A taste of the 60 copy-paste prompts inside the book. Swap in your details, paste into ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini, and watch the difference a well-built prompt makes.
It's 8:52. Your 1:1 starts at nine and you have not looked at your notes since last week. You can wing it with "so, how's it going?" or walk in sounding like you have thought about this person all week. This gets you the second, in four minutes.
Act as a seasoned executive coach. I have a 1:1 with [name] in [minutes] minutes and haven't prepped. Context: [last 1:1 notes, their quarter goals, any Slack/email threads involving them this week]. From what you can tell they seem [thriving / steady / struggling / possibly a flight risk]. Give me exactly three things, no preamble: (1) one specific opening question that proves I read their context, never "how are you"; (2) the one unsaid thing in their recent context I should make room for, with the exact evidence you're basing it on; (3) one commitment I can make before they leave that removes a real blocker. If the context is too thin to be specific, tell me the single thing to check first. Under 200 words.
An email lands in all caps, or close to it. A client or a senior stakeholder is furious, and your first instinct, defend or fire back, is exactly the wrong one.
Act as a crisis-communications expert. Here's an angry message from [stakeholder]: [paste it], and here's what's actually true about the situation: [context, what's our fault versus not]. Draft a calm reply using LEAP: Listen (name the specific complaint), Empathize (validate the frustration), Acknowledge (own what's fair without admitting fault that isn't ours), and Propose (one concrete next step with a timeframe). Keep it short and human, not corporate. Flag anything in their message I should NOT concede, and give me a one-line holding reply in case I need to buy time first.
Five requests, all "urgent," all from people who matter. Saying yes to everything means everything slips. You need a defensible order, not a gut call you'll have to justify later.
Act as a senior product manager. Here are the requests competing for my team's time: [list them, with any reach, impact, or effort data you have]. Score each using RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort). If I haven't given you the inputs for a factor, ask for them first; if I tell you to proceed anyway, mark each score Low/Medium/High confidence and say what data would change the ranking. Then rank them highest to lowest with a one-sentence reason for the top choice, and flag any "urgent" request that RICE says is actually low priority, because that's the hard conversation to prepare for.
Leadership just handed you a major new project, but your team is already full. Saying "we're maxed" makes you the bottleneck. You need to say yes and make the resource math their decision.
Act as a VP of strategy. I've been handed [new project]. My team's current top priorities are [list], and here are my capacity assumptions: [team size, weekly capacity, deadlines, budget]. Draft a professional reply that accepts the project and shows, using only the assumptions I provide, the resources, budget, or timeline needed so current commitments don't slip. If an assumption is missing, put it in a "math needed" section instead of inventing a number. Give leadership three clear options and mark the one you'd recommend. Executive tone, solution-oriented.
It's 8:45. Your inbox and Slack are already a wall of other people's priorities. The next 30 minutes decide whether you run the day or it runs you.
Act as an elite executive coach. It's the start of my day and I need to triage it in the next 30 minutes. Here's what's in front of me: [today's calendar, the top unread messages, my goal for the week, one thing my manager asked for]. Give me exactly three things: (1) the one task to do before my first meeting, doable in 25 minutes; (2) three things to batch later in one sitting; (3) three things that look urgent but can wait until tomorrow, with why. If two things genuinely compete for the number-one slot, tell me the tie-breaker. Under 200 words, no fluff.
Reviews, hard conversations, decisions, managing up, hiring, delegation — plus the framework to build your own.
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