Last edition I told you about StakeholderSync, and promised five more. This is me keeping the promise. Six tools, six problems, and the unglamorous story of how each one was born.
TL;DR 👀
- Every tool is real product work I used to do by hand. Even with a template, it ate hours, so I packaged each one into a few-minute tool.
- Six problems that follow every PM around: time, prioritization, metrics, stakeholders, interviews, specs.
- Each one is a tiny tool now. One-time ₪99 (~$33). Yours forever. (Bundles too: any 3 for ₪249, all 6 for ₪399.)
- They're not only for PMs. Founders, designers, marketers, CS, and consultants get the same value.
- The point was never the tool. It's the hour it gives back, every single week.
Hey everyone ☕
Last time I told you about a meeting that took me apart, and the tool I built so it would stop happening. That was StakeholderSync. At the end I mentioned it had five siblings, and a few of you wrote to ask about them.
So here they are. All six.
None of these started as a product. They started as frustration. The same handful of jobs showed up at every company I worked at, in every role I held: prepping for a meeting, writing a spec, scoring a backlog. And every time, I did them the slow way, from scratch. A doc. Then a Notion page. Then a spreadsheet. Then a worse spreadsheet. Even when I had a template, it still ate hours. I rebuilt the same things for twelve years.
At some point I stopped rebuilding and started packaging. One small tool per job, with AI doing the heavy lifting, fast enough to reach for the moment the problem hits.
This is the story of all six, and who else (besides PMs) keeps reaching for them.
How six frustrations became six tools 🛠
Here's the pattern, every time.
A problem kept costing me an hour I didn't have. I'd build a quick fix. It worked, so I'd rebuild it at the next job, a little better. After enough rounds, the "quick fix" was carrying real logic, and I was retyping it from memory.
So I wrapped each one into something small and finished. Not a platform. A tool that does one thing in a few minutes and then gets out of the way.
The difference this time: the analysis runs itself. Each tool has a bit of AI under the hood, doing the part I used to do by hand. The scoring. The brief. Reading a call. I point it at the problem, it does the work.
The before-and-after, honestly:
| Tool | The old way (my estimate, swap in yours) | The tool | What you get back |
|---|---|---|---|
| TimeLens | A vague guess about my week | 30 sec/day | The truth about your week, plus one fix for next week |
| PrioritizePro | An afternoon in a scoring sheet | 10 min | A ranked list, plus a rationale that ends the argument |
| MetricsMentor | Days of debating what to measure | 15 min | A North Star and its guardrails, plus the metrics to stop chasing |
| StakeholderSync | A doc I rebuilt at every job | 2 min | A brief before every meeting, plus the pushback before it lands |
| UserInterviewKit | ~1 hr building a guide per study | 5 min | A bias-checked guide, plus the themes after the call |
| PRD-in-a-Pocket | An hour staring at a blank page | 20 min | A spec your team can ship from, stories and risks included |
Add it up across a year and it's roughly 80 hours back, the better part of two working weeks. But the time isn't even the main thing. It's walking in prepared, instead of winging it and hoping.
Let's go one by one.
01 · TimeLens, where did the week actually go? ⏱
Born from: my busiest quarters being my emptiest ones. Weeks of nonstop reacting that felt productive and moved nothing. I couldn't see it until I tracked it.
I started logging my own time in fifteen-minute taps, but with categories that matched the actual job. Not "Meeting." Discovery. Specs. Stakeholder management. Deep work. Reactive work. At the end of the week, one number I couldn't argue with: how much of it was strategy, how much was just reacting.
Your week
Deep work 18%
Discovery 22%
Specs 14%
Stakeholder mgmt 24%
Reactive 22%
The first honest report stung. That was the point.
Who else, besides PMs: any founder who can't tell building from putting out fires. Any freelancer wondering which client quietly eats their week. Any manager whose calendar looks full and whose roadmap isn't moving.
Reach for it when: you end a Thursday (or Friday) with no idea what you actually did.
02 · PrioritizePro, score the backlog, settle the argument 📊
Born from: the realization that the framework was never my problem. RICE is easy. Defending the ranking in a room full of people who each want their thing first, that's the hard part.
So the tool does both. Score your features with RICE, ICE, MoSCoW, Kano, or Cost of Delay. Compare them side by side. And out comes a rationale doc, the part I always skipped and always regretted.
Q3 backlog · RICE
1. SSO for enterprise, 42.0
2. Onboarding redesign, 31.5
3. Mobile push, 18.7
4. Dark mode, 6.2
When the ranking comes with the reasons, the fight stops being you versus them. It becomes everyone versus the priorities.
Who else, besides PMs: founders deciding what to build first on a runway that won't wait. Eng leads weighing tech debt against features. Marketers ranking channels. Anyone walking into a "why isn't my thing first" conversation.
Reach for it when: a roadmap review is coming and you can feel the argument warming up.
03 · MetricsMentor, the metric that matters, plus guardrails 🧭
Born from: watching teams chase numbers that go up while the product quietly fails. Installs climb. GMV (gross merchandise value) climbs. And nobody's actually getting value. I wanted a fast way to find the metric that only moves when the product really works.
