WorkOS

Abundance Engineering: Fun, Energy, and the Paper Audit

Deliberately manufacture an abundant mindset by reframing for fun, scheduling for energy, and journaling the triggers.

Adversarial Dogfooding Loop

Force all your work through your own product even when it's the wrong tool, so it becomes the right tool

Innovation7 steps

AI-First Product Leadership: Hold the Paddles

If AI steers your product, the product leader must own the objective, features, data and infra.

Autonomy as Selfish Leadership

Let people bring themselves to the work; you trade a little visibility for higher velocity, morale, and results.

Avoidance Reversal

Whatever emotion you avoid, you invite — in exactly the way you avoid it. Backward-engineer any problem.

Backwards From the Peak: Ambition Set by Potential, Not by Numbers

Derive goals from what the thing could be, then work backwards; today's numbers are not the anchor.

Bad vs Sad Quality Tiers

Classify every failure as bad (irrecoverable) or sad (recoverable pain) so teams triage quality across many surfaces.

Be the Historian

Systematically reconstruct why past decisions were made so you inherit the lessons and see the baggage.

Betterment Over Perfection (The Painful-Gap Method)

Don't craft a perfect strategy — close your single most painful gap, then the next, forever.

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.

Build-and-Bake: Ship the Same Feature Until the Model Catches Up

Prototype ambitious features now, let them sit, and re-release the same shape each time models leap

Builder vs. Information Mover

Diagnose which half of your role AI kills and which half it supercharges.

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 Current Model, Prototype for the Next

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

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

Peak Performance3 steps

Build-With-The-Tools Assessment

Don't test people on doing work without AI — hand them the tools and score what they can build in an hour

Build Your Own Senior-Engineer Benchmark

Measure AI honestly by scoring new models against real human experts rewriting your actual broken work.

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.

Capability-Value-Scale Software Maturity

New software passes through three stages — what's possible, then what's valuable, then what scales

Clear-Goal Ambiguity Cut

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

Sales5 steps

Compelling Reason to Buy (Not to Sell)

In the bowling alley it is never about you — close the laptop and collect problem domain knowledge.

Conjecture-Driven Learning (Collecting and Connecting Dots)

Don't consume content — generate a conjecture, then hunt across every field for proof of it.

Conversation as Ping-Pong (Give-to-Get)

Index toward asking questions, but hit the ball back and forth instead of interrogating or monologuing.

Mindset6 steps

Conviction-Over-Demand Career Navigation

Stop chasing the most in-demand role; chase the conviction where you can make a dent and learn.

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

Reinvent yourself by manufacturing one small moment of building joy, not by studying harder.

Daily Experiments With the Inner Critic

Stop fighting the critical voice in your head. Run a new response experiment on it every day.

Finance4 steps

Decide-Today Runway Math

Cost cuts only buy runway if you make them now; every month you wait permanently destroys optionality

Deep Work vs. Ping-Pong Day Design

Split every day into deep work and reactive time, and refuse to open Slack before noon.

Depth Without Stomping

Go deep on the details of the business, then course-correct by seeding hypotheses instead of overruling.

Design Capabilities So Rivals Say 'Life's Too Short'

Build capabilities and systems so nuanced that imitators choose a different battlefield instead of copying you.

Designing Robots That Feel Non-Threatening

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

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

Detune Precision by Time Horizon

The shorter the horizon, the more detail; keep long-range plans deliberately hazy to avoid false precision

Dictate-and-Template AI Story Scaling

Prime ChatGPT with your team's exact template, then dictate context naturally to generate an org's worth of specs.

Influence5 steps

Difficult Personality Protocol: Drivers and Gratitude

Reverse-engineer what a difficult person cares about, then reframe frustration into what you can learn from them.

Distribution Beats a Commodity Product

When products in a category are basically interchangeable, an adequate product with superior distribution wins

Distribution-First Moat

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

Self-Mastery4 steps

Dive-In Career Strategy for a Platform Shift

Facing a disruptive technology, submerge yourself in it and aim to hold at least two of three career pillars

Innovation6 steps

Diverge-Then-Converge Roadmap Reset

On a platform shift: drop the roadmap, keep the objective, let teams go crazy, then pick 4-5 bets.

Do It End-to-End Before You Hire For It

If the core team can't crack a function once, a new hire won't rescue it.

