Whimsical

Advocate Yourself Out of a Job

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

Influence4 steps

Benefit-Priming Questions (Good Friction)

Add a step to your signup flow — a question that makes users think about the benefit — and conversion goes up.

Self-Mastery3 steps

Burnout vs Depression Self-Diagnosis

Tell exhaustion apart from depression by checking whether the flatness spreads beyond work.

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.

Context Is All You Need Prompting

Treat the model as a brilliant stranger with zero context, and supply what a colleague would already know.

Communication4 steps

De-Risking the High-Stakes Meeting

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

Designing a Zero-to-One Incubator Inside a Giant

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

Design Your Day (Calendar as Canvas + Groundhog Day Iteration)

Draw the day you want on the calendar, run it, see what actually happened, adjust, repeat

Communication7 steps

Discovery by Silence

Stop pitching, ask an open question about their whole life, then say nothing until the roadmap falls out

Evaluative User Research (Hunt for Reasons They Won't Use It)

Test prototypes to find every reason people won't use it — and never let the researcher go alone

Strategy5 steps

Evidence-First Intervention Design

Literature review, then hypothesis, then 30 variants, then relative testing — never show users one design.

Feature Team vs. Empowered Product Team Diagnostic

Tell in minutes whether your squad is handed features to ship or problems to solve

Influence4 steps

Friction Injection for Behavior Suppression

To make people do less of something, add logistical AND cognitive friction at the moment of the hot decision.

Strategy6 steps

Go-Go-Go Plus Long-Term Compounding

Sprint to a proof of existence today; slow down to build the thing you will never regret owning

High Agency, High Urgency Hiring Filter

Hire for two traits only — people who see a problem and go, and people who go now.

Incentive Alignment Against the Dark Side

We are what we measure. Set the team's incentive on the behavior, and lengthen its time horizon.

Justifying Non-Sexy Product Investments

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

Marketing4 steps

Kindle and Fire Growth Strategies

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

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

Willpower never wins. Move the candy further away than the sandwich.

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

A daily four-step loop that changes your defaults instead of making you faster at the wrong things

Mindset3 steps

Measure in Hundreds

If your unit of measurement is one hundred attempts, five failures means you have effectively tried zero times.

No Bystanders on Product Strategy

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

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Paying Is the Only Signal

Discount friends' feedback to zero, and convert 'willing to pay' into money actually moving — refundable

Perceived Simplicity

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

Productivity3 steps

Problems One and Two

Stop reporting your productivity on problems 3-100; get stuck on the two hardest ones

Mindset4 steps

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

Treat each day as an experiment you ran, not a gravestone of success or failure

Communication5 steps

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

Announce a slower response cadence with a 'because', then actually slow the hamster wheel

Influence4 steps

Right for Wrong

Get people to do the thing they already want to do — by giving them a shallower, more immediate reason.

Leadership6 steps

Shipping 0-to-1 Inside a Big Company

Make it the customer's idea, storyboard it in Sharpie, prove it once, and show the economics

Marketing3 steps

Sizing and Time-Boxing a Channel Experiment

How much team and time to commit to a new channel, and what signal to look for before killing it.

Solution-Weighted Discovery

Spend a little time validating the problem; spend most of it winning on the solution

Stamina as the Kill Signal

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

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.

Innovation6 steps

Study Group

A one-hour role-play where employees forget they work at your company and try to use your product

The Behavioral Diagnosis

A journey map on steroids: every micro-step to the behavior, with the blocking psychology named at each one.

Mindset4 steps

The Best-Teams Adoption Heuristic

Adopt a practice only if several of the best teams already use it — then strip the culture from the technique

The Better Tool, Same Problems Lens

Every model leap gets normalised within months — build for the boring future, not the euphoric one.

The Constrained-Resource Headcount Test

When the bottleneck isn't people, each new hire is a net productivity loss unless they uplevel everyone.

The Daily Highlight

Pick the one thing you want to name as today's highlight, size it to 60-90 minutes, write it down

The Diseases of a Devolving Product Company

Four diagnosable diseases that turn a great product company into a feature factory

The Easiness Ladder: Default, Then Rule of Thumb, Then Decision

First line of defence is always a default. If you can't default it, give people a heuristic — never a calculation.

The Five-Day Design Sprint

Go from zero to a tested prototype in five days — decide with customer reactions, not hunches

The Four Product Risks and Their Owners

Valuable, usable, feasible, viable — any one fails and the product fails

Marketing4 steps

The Growth CMO Operating Model

Run marketing like agile product development — data-driven, iterative, and married to product.

Strategy6 steps

The Leakable Metric

Pick the one metric your customer would be delighted to discover you'd been measuring all along

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 One-Quarter Empowered Team Experiment

Convert a single feature team into an empowered product team in one low-risk quarter

Strategy5 steps

The Platform Encroachment Test

Build where the platform's mission says it will never go — the general layer is not yours to own.

Self-Mastery4 steps

The Product Manager's Four Areas of Homework

The four knowledge domains a PM must own because nobody else on the team can bring them

The Product People Spectrum: Innovators to Executors

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

The Proxy Goal Ladder

Every metric you chase is a proxy — climb the ladder to the mission before you optimise it.

Communication4 steps

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.

The Three B's (Behavior, Barriers, Benefits)

Pick an uncomfortably specific behavior, strip its barriers, then engineer an immediate benefit.

The Three Sacred Accesses

Delegate anything off the PM's plate except direct access to customers, engineers, and stakeholders

The Users Having a Bad Day Chart

Emit a log line every time a user hits pain, stack them in a bar chart, and burn the bars down

Marketing3 steps

Three-Ingredient Emerging Channel Evaluation Framework

Decide whether a hot new acquisition channel is worth your time using three lenses before you invest.