Substack

$100 Voting for Prioritization

Give everyone $100 to allocate across options and surface the elephant in the room.

Additive Hiring

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

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

Argue for the company-optimal allocation of your team even when it defunds you — and read the response.

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

Influence3 steps

Anchor High, Never Split the Difference

Find the ceiling; a reflexive split leaves six figures on the table

Anchor the Streak to Your Unit of Use

Tie a streak to the smallest genuinely-meaningful action, not the easiest possible tap.

Sales3 steps

Arming the Champion

Win the champion first, then pre-load them to defeat every other stakeholder's objection

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

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

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

Stand in the future you designed and look back — don't forecast forward from today's constraints.

Bend-Not-Break Flexibility with a Sanctity Keeper

Add flexibility so users don't break a streak — but appoint someone to guard it from being cheapened.

Bias Interrupters for Introvert-Safe Decisions

Design meetings so the loudest 20% can't take 80% of the air — vote offline, then go round the circle.

Mindset3 steps

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.

Bowling Pin Market Entry

Dominate one underserved niche, then knock over adjacent segments until you can challenge the leader

Breaking Through the Senior-Manager Choke Point

Two gates block senior promotion: can you do the job, and does the job exist.

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

Journal on questions that scare you — that's where the gold is

Influence4 steps

Build Champions Before the Offer

The negotiation starts sooner than you think — plant reciprocity and recruit coaches across the org

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

Build With, Not For: The Product Lab Cohort

Stand up a permanent invite-only user cohort so no fundamental change ever ships cold.

Innovation6 steps

Build Zero-to-One in the Dark

Inside a big company, new products die of attention. Ask for less scrutiny, fewer resources, and room to fail.

Leadership6 steps

Buying Life One Hour at a Time (Public Failure Recovery)

Own the failure, buy trust back one hour at a time, then get face-to-face.

Calendar-Defended Proximity

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

Catalyst Review Forum

Replace the standing weekly review with parallel, role-based topic blocks anyone can join.

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.

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

Design your own market category instead of competing for a slice of someone else's.

Cathedrals Not Bricks

Make every team member see the whole cathedral, not just the brick they're laying.

Channel Diversification Before the Drought

A one-channel growth company is always a no-no — turn on the second channel while the first still works.

Choosing a Startup PR Agency

Vet PR agencies on month-one behavior, writing samples, and lead time — not on big-brand logos.

Clarity Over Cleverness in Feature Design

Comprehensibility is a retention lever — make the design a plain distillation of what you're tracking.

Cohort-Gated Private Beta

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

Concentric Circles Message Propagation

Spread any message outward from your own desk, one audience ring at a time — never skip a circle.

Consumer Subscription Viability Test

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

Context Not Control

Your job as a leader is to give people the context to decide well — including the context that isn't flattering.

Controllable Goals

Set goals inside your control (inputs), not outcomes you can't guarantee

Control the Channel, Pace, and Field

Never negotiate over email; slow it down and pick the room where you win

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Cultural Erogenous Zones

Stop trying to change what people care about; bridge from what they already care about to you.

Damming the Demand

Compete category-to-category against the status quo, never product-to-product against a rival.

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Deflect the Number Question

Never name your figure first; make them reveal the range instead

De-Risk the Biggest Swings First

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Desensitization for Performance Fear

Neutralize public-speaking (or any) fear by exposing yourself in tiny, low-stakes, escalating doses

Design as Category-Crowding Leverage

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

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.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

Fix the incentive system and the time horizon first — everything else about internal incubation follows.

Detach Self-Worth From the Outcome (The Art-Project Reframe)

Pursue the work as a puzzle you enjoy, not as proof that you're somebody

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Differentiate Above The Model, Not Around Its Gaps

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

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

Double Down on the Pull

When something you made gets unexpected traction, drop the plan and lean all-in

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.

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.

Influence3 steps

Earn the Right to Teach

Build real depth and pedigree first — then your writing has something worth reading

Communication6 steps

Energy-Aligned Writing

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

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.

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

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.

Finance4 steps

Expand the Pie with Performance Triggers

Break the salary band by making it 'we' and tying pay to outcomes

Expectation, Gap, Fill

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

Fairer Marketplace Rating System Design

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

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Find-the-Nugget Angle Selection

Ignore the company's own messaging; find the single thread reporters care about and double down.

Flash Tags for Calibrated Feedback

Tag every piece of feedback FYI, Suggestion, Recommendation, or Plea so teams know how hard to weigh it.

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.

Follow the Pull

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

Forest Time

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

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

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

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.

Frame, Name, Claim the Problem (Languaging & Point of View)

Use new language to reframe a problem so people see it differently and want a new solution.