Dollar-Driven Discovery

Test the dollar potential of a hypothesis, not just whether customers 'like' the idea

Dress to Signal Effort, Not Expense

Fit beats brand, dress one level up, and ask when you don't know the code.

Elastic-Demand Career Bet

Invest in domains where making people 10x more productive increases demand rather than reducing it

Embrace the Imposter: Act Despite Expecting to Fail

Stop trying to feel confident; give yourself permission to fail and take the shot anyway.

Emotional Fluidity (Emotional Inquiry)

Unkink the hose: welcome, feel and physically express emotions instead of managing them.

Empathize-Then-Invent (The Stories Method)

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

Peak Performance4 steps

Engineering the Creative Peak

Single-shot coffee, a two-hour deadline, and a good night's sleep — dial in the state, not just the effort.

Finance3 steps

Enterprise Land Price Floor (Defendable ACV)

Land enterprise deals at 75K-150K — a cheap land price poisons your expand.

Equally Disappoint Everyone

In your power years, prioritize by spreading disappointment evenly to protect time for reinvention.

Exponential Bet Allocation

If AI is your core value, shift the growth portfolio from micro-optimizations to large bets

Peak Performance3 steps

Exposure Hours

Build taste as a trainable skill by quantifying time spent watching real people use products

Self-Mastery4 steps

Exposure Time for Taste

Deliberately spend more time learning than building to develop the judgment AI can't give you.

Fear-to-Agency Reframe

When AI change triggers fear, lean in and ask what's within your control — turn it happening to you into happening for you.

Find the Cocktail Party

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

First-Call Yes-or-No Qualification

On the first call it's yes or no, never maybe — a no is data that saves the relationship.

Five Principles to Live By

Build, test and refine five simple principles — then decisions get made automatically.

Five-Star Meetings

Make every meeting one people love leaving. The ones that stay bad are a map of your company's real problems.

Fixed Time, Variable Scope (Appetite-Based Planning)

Set the max time you'll spend first, then design a solution that fits it — instead of estimating a concept.

Follow the Heat

The company's pressure point moves stage by stage; staff it as it moves.

Follow the Pull

Bet your career on the thing you enjoy, are good at, and others value — even if it's not the plan.

Founder-Mode Navigation: Objective Behind the Ask

Treat the founder as a lever, and every founder directive as a mechanism hiding an objective.

Framing (Setting the Boundaries)

Narrow a fuzzy request down to the specific problem worth solving before you design any solution.

Friction Smells: Signs Your Team Can Move Faster

The tell-tale signals that friction, not capability, is capping your team's speed

Frozen Competence: Where Human Value Survives

Models commoditize yesterday's competence; your value is using that cheap competence to make something new.

Fundamentally Different, Not Incrementally Better

Only a fundamentally different experience gets customers to tell their friends about it.

Give-It-Away Growth Engine

Reclassify free product and AI costs as marketing spend, then give the product away to your best distributors

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.

Harder Is Easier (The Figure-It-Out Principle)

Commit to the costly right thing up front, and the trust it earns makes everything else easier.

Communication7 steps

Hard Feedback, Both Directions

Receive: feel it, don't react, come back curious. Give: state the care out loud, then be direct about perception.

High Agency, High Accountability

Pair the freedom to solve problems your own way with clear ownership of the hypothesis and the outcome.

Hire a Founder-Cosplayer, Not a Salesperson

For the first enterprise rep, hire someone who can cosplay the founder — vision, not scripts.

Hire for Clarity-from-Chaos

Screen for fire-in-the-belly, high agency, and the ability to create clarity out of chaos — proven by work trials

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Hire Yourself First (Build in Public)

Do the job professionally in public before anyone hires you — then the hire is just changing the vehicle.

Humor as a Calibrated Mastery Signal

A joke landed right up the line proves you own the room; keep a ranked joke file to do it on demand.

Hypothesis-First Customer Discovery

Bring a crisp hypothesis to the interview — then be its judge, not its lawyer.

Intuition as Hypothesis Generator

Treat product taste as a hypothesis machine, not an oracle — then debate it down to a working hypothesis

Irreducible Complexity — The Simplicity Audit

1 + 1 = 1.5, not 3 — every addition subtracts, so audit the system, not the local decisions

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.

Just-in-Time Planning

Shrink long roadmaps to a lightweight monthly priority list and grant explicit permission to kill dead processes.

