How to Recruit Better with Case Studies
What a candidate tells you about themselves is close to worthless. A case study takes the description away and makes them act, which is the only thing that shows you what they can really do.
Frameworks for leaders and builders.
How to make better, faster and clearer decisions
A structured framework for making better, faster, and clearer decisions. Start with the answer, list your reasons, and pressure-test with counterarguments.
Consultative Selling - the secret to winning complex sales
Consultative selling is the ability to uncover and develop a buyer's true needs, both the obvious and the hidden, and to connect those needs to tailored solutions.
Internal Memos
Internal memos are a powerful tool for aligning your team around decisions, changes, and initiatives. Use this template to communicate clearly.
How to verify a project plan will succeed
Writing great specification documents is both an art and a science. They are not static templates but dynamic tools that align people, clarify intent, and accelerate execution.
Fight for your culture so your team grows and wins
Culture change is not a slogan, a training session, or a motivational speech. It is the sum of thousands of micro-behaviors: which tools people use, which shortcuts they take.
How Great Leaders Create Rhythm, Velocity, and Evolution (The Drumbeat)
As a CEO or senior leader, your single most critical skill is creating and maintaining the organizational drumbeat, the rhythm that keeps your company operating with discipline.
Meta-Managing: How to drive compounding growth through your leaders
As you advance in senior leadership and have other leaders reporting to you, your management of those managers will determine a tremendous amount of your impact and their success.
The Art of Getting Ahead and Staying Ahead
In business, your ability to solve a problem or drive a key initiative to completion drops dramatically once you've hit the last minute. The real power lies in seeing problems early.
Writing High-Quality Specifications for internal projects
Writing great specification documents is both an art and a science. They are not static templates but dynamic tools that align people, clarify intent, and accelerate execution.
How to Manage Your Managers
Managing managers is one of the hardest, and most critical, transitions in leadership. You're no longer directly running the business. You're leading the people who do.
How to execute projects that generate compounding growth
Running the business keeps things alive. Building the business makes things better and is the key to winning over time. Your success compounds when you invest in systematic improvement.
A team contract to overcome mistakes and become a better leader
A framework and social contract for growing stronger from mistakes. Lessons from managing over 700 employees while making mistakes. Resilience is more important than perfection. You are an…
Startup fundraising playbook: running a thoughtful competitive auction
TLDR: Startup fundraising starts well before you are actively raising (lessons from +$100M raised). When done well it is a competitive Auction. There are 3 main phases: a) build an…
The Key for Successful Go To Market: Rational Needs-Based Segmentation
Companies that clearly define their target audience and focus on conquering that addressable market can become very successful, especially if their target audience is part of a focused well-defined…
3 Must follow rules for fundraising storytelling
Every business story needs to be: Radically Simple. Instantly Credible. Can’t-sleep Exciting. Success in almost every new initiative or startup begins with telling & selling a story. Then, over time…
Questions for growth: Introducing Our Growth Assessment Tool
Reflection drives ideas, which drive action which drives growth. Reflection starts by asking great questions, deciding which are valuable to answer then diving in deep until you find the truth.…
How Self-Managed Teams Can Resolve Conflict
Originally published on Harvard Business Review. In a traditional team structure, conflicts can be escalated to the boss to resolve. Can’t agree on how to prioritize projects, or on which…
4 Ways to Guide Your Employees Toward Empowered Decisions
Originally published on Entrepreneur Magazine. Traditional top-down management can create a single point of failure within each department: a middle manager held accountable for his team’s projects…
How One-Person Businesses Will Transform Corporate America
Not so long ago, taking a trip to New York City meant riding around in yellow taxis and staying at the Plaza Hotel. Now, for many, it means staying at…
Top-Down Management Structures Are Crumbling: How Will You Adapt?
Originally published on CEO.com. Not long ago, employees succeeded in the workplace by producing consistent, high-quality work as specifically directed by their managers. Once promoted into middle…
3 organizational structure changes to strengthen your startup’s tech team
Originally published on Ventureburn. Hiring experienced technologists is difficult. Many are happy in their current positions, and the others are inundated with offers. With software developer…
Deliver. Automate. Fail Fast. Succeed.
Originally published on Business2Community. Software development and startup companies have an almost endless list of things to do. Even if they complete all of their tasks, there’s no guaranteed…
No Secrets: Why Honest, Frequent Feedback Is The Key To Your Culture
Originally published on Young Upstarts. Culture will make or break your startup. You can’t just create a company culture, but you can direct it in the way you develop leaders,…
Improve your startup strategy by focusing on 3 time-horizons
Building a strategy is similar to solving a very complicated problem. The computer science approach to this is break the big problem into smaller ones, but that is not a…
For developers: How to build a business model and prove your idea is awesome in 10 minutes
So you have an awesome idea and you know it’s going to make a lot of money, but for some reason not everybody believes you. Well, first of all, that…
Build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) by focusing on User Stories NOT features
When building a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) the goal is to build something as quickly as possible, release it to the world and get feedback. Then improve and continue building.…
How to add value to your customers not your product: The value creation and capture model
The goal of this post is to help breakdown value creation and value capture. At first glance we can see that there is more than one way we can add…
Product management in 5 simple steps
My goal in this post is to break down the main activities great Product Managers do and briefly discuss each. This is meant to help organize and break apart the complex world…
A simple model for feature prioritization
In this post I hope to quickly break apart the feature prioritization process. My goal is to help make prioritization more of a science and less of an art. Nothing below…