The Last of Us

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

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

Autonomy at the VP Level

Place decision autonomy at the VP layer — not the leaves, not the top — to maximize thinking without producing chaos.

Peak Performance3 steps

Beating Pre-Talk Nerves

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

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.

Centralized vs. Decentralized Org Choice

Pick your org model from your product strategy: speed (Amazon) or unified experience (Apple), and accept its cost.

Choosing a Startup PR Agency

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

Leadership6 steps

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.

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

Cultural Erogenous Zones

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

Innovation7 steps

Design for the Most Complex Use Case First

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

Empathize–Create–Evangelize

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

Explain-It-to-Prove-You-Understand-It

Force yourself and others to explain decisions; if you can't articulate it, you probably don't understand it.

Fault-Tolerant User Interfaces

Design your UI to match the real hit-rate of your machine learning, not a fantasy of 100% accuracy.

Find-the-Nugget Angle Selection

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

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

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

Full-Stack Relationship Orgs

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

Leadership6 steps

Go and See: Walking All the Way to Ground

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

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

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

Guardrails Before Control

Set the quality bar, coach to it, then buy control only for the gaps that remain.

Hardest-Side-First (One-Player Mode)

Pre-PMF, ignore marketplace dynamics: own the hardest side and hack the other one.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Homework for Life

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

Imperatives: The Cross-Team Must-Do List

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

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.

Strategy7 steps

International Market Entry Stack Rank

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

Marketing4 steps

Kill NPS, Ask CSAT

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

Location and Action Openers

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

Macro / Middle-Range / Micro Research Portfolio

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

Manufacture Your Own Supply

Find the asset blocking non-suppliers from supplying, then rent it to them with strings attached.

Mistakes of Commission Over Omission

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

Optimizing for Feelings

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

Marketing6 steps

Pressure = Force ÷ Surface Area

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

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.

Rank, Don't Filter

Every user-facing filter silently carves out your supply — turn preferences into ranking signals.

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

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

Marketing4 steps

Recall vs. Discovery Interface Split

Match interface density to user intent: dense grids for recall, low-density sound-rich feeds for discovery.

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

Separating Change-Aversion from Real Problems in a Redesign

After a redesign, split 'upset because it changed' from 'upset because it's worse' before you react.

Productivity3 steps

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

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

Speaking with Adjacency

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

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.

Leadership6 steps

The Assumption-Break PM Interview

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

Influence4 steps

The Business-Fluency Scalpel for Researchers

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

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

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

The Contrarian Coverage-Gap Angle

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

The D5/D7 Ungameable North Star

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

Leadership7 steps

The Decision Tempo System

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

The Direct Funding Pitch

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

The Dogfooding Boundary Rule

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

Marketing4 steps

The Earned Channel Priority

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

The Embedded Insights Partner Model

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

The Five-Second Moment

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

The Five Stakes Tools

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

The Five Tools Researcher

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

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

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

The Four Engines of Attention

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

Productivity5 steps

The Four Levers of Velocity at Scale

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

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 Future Headline

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

The Going Direct Playbook

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Gut-Check Protocol

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

The Human Behind the Role

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

Entrepreneurship8 steps

The Internal Founder Pod

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

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 Lightweight-First Outreach Opener

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

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 Market Health Metric

Find the leading proxy that predicts liquidity, then find the threshold where it plateaus.

Innovation5 steps

The Marquee Mock Exercise

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

The Once Upon a Time Vision Story

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

Productivity4 steps

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

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

Marketing6 steps

The Peer Supply Engine

Pay your best suppliers to onboard and recruit the next ones, at a tenth of the cost.

Influence4 steps

The Personal Interest Inventory

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

Mindset3 steps

The Power of Yes

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

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 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.

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 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-Point Story Test

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

The Three-Signal Marketplace Screen

Fragmentation, uniform needs, high matchmaking barrier — no marketplace works without all three.

Productivity4 steps

Think It, Build It, Ship It, Tweak It

Four product phases where spend rises stage by stage — so you must retire risk before the money starts.

Mindset3 steps

Three-Model Triangulation

Apply three different mental models to a problem; agreement across them sharply raises your odds of being right.

Top 10 Things You Should Know

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

Two Product-Market Fits

A marketplace must pass the disappointment test independently on each side.

Mindset4 steps

User-Centered Performance Detector

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

Values as a Mirror

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

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

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

Productivity4 steps

Your Problem Isn't Unique

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