Kill Hope Before Hope Kills You

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

Label the Process Stage, Not the Polish

A production-looking prototype no longer means it's production-ready — say the stage out loud

Self-Mastery6 steps

Laser Mode: Engineering Speed Bumps Against Distraction

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

Latent Demand Mining

Watch for people jumping through hoops to make your product do something, then make that the smooth path.

Leader Dogfooding for Product Pulse

Live and breathe your product as a real user (or meet customers) and trust the anecdote over the dashboard.

Leading a Team Through Crisis

Radical transparency plus generosity-first equity keeps your best people through the storm that needs them most

Lean Into Your Spike

In the AI era, double down on your unfair advantage and stack disciplines to become a unicorn

Learn the Tokens, Not the Depth

In the AI era, master the symbolic vocabulary of a domain rather than its exhaustive depth

Live Shaping Session

Put product, a senior engineer, and a designer in a room to sketch and break ideas until one is clearly buildable in the appetite.

Maintain Noise in the Market

Ship every day and talk about it constantly so the product feels alive — with tiered big launches on top

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

Make Time: Highlight, Laser, Energize, Reflect

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

Manager-as-IC Onboarding

New managers ship as individual contributors first — and keep doing it — before and while they manage people.

Manager Visibility via an Always-On Agent

Enlist a standing AI session across all repos and channels to stay on top of 8x throughput and drive conversations.

Marketing's Reversibility Advantage: Try Everything, Make Noise

Product changes are near-permanent; marketing changes cost nothing, so experiment relentlessly.

Match the Medium to the Point

When implementation is cheap, the skill is choosing document vs prototype for the point you're making

Minimum Lovable Product

Viability is no longer enough — the bar is a product people love and want to talk about

Mission-Above-Product Prioritization

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

Mission Drive Audit

Prove you're mission-driven by showing you cannot profit except by achieving the mission.

Entrepreneurship5 steps

Mission-Protective Provisions Playbook

Lock in founder and mission protections now, while you still have the leverage to do it.

Model Introspection Harness Repair

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

Nine Nos For Every Yes

Guard product quality with creative restraint — every feature you say yes to is a puppy you must care for forever

Obsolete Yourself

Treat every repeatable thing you do as something to replace with software or an agent.

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

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

Output-Toward-Outcome Measurement

Don't forsake motion for progress — keep asking whether the metric you climb still serves the outcome.

Own-the-Framing Design Partnerships

Design partners guide the build — set the pricing frame up front and filter feedback 80/20.

Parallel Draft Divergence

Start one idea 4-5 times in parallel, each with more precision, then pick the obvious winner.

Patient-Then-Floor-It Hiring

Be obsessively patient hiring the founding team; step on the gas the moment demand exceeds what you can handle

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.

Positive Delusion, Bounded by Learning

Assume everything is possible until proven wrong — but keep learning what's actually possible.

Practitioner-Sourced Wisdom

The best advice comes from people on the ground doing the thing — not from pontificators.

Prescriptive vs. Framework Metrics

Know whether your metric is a recipe or a lens — and never misuse a recipe

Presume Radical Uncertainty (The 1997 Lens)

Treat an emerging platform as if it were 1997 for the internet: assume most of it doesn't work and you can't yet name the winners

Price-Elasticity Three-Response Model

When a technology makes something cheaper, work out which of three demand responses your market will take

Prime-Then-Parallelize AI Coding Workflow

Front-load the architecture, fan out to agents, then step back and evaluate

Product-First AI Prompting

Steer AI builders by describing the end-user experience ambitiously, then iterate like you're coaching a collaborator

Product Scrapbooking

Continuously file every real-world clue about every opportunity so it's ready when the roadmap arrives.

Proven Better New

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

Entrepreneurship4 steps

Pull-Based Product-Market Fit

Be stubborn on your thesis but open on its form — chase the customer who is surprisingly easy to sell, not the one you must force

Pull, Not Praise: Reading Real Product-Market Fit Signals

Judge customer calls by the questions they ask, not the compliments they give.

Quality, Features, Deadline — Choose Two

Every launch drops one of three; software lets you drop quality only if you plan to earn it back

Question the Assumption

Every problem rests on hidden assumptions. Surface them and the problem often dissolves.

Raise Your Happiness Baseline

Big events only move you temporarily — the real lever is lifting the baseline you always return to.

