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Adrenaline-Reframe Public Speaking Prep

Decide not to hate speaking, ride the adrenaline instead of fighting it, then rehearse to ad-lib readiness

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

Backcasting & Reject the Premise

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

Best-Model-First Agent Workflow

Use the most capable model on max effort, start in plan mode, then auto-accept — counterintuitively cheaper.

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.

Strategy6 steps

Breadth-Then-Depth Platform Strategy

Go wide to discover your niche, then put all your wood behind the few arrows that lift the rest

Build for Day 365 Retention

The most valuable companies have the highest one-year retention — engineer for it using early social signals

Build for the 80, Kill Your Darlings

When a product is loved but too small for the mission, serve the silent 80% and abandon what the vocal 20% cling to

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build for the Model Six Months Out

Design your AI product for the model that ships in six months, not the one you have today.

Productivity4 steps

Build It Wrong Before You Know It's Right

Use AI to test a hundred ideas a day as a failure machine, not to polish one idea for three months

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.

Canonical Everything

One canonical doc, one vocabulary, one owner per stream — the source of extreme clarity.

Category Design: Create Demand vs. Capture Demand

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

Celebrate Adoption, Not Shipping

Replace hours and feature counts with customer-adoption outcomes teams can actually steer toward

Marketing4 steps

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.

Communication6 steps

Communication Is The Job

Impact happens only through artifacts and words — so map the mental model before you speak.

Damming the Demand

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

Innovation5 steps

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

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

Distribution-First Moat

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

Dogfooding to Build for Creators

Become a real user of your own product so you feel the problems instead of just reading feature requests

Don't Box the Model In

Give the model tools and a goal, not a rigid workflow — scaffolding gains get wiped out by the next model.

Marketing3 steps

Do Things That Don't Scale to Feel Magical

Manually deliver a magical outcome behind a one-button experience to win a commoditized market before automating

Empathize-Then-Invent (The Stories Method)

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

Find the Cocktail Party

To reinvent social, find where the cocktail party wants to happen and make it rowdy and socially productive

Self-Mastery4 steps

Forest Time

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

Marketing4 steps

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.

Growth Accounting

Measure net growth as new minus churned plus resurrected to find your real lever.

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.

Gut as a Type of Data

Treat intuition as a legitimate data point you must articulate objectively, not a mandate you impose

Handbook-as-Code

Treat how the company operates as a versioned repo anyone can submit a merge request against

Hiring on Skills, Attributes, and Values

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

Self-Mastery5 steps

Identity Threat to Curiosity

Your worst behaviour comes from identity threat — turn the clench into 'fascinating, tell me more'.

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.

Mindset4 steps

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

Separate belief from hope, and refuse to launch until you're collecting winnings instead of making bets

Latent Demand Product Discovery

Find your next product by watching people misuse your current one for something it wasn't designed to do.

Leverage Your Leaders

Stop proving you can do it alone — make it cheap for your manager to unblock you.

Marketing5 steps

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

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

Make Everyone a CEO

Give people a real hill to take with operating control so they do the right thing when you're not in the room

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.

Micro and Macro Barrier Removal

Grow by systematically removing both structural (macro) and friction (micro) barriers.

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

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

Perfect Execution Before Judging Strategy

Diagnose people/process first, and only re-evaluate strategy once execution is perfect.

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.

PM Your Career Like You PM Your Product

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

Portfolio Hiring: Range Over Style

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

Proven Better New

Master the proven, add a verifiable better, gamble one risky new — to stack the odds a product wins

Radical Candor Feedback and Role-Fit Reframe

Care personally and challenge directly, and treat underperformance as wrong-role, not a bad person

Mindset5 steps

Reading Your Own Critics

Read every criticism carefully, believe none of it blindly — you know more than the critics do.

Communication5 steps

Reframe Self-Promotion as Education

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

Innovation6 steps

Right Model for the Right Use Case

Route each AI feature to a model chosen for that job, not one popular LLM stretched over everything

Communication5 steps

Short Toes

Engineer feedback so it lands on the work, never the person — the async collaboration protocol

Software Is Not a Moat

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

Stamina as the Kill Signal

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

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Start Embarrassingly Small

The more ambitious you are, the humbler your starting point should be — begin at 1,000 feet, not 100,000

Innovation5 steps

Stated vs Revealed Preferences: Holding Conviction Through User Outrage

When users scream and keep refreshing, believe the behaviour — then debug details, not vision.

Stay Close to the Metal

The best product CEOs micromanage the pixel-level details and are the first and last mile of the product

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Stay Valuable After Acquisition

Anchor to the shared mission, market yourself internally, and flex with every strategy shift to survive an acquisition

Steering AI to a Non-Obvious Strategy

AI gives predictable strategy when asked lazily — enumerate every input first, then make it argue back

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.

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

Transfer your product instincts by working in the open and cloning a shadow who becomes a mini-you

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 Agreeable/Giver Hiring Matrix

Prize the disagreeable giver; beware the agreeable taker on your team.

Marketing3 steps

The Better Trap

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

The Curator Leader (Not the Visionary)

The best product leaders don't own the ideas — they build environments where great ideas bubble up and get chosen

The Decision Meeting Operating System

Pre-read 24h before, three options plus a recommendation, a traffic-light table, notes 24h after.

The Deep Dive PM Interview

Make candidates write real async requirements and defend them — a two-way test for remote PM fit

The Eye of Sauron: Calibrating Leader Depth

Go pixel-deep only on what hinges success — and tell people exactly where their space begins.

The Fast-Feedback Flywheel

Fix every piece of user feedback within minutes so people feel heard and give you even more.

The Forge and the Dam

Two career positions compound: the company's hottest fire, or the critical thing nobody watches.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Learning-Impact Ladder

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

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.

The Marketplace Priority Stack

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

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

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

The Pod + Product Staff Team Model

Replace the 13-person specialist team with a 6-person generalist pod plus one summoned specialist

The Rallying Activation Metric

The value of an activation metric is shared clarity, not statistical precision.

The Remote-First Operating Stack

Five mechanisms that make an all-remote company across 60+ countries actually work

The School Pyramid Simplification Method

Build a curriculum from kindergarten to PhD to make a gnarly project comprehensible.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Six-Month Passion Test

Don't trust your identity about what you'll love — give the unfamiliar job six months, then judge.

The Three Modes of Customer Understanding

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

The Three-Trait Hire Plus Two AI-Era Premiums

Grit, quick-learning, self-awareness get you hired anywhere — curiosity and putting yourself out there keep you relevant

The Transparency Ramp

Default everything to public except three named exceptions, then ramp until it feels uncomfortable

The Zone of Benefit (3x Rule)

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

Finance3 steps

Token Budgets as a Trust-Proportional Resource

Kill the token-spend leaderboard; cap AI spend like any resource, sized to trust in someone's ROI judgment

Under-Resource to Force Automation

Deliberately under-staff projects and hand out unlimited tokens so people are forced to automate with AI.

Understand, Identify, Execute

Instrument the data first, find the drop-offs, then build products to fix them.

Marketing5 steps

Virality as Customer-Augmented Marketing

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

Vision-Strategy-Execution Split (and the Controversy Test)

Vision is the destination, strategy is an opinionated path — and a real strategy must be disagreeable

Innovation5 steps

Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity

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

Communication3 steps

When-It-Leaks Communications Pre-Mortem

At scale you can't test quietly — decide the message before you even know you want to launch

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.

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.