N°60Opinion
The three-month rule.
Nothing should run past three months of build without meeting a real user. Why calendar milestones lie, defining evidence before the clock starts with The Leap, and the three months of runway you can actually name.
8 August 2026
6 min
N°59Guide
Canvas the founder, not the idea.
The Lean Canvas maps the idea; the Founder Canvas maps the founder's journey in twelve boxes across three lanes. Free, CC BY-SA, and at v0.9, being shaped with a founding group of founders.
1 August 2026
7 min
N°58Guide
What a raise really costs you.
Dilution in plain English: pre-money versus post-money, the maths of the investor's share, the option-pool shuffle that quietly lowers your valuation, and why founder ownership compounds down across the rounds.
1 August 2026
8 min
N°57Guide
Find the one assumption that could sink it.
Assumption mapping in plain English: surface what you're assuming across desirability, viability and feasibility, score each on impact and evidence, and test the leap of faith first.
1 August 2026
8 min
N°56Guide
Six cheap experiments to test your riskiest assumption.
Problem interviews, fake-door, pre-sale and letters of intent, pricing tests, technical spikes and Wizard-of-Oz. What each experiment is, when to use it, the pros and cons, and a worked example.
1 August 2026
10 min
N°55Guide
Your runway isn't the number you think it is.
Runway is cash over net burn, not gross. Turn it into a zero date, start raising six months early, and aim to be default alive. A founder's guide, with the free calculator.
31 July 2026
6 min
N°54Opinion
Ten tips for a tech startup that actually works.
The ten rules I keep giving first-time founders, plus a bonus on network effects: keep it small, build less, make a painkiller, play the long game, build a habit, earn trust, and win the narrow fight you can actually hold.
30 July 2026
7 min
N°53Guide
SPC will fund you to minus one. Applications close Sunday.
South Park Commons' Founder Fellowship closes 2 August: $400K for 7%, $600K guaranteed next round, credits that aren't cash. The deal unpacked, who should apply, and how to do it well in four days.
29 July 2026
6 min
N°52Opinion
Stop firing your deck into the void.
Introducing The Raise: a free tool that matches your startup to the investors who actually fit, with the real submission route for each and a pipeline to track it all.
29 July 2026
5 min
N°51Opinion
YC just handed 1,000 founders the same 13 ideas. The idea was never the moat.
A senior product read on YC's Fall 2026 wishlist: the real signal is the theme, and a published idea is the most crowded start line there is.
28 July 2026
7 min
N°50Guide
How to test a startup idea for under £1,000.
Five cheap experiments to find out whether anyone wants your idea before you build it — with what each costs, what it proves, and when to use it.
24 July 2026
9 min
N°49Opinion
Every agency offers strategy. Few can afford to tell you not to build.
Agencies win by selling build, so they're wired to add scope. A fractional CPO sits on your side of the table and can tell you the truth: often, don't spend.
22 July 2026
7 min
N°48Opinion
Why I'll take equity instead of your last £10,000.
Founders buy the team they can afford, not the one they need. Why I take part of my fee in equity, and what it says about whose side I'm on.
21 July 2026
8 min
N°47Guide
Growth feels like proof. These five numbers tell the truth.
LTV, CAC, the ratio, payback and retention, worked out through one made-up startup — the first-time founder's guide to whether growth is real.
19 July 2026
9 min
N°46Guide
Your deck gets two minutes. Build the twelve slides that survive it.
The investor deck in twelve slides and four acts, with the one rule behind each — the fundraising playbook we plug in with partner Matas Ramanauskas.
17 July 2026
9 min
N°45Opinion
Your next user isn't human. Design for what it must never do.
Agentic AI gave your product a second user, one that acts at machine speed and can move real money. The new design discipline is the guardrails it can never cross.
13 July 2026
7 min
N°44Opinion
AI didn't replace the PM. It deleted the easy half.
The scarce skill isn't building any more. It's deciding what should exist and proving it works. In regulated products, that gap is widest of all.
2 July 2026
7 min
N°43Opinion
The basics, done vaguely.
Most product failure isn't a strategy problem. It's the basics done loosely: the problem, "done", the outcome, the owner, all left fuzzy. Vagueness is a tax that compounds, and sharpness is cheaper than strategy.
24 June 2026
7 min
N°42Opinion
Move fast and break things — until the thing is someone's money.
Why Zuckerberg's mantra breaks fintech, and how to adapt it: move fast where a mistake is reversible, deliberately where it isn't — and engineer your way out of the irreversible corner.
11 June 2026
9 min
N°41Opinion
Senior product leadership, without the full-time bet.