Reading a Market Through ARPU and Profit Pools

ARPU is capped by per-capita income; a country's profit pools reveal what it actually values.

Reading the Invisible Language of the To/CC Line

Recipient order, To vs CC, and reply order all send signals people quietly read.

Reflect: The Daily Experiment Loop

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

Reframe Metrics to Leadership's Language

Pick two or three metrics that speak the exact word your leaders keep repeating

Reframe Self-Promotion as Education

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

Reset Expectations + Slow Your Inbox

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

Ride the Models

Stay valuable in AI by playfully applying each new model to your own work and re-testing what it couldn't do before.

Right Robot for the Job (Not a Generalist Humanoid)

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

RLAIF Reward Design

Have an expert define success criteria and a rubric once, then let AI reinforce the capability — more scalable than labeling examples

Scheduling by Deference

The one asking does the work: let the busier person set the time, and give real options.

Seek To Not Be Needed, But Be Valuable

Build a self-reliant team that's resilient to chaos by systematically removing yourself as a dependency.

Sell the Alpha (Gap Selling vs Problem Selling)

Sell leaders the opportunity to become a superhero, not a fix for a narrow problem.

Services-First Foot-in-the-Door

Sell enterprises a service they already know how to buy, then migrate them to the product.

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

Show Me the Apparatus Test

A value is only real if there's an expensive apparatus that enforces it every time, no exceptions.

Simple, Novel, Emotional: The Shareability Formula

Make it simple, make it show something new, make it feel something — then cut the cleverness.

Small-Pond ICP Narrowing

Constrain your first ICP so tightly that customers talk to each other — then let word of mouth light the fire.

Software Is Not a Moat

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

Spec-as-What-Good-Looks-Like Verification

Check your definition of good into the repo so AI code review can automatically validate work against it.

Spiritual Holding Company (Mission Guardian Selection)

Give the mission its own sovereignty by appointing a renewable guardian that outlives any founder.

Start Embarrassingly Small

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

Stay Close to the Metal

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

Steering AI to a Non-Obvious Strategy

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

Strategic Friction

Add friction that helps a user understand why the product is for them; cut friction that doesn't

Communication4 steps

Street-Smart Decision-Making

Give the customer's perception as much weight as your logic — model the narrative, not just the numbers.

Summarize, Checkpoint, One Click Better

Manufacture strategic thinking in real time by synthesizing the room, then improving the idea one click.

Super Agent With a Forward-Deployed Human

Give the whole company one shared agent, owned by a human who keeps it working — not personal agents for everyone.

Supply-Chain Criticality Hierarchy

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

Task vs. Job Automation Test

Before predicting a role's automation, ask whether the automatable task IS the job or just one piece of it

Teaching Hospital and Tech Assistant

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

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

Peak Performance5 steps

The 10% More Enjoyment Test

Enjoyment is a measure of efficiency. Enjoy the work 10% more and you are 10% more efficient.

Marketing11 steps

The 11 Zero-Day Marketing Exploits

Eleven recurring meta-patterns for engineering an unfair go-to-market advantage.

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 4x4 Debugging Framework

Four escalating ways to unstick a broken build, each tried exactly once, ending by teaching the agent.

The 51-49 Decision Rule

When options are near-even, just pick one fast — more data won't meaningfully improve a close call.

The 70% Decision, Reward the Learning

Commit at 70% confidence with an explicit hypothesis, then iterate — and reward learning, not outcomes.

The 7-Minute Felt Gratitude Practice

Seven minutes of felt (not listed) gratitude with another person daily — then aim it at where you feel lack.

The 95/5 Growth Inversion

In fast-moving AI markets, spend 95% inventing new growth loops and 5% optimizing existing ones

The Absurd-Scenario Interview (Screening for Second-Order Thinking)

Pose an impossible hypothetical and grade the chain of consequences, not the answer.

The AI-Document Slop Test

An AI-written document is fine — as long as you can stand behind every line and it took longer to make than to read.

The AI Expertise Layer

Don't outsource all AI to foundation models — keep expertise and measurement to break the quality glass ceiling.

Peak Performance5 steps

The Apex Survivor Model (Metabolism, Conversion, Adaptation)

Species that lasted 100M years share three traits — run your company on the same three.

Marketing5 steps

The Attributed Influencer Launch Sequence

Stagger tracked influencer shares over days, then weaponize the leaderboard.

