Career Capital
Building judgment, taste, compound learning, PM career strategy
1
The Taste Compound Loop
Taste is game recognizing game before the game is called — build it by exposing, opining, and tracing the canon, not by waiting for the results.
Taste means having a real opinion about what is good and being able to explain why — not just copying what successful people do. You build it by trying lots of products, forming views on what works and what doesn't, and then tracing back to understand why those things were built that way. The more you expose yourself to across different fields (not just product), the faster the muscle develops.
2
Career Compounding Rate
Pick the highest compounding rate, deploy your superpower, solve their problem not yours.
Join the fastest-growing company you can get into, because you learn more in one year there than three years at a slow company. Figure out the two or three things you're genuinely great at, and find roles where those things determine whether you succeed or fail. Don't chase titles — chase the rate at which you're being forced to grow.
3
The Leverage Shift
Process serves progress. Team over title. Learning rate over comfort rate.
Early in your career, your job is to keep things moving and learn fast — not to own the process for its own sake. The biggest traps are becoming married to rituals like standups and sprints, making it about yourself instead of the team, and refusing to admit mistakes. Optimize for learning rate above all else.
4
Compound Trust Acceleration
Learn from the most trusted person in the room until their credibility becomes yours.
As a new PM, nobody trusts you yet — and that is not personal, it is structural. Your job in the first phase is to find the most respected, knowledgeable person in your organization and ask them to either teach you or let you help them. Do this visibly, consistently, and your trust with the entire organization compounds quickly because people see you learning from the best.
5
Compound Execution Capital
Ship, measure, follow up, carry the water, write it down — repeat until it's taste.
Focus on doing your actual job every day before consuming more advice. The three things that matter most early on are communicating clearly, prioritizing ruthlessly, and executing relentlessly — not strategy or vision. The PM who ships more and gets more reps will outperform the PM with the perfect strategy every single time.