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Give Away Your Legos

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

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

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

Growth Is a Game of Inches

Don't chase the step function. Ship 20 bets at 20% instead of 4 perfect ones — then raise the hit rate.

Influence4 steps

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

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.

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

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

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

Keep the growth, hold the 'mindset' loosely — nailing it down turns growth into a fixed mindset

Hypothesis-Driven Experimentation: Learning as a Win

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

Productivity5 steps

Imperfect Metrics as Education

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

Incumbent Anchoring

Position your product as taking on a household-name incumbent, never as a new category.

Inspiration, Not Imitation

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

Introvert-Inclusive Meeting Design

Four manager tactics to surface the best ideas from quiet people, not just the loudest three

Intuition-to-Automation Buildout for PLS

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

Invest in High Performers by Running Experiments

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

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.

Learn by Making, Test the Extremes

Stop debating consequential decisions — run the experiment that shows the upper and lower bounds now.

Lightning Strike Go-to-Market (Supers, POV & Word of Mouth)

Concentrate firepower on super consumers with a reframing POV to ignite word of mouth.

Magic and Science Decision-Making

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

Magic Lenses

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

Main Quest vs Side Quest Focus Filter

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

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

Teams break on the leader's unsorted baggage, not on talent, strategy, or execution

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.

Manufactured Deadlines

Impose external constraints so solo creative work actually ships

Marketplace Whack-a-Mole: Managing Winners and Losers

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

Metric-Owned Teams with Soft Feature Ownership

Give teams a metric to move, not a feature to own — anyone can touch any surface that helps their number.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

Doing nothing is the riskiest comms strategy — it hands the win to the status quo by default.

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

Get the CFO, the head of people and sales fingerprinted on product strategy before growth goes negative.

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

Oh-Sht Moments Career Calibration

Measure growth by counting the moments you felt underqualified and stretched.

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.

Optimizing for Feelings

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

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.

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.

Platform Betting Strategy by Company Stage

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

PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product

Write a spec for your career: destination, metrics, milestones, and a measuring stick for every offer.

PQA Signal Detection

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

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

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

Predict vs. Decide: Think in Differentials

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

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

Same effort, narrower target, more impact — shrink your surface area to raise message pressure.

Product Accountability for Pipeline

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

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.

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.

Publication-to-Story Fit Map

Match each story type to the one publication most likely to cover it, before pitching anyone.

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.

Raising the Longer-Runway Child

Four principles for parenting introverted or shy kids without shaming their temperament

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

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

Reframe Self-Promotion as Education

You make the light bulb but you sell light. Rename the act and the resistance disappears.

Revealed-Behavior Notification Timing

Trigger reminders off what users actually did, not what they said they'd do — 23.5 hours after last use.

SaaS-Marketplace Transition Test

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

Scenario-Based PM Interviewing

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

Sell-Ready From Day One

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

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.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Shadows of Superpowers

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

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

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

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.

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

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

Simplest-V1-Then-Amplify Experimentation

Ship the barest encapsulation of a hypothesis, confirm it has legs, then beat the heck out of it.

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.

Speak Early, Speak From Conviction

Two tactics to get an introvert's ideas heard and acted on in loud meetings

Stamina as the Kill Signal

Projects die of exhausted stamina long before they die of exhausted money — so watch the team, not the runway.

Start Bespoke, Become a Marketplace Later

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

Stocks-and-Flows Pipeline Diagnosis

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Stretch With an Anchor

Take the role that will hurt you into growth — but only if one or two things in it are already in your wheelhouse.

Supply-First Marketplace Building

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

Systematic Invention (Expertise + Scheduled Thinking + Recombination)

Be an expert, book two hours a month, and fuse two things that already exist.

Systems Not Goals

Build a default-on repeatable system instead of chasing a one-off target.

Talent Density as Prerequisite

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

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

Sales4 steps

Teaching the Customer How to Buy

Beat indecision by de-risking the buyer's decision, not by piling on FOMO

The 10% Planning Rule

Never spend more than 10% of an execution period planning it.

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.

The 20-Minute Focus Ignition

Beat the hardest part of deep work — starting — by force-blocking distractions for 20 minutes

Leadership6 steps

The 30-60-90 Day Landing Plan

Listen for 30, align for 30, execute for 30 — and negotiate the listening time with your manager up front.

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

Sales5 steps

The Best-Rep Pitch Pilot

Roll out a new sales pitch by piloting it with your best rep, then let sales sell sales

The Better Trap

A 'better' copy of an existing solution to a well-understood problem almost always fails.

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

The Boring Engineering Strategy

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

The Comms Equation (Goal → People → Action → Belief → Medium)

Back-solve every comms plan from a business goal, never from an impressions target.

