Waymo

Barrels-and-Ammunition Team Design

Staff each team from the gap, not from a fixed PM/EM/designer template

Best-Idea-Wins Culture: Speak Up, Then Commit

Engineer a culture where the junior person's idea can win — then walk the chosen path decisively.

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

Build a foundation, then ship prototypes that pre-answer the hiring manager's core questions.

Build for the Current Model, Prototype for the Next

Elicit max capability from today's model while pre-building the products the next model will unlock

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Build in Private (Best Work Is Done Alone and Quietly)

Skip the public-building playbook and pour your limited time into customers and product instead.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Build the Company Only You Could Build

Reject the pivot-and-blitzscale playbook; commit to the one idea that dies without you.

Champion-Led Agent Adoption

Roll out new AI tooling by letting a few excited early adopters pave the way for the team.

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

Because general LLMs can do anything, a sharp key-user + problem + use-case triad is what rules approaches out

Communication5 steps

Clear Is Kind: The Three-Sentence Correction

State the failure, state your belief in them, hand them the responsibility — starting tomorrow

Concentric-Circles Portfolio (Earn the License to Expand)

Obsess over a flawless, efficient core; that attention earns you the license to make growth bets in the outer rings.

Customer Research as a Documentarian

Observe like a non-judgmental documentarian, find the pattern, then validate the truth with data

Cycle-Time Is the Enemy (Ship Ship Ship)

The gap between knowing something is good and users seeing it is your biggest enemy — attack the decision time, not the work time.

Decompose-and-Ensemble

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

Deep Human Evaluation Over Leaderboards

Measure real progress with experts who work through the answer, not crowds who vibe for two seconds.

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

Make robots soft, attentive, and telegraph intent before they move.

Design the Dream Objective Function

You become what you measure — so measure the rich thing you actually want, not the easy proxy.

Disrupt Yourself Before Someone Else Does

Market leaders survive by challenging and cannibalizing their own products before an upstart does it for them.

Don't Default to the Chatbot: Choosing the Right AI Interface

Reject the intuitive AI copy; ask what problem your business actually needs solved.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Do The Five Fundamentals Harder

Startup success isn't secret knowledge — it's executing the well-known basics far past normal effort.

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

Communication4 steps

Evals as Articulating Success

An eval is just a clear spec of ideal behavior — the shared language of AI product work

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

Give AI work a metric, run hackathons, and study what makes AI products feel magical.

First-Principles Framework Method

Decompose every initiative into goal, mechanism, and value questions to build joined-up strategy — and mini-CEO operators.

First-Principles Future Visualization

Build vision by vividly imagining the far future, then extracting what must be true

From Brick Layer To Architect

Reclaim the 10% of high-leverage architecture work by delegating the 90% of implementation to AI.

From Victim Consciousness to Radical Responsibility

Shift from 'life happens to me' to 'I author my response' to reclaim agency

Get Promoted by Not Optimizing for the Promotion

Focus 100% on business impact and make your ambitions known — but never engineer your work around the title.

Gut-Over-Data Bets (When the Numbers Say No)

Make bets the data argues against when you intrinsically understand a real, unsolved end-user problem.

Leading Without Fear: Allow, Come Home, Reframe

Break the cognitive-emotive fear loop in high-stakes moments instead of suppressing it

Strategy5 steps

Lowercase-c vs Capital-C: AI-Proofing Your Skill Stack

Sort every task into what AI does 80% well and what only a human can do — then invest accordingly

Influence5 steps

Manufacture the Room (Bending the Universe)

Decide which room you must be in, then engineer a legitimate reason to be standing in it

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

Route every cross-org tradeoff through a single shared mission so decisions are fast and everyone stands behind them

Model Introspection Harness Repair

When an AI agent misbehaves, ask it why — its explanation reveals the harness gap to fix

Model Maximalism

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

Off-the-Shelf to Prove It, Custom to Ship It

Prototype with whatever works fastest; go custom only when KPIs demand it.

One Click Faster (Clock Speed Management)

Three tactics to raise an organization's pace without lowering its bar

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

Match the PM archetype you hire to the product's stage of maturity

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.

Read Old Books You Know Nothing About

With ~50–100 books left in a lifetime, spend them on time-filtered classics in domains you're ignorant of.

Reason About It Like a Human

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

Reinforcement Learning Environment Design

Build a fully-fleshed simulated world, inject real chaos, and reward the trajectory, not just the answer.

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

Strip emotion out to get the raw decision, then handle feelings separately afterward.

Self-Mastery4 steps

Reps-to-Judgment (Building Product Sense)

Product sense isn't taught — it's earned through thousands of shipped micro-decisions with the shortest possible cycle time.

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

Match robot form to the task; reserve humanoids for the long tail, not the line.

