personal-operating-manual
A document created by a leader that articulates their values, quirks, and expectations to accelerate mutual understanding with their team. Use when onboarding new team members or taking over a new team.
Discover tools sales marketing skills, compare source repositories and read the instructions for each workflow.
A document created by a leader that articulates their values, quirks, and expectations to accelerate mutual understanding with their team. Use when onboarding new team members or taking over a new team.
Treat company culture as a product you build for employees. Iterate on it using feedback loops (NPS), identify bugs, and evolve it—don't try to preserve a static version.
Use when designing retention mechanisms, habit loops, or auditing why users drop off despite engaging with core features, to structure gamification beyond superficial badges
Use when defining new product lines or major pivots, when single PR/FAQ leads to tunnel vision, or when giving leadership real strategic choices instead of yes/no decisions
Use data to establish business observability (diagnosing problems) but use creative design thinking to solve them (treatment). Resolves the conflict between data-driven and intuition-driven product development.
To replicate startup speed in large companies, launch new products as separate legal entities (C-Corps) with distinct brands, reporting directly to the CEO, bypassing standard chains of command.
When firing someone, separate the business decision from humane implementation. Act as their talent agent—actively use your network to help them find their next role.
Use when hiring for early-stage high-growth companies, when filtering out comfort-seekers, or when building teams tackling unsolved technical challenges
Use when joining a new company, taking over legacy products, or proposing strategies that were previously attempted to avoid repeating past mistakes
Treat product usage costs (even high LLM costs) as marketing expenses. Remove all friction to access, let users create social proof. COGS becomes CAC. Ship to create noise.
A three-level framework to gauge growth quality. Level 1: Core Action completion. Level 2: Retention via accruing benefits and mounting loss. Level 3: Self-perpetuating loops. Don't optimize for MAU—optimize fo...
Use when building zero-to-one products, when the solution shape is undefined, or when teams are applying growth metrics too early
Use when facing conversion plateaus, expanding to new markets, or when aggregate data fails to reveal growth bottlenecks, to identify high-leverage improvements by focusing on worst-case users
Use when managing growth experiments, when a product area faces diminishing returns, or when deciding whether to generalize or specialize in career or product strategy
Use before launching products or signing contracts, when needing to combat sunk cost fallacy, or when standard pre-mortems fail to change behavior
Use when designing onboarding flows, writing marketing copy, or creating the first-mile product experience to capture attention from indifferent users
Use for core product areas defining long-term brand value, when A/B tests are fragmenting product vision, or when short-term optimization threatens architectural integrity
In an era where AI lowers the cost of building software, viability is obsolete. The differentiator is joy and emotional connection. Prioritize "Wow" over "Aha"—brand is product interaction.
Use when defining long-term product strategy, when needing to pivot from horizontal to vertical focus, or when teams struggle with prioritization due to serving too many use cases
Write a future-dated Press Release and FAQ before any coding begins to ensure the product solves a real customer problem. Work backwards from the customer, not forward from capabilities. Amazon's foundational p...
A behavioral model defining the opposing forces in switching decisions—Push, Pull, Anxiety, Habit. Change happens only when (Push + Pull) > (Anxiety + Habit). Core to Jobs-to-be-Done theory.
Use when designing AI agent products, defining roadmaps for agentic workflows, or evaluating how to evolve AI from passive tool to proactive partner in software development
A JTBD interviewing technique to reconstruct the customer's timeline and uncover causal mechanisms behind a purchase. Resembles criminal investigation—penetrate surface-level answers to find the struggling mome...
A quality control mechanism with a designated interviewer from outside the hiring chain who has veto power to ensure candidates raise the bar (better than 50% of current employees in role). Amazon's talent dens...
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