Superhuman

Agency Over Title: The Force-Multiplier Mindset

Ignore role boundaries — use AI tools to execute your own ideas end to end

Answer the Question Behind the Question

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

B2C2B: Horizontal Wedge to Enterprise

Win a billion-user consumer use case first, then let personal users carry the product into their workplace.

Marketing2 steps

Beautifully Simple Pricing

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

Influence5 steps

Behavioral Pricing: Compromise, Decoy and Framing

Raise revenue 30%+ by reframing tiers and framing prices — without touching the product.

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

Breath-Taking Questions (Radical Self-Inquiry Prompts)

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

Bridging-Based Agreement

Surface content only when people who normally disagree agree — that's the signal of truth.

Build Only Where You Can Be Best (Model Sourcing)

Build in-house only where your unique data or position lets you beat the frontier; otherwise buy

Bundling vs Unbundling Wave-Reading

Read where the market sits in the eternal bundle/unbundle cycle to decide vertical vs horizontal.

Cannibalize Your Own Product Every 6-12 Months

Make your current product look silly on a fixed cadence instead of only shipping what users ask for

CEDAF Delegation Framework

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

Chop-It-Up AI Collaboration Loop

Don't hand AI one giant spec — specify a little, review a little, repeat in tight loops.

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.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Community as an Economy

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

Complaint Storms

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

Complement-the-Frontier Model Strategy

Don't rebuild foundation models — train small specialty models that attack their weaknesses in speed, cost, and niche tasks.

Concierge Manual Onboarding

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

Content Market Fit

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

Cut Scope, Not Quality

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

Decompose-and-Ensemble

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

Delete-First Lean Engineering

On a small team, deleting code beats writing it — audit for features whose maintenance cost exceeds their gain.

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

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

Distribution-First Moat

Solve distribution before you obsess over product-market fit; it is the harder, more durable edge.

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

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

Dogfood-Driven Realism

Be the end user, use your product intensely daily, and never ship anything that isn't useful to you.

Sales3 steps

Dollar-Driven Discovery

Test the dollar potential of a hypothesis, not just whether customers 'like' the idea

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

Embodied Algorithm Offsite

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

Empathize-Then-Invent (The Stories Method)

Listen deeply to users for hours, then build something new — never the literal feature they asked for.

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

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.

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

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

Fall-On-Your-Face Taste Calibration

Deliberately push AI past its limits in a safe environment to build a gut feel for what it can do.

Fixed Time, Variable Scope (Appetite-Based Planning)

Set the max time you'll spend first, then design a solution that fits it — instead of estimating a concept.

Framing (Setting the Boundaries)

Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.

Strategy2 steps

Freemium Two-Product Rule

Make the free tier good enough to spark word of mouth and the paid tier different enough to justify upgrading

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.

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

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

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

High-Ceiling Market Test

Attack markets with a high ceiling and easy switching; incumbents win only where there's little left to build.

Hills-and-Valleys: Getting Value From Probabilistic AI Tools

Be patient and explicit, start small, and learn where the model is strong vs weak

Hire Raw Intellect Over Experience

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

Hold the Mindset Loosely, Stay Attached to Growth

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

How You Charge Beats How Much: Pricing-Model Design

Pick the monetization model, then the price metric, then the structure — the number comes last.

Hypothesis-to-Data Over Strategy

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

ICE Prioritization

Score every experiment idea on Impact, Confidence and Ease to run a high-velocity testing program fairly

Strategy6 steps

Inflict Pain, With a Smile

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

Inspiration, Not Imitation

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

Internal Virality for Alignment

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

Irrationally Optimistic, Uncompromisingly Realistic

Push hard toward a future you believe in while killing your own hypotheses as data arrives

Jobs-to-Be-Done Agent Mapping

Bring order to AI chaos by listing every stakeholder's jobs-to-be-done, then mapping agents onto them.

Knowledge-Work End-State Idea Generation

Pick an area of knowledge work and reason forward to its end state as AI matures — then build for that.

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.

Leaders, Fillers and Killers

Sort every feature into leader, filler or killer to configure packages that unlock segments.

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

Lego Brick vs Lego Box (Selling Solutions Up-Market)

Sell ready-made solution boxes to move up-market while still building composable bricks behind the scenes.

Live Shaping Session

Put product, a senior engineer, and a designer in a room to sketch and break ideas until one is clearly buildable in the appetite.

Magic Lenses

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

Make the Unconscious Conscious to Fix a Team

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

Manage Up by Sharing Your Point of View

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

Sales6 steps

Mastering B2B Negotiations Through Value

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

Model Maximalism

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

MOO — Most Obvious Objection

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

Move the PMF Score: Reposition + Speed to Value

Raise a low product-market-fit score without changing the product — refocus expectations and collapse time-to-value

Must-Have Benefit Excavation

A three-question survey sequence that turns 'they like it' into the exact hook that acquires customers

Naturally Hedged Product Portfolio

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

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

NLX: Designing the Natural-Language Interface

Conversation is an interface with real constructs — design it, don't just let the model lead

Entrepreneurship5 steps

People, Market, Product, Distribution

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

Phase-Bounded Big Bets

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

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.

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.

Portfolio Hiring: Range Over Style

Hire designers on portfolio alone; wide range proves a designer, a signature style reveals an artist.

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

Strategy6 steps

Price Before Product: The Willingness-to-Pay Conversation

Have the pricing conversation months before launch and use it to prioritize what you build.

Principles-First Product Design

Set non-negotiable principles up front — voice of the people, no override button, full transparency — and never bend them.

