Strategy stripped to its solo-operator essence: given one engineer, finite hours, finite channels, finite attention — what is the cheapest credible path to a paying customer for each product you run, and which products don't have one? Build the strategic decision matrix. Make the kill decisions, in writing. Most multi-product portfolios do not survive this module intact. The kill decisions are the deliverable. Strategy for one is capacity planning with a hard budget: you don't get to wave your hands and say "we'll scale horizontally" — you choose what to compute and what to cache. The KEEP/DEFER/KILL pass is monorepo deprecation: modules get marked, scheduled, and removed, because the alternative — deprecated modules accumulating forever — is a codebase everyone is afraid of. You already run this discipline on code. The matrix asks you to run it on your products and your hours, where the only new variable is that it hurts.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
When the decision matrix forces kills out of your portfolio, your first instinct will be to game the matrix to keep everything alive. I want to name that move before you make it, …
Run the arithmetic that most engineer-founders refuse to run. Say you have four side products and roughly 15 hours per week of product time after the day job, family, and recovery…
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Essential
Approach: Important
Applied to your entire real portfolio — every product, side project, and "I want to build this" item.
7 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.