The benefits of plugging in a fractional CPO for startups and SMEs: senior judgment from day one, a fraction of the cost, impact in weeks, and no lock-in. The empty product seat has a cost too.
7 June 2026
7 min
N°40Guide
The Delivery Dynamics Triangle — ship fast, stay smart.
Good, fast, cheap is the wrong triangle for startup-speed teams. The real trade-off is features vs technical debt vs product debt. Make it visible, choose your imbalance on purpose, and know which lever you're pulling.
7 June 2026
8 min
N°39Opinion
The discipline of not spending.
When you're building a product, the smartest spend is almost nothing. Spending feels like progress. It isn't. Build to learn, build sticky not cool, and match spend to confidence. Startups and SMEs both get this wrong.
7 June 2026
8 min
N°37Opinion
What actually is a product? A thought experiment.
The artefact isn't the product. The experience isn't the product. Your whole business is. Every decision is a product decision, whether the org chart agrees or not. The four-layer view.
30 May 2026
9 min
N°36Opinion
Why I keep going back to Hooked, by Nir Eyal.
The four-step loop most great consumer products run on — Trigger, Action, Variable Reward, Investment. Where teams misapply it, the ethical line Eyal himself raises, and when the model doesn't apply at all.
26 May 2026
8 min
N°38Guide
The UX Piece — when "the design team" is one designer with thirty open Figma files.
The seat that owns research, design and validation: the difference between a product that ships pixels and one that ships value. Why most teams treat UX as an output instead of a function.
24 May 2026
9 min
N°35Opinion
App fatigue is real. Most products don't need an app.
You're fighting for attention, not screen real estate. The friction hierarchy of surfaces, the three-question test, and why default-to-app is the most expensive decision most teams make.
22 May 2026
7 min
N°34Guide
The Backlog — what healthy looks like.
Three layers (Discovery → Refined → Ready), the five anti-patterns, and the grooming cadence that nobody skips. Includes Definition of Ready / Done templates.
21 May 2026
8 min
N°33Guide
Acceptance Criteria — the contract.
What makes AC verifiable, the patterns that hold up under audit, and the five-second test for spotting a weak one. Weak vs strong AC, four side-by-side comparisons.
7 May 2026
7 min
N°32Guide
The User Story — anatomy of one that holds up.
Four sections in order — User Story, Background, Requirements, Acceptance Criteria. The format we use across every engagement, with a worked example you can paste straight into Jira.
23 April 2026
9 min
N°31Guide
The Roadmap — what it actually is, and how to read one.
The three altitudes (Now, Next, Later), outcome vs output roadmaps, the five common anti-patterns, and a diagnostic checklist for reading someone else's roadmap.
9 April 2026
8 min
N°30Guide
The Coaching Piece — why levelling up beats replacing.
Most fractional shops avoid coaching because the economics are bad. We made it a Core Piece on purpose. The PM maturity ladder and where coaching adds 2–3× leverage.
17 March 2026
8 min
N°29Guide
The Quality Piece — when "we'll add tests later" has run out.
The exponential cost of catching bugs late. What a Quality Lead actually owns, and when each kind of team needs one.
13 February 2026
8 min
N°28Guide
PO vs PM — same letters, different jobs. Here's where the line falls.
From strategy to ship: where exactly the PO Piece lives, and when scaleups outgrow having one person do both jobs.
23 January 2026
7 min
N°27Guide
The PM Piece — the role most growing teams misjudge.
Engineering is shipping, nobody's deciding what's next. The PM triangle (users, business, engineering) and when each ICP needs a PM Piece.
12 December 2025
8 min
N°26Guide
What a fractional CPO actually does — and when your business needs one.
The three altitudes a Chief Product Officer operates at: Board, Org, Product. When startups, scaleups and enterprises each need a CPO Piece. Diagram included.
14 November 2025
9 min
N°25Guide
KPIs vs Metrics — not the same thing.
A metric is anything you measure. A KPI is the small set of measurements that decide success. Most teams have 30 metrics and 0 KPIs. Why that's the problem.
31 October 2025
7 min
N°24Guide
RICE — a scoring system, not a decision system.
Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort. Intercom's framework for prioritising features. Useful structure, dangerous false-precision.
24 October 2025
7 min
N°23Guide
A/B Testing — the experiment, not the answer.
A/B tests are the gold standard for causal evidence — and the most-misused tool in product. Statistical power, the false-positive trap, and when a test isn't worth running.
17 October 2025
8 min
N°22Guide
Continuous Discovery — weekly, not quarterly.