The Automatable Growth Loop (CACHE)

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

The Beachhead Segment Formula

Pick a first market that is big enough to matter, small enough to lead, and fits your crown jewels.

The Bowling Alley Adjacency Expansion

Grow segment by segment along adjacencies — same customer new use case, or same use case new customer.

The Business-Meal Deference Protocol

Order middle-to-last, never the priciest dish, always offer to pay, and keep your tip invisible.

Strategy7 steps

The Carve-Out Cohort Turnaround

To fix a load-bearing product, secede from the metrics system with a small randomized cohort.

The Chasm Positioning Formula

Technology leaders who have specialised and committed to THIS problem — respect the incumbent, outclass the peers.

The Circuit Breaker (Back to Shaping)

When a project overruns its appetite, don't extend it or gut the agreed value — pull it back into shaping mode.

Strategy6 steps

The Coherent Strategy Specificity Test

A strategy is not an aspiration — it names a specific customer, pain, solution and advantage in one sentence.

The Conversion-Funnel Cold Email

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

The Culture Bank (Todd Park's Deposit Rule)

Treat trustworthiness as an asset: only ever make deposits, never intentionally make a withdrawal.

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 Daily Highlight

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

The Delta 4 Framework

Score old vs new solution out of 10; if the efficiency gap isn't 4+, the product won't stick.

The Design-Partner Pod Model

Give each cross-functional pod 6-12 real customers to co-build with, so features ship pre-validated.

The Detail Dial

Calibrate how prescriptive a shaped plan is to the builder's seniority — more detail lifts juniors, less frees seniors.

The DevX Listening Tour

Before you build a tool, walk developers through their yesterday

The Dummy Explanation (Escape Your Bubble)

Write every message as if the reader knows nothing about you, your product, or your market.

The Escape Hatch Principle

Abstractions should let power users drop to raw control when the model doesn't fit their problem

The Five-Day Design Sprint

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

The Forgotten-Name Recovery Playbook

Tactical moves to survive not remembering names or whether you've met someone before.

Marketing5 steps

The Four Go-To-Market Playbooks

Early Market, Bowling Alley, Tornado, Main Street — each has its own playbook, and mixing them backfires.

Entrepreneurship4 steps

The Four Levels of Product-Market Fit

Sequence PMF as four levels, optimizing satisfaction, then demand, then efficiency in turn

The Four Principles of Building Hardware Fast

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

The Four Ps of Pivoting

Persona, Problem, Promise, Product — the four levers to change when you're stuck

Mindset2 steps

The Fresh-Start Test

Ask 'if I started today, would I do this?' — and if the answer is different, change now, not next life

The Friction Commitment Test

Deliberately make the next step hard to filter for buyers who truly want it.

Leadership7 steps

The Frictionless Seven-Step DevX Program

A start-anywhere playbook to stand up a developer-experience initiative

The Friend-Zone Test

Sit customers down and force the truth: do you need me, or do you just like me?

The IC Compensation Anchor

Believe your IC worth, then neutralize the 'grow into management' pay dodge by naming your non-management intent up front.

Marketing5 steps

The Influence-Graph Fanboy Loop

Run PageRank on your community's network, then approach the central nodes for feedback — not distribution

The In-Product Feedback Loop

Stream user reactions straight into your team's consciousness by building feedback into the product itself

The Internal-Signal Quality Bar

It's done when it makes YOU laugh or tear up — not when someone else approves it.

The 'Just Evil Enough' Ethics Test

An Occam's-razor line between subversive-and-clever and actually evil.

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 Lindy Commitment Test

However long you've sustained something is roughly how much longer you can trust it to last.

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 Low-Heart-Rate Abundance Posture

Enter high-stakes rooms calm by treating every meeting as one of many, not your one shot.

The Low-Trust Market Playbook

In low-trust markets, trust concentrates — so focus becomes a curse and the super app wins.

The Marquee Customer and the 10th Executive Sponsor

Before you cross the chasm, win one famous logo — by finding the one exec in ten who wants to leapfrog.

The Nine-Scopes Kickoff

At kickoff, have the builders translate the shaped idea into nine-or-fewer implementation chunks to test scope and build clarity.

The Non-Fatal Override

If it isn't fatal, let them run it — but log your skepticism first so the outcome teaches both of you

The Owner-Not-Renter Veto

How a PM says 'not yet' to an executive chain that desperately wants to scale.