Principles for Building Trustworthy AI Products

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

Product-First AI Prompting

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

Productize to Segments (the 'You Can Act Differently' Test)

Segments are defined by needs and willingness to pay — and only count if you can act differently on them.

Prompt Sets Are the New PRD

Communicate product ideas by building the prototype, not writing the doc — demos before memos

Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout

Never take the next expansion step until the data from the last one has already convinced you.

Influence3 steps

Pseudonymity for Honest Contribution

Let contributors stay anonymous — people cross partisan lines far more readily when their name isn't attached.

Reason About It Like a Human

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

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.

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.

Reset Through Better Abstractions

Don't fear throwing work away — a better abstraction compounds and recovers sunk cost fast.

Reverse-Engineer-Then-Formalize at Scale

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

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.

Influence4 steps

Sales Then Logistics

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

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.

Selective Deep-Dive Leadership

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Shadows of Superpowers

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

Ship-Fast Operating Model

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

Signposting

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

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

Mindset3 steps

Slow vs Fast Decisions

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

Software Is Not a Moat

Any feature you ship can be cloned; build ecosystems, platforms, and hardware that can't be copied.

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'

Solve Before Scale

Run in a distinct 'solve' mode before you ever switch to 'scale' mode

Influence4 steps

Speak Accurately (Avoid the Single-Minded Martyr)

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

Spirit-First OKRs

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

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.

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

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

Strategy Not Self-Expression

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

Systems Over Headcount (The Small Bus)

Solve with better systems and talent density instead of adding people; a smaller bus turns faster.

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.

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 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.

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 20/80 Willingness-to-Pay Axiom

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

The Acceptable / Expensive / Prohibitively Expensive Price Ladder

Three questions that reveal both a price range and the psychological cliffs you must hide behind.

Marketing6 steps

The Ambassador Program Blueprint

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

The Atomic Unit of Sharing Test

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

Finance4 steps

The Attribution-Autonomy Pricing Matrix

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

The Break-Even Indifference Test

Offer economically identical pricing models and see which one people irrationally prefer.

The Broccoli-Inside-Sugar Product Strategy

Hide your ambitious vision inside a form factor people already want and use daily.

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

The Circuit Breaker (Back to Shaping)

When a project overruns its appetite, don't extend it or gut the agreed value — pull it back into shaping mode.

The Community Form-Factor Matrix

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

The Complicity Question

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

The Dehydrated Company Hiring Model

Only hire when a function is underwater, so headcount forces ruthless prioritization

The Design Sprint Scorecard

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

The Detail Dial

Calibrate how prescriptive a shaped plan is to the builder's seniority — more detail lifts juniors, less frees seniors.

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 Diversified Roadmap Portfolio

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

Finance3 steps

The Downturn Pricing Playbook (Never Drop the Price)

Three moves that protect price integrity in a recession: de-feature, non-pricing actions, change the model.

The Earned Channel Priority

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

The Escape Hatch Principle

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

The Ex-Growth Company Test

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

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.

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

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 Levels of Product-Market Fit

Sequence PMF as four levels, optimizing satisfaction, then demand, then efficiency in turn

The Four Ps of Pivoting

Persona, Problem, Promise, Product — the four levers to change when you're stuck

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.

Sales3 steps

The Friend-Zone Test

Sit customers down and force the truth: do you need me, or do you just like me?

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.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The In-Product Feedback Loop

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

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 Loonshots Two-Structure Organization

Run a big rigorous org and a tiny flat innovation team side by side; the leader's job is the bridge.

Productivity5 steps

The Meeting Operating System

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

The Minimum Lovable Product (MLP)

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

The Nine-Scopes Kickoff

At kickoff, have the builders translate the shaped idea into nine-or-fewer implementation chunks to test scope and build clarity.

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.

The Open Core Line: State and Collaboration

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

Influence3 steps

The Panini Effect

Show your product line as an unfinished puzzle and attach rates jump from 20% to 40-50%.

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.

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.

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

The Product Strategy Stack

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

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

The Reboot Leadership Equation

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

The Roadmap Is a Story, Not a Spreadsheet

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

The Sean Ellis Test

A one-question survey that reveals product-market fit before your retention data can

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 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.

Self-Mastery3 steps

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.

Self-Mastery3 steps

The Swipe File

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

The Switch Log

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

The Thermal Team

Run a startup inside the company: one owner, one senior sponsor, total focus, self-set pace.

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.

The Three Dimensions of an Agent

Score any 'agent' on autonomy, complexity, and natural interaction — each a spectrum

The Three-Pillar Competition Philosophy

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

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

The Two-Engine Profitable Growth Architect

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

The Two-of-Three Inflection Test

Only build a new zero-to-one product when at least two of three inflections line up

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 Weekly Marketable Feature

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

Two-Day Work-Test Hire

Bring finalists on-site for two days to do a real end-to-end project — it screens skill and fit at once.

Update Your Priors: The AI Capability Arbitrage

Re-test what AI can do today and demand more of it — old scar tissue is leaving alpha on the table

Value Delivery Engine: Activation-First Growth Sequence

Fix conversion, engagement, referral and revenue before you obsess over acquisition

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Vertical AI Opportunity Finder

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

Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity

Great ideas come from many ideas; build a high-velocity, no-gate, ego-free making-and-critique culture.

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.

Communication4 steps

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.

Worse Is Better, Tech Debt Is a Champagne Problem

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

Wow-First MVP

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

Your Problem Isn't Unique

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