Teresa Torres's reframe: the product team interviews customers every week. Why batched discovery dies, and what continuous looks like at 1, 5 and 50 teams.
10 October 2025
8 min
N°21Guide
User Research — the discipline, not the workshop.
Generative, evaluative, mixed methods, recruiting, analysis. What separates "we did some user interviews" from a research practice. The methods that earn their keep.
3 October 2025
9 min
N°20Guide
Design Thinking — empathy first, solution last.
A five-step process: Empathise, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. Useful frame, often mis-applied. Where it lands well and where it's overkill.
26 September 2025
8 min
N°19Guide
Lean Startup — the scientific method, applied to building.
Eric Ries's framework: build, measure, learn. The minimum viable experiment. Why most teams say "lean" and run the opposite of lean.
19 September 2025
8 min
N°18Guide
OKRs — the discipline of saying no.
Objectives and Key Results, properly used, force prioritisation. Properly mis-used, they become a manager checklist. Doerr's framework, the common mistakes, and what makes a good Key Result.
12 September 2025
9 min
N°17Guide
Jobs to be Done — the switching question.
Customers don't buy products, they hire them to do a job. Christensen's framework, the four forces of switching, and why it changes how you compete.
5 September 2025
8 min
N°16Guide
Product-Market Fit — the moment demand pulls you.
When the market wants the product more than you can supply. How to know when you have it, how to measure it, and the dangerous illusion of "almost".
29 August 2025
9 min
N°15Guide
MVP — the most misused three letters in product.
Minimum Viable Product means the smallest thing that proves the hypothesis. Most "MVPs" prove nothing because they're scoped to ship, not to learn.
22 August 2025
8 min
N°14Guide
Accessibility — the floor, not the ceiling.
WCAG defines four principles: Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, Robust. AAA is the goal. Three changes that get you most of the way.
15 August 2025
8 min
N°13Guide
The Design System — infrastructure, not decoration.
Tokens, components, patterns, guidelines. Why every team building more than three products needs one, and what an MVP design system actually looks like.
8 August 2025
9 min
N°12Guide
The Journey Map — what the user feels, step by step.
A visual of the user's experience across touchpoints, with emotion line, pain points and opportunities. The artefact that creates the most cross-functional alignment in one workshop.
1 August 2025
8 min
N°11Guide
Personas — a tool, not a deliverable.
A persona is a sharp profile of a user segment, written to make team decisions easier. When personas earn their keep, when they're cargo-cult artefacts, and what replaces them.
25 July 2025
7 min
N°10Guide
CX — the full arc, beyond the screen.
Customer Experience is the entire relationship — marketing, sales, product, support, billing, churn, win-back. Why CX is broader than UX, and why product teams forget half of it.
18 July 2025
7 min
N°09Guide
UI — the surface of UX.
User Interface is the visible layer the user touches. It isn't the whole of UX, but it's where bad UX shows up first. Anatomy of a UI that holds up.
11 July 2025
7 min
N°08Guide
UX — the whole thing, not just the screens.
User Experience is everything the user feels while interacting with your product — including before they install it and after they uninstall it. Why most "UX" jobs are actually UI jobs.
4 July 2025
8 min
N°07Guide
Story Mapping — the flatness problem, solved.
A backlog is a flat list. A story map is a two-dimensional view that answers "what's the order, and what can we cut?" The Jeff Patton technique still works.
27 June 2025
8 min
N°06Guide
Definition of Ready, definition of Done.
Two short lists that prevent half the arguments in product. The criteria that say "you can start this" and "you can ship this".
20 June 2025
8 min
N°05Guide
The Retro — blameless, or pointless.
Sixty to ninety minutes of structured reflection that either compounds team capability or wastes everyone's time. Four formats that work, and the one rule that decides whether any of them do.
13 June 2025
7 min
N°04Guide
The Epic — a big thing, broken down.
A unit of work too big for one sprint, big enough to need its own conversation, small enough to ship inside a quarter. The hierarchy and the trap.
6 June 2025
8 min
N°03Guide
The Sprint — a fortnight, committed.
Two weeks. A goal. A bounded scope. Done at the end. Why the time-boxing is the point, not the rituals around it.
30 May 2025
7 min
N°02Guide
Scrum — the framework, not the religion.
A defined set of roles, events, and artefacts you can run in a fortnight. Where it works, where teams cargo-cult it, and the version-2020 changes that matter.
23 May 2025
8 min
N°01Guide
What Agile actually is — and what it isn't.
The four-line manifesto written in 2001, a dozen frameworks that came after, and the question that matters far more than which framework you pick.
16 May 2025
9 min
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