Strategy5 steps

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

Don't disable high-stakes uses to avoid downside — engineer them to be great

Leadership5 steps

Ship-Fast Operating Model

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

Ship-in-Research-Preview Speed Loop

Cut idea-to-user time from months to a week by branding launches as previews and pre-wiring the launch chain

Innovation5 steps

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

When product properties are emergent, launching is how you discover them

Sales4 steps

Simpler-Fairer Pricing Reset

Deliberately give away revenue to simplify pricing — it lifts retention and restores a customer-obsessed culture.

Standing Up a Product Discipline From Scratch

Turn an implicit PM function into a real one by writing the ladder first, then wiring hiring to it

Stickiness Over Moats

Stop chasing barriers competitors can't cross; build accumulating value they can't easily replace.

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

Rank every component by how catastrophic losing it is — then pre-buy the killers.

Tasks, Not Problems

Delegate to AI agents by handing them scoped, verifiable tasks — never open-ended problems.

The 100%-or-Nothing Automation Rule

An automation that works 95% of the time isn't an automation — push it to 100% or don't rely on it

Productivity3 steps

The Agent Foothold Onboarding

Onboard an AI agent like a new hire: environment first, easy tasks next, then scale.

The Career S-Curve for Attracting Talent

Map where a candidate sits on the ambiguity-vs-scale S-curve, then sell them their next step

Peak Performance5 steps

The Complementary Learning Modes Ladder

Mastery needs many kinds of practice — imitate a master, get preference feedback, get graded, then live it.

The End-User Feedback Spectrum

Deliberately gather user feedback across the full quantitative-to-qualitative range, not just the end you're comfortable with.

The Extreme Dog-Fooding Loop

Use your own product at scale, document every flaw with screenshots, then personally drive the fixes to closure.

The Failure Interview Question

Ask senior candidates about one time they failed and what they learned — and watch how they answer.

The Fixit OKR

Put a hard number on fixing known-broken issues and fund it alongside growth, so quality work never gets zero resources.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

If the market stops sharpening your path, the problem is the foundation — not the effort.

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

Sequence the work so hardware's un-updatable, one-shot nature can't sink you.

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

Don't automate everything away — give users enough control to feel ownership.

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

Leadership5 steps

The Org Chart With Your Name On It

Win the promotion by solving your boss's org problem, not by asking for your next title

The Parallel Agent Workflow

Run several AI agents at once and insert yourself only where your expertise actually matters.

Communication3 steps

The Rule of Seven

When an email thread hits seven replies without resolution, stop typing and get on a call.

Innovation5 steps

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

Incubate new product lines as separate 'seed companies' with dedicated teams and adjacency-based selection

Innovation5 steps

The Technology Wave Specialization Ladder

Ratchet down on a new technology while it's still weird — teardown, no-code, then fun build

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

Map any AI PM role into one of three types to target the right skills and job.

The Two-Sided Quality Signal

Great curation does two opposite jobs at once: kill the worst, surface the best.

The Whole-Body Yes: Decoding Emotions as Signals

Read fear, sadness, anger, joy, and creative energy as actionable workplace data

Self-Mastery5 steps

The Zone of Genius Calendar Audit

Bucket last quarter's calendar by joy, then ask what only you can do

Productivity3 steps

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

Judge a model-harness combo with heavy usage, a trusted five-person taste panel, and ~10 sharp evals

Productivity5 steps

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

Fear of a new technology is misunderstanding — spend time with it and you'll see its edges.

Finance4 steps

Value-Anchored Outcome Pricing

Price the outcome, not the seat; set the number from customer value and let cost be your problem.

Values as a Sharp Knife

Rewrite company values as deliberate filters, then hardcode a scoring formula that removes people who don't fit.

Values Reverse-Engineered from Why You Win

Don't philosophize your company values — extract them from the reasons you're actually succeeding.

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.

Vision-Execution Polarity Balance

Diagnose whether you're over-theorizing or over-running-walls, and dynamically retune

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

Bring energy, wander into the unknown while others wait, and amplify signal with AI.

Wartime Company Reset

When a platform shift threatens your core business, declare wartime and go all-in rather than hedge.

When to Hire Your First PM

Stay founder-as-PM until bottlenecks, hijacked eng/design, or new customer segments force the hire

Write the Press Release First

Before building anything, write the launch press release as if the product shipped today.

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

Treat every hardware build as one of a handful of irreversible compiles a year.

Your First Company Is a Zero (Build the Founder Muscle)

Treat your first three founding years as a craft apprenticeship, not a success you owe yourself.

Your Life's Objective Function

Make your implicit life values explicit and test daily choices against future-you

Zero-to-One Team Building

For brand-new categories, hire generalists, adjacent-domain experts, and AI-native new grads.