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Adapt the Model, Don't Build One

Post-training is the new pre-training — steer an off-the-shelf model to your outcome instead of pre-training your own

Advise Like an Investor: The Company Selection Filter

Your advisory portfolio is an investment portfolio — pick for the liquidity event, not the logo

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

AI Answer Box Keyword Triage

Segment your keywords by intent, quarantine the informational ones, and start teaching the AI

Self-Mastery4 steps

AI as Your Learning Engine

Stop only asking AI to do work for you — spend your spare hours making it train you

Self-Mastery3 steps

AI Introspection Rubric

Point an AI agent at a folder of your own notes to surface criteria you hold implicitly and turn them into a rubric.

April Dunford's Five-Step Positioning Framework

Position a product by starting from what you must beat, not from a market category.

Artificial Density Testing

Manually cram enough users into one cluster to get a clean yes/no on a social product

Assessing Whether SEO Is Right for Your Product

Judge SEO fit by two signals — a large addressable market and existing domain authority.

Assume the Disruptor Is Right

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

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.

Building Trust Through Speed

Ship an honest 'research preview' early, then visibly iterate on feedback so speed builds trust instead of eroding it.

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.

Canonical Everything

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

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.

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

Earn trust before you inflict change: the first 90 days of a leader inheriting a team.

Conditional-Layer Validation

Reduce a consumer product to ~4 things that must be true and validate them one at a time

Consistent, Distinctive, Famous

The three-word brand brief for founders — and why fame is the nonlinear one nobody names.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Consumer Subscription Viability Test

Freemium-plus-paid-acquisition consumer subscriptions fail without ~60-70%+ retention or a network effect

Marketing3 steps

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

Pay users in product credits to publicly share what they built — turn usage into free distribution.

Decompose-and-Ensemble

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

Deliberate Low-Leverage Leadership

Choose the nitty-gritty tasks 'anyone could do' — because when a senior leader does them, they become high leverage.

De-Risking the High-Stakes Meeting

Turn important meetings from big-reveal gambles into pre-worked, question-proof conversations.

Design for Humanity, Not the Organogram

Small teams plus human briefs beat large teams plus metrics — reciprocity does not scale.

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

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

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

Founders need one specific plan; allocators need many bets and a discount on their own forecasts

Differentiation vs Table Stakes

Balance the roadmap between what attracts new customers and what they require to switch at all

Eigenquestions (Finding the Question That Drives the Answer)

Find the one or two questions whose answers collapse a complex decision into clear quadrants.

Eval-Driven Product Development

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

Evals as Articulating Success

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

Execution Beats Strategy

Perfect strategy with poor execution teaches you nothing. Good-enough strategy with perfect execution compounds.

Influence5 steps

Expand, Don't Shrink

Insert a step between receiving feedback and acting on it — then answer it by adding tools, never by getting smaller.

Experiment at 30: Trend Over Precision

You can run meaningful experiments with as few as 30 users — more data buys precision, not different trends.

Fail Conclusively (Maximize the Treatment Effect)

Design experiments that kill an idea for good, so no future exec can resurrect it.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Fall in Love with the Problem

Start every venture with a validated problem, not a solution, so the problem becomes your North Star.

Familiarity-Anchor Copy for New Concepts

When users land but don't act, the product isn't wrong — anchor unfamiliar concepts to something they already know.

Mindset4 steps

Fear Gives Bad Advice (The Prediction Bet)

When gripped by fear, do the opposite of your gut — and use a bet to prove it to yourself

Fear-Origin Audit for Product Bets

Products built from competitive fear fail; audit the motivation before you audit the roadmap.

Communication6 steps

Feeling-First Product Metaphor

Pick the feeling, name where you last felt it, and let the metaphor make a thousand small decisions for you.

Founder Intuition vs Team Expertise Handoff

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

Freemium Decision Framework (What to Make Free)

Make a feature free if it drives your growth model; gate it if it creates friction for growth.

Functions and Missions: The Two-Axis Org

Craft and careers live in functions; delivery lives in cross-functional missions with three flavours

Peak Performance3 steps

Genius-Zone Time Budget

Spend at least 50% of your time on the work you're both great at and love — it's what keeps you showing up.

Growth Accounting

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

Growth-as-Cleanup-Crew Team Design

Point your first growth hire at known gaps, don't ask them to discover strategy from scratch.