The Complicity Question

Ask how you helped create the conditions you claim you don't want, to reclaim your agency

Influence5 steps

The Consultative Interview Flip (Sell the Vacation)

Run the interview like an enterprise sale so there is no competition when the offer comes

The Contrarian Coverage-Gap Angle

Give reporters the bold opposing view on a trending topic they're already covering positively.

The Control Principle Prioritization Filter

When several designs solve the problem, ship the one that leaves your users most in control.

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Costly-Signal Subscription Model

Subscribers granted you access to their brain — stop apologising for using it.

The Creator Growth Triad

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

Marketing6 steps

The Curated Peer Recommendation Loop

Grow supply-side discovery by letting creators recommend each other, not by recommending for them.

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

The Design Sprint Scorecard

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

The Differentiation 2x2 (Escape Loserville)

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

The Direct Funding Pitch

Pitch funding news by pattern-matching a beat reporter and stating the deal in three sentences.

The Earned Channel Priority

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

The Ex-Growth Company Test

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

The Facilitator-First Ramp for Product Leaders Under a Product Founder

Joining a founder with strong product sense? Spend your first months translating, not deciding.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Foundation Sprint

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

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

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

The Founding Hypothesis (Mad Libs Strategy Sentence)

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

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.

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.

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The Full-Stack Centralized Insights Org

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

The Going Direct Playbook

Build one owned channel, voiced by a real human, primed before you ever need it.

The Ground-Truth Feedback Loop

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

The Honest-Applicable-Reversible Values Test

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

The Impact-Not-Activity Interview

Win interviews on presence and enthusiasm first, then on impact — never on how hard you worked.

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

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

The Introvert's Career Visibility Playbook

Five moves to get your value seen and your ambition known without becoming someone you're not

The Jargon-Strip Clarity Test

Say what your product does out loud in plain answers; if the writing can't match, strip the jargon.

The Keeper Test

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

The Learning-Impact Ladder

Alternate between roles where you have mastery and roles where you're the newbie — zigzag, don't climb.

The Lightweight-First Outreach Opener

Open cold with a one-line 'are you open to ideas?' instead of a full pitch, to earn a reply.

Mindset3 steps

The Lindy Commitment Test

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

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 Magic Loop

A five-step, repeatable loop that converts helping your manager into leverage for your own goals.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

Pre-commit an explicit ranking of who you serve first, so thorny trade-offs resolve themselves.

Productivity5 steps

The Meeting Operating System

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

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

Growth masks all problems — so ask what you'd do if growth went negative, before it does.

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.

Leadership6 steps

The PM-Engineering Alignment Operating System

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

Sales3 steps

The Product-Led Sales Escalator

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

The Reboot Leadership Equation

Practical skills + radical self-inquiry + shared experiences = better leadership and resilience

The Relentless Iteration Loop

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

Communication6 steps

The Repeatable Idea Test (Put the Pill in the Cheese)

Engineer a message people repeat for their own reasons — memorable, effortless, and never an inside joke.

The Scaled-Liquidity Smell Test

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

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

Sales5 steps

The Setup-and-Follow-Through Sales Pitch

Structure a sales pitch as market setup then differentiated value, not a feature walk-through

The Shared-Fate EM/PM Pair

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

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.

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.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

The Soft Pushback

The one-line, zero-aggression ask that recovers ~20% of comp almost every time

The 'So What?' Ladder to Differentiated Value

Ladder a differentiated feature up through repeated 'so what?' until you reach value rivals can't match

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

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.

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.

Leadership7 steps

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

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.

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

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

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

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

The Three Pillars of Self-Serve Monetization

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

The Time-Boxed Leap Bet

De-risk a scary career leap by treating it as a fixed-length experiment with a fallback

The Tomorrow Test for Saying No

Decide whether to accept a distant commitment by imagining you had to do it tomorrow

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

The Two-Question Introvert Diagnostic

Two thought experiments that reveal your true temperament preference, cutting through learned behavior

The Two-Year Publishing Cadence

Write a post several times a week for two years and an audience will find you

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 YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

The Zero-to-Seven-Day Retention Sprint

Concentrate experiments and flexibility on the first 7 days, where loss aversion actually locks in.

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

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

Throwaway Prototyping To Discover The Product

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

Timeless-Customer Team Structure

Organize teams around customers and problems that never end, not around product surfaces that do.

Two-Way Write-Ups

Make written docs conversational with done-reading, Dory questions, and a sentiment table.

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.

Values as a Mirror

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

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

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

Visibility Signals Importance

Users care about a feature in proportion to how much the product visibly cares about it.

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.

Work Alone Together (Note-and-Vote)

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

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

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

Influence5 steps

Write What You Repeat

If you say it more than once, write it down — then get an accountability partner to enforce a monthly cadence.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

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