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Ad Strength Hole-in-the-Ship Diagnostic

Use Google's brand vs non-brand ad-strength report to find the one fix that lifts the whole account

AI as Your Learning Engine

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

AI as Your Personalized Just-In-Time Tutor

Feed AI a curriculum tuned to how you learn, then prove understanding by teaching it back.

Be The User Reset (Jobs-to-be-Done)

Zoom out and ask what the user hires your product for — then be that user and ask if you'd even buy what you made.

Be Your Own First Customer: Internal Tools to Product

Turn the ugly tools your team builds to serve customers into the product — most of the value is below the waterline

Break Into AI PM With a Prototype Portfolio

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

Bridging-Based Agreement

Surface content only when people who normally disagree agree — that's the signal of truth.

Builder vs. Information Mover

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

Build for Where the Models Are Going

Design products for the capability one to two years out, not today's model ceiling.

Influence4 steps

Buy-In as a Journey, Not a Meeting

Win the decision before the decision meeting by looping stakeholders in early and staying open on the solution.

Capacity-Red Headcount Justification

Add headcount only when a days-committed-vs-days-in-quarter calculator stays red after cutting low-value work

Clarity Over Cleverness

Lean into understood standards instead of reinventing them, and you get leverage for free

Come In Listening, Not Swinging

New leader's first move: earn trust before inflicting the change you were hired to make.

Communication6 steps

Communication Is The Job

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

Complementary Format Integration

Bring a proven new format into a mature product so it expands, not contorts, the core

Context-First Agent Debugging

When a coding agent won't do what you want, treat it as a missing-context problem, not a model problem.

Context Over Control: Debate Upstream of the Solution

Empower teams by aligning on goal, hypothesis, and data—never by prescribing the solution.

Entrepreneurship3 steps

Conviction-Gated Team Scaling

Start tiny to earn conviction, then staff up enough to actually ship the best version

Credits-for-Sharing Loop

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

Mindset4 steps

Crossing the Chasm from Fear to Joy

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

Cultivate Agency, Not Skills

When AI hands everyone the skills, agency becomes the only differentiator — and you build it by making things.

Customer Research as a Documentarian

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

Cut Scope, Not Quality

When time is short, strip features down to the core instead of shipping the same feature badly

Decompose the Strategy You Disagree With Into Hypotheses

Break a plan you doubt into assumptions, find the one you reject, and design the smallest test.

Define Success Before You Prompt

The clearer your definition of success and failure, the better the work you get from people or AI.

Delete-First Lean Engineering

On a small team, deleting code beats writing it — audit for features whose maintenance cost exceeds their gain.

Demos Not Memos

The first 10% of every project is now free — so build something to react to instead of writing documents.

Design in the Material

PMs and designers should code — not to ship, but to master the material and truly understand what they're designing.

Determinate vs Indeterminate Optimism (Betting Under Deep Uncertainty)

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

Diagnose With Data, Treat With Design

Data tells you where the problem is; only a creative process tells you how to solve it.

Dimensionality: Every Strength Is Its Own Weakness

See yourself as infinite dimensions so feedback becomes data, not an identity threat.

Dissolve the Roles: Build Small Builder Teams

Shrink teams and drop role labels so AI-empowered individuals own the whole problem.

Documentation vs Storytelling Safety Framework

Sort every AI-video use case into documenting reality (block) or storytelling (enable)

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

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

Equally Disappoint Everyone

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

Exposure Time for Taste

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

Mindset3 steps

Extract the Chain-of-Thought, Not the Recommendation

Treat every advisor as an LLM: mine their reasoning, not their verdict, because their answer is trained on a different corpus.

Fast-Thinking / Slow-Thinking Org Split

Split product org into a weekly-shipping AI group and a deliberate-infrastructure group so both speeds coexist.

Feedback as a Daily Practice: Opt-In, Check Intention, Name the Difficulty

Make feedback frequent and safe by pre-agreeing to it, checking your motive, and admitting it's hard.

Leadership3 steps

Fight Club: A Standing Slot for Conflict

Reserve a recurring weekly slot with your key peers specifically to surface and resolve conflict early.

Finding High-Leverage AI Ideas

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

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.

Give It Your Hardest Task

Evaluate a serious AI tool on your gnarliest real problem, not a dumbed-down toy.

Goal-Talent-Purpose-Process: Managing People and AI With One Playbook

Treat managing agents like managing people: same four levers, different resources.

Greedy-but-Smart Compute Allocation

Throw hundreds of dollars of inference at high-value problems — the value-to-cost ratio is absurd in your favor.

Growth Can't Reverse a Decline

A growth team can't fix a slowing business; stop the decline first, then add growth to amplify.

