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Thinking in Bets

By Annie Duke

3 recommend/use · 4 sourced episodes

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Short attributed excerpts only. Timestamps are approximate.

Related frameworks

Leadership6 steps

Discover–Discuss–Decide (Nominal Group Meeting Protocol)

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

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Exponential Bet Allocation

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Kill Criteria (Premortem Plus Pre-Commitment)

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Lean Into Your Spike

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Make the Implicit Explicit: Decision Rubrics and Mediating Judgments

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Mental Time Travel

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

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Middle-of-Funnel Lead Pooling

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Self-Mastery5 steps

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

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Ruthless Simplification for PM Writing

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Start-With-Why One-Pager

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Strategic Friction

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Tactical Retention & The Cancellation Flow

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

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The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

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

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The Billion-Dollar Bootstrapping Heuristic

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

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The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

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

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The Data-Driven Red Flag

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

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Strategy8 steps

The Landscape-First Product Strategy Doc

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

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Leadership4 steps

The Most Charitable Interpretation

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

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Communication4 steps

The Nevertheless Close

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

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The Quarterly Pricing Cadence

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

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There Is No Such Thing As a Long Feedback Loop

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

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Productivity5 steps

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

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

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The Tempo Framework

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

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The Three Threads of Great PMs

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

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Strategy4 steps

The Two-Bucket Controversial-Test Triage

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

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Leadership5 steps

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

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

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The Value Metric Pricing Model

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

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