The Pivot Decision Algorithm

Five ordered gates — problem, assets, energy, team, capital — that decide whether to pivot or shut down after losing PMF

Leadership6 steps

The PM Framework Wrapper

A PM's real output is a framework that wraps strategy plus a point of view — and gets everyone to the same destination

The Pod + Product Staff Team Model

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

The Product-Adjacent Inroad

Break into PM by moving internally from a product-adjacent function, trading domain knowledge for the role.

The Product-Market Fit Treadmill

In AI, you must recapture product-market fit every three months as both product and market shift under you

The Reach Test

Judge whether an AI tool is truly useful by whether you reach for it unprompted each morning.

The Recon Canvas

An 18-square grid for scanning product, medium, and market for subversive openings.

Communication4 steps

The Relentless Iteration Loop

Read-through, add, repeat 50-100 times, set aside, return — then hand to editors. That's the secret.

The Research Coordinator Role

Borrow the recruiting-coordinator role to schedule all customer research, so PMs never lose time to logistics.

The Scheduled AI Chief of Staff

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

Innovation6 steps

The Sean Ellis Scale Gate

Never scale a product until a calibrated share of users would be 'very disappointed' without it.

The Skip — Plan the Move After Next

Optimize career decisions for the job two moves out, not the next job.

The SMB-or-Enterprise Binary (Mid-Market Doesn't Exist)

There is no mid-market — decide which of two distinct games you're playing and don't bleed them.

Productivity6 steps

The Source-of-Truth PRD Cascade

Spend a day writing five layered docs so the agent, not you, carries the context on every build.

The SPACE Framework

Pick balanced developer productivity metrics across five dimensions — never rely on one.

The Spiral Method for Learning Fast

Chain expert-to-expert referrals until you hear only repeats — that's how you know you've hit the bullseye.

The Strategic Formula: Simple Why x Change Agent

Being seen as strategic = articulating a compelling, simple why AND championing big, hard ideas.

The Strategy Choice Cascade

Five interlocking questions that force a strategy into an integrated, reinforcing whole.

The Subversive Mindset (System Awareness → Novelty → Disagreeability)

Get a system to behave in a way its creators didn't intend, in three learnable steps.

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 Top-Three Weighted DevX Survey

Force a top-three, weight by frequency, and never ask four questions at once

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

The Two-Crisis Triage

Classify every founder crisis as cash or product-market-fit, then run three diagnostic questions before acting

The Two Departments That Matter Test

Find the 1-2 departments whose 10x effort produces a 10x company outcome, then work there.

The Two-Week Deputization Rule

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

The Values-Obedience 2x2 (Krishna, Rama, and Founder Dharma)

Plot leaders on values x obedience to see who creates, who sustains, and who must never be hired.

Finance4 steps

The Value-State Test for Crossing the Chasm

VC money buys a change in your company's value state — you have crossed when you no longer need the next round.

The Why School (Training Second-Order Thinking)

One 'why' question per meal, answered the next day — how second-order thinking gets built.

Three-Legged Model Evaluation

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

Three Tenets: Can-Do, High Standards, Intensity

The three cultural tenets Foody credits for the fastest revenue ascent in history

Tier-One Logo First

Chase the Walmarts and Nvidias first — the market leaders are your real early adopters.

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

Trapped Value and the 10% Capture Rule

Find the pool of value your technology unlocks — you keep roughly 10% of what you release.

Two Routes to Win: Differentiation or Low Cost

You must be the differentiated choice or the lowest-cost provider — anything in between gets bullied.

Value-Chain Eval

Before applying AI to your business, build a systematic test that measures how well it automates your core value chain

Value-Up-The-Stack Test

To find where the money accrues in a platform shift, test the infrastructure layer for network effects, differentiation, and pricing power

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

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

Volume-of-Ideas Design Velocity

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

Want Over Should (Self-Discovery, Not Self-Improvement)

Replace shoulds with wants and experiments — self-improvement encodes 'I'm broken' and slows evolution.

Leadership6 steps

We Might Be Wrong, But We Are Not Confused

Make being wrong cheap and being confused unacceptable, in both thought and execution.

When-It-Leaks Communications Pre-Mortem

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

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.

You Only Get to Compile Five Times

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

Zero-to-One Team Building

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

Zone Defense for Product Work

Spread taste-makers out to cover the whole field instead of clustering on the same problem