Hand the Toil to the Model First

Delegate the boring, repetitive parts of engineering to agents before anything else, and collapse the path to production.

Hire by Repelling: The Distinctive Bat Signal

The best talent magnets deliberately turn some people off — clarity on who you're NOT for is the point

Hire Yourself First (Build in Public)

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

Hiring for the Extra 20%

Skills are table stakes — screen for the people who'll chase the real outcome, using lateral personality signals

Self-Mastery5 steps

Identity Threat to Curiosity

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

Incrementality via Conversion Lift & Geo Tests

Prove paid actually caused growth by withholding ads from a control group and measuring the lift

Inspiration, Not Imitation

Use competitor teardowns as an input to ideation, never as the finished destination.

Instrument-and-Improve S-Curve Prioritization

Let retention curves and diminishing returns tell you when to optimize and when to bet on something new

Productivity5 steps

Intentional Remote Operating Model

Make remote work productive by scheduling connection in bursts, protecting synced deep-work blocks, and banning status meetings.

Internal Virality for Alignment

Get a big org aligned by making a prototype go viral inside the company instead of grinding stakeholder meetings

Jobs-to-Be-Done Interrogation (The Big Hire)

Interrogate the moment someone first hired your product to find the real cause of usage

Kind and Candid

Reframe candor as an act of kindness so you actually deliver the hard message.

Leverage Your Leaders

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

Live in the Future, But Not Too Far

Hold the far-future vision, but land with users where they already work today.

LLM-Optimized Codebase Architecture

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

Many Bets, Charge Early

Maximize the number of fast bets, then force a verdict by asking the customer to pay a lot — now

Milestone-Gated Launch Sequence

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

Mixed-Initiative Contextual Assistance

Surface AI help at the moment it's relevant instead of interrupting with notifications.

Negotiate From Genuine Indifference

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

Obsolete Yourself

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

Obviously Good, Then Incremental Correctness

Only make obviously good stuff, ship it in iterations, then reconcile the sprawl back to a naked robotic core.

Marketing5 steps

Paid Channel Sequencing Ladder

The order to adopt paid platforms: user-driven search first, disruptive media next, expensive targeting last

Parallel Draft Divergence

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

Peer Feedback Groups

Small standing peer pods that review each other's rough-draft work to build feedback muscle and trust.

Performance = Potential − Interference

Two levers only: raise the team's ceiling, or remove the weight sitting on top of it.

Leadership3 steps

Pioneer, Town Settler, City Planner PM Matching

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

Pivot to the Burning Problem

Founders are usually too anchored to their own product vision — index to the customer's real fire instead

Play-First AI Fluency

Build real AI intuition by playing — invent fun side projects, use everything, and share the artifact not the doc.

Mindset4 steps

Positive Delusion, Bounded by Learning

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

Principles-First Product Design

Set non-negotiable principles up front — voice of the people, no override button, full transparency — and never bend them.

Processing Over Memory: A Task System for the Overwhelmed Manager

Write everything down at the moment it's owed, groom into logical chunks, and free your head for thinking not remembering.

Prove-It-At-Every-Step Rollout

Never take the next expansion step until the data from the last one has already convinced you.

Influence3 steps

Pseudonymity for Honest Contribution

Let contributors stay anonymous — people cross partisan lines far more readily when their name isn't attached.

Quality Is Growth: Making the ROI Case

Kill the 'business goals vs design goals' framing by collecting the quality wins that moved your own metrics.

Query Fan-Out Content Strategy (AEO/GEO)

Win AI answers by understanding that a machine, not a person, is doing the searching behind every response

Reach for the Stars, Land on the Moon

Sketch the ideal end-state journey, then work backwards and ship it in measurable pieces.

Mindset5 steps

Reading Your Own Critics

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

Rebrand Eyes-Wide-Open

A homepage redesign or rebrand won't drive growth; budget 3-6 months to claw performance back after launch.

Signal vs Noise Metric Selection

Let the campaign's single goal decide which metric is signal — everything else is noise

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.

Stage-Gated Product Incubation

Grow new products through five funded stages — wonder, explore, make, impact, scale — validating at each gate.

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

Stated vs Revealed Preferences: Holding Conviction Through User Outrage

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

Strategic Technical Debt as Leverage

Startups should take on technical debt on purpose — it's how you outrun bigger companies

Task Loss, Not Job Loss

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

Taste as a Trainable Model

Taste is a virtual machine in your head that predicts whether your in-group will like an idea — built by reps with feedback.

Taste, Humility, Hutzpah: The Designer Hiring Lens

Hire for judgment, humility, and the courage to say 'not good enough' — tools and process you can teach.

The $10 Game for Personal Priorities

Allocate a notional $10 across your priorities to expose where your time actually goes versus where it should.