Influence4 steps

Guild Nights

Six interesting people, one topic, at your house, catered — the highest-ROI network you can build

Happy GMV and Minimum Viable Happiness

Track only the GMV that produced a retained customer, and boil the thimble until it clears the bar

ICE Prioritization (Impact, Confidence, Ease)

Score each idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to bubble the best ideas up without over-engineering the math

Idiosyncrasy Preservation (The Stand-Up Comedian Test)

Protect the odd, inconsistent details of your product — idiosyncrasies count double.

Innovate Inside a Big Company as a Separate C-Corp

Spin new products into their own C-Corp with a founder-type lead reporting to the CEO, bypassing core-code review

Inverted Time-to-Value

Engineer the aha moment into the first 3 seconds using non-obvious platform mechanics

Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments

Fund performance, UX and velocity work by making the invisible measurable and the downside of neglect concrete.

Kindle and Fire Growth Strategies

Non-scalable kindle hacks exist only to unlock the scalable fire strategy worth hiring for.

Latent Demand Detection

Find product ideas where people already fight through a distorted process to get a value

Leader Emulators

Build runnable models of the sharpest people you've worked with, then boot the right one when you're stuck.

Legibility Framework for Spotting Frontier Ideas

Hunt for illegible ideas — the ones with real energy that nobody can quite articulate yet — and translate them.

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

Structure your repo so the AI writes the least code possible — infrastructure absorbs the complexity.

LNO Framework

Match your effort to each task's leverage, neutrality, or overhead

Map Your Product Against What AI Can Do

Start from your product's core job, then classify each part as AI-replace, augment, partial, or not-yet

Markets as Currents, Not Bodies of Water

Chase the change dynamic pulling the market, not the size of the market

MAYA: The Right Amount of Weird

Ship the most novelty a market will swallow — one notch past familiar, never past comprehensible.

Measurements Are Not Insights (Instrumentation for Analytics)

Turn raw metrics into segmented, causal insights you actually act on.

Productivity4 steps

Measurements vs. Insights Instrumentation

A measurement is an observed fact; an insight answers 'why' and changes what you do — instrument for the latter.

Metrics Trees

Decompose your North Star metric and top business KPI into a tree of sub-metrics to align teams and estimate impact

Micro and Macro Barrier Removal

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

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

Don't spend a dollar on marketing until users start sharing your product unprompted.

Minimum Viable Experiment + The Dogfood Gate

Ship the cheapest version of an experiment — but use it yourself before you trust its null result

Mochary's Script for Difficult Conversations

Defuse the amygdala by warning first, delivering the message, then letting the person release emotion.

Model Maximalism

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

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

The best position to sell your company is being genuinely fine not selling it.

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

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

Marketing7 steps

Optimize the Second Screen (Post-Click Leverage)

Everyone crowds the ad; the compounding wins sit on the page people land on after it

Perceived Simplicity

Keep advanced power in the product but discoverable only to those who go looking — invisible to everyone else.

Perfect Execution Before Judging Strategy

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

Physics-Then-Loops Growth Modeling

Map the fixed physics of your business first, then find the one underused lever inside them to change.

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.

Planning in Seasons

Replace rigid roadmaps with secular 'seasons', loose quarterly OKRs, and deliberate slack

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.

Problem-First, Wheelhouse-Checked, Unit-Economics-Proven

Three gates a product idea must pass before you build the solution you already fell in love with.

Product as Organism: the metabolic loop

Treat an AI product as a living system that ingests signals, tunes on rewards, and improves with every interaction

Product-Market Fit = Retention

There is one metric for product-market fit: do customers come back?

Marketing3 steps

Product-Market-Story Fit

Great product in a great market still fails if the story is wrong or missing — add the third leg

Entrepreneurship6 steps

Protect the Core Magic: Acquisition Integration

Freeze the loop users love, rebuild everything behind it, and narrate the seams honestly

PSHE Career Growth Framework

Evaluate talent by how far up the Problem-Solution-How-Execution ladder they operate.

Self-Mastery5 steps

Putting On the Coat of the Job

Run the spreadsheet, then tear it up — and simulate a Tuesday in the job instead.

Self-Mastery3 steps

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.

Mindset3 steps

Remove the Emotional Filter From Decisions

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

Retention Benchmark Ladder

Concrete week-one cohort retention floors: ~80% friends/family, 60% free at scale, 20-30% paid.

Roasting Plus High Standards

Let the team feel safe enough to roast you, then apply high standards without fear — safety makes rigor easier.

Run Toward the Hard Use Cases

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

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

Scaling Expert Judgment Through Algorithms

Structure your experts' judgment into a signal, train on that — not only on engagement

Scenario-Based PM Interviewing

Interview PMs by making them do the real job under real constraints, not recite prepared stories

Separate the Decision from the Implementation

Decide for the stakeholder as if there were no feelings, then solve each hurt in implementation

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.

