Describe the moment. PL will roleplay the other side, push back, and show where your thinking breaks.
Use a prepared situation when you do not want to write your own.
Telling your CEO the v2 she announced is wrong
Stakeholder Management · Hard · 8 min
Practice raising hard truth to a high-conviction founder — with evidence, with a real alternative, without flattery, without panic.
practice ->
Your strongest IC just told you they're interviewing
People Leadership · Hard · 8 min
Practice the conversation that holds the relationship, hears the real reason, and earns the right to keep them — without sliding into a counter-offer reflex.
Legal has been silent for three months and just blocked launch
Stakeholder Management · Medium · 8 min
Practice surfacing what changed with a stakeholder who has been quiet — and getting to a path forward in 30 minutes without putting them on the defensive.
Your project just became off-strategy. The skip-level wants a 1:1.
Practice positioning your team's work after a company pivot — without pretending it still fits the new strategy and without abandoning the value.
Pitching next year's platform bet to a quarterly leadership team
Practice making the long-bet case to leaders optimizing for the next quarter — without softening the timeline or selling certainty you don't have.
The feature you shipped didn't move the metric
Practice owning a clean miss with your VP — without deflection, without performative humility, and without abandoning the underlying bet.
The designer who won't let go of the redesign
Product Strategy · Medium · 8 min
Practice making a hard design judgment with a craft partner you respect — when the data says her six weeks of work didn't beat the prior version.
The angry customer who's actually right
Customer Judgment · Hard · 8 min
Practice listening past frustration to find the real broken assumption — and committing to one specific fix without over-promising or hiding behind apology.
Your dashboard says success; your researcher says failure
Product Strategy · Hard · 8 min
Practice synthesizing conflicting evidence — a metric that says ship and qualitative research that says don't — and making a recommendation you can defend in either direction.
Defining 'done' with the peer who keeps shipping bugs
Customer Judgment · Medium · 8 min
Practice setting a shared quality bar with a senior peer whose definition of "done" has been creating customer-visible bugs for two quarters.
The QA report came in red 36 hours before launch
Practice making the ship/slip call when QA finds a P1 edge case the night before launch and your war-room expects an answer in the next ten minutes.
Specing the AI feature your CEO just announced on earnings
Practice scoping an exec-driven feature into a shippable v1 spec without dropping ambition or making promises engineering can't keep.
Defending a delayed launch
People Leadership · Medium · 8 min
Practice holding the line on a launch slip without losing trust with a senior partner.
Giving feedback to an underperforming peer
Practice delivering specific, actionable feedback to a peer whose work is slipping — without damaging the working relationship.