The 10x Lens on New Ideas

For every promising idea, ask where it could go in 3-5 years if it were 10x bigger — and let that reshape it now.

The 18-Month Growth Model Overlay

Spend ~20-25% of growth time annually seeding new loops so your S-curve never flattens with no successor.

Productivity5 steps

The 4x4 Debugging Framework

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

Mindset4 steps

The Barbell Media Diet

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

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

The Earned Channel Priority

Make building an owned/earned acquisition channel your growth team's number one priority over rented ones.

The Eye of Sauron: Calibrating Leader Depth

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

The Forge and the Dam

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

The Forward Deployed Engineer Loop

Embed a real engineer inside the customer's building and run a build-show-iterate cycle every single day

The Founder-Led Growth Prerequisite

Don't hire a growth team until you have proven PMF and enough data to run experiments.

The Four Conditions for Operationalizing Quality

Group effort, vision + alignment, an editor, and the courage to say 'almost, but no'.

The Full-Stack Role Collapse

In the AI era every role needs a minimum baseline in the adjacent two — deep in one, dangerous in the rest.

The Gravity Model for Zero-to-One Products

Ship new products with tiny shielded teams, then let traction—not headcount—pull in resources.

The IKEA Effect for AI Products: Leave Knobs and Levers

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

The Levels of Quality Ladder

Rate every feature 1-5: works → error-free → usable → desirable → surprisingly great.

Communication5 steps

The Low-Maintenance Work-in-Progress Deck

One shared slide deck of screenshots, updated monthly, that kills redundant work and spreads patterns.

The Murder Board

Before starting a project, invite smart outsiders whose only job is to tear your two-page plan apart

The One-Month Experimentation Rule

If you can't collect the sample size in a month, don't A/B test it; ship it and measure pre vs. post.

The Ops Cadence Spreadsheet

A rocks-and-pebbles spreadsheet that assigns every account task a defined weekly/biweekly/monthly rhythm

The Public and Secret Roadmap

Split your roadmap into what users ask for and what only you can see — the wins come from the second

The Refounding Test

Ask how you'd rebuild AI-native from scratch — then decide whether your legacy asset helps or you should sell.

The Scrappy Wedge for Unglamorous Investment

Win backing for unsexy work by starting small, showing it visually, making it easy for others, and proving momentum.

The Seedling Model for Going Multi-Product

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

The Signs of Life Test

Spend a tiny budget on a new platform to detect a positive signal before committing to a full campaign

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 Skip — Plan the Move After Next

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

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 Strategy Contract

A one-page doc sitting between vision and roadmap that every pod writes for itself.

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 Surgeon Management Model

Spend over half your time making your top 10% feel like a supported surgeon who can't be blocked.

The Teammate Onboarding Model for AI Agents

Adopt a coding agent the way you'd onboard a new intern — pair first, then delegate.

The Thermal Team

Run a startup inside the company: one owner, one senior sponsor, total focus, self-set pace.

The Three Flavors of AI Product Management

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

Leadership3 steps

The Three-Hire Performance Team Sequence

Build a paid team in order: data-driven generalist, then creative, then a dedicated data scientist

The Tiny Core Principle

Every enduring product has one tiny thing that is a superpower — find it, protect it, and stop bolting on features.

Communication4 steps

The Trade-Off Menu: Turn a Velocity Demand Into Leverage

When leadership wants everything faster, hand them a menu of what you'll do and what you won't—and make them choose.

The True Competition Metric

Use auction-insights math to tell a genuine competitive threat from a harmless close-variant accident

The Weekly Marketable Feature

Every engineer ships one feature per week that a user would pay or show up just for

Think From First Principles by Writing

Close the laptop, write the question at the top of a blank page, and answer it before Googling anything.

Two-Sided AI Adoption

Pair top-down executive buy-in with a bottom-up tiger team of excited power users.

Unblock the Review Bottleneck

The limiting factor on AI productivity is human review speed — engineer the agent to validate its own work.

Velocity Guardrails: Ship Freely Until the Metrics Go Red

Standardize a few quality metrics per team; below the line they ship anything, above it they fix before they ship.

Vibes Before Evals

For a genuinely new AI feature, start with open-ended vibes testing; add evals only once the use-case cluster is clear.

Waiting vs. Wandering: The IC PM Operating Model

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

Leadership7 steps

Walk the Store: The Essential Journeys Quality Program

Name your 15 critical user journeys, give each a cross-functional owner, and score them on a fixed cadence.

When to Hire Your First PM

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

Workshop-First Advisor Hiring

Vet an advisor with a paid working session on a real problem, then re-evaluate their value every month.

Your Problem Isn't Unique

Never start from scratch; find who already solved your problem and patternize the solution.