Seed Bank
A collection of lenses to:
North Star Metric Check
Validate whether work meaningfully moves the primary product metric.
Optimization Supremacy (AI)
A diagnostic lens exposing how optimization regimes shape and distort AI behavior.
The Attribution Decay Lens
This lens examines how ideas detach from their originators as they move through institutions.
Human Dignity
Treats human beings as ends rather than instruments. Acts as a constraint on optimization, efficiency, and abstraction when they collide with lived human experience.
PM As Editor
Adopt the role of an editor: cutting, clarifying, and sharpening instead of adding.
Value Pluralism
A diagnostic lens that exposes ethical and value conflicts masked by optimization-driven decision systems.
Delivery Discipline
Who Pays The Cost If This Fails?
Identify who bears the downside if the decision goes wrong.
The Growth Product Designer Lens
The Growth Product Designer Lens frames design value almost exclusively through measurable growth outcomes.
Situated Usefulness
A counter-lens to Atlas itself that challenges the assumption that more reflection always improves outcomes.
The Refusal Lens
Recognizes refusal not as absence of contribution but as meaningful signal indicating ethical or structural misalignment.
Leading vs Lagging Indicators
Pain or Convenience?
Determine whether you are solving a true pain or merely adding convenience.
Assumption Mapping
Surface and rank assumptions by risk and evidence.
Logic
Privileges internal consistency, inferential validity, and non-contradiction. Logic enables coordination and reasoning while remaining a chosen epistemic foundation rather than a metaphysical absolute.
Who Is This Actually For?
Force a singular user archetype decision before allowing further discussion.
Proxy Metrics
Optimization Supremacy
A powerful but hazardous lens that treats optimization as a supreme decision principle, often producing unintended harm by subordinating ethics, context, and human judgment to metrics.
Decision Reversibility
Classify decisions by reversibility before escalating or slowing them down.
Statistical Pattern Completion
A foundational lens for understanding large language models as probabilistic text predictors rather than reasoning agents.
What Role Are We Performing Instead Of Solving?
Distinguish between genuine problem-solving and role-based theater.
The Sovereignty Lens
Affirms disengagement as a legitimate response to extractive or misaligned contexts.
Output vs Outcome
The Paid Container Lens
This lens examines how exploratory, sense-making, and framing work can be ethically engaged by placing it inside a paid or explicitly bounded container.
The Epistemic Commons Lens
The Epistemic Commons Lens frames certain conversations as non-instrumental spaces for shared sense-making, exploration, and conceptual emergence. It treats thinking as a collective, provisional activity rather than upstream production work.\n\nThis lens is essential for creativity, learning, and philosophical depth—but becomes dangerous when mistaken for a safe default inside profit-seeking organizations.
The Instrumental Clarity Lens
Interrogates requests for simplification or legibility that strip knowledge of its ethical or relational conditions.
Model Skepticism
A meta-level diagnostic lens used to question the certainty, assumptions, and predictive claims of other strategic frameworks.
What Would Change If This Were My Name On It?
Force personal ownership by imagining public attribution.
What Must Be True For This To Work?
Identify the minimum conditions required for success before committing.
North Star Metric
Goodhart's Law
Alignment as Coordination Device
A lens that reframes AI alignment as institutional coordination rather than technical morality.
Empiricism
Privileges observation, experiment, and falsifiability. Grounds claims in the world while remaining aware of measurement limits, observer effects, and proxy distortion.
Kill A Feature
Deliberately evaluate what could be removed without harming core value.
One-Way Door Test
Explicitly identify whether a decision is hard to reverse.
The Extraction Gradient Lens
This lens detects gradual shifts where open-ended collaboration increasingly benefits one party without explicit agreement.
Human Imitation Heuristic
A heuristic lens highlighting the risks and benefits of human-like AI presentation.
Alignment Before Velocity
Slow down delivery until decision-makers share the same problem definition.
What Would Break First?
Identify the most fragile assumption if usage scaled 10×.
Time To Truth
Measure how long it takes to know whether a decision was right or wrong.
Who Cannot Say No Here?
Reveal hidden power dynamics by identifying who lacks refusal power.
Local Accountability
The Corporate AI Extraction Lens
This lens examines how open-ended epistemic labor—sense-making, framing, and conceptual design—can be absorbed by organizations without attribution, persistence, or compensation, particularly in AI-adjacent contexts where conversation functions as upstream R&D.
Local Optimization vs Global Optimum
What Problem Are We Borrowing From The Future?
Expose long-term costs created by short-term gains.
Practical Epistemology
The Mode Confusion Lens
This lens examines breakdowns that occur when exploratory, cooperative modes are applied inside asymmetric or extractive systems.
What Are We Pretending Is Stable?
Surface assumptions about permanence in plans, systems, or agreements.
The Non-Commons Lens
Evaluates whether abstraction or reuse would distort meaning, violate context, or enable harm.
Execution Velocity
Value Before Scope
Force articulation of user value before discussing features or implementation.
Impact vs Effort Reset
Re-evaluate priorities when a roadmap feels bloated or stagnant.
Customer Language Audit
Replace internal jargon with the language customers actually use.
Input vs Output vs Outcome
What Is Being Optimized At The Expense Of Everything Else?
Reveal what becomes invisible when a single metric dominates.
The Asymmetry Lens
Surfaces structural inequalities—informational, economic, or reputational—that distort consent and choice while presenting as equal participation.
What Would Make This Obsolete?
Identify the conditions under which the current solution should be replaced.
Chosen Foundations
A meta-lens that surfaces the foundational commitments Atlas depends on while refusing to treat them as transcendent truths.
Decision Ownership
Make decision ownership explicit before discussion begins.