Tell it your product type, get a North Star, the inputs that drive it, the guardrails that protect it, and the anti-metrics to watch. In plain English you can paste straight into a doc.
Ground-travel booking · B2C
★ North Star: completed trips per traveler / quarter
Inputs: search→book conversion, route coverage, 90-day repeat rate
Guardrails: cancellation %, support contacts, CSAT
Anti-metric: bookings alone, it ignores cancellations and no-shows
Who else, besides PMs: this one's really for founders. If you're standing up a product and you don't yet know what or how to measure, this is your ramp-up. Early teams wiring analytics for the first time. Marketers tired of reporting vanity numbers nobody trusts.
Reach for it when: you're about to instrument a product and you're not sure which events even matter.
04 · StakeholderSync, never walk into a 1:1 unprepared 🤝
You met this one last time, so I'll keep it short.
Born from: the meeting that took me apart, and years of preparing for the plan instead of the people. Now I save a profile per stakeholder (their KPIs, their concerns, how they like to hear things), and before any meeting I get a brief, plus a heads-up on what they'll push back on, before they do.
The part I lean on most is that pushback prediction.
It's the closest thing I've found to walking into a room already knowing how it ends.
Who else, besides PMs: anyone who walks into rooms they don't run. A designer presenting to a difficult client. An eng lead in a steering committee. A founder in front of a board. A salesperson prepping a key account. A consultant juggling five client stakeholders who all want different things. The negotiation methods baked in (Voss, STATE) carry well past product work.
Reach for it when: you've got two minutes before a meeting that matters.
05 · UserInterviewKit, questions that get past polite answers 🎙
Born from: spending hours before every study building the right questions for the method I was using, and still catching myself leading the witness. "You didn't like that, right?" gets you a yes and teaches you nothing.
So I built a tool that does it for me. Tell it your industry and your research goal, and it builds you a ready-to-ask interview guide: warm-ups, core questions, and follow-up probes, with a bias check on every question. A few minutes later the guide is in your hand, and you just walk into the call and ask.
Switch interview · JTBD
1. Walk me through the day you decided you needed something different. Where were you?
↳ What happened right before that?
2. What finally pushed you to look for a better way?
⚠ Avoid "why didn't you like it?", it leads the witness.
Then comes part two: record the conversation, and afterwards drop the transcript and your notes into the tool. It does the analysis for you and hands back the insights: the key themes, the jobs-to-be-done, and the surprises, pulled straight from what they said.
Who else, besides PMs: founders before product-market fit, talking to users without steering them. Marketers running message or churn interviews. Customer success and sales running win-loss conversations that actually hold up.
Reach for it when: you've got a call in an hour and a blank page where the guide should be.
06 · PRD-in-a-Pocket, a PRD your team will ship from 📝
Born from: even with a template, a PRD my team could actually ship from took an hour I never had. And I was usually writing it in stolen moments anyway, on the couch, at a coffee shop, away from the desk where the "real" tools live. The blank doc always found me with no structure handy.
So this one walks you through it: problem, users, success metrics, scope, risks. PM-grade prompts at every field, industry examples when you're stuck, and a clean Markdown export when you're done.
PRD · "Conversation Redesign"
Problem: long threads are hard to follow; readers from a notification don't land on the comment they came for, so they bounce.
Success: reply rate and read-depth up; bounce-from-notification down.
Out of scope: moderation tools, real-time chat, profile redesign.
It includes the parts I used to drop when I was tired: user stories, acceptance criteria, and risks (Cagan's four).
Who else, besides PMs: founders writing their first spec for a freelancer or agency. Solo builders structuring an idea before they touch code. Anyone who needs to hand a developer something clear instead of a paragraph and a prayer.
Reach for it when: an idea is sharp in your head and you need it shippable before it fades.
What building six tools taught me 🎯
1. The best tools come from your own repeated frustration.
Not a market gap. The thing that costs you an hour, again, this week.
2. If you've rebuilt it three times, productize it.
The third rebuild is the universe telling you to stop retyping from memory.
3. A tool people run beats a process they admire.
Twenty minutes that happens beats a perfect framework that doesn't.
4. Finished and small beats big and someday.
Six tiny tools shipped. One grand platform would still be in my head.
5. Meet the work where it actually happens.
In the cracks of a real day, between meetings, not at some ideal desk that never comes.
Final thoughts
I spent years waiting for the time, the headcount, the proper tooling to do this work the right way.
It never showed up. So I built small, in the cracks. Six frustrations, six tools, one reason: I was tired of solving the same problems by hand.
If any of these problems are yours too, that's the whole point. I built them so you don't have to rebuild what I already did.
Let's connect 🤝
The six tools live in the PM Toolkit. One-time, ₪99 each (~$33), yours forever. There are bundles too, if you want any three or all six.
If you're leading product without the authority to match, or standing up a product and not sure where to start, that's the work I do with teams.
P.S. If someone forwarded you this, you can subscribe right here, where UX, business models, and strategy meet. No fluff. Just lessons you can apply tomorrow.
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