Ship-to-Learn Research Allocation

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

Ship-to-Learn: The Emergent-Product Loop

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

Single-Channel Build-in-Public Bet

Find the one channel that resonates with your exact audience, then double and triple down.

Speed-to-Aha Over Best Product

Sometimes the correct product decision hurts the aha moment — cut it and get users to magic faster.

Stamina as the Kill Signal

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

Stratified Design Work

Split your time between supporting engineers' execution and setting a 3-6 month vision, not polishing mocks.

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.

Swinging the Pendulum

Spot an undesirable state, correct it — but know you'll overcorrect, so aim for the middle

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

Your job won't vanish — analyze it as a bundle of tasks and keep swapping the tasks AI absorbs

The 30-Day Keeper Test

Calendar every new hire 30 days out and ask: knowing what I know now, would I hire this person?

Marketing3 steps

The Age-Invitation Curve

Target the age band still adding social connections, or plan to buy every user with ads

The Agreeable/Giver Hiring Matrix

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

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the B-side of your career so a bad season doesn't read as a verdict on your life.

The A-Side / B-Side Career Ledger

Track the failures between your highlights so setbacks read as moments, not verdicts

Mindset4 steps

The Barbell Media Diet

Read only the up-to-the-minute and the timeless — distrust everything in the middle

Self-Mastery7 steps

The Bootloader: Structured Morning Self-Reflection

Boot the day with exercise, then run an hour of red-yellow-green review across every role in your life

The Broken Equation Test

No amount of product craft can fix a company whose underlying math doesn't close.

The Confidence Meter

Score how much evidence actually backs an idea, from a shiny pitch deck (0.1) to a live A/B test (10)

The Dance of 100 Nos — Fundraising Storytelling

Investors decide in seconds and 1% say yes — so lead with your strongest point and tell an emotional, detailed story.

The Decision Meeting Operating System

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

Leadership6 steps

The Dinosaur Brain Product Review

Executives hold three facts. Bring a recommendation, not a catalogue — and leave with principles, not answers.

The Double Lock (Sober and Drunk)

Debate every big decision twice — once rationally, once psychologically — and only act if both agree.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Energy Audit (Zone of Genius)

Color every hour of two weeks green or red, then eliminate the reds until your calendar is 80% green

The Enterprise AI Adoption Ladder

Three sequential stages that separate companies winning with AI from those spinning their wheels

The Ex-Growth Company Test

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

Communication5 steps

The Fascinating Reframe

Convert the visceral urge to be right into a question that harvests the information you're missing.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

The Foundation Reset Heuristic

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

Sales4 steps

The Four Forces of Switching

Understand any adoption decision as a tug-of-war between attraction, anxiety, habit, and inertia

The Four Phases of Focus

Do one thing at a time — idea, PMF, then either growth or business model — and shift gears cleanly.

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.

The Four Things a Product Manager Brings to the Team

Prepare to contribute by mastering users, data, the business, and the competitive landscape.

Finance5 steps

The Front-Loaded Advisor Equity Structure

Equity only, a three-month cliff, vesting front-loaded to the value, and an exit built in

The GIST Board and Outcome Roadmaps

Replace release roadmaps with a living board of goals, ideas, and validation steps that the whole team owns

The GIST Model

Split product work into Goals, Ideas, Steps, and Tasks so evidence — not opinion — drives what gets built

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.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Growth Advisor Sourcing and Vetting Gauntlet

Wait for PMF, source through VCs and channel-leading companies, and borrow a trusted expert to vet

The Hierarchy of Engagement

Three stacked levels — core action, accruing benefits, self-perpetuation — that decide if a consumer product endures

Entrepreneurship5 steps

The Hierarchy of Marketplaces

Focus, tip, dominate — the only sequence that produces a marketplace worth owning

The Hill Climb

Name whether you're optimising a local hill or crossing the valley to a bigger mountain — then price the valley.

The Humane Firing Process

Warn, deliver, let them release emotions, then become their active agent to their next job

The Humane Mass Layoff Playbook

Cut deep once, in dollars not headcount, delivered 1:1 — then heal the stay-team by making them feel heard

Communication3 steps

The 'I Perceive You To Be In Anger' Feedback Formula

Interrupt someone's anger without triggering more of it by using a judgment-free I-statement

The Marketplace Priority Stack

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

The Maximally Accelerated Question

A forcing question that separates critical path from what can wait

The Meeting Operating System

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

The Minimum Viable Experiment Trap

A lean test that strips out the mechanism doesn't test the idea — it buries it.

