideas that make smart peers laugh — real alpha lives in the ugly babies everyone dismisses.

The Unsell Email

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

The Utility Curve

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

The Value Metric Pricing Model

Charge on a metric that scales with value so acquisition, retention, and expansion self-correct

The Waterline Model (Snorkel Before You Scuba)

Diagnose team problems from the top down: structure and dynamics, not the people, cause 80% of issues.

The Weekly Marketable Feature

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

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

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

Three Levels of Listening

Drop from your own inner monologue into hearing what people communicate beneath their words

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

Tier-One Logo First

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

Timeline Padding Audit

Keep startup pace by curiously separating real constraints from padding, and killing projects that won't converge.

Top 10 Things You Should Know

A living, stack-ranked problem doc every PM owns — and every stakeholder must fill in too.

Influence4 steps

Treat the Executive as Your Key User

Run stakeholder conversations as discovery interviews, not approval requests.

Tuning Your Operating Cadence

Set review rhythm by two signals: too fast if no progress, too slow if content is stale

Turn Advice Into a First-Principles Framework

Don't collect rules — ask why, triangulate three people, and rebuild the reasoning underneath.

Understand Work (Understand → Identify → Execute)

Budget intentional time to understand a problem first, so your team ships fewer things with a far higher win rate.

Unquantifiable-First Decision-Making

Demote metrics to a support function and let taste, fun, and delight drive — because Goodhart's law means any metric-as-goal degrades.

Values as a Mirror

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

Values, Not Behaviors: The Culture Car Wash

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

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

Build where the winning data is locked behind a company or industry's walls — foundation models won't go there.

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Leadership7 steps

Walk the Store: The Essential Journeys Quality Program

Name your 15 critical user journeys, give each a cross-functional owner, and score them on a fixed cadence.

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

When You Eat a Sandwich, Don't Nibble

Deliver hard news and hard change in one decisive move, then deliberately over-correct

Which Product Ops Pillar to Start With

Choose your first product ops investment by company stage and where your biggest fire is

Wow-First MVP

Cut scope to the critical few features, but never compromise quality — so a flop can only mean the idea was wrong

You Are Not the Protagonist (Operationalize, Don't Impose)

Your job isn't to convince everyone of your vision — it's to understand the leader's vision and find the spiky places you can shape it.