The Negative-Growth Rehearsal

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

The Parallel Sweet Spot: Psychological, Technological, Economic

Solve all three constraints at once — running them in series is how great products die.

The Product People Spectrum: Innovators to Executors

Great product careers get filtered at strategy — deliberately move executors toward the strategic middle.

The Rallying Activation Metric

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

The School Pyramid Simplification Method

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

The SEO Staffing Stack Rank and Impact Clock

Internal expert, then a relentless doer surrounded by advisors, then agencies — and 3 to 12 months to prove it

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 Single Affordance Rule

One product, one job. Added functionality can subtract value by destroying clarity of purpose.

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 Solar System Bundle

Anchor a subscription on one sun product, then orbit satellites that share its DNA

The Story Chapters Framework for Executive Communication

Find the last obvious point for your audience, then build from there — skip neither the setup nor the basics.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Superpowered Individual (Combination-of-Skills Career Moat)

Go deep in one craft, then use AI to add adjacent crafts until you become un-replaceable

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 B's of Behavior Change

Change user behavior by picking a specific Behavior, removing Barriers, and adding immediate Benefits.

Leadership7 steps

The Three-Chapter Hiring Playbook: Find, Assess, Close

Hire the top 1% by hunting signs of excellence, then closing with the whole exec team and the family

The Three Levels of Making Someone Feel Heard

Escalate from acknowledging, to reflecting words, to voicing the unspoken thoughts behind them

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 Tippability Test

Check supply fragmentation, supply heterogeneity and incumbent competition before you fund a marketplace

The Two-Bucket SEO Fit Test

Does your product mint pages by itself? The answer decides your entire SEO strategy

Communication7 steps

The Unique Voice Test

Ask of every line: could any other company have written this? If yes, rewrite it

The User Imagery Adoption Test

Adoption stalls on who owns the product, not what it does — audit your user imagery before you scale.

The Validation Gamut (Assessment, Data, Tests, Experiments, Release)

Validate an idea's assumptions cheaply first — assessment and data before you ever build, fakes before you build for real

The Wizard of Oz Validation Method

Validate a feature's value and conversion rate before building anything by faking the backend manually.

The World-Class Proof Interview

Two questions: why here, and what are you world-class at — plus how do you know?

The Worst Product You Ever Shipped

One interview question that separates PMs with real reps from PMs with a clean résumé.

Productivity4 steps

The YOLO Rule: When Not to Run an Experiment

Experiments have a cost — sometimes shipping 40 things fast beats testing 10 things properly

Entrepreneurship6 steps

The Zero-CAC Consumer Subscription Engine

Mission, no paid ads, retention-as-value, and data rigor — why Duolingo survived where B2C subs die

Three Designer Hiring Archetypes

Hire for one of three profiles — block-shaped generalist, deep-T specialist, or the crack new grad.

Three Ways to Find Marketplace Whitespace

Unbundle a low-NPS segment, own an ignored niche, or change the atomic unit of supply

Tipping Loops: Growth Loops and Happiness Loops

Two symbiotic loop types — one grows the marketplace, one keeps it happy as it grows

Leadership6 steps

Toddler Soccer Goal Detangling

Goal every team on the same output metric and they swarm the ball. Detangle the customer journey into lanes.

Productivity4 steps

Top-Down / Bottoms-Up Core Action Analysis

Cross two analyses — return-propensity ranking and product purpose — to find the one action worth optimising

Top Goal with an Accountability Partner

Protect a daily block for your own priority and have a human physically present to force you to do it

Strategy6 steps

Treat the World as One Market

Default to one global version; localize only where law or platform forces you to

Two-Mode Prioritization for AI Products

Prioritize backward from model magic AND forward from customer needs

Two-Mode Product Teams

One team, two clocks: ship at the speed of the moment, and build the system between moments

Understand, Identify, Execute

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

Mindset3 steps

Understand It to Dissolve the Fear

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

Understand Users by Watching Failures in the Funnel

Watch real users, and interview the ones who failed in your funnel — they know what you need to fix.

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.

Communication5 steps

Viral Hoax Counter-Attack

When a hoax threatens your app, treat it as a growth problem and out-viral it on every vector

Leadership6 steps

Wartime Product Management

In a crisis: blow up the roadmap, share context, restate the mandate from the mission

Win on the Platform, Not the Features

Durable products win on invisible infrastructure — reliability, reach, privacy — not on the feature list

Win the Early Majority with Simplicity

Market leaders are won in the change-averse early majority — and the only lever is simplicity.

Mindset3 steps

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.