Free Resources

Tools I'd hand
to a colleague.

No course upsell. No gated community. Just the stuff I actually use — guides, AI tools worth knowing, and teaching materials from 15+ years in the classroom.


Section 01

Leadership & Career

Guides built from real transitions — not theory. Aimed at operators and practitioners making the jump from doing to leading.

PDF Guide

Leadership in Practice

Practical wisdom from 20+ years running enterprise programs at Dell, GM, and Workiva. Six core leadership challenges — recovering stalled initiatives, developing people under pressure, managing cross-functional dependencies — each with a challenge, insight, and practical application you can use this week.

PDF Guide

Unlock the Power of Effective Leadership

A practical leadership philosophy for the move into a leadership role — what to do once you're there. Covers agility in leadership, transitioning with confidence, strengthening influence, and building teams that don't need you to function. Combines strategic frameworks with the human side of leading.

Interactive Guide

Building Your Leadership Resume

An interactive visual guide for rewriting your resume for a leadership role — not just updating it. Covers the management vs. leadership pivot, how to frame impact at scale, and the exact language shift that signals you're ready to lead, not just execute. No email required.

Section 02

AI Tools for Operators

The tools I actually use — curated for program managers, consultants, and operations leaders. Free or free-tier-first. No fluff, no referral links.

Claude (Anthropic)

Free Tier

Best for long-context analysis, drafting frameworks, and working through ambiguous problems. Handles nuance better than most for strategy and comms work.

Why it's here: Free tier is genuinely useful. Handles 100k+ token context on paid — critical for reviewing large program docs.

claude.ai ↗

Perplexity AI

Free Tier

Search that actually synthesizes instead of just returning links. Useful for fast competitive research, regulatory lookups, and staying current without reading 12 tabs.

Why it's here: Replaces most of my Google use for research. Free tier handles 90% of the use case.

perplexity.ai ↗

Gamma

Free Tier

Turn a prompt or outline into a polished presentation in under 5 minutes. Not a PowerPoint replacement — a fast draft engine for decks that need to exist quickly.

Why it's here: Free tier gives you real output, not a teaser. I use it for kickoff decks and status update slides.

gamma.app ↗

Otter.ai

Free Tier

Live transcription and meeting summary. Joins calls automatically and produces searchable transcripts. Useful for tracking action items and decisions without being the designated note-taker.

Why it's here: Free tier covers 600 minutes/month. More than enough for most consulting engagements.

otter.ai ↗

Notion AI

Freemium

If you're already in Notion, the AI layer is worth turning on. Summarizes pages, drafts SOPs, and helps translate messy notes into structured documentation without leaving your workspace.

Why it's here: Context-aware — it reads your own docs. More useful than a general-purpose LLM for internal knowledge work.

notion.so ↗

ChatGPT (OpenAI)

Free

Still the most widely supported and easiest to get approved in enterprise environments. Best for code generation, formula writing, and situations where your stakeholders need to see the tool you used.

Why it's here: Organizational currency. If your client uses it, knowing it well is a practical advantage.

chatgpt.com ↗

Section 03

Teaching Materials

Built for the classroom at University of Nebraska Omaha over 15+ years. Useful outside of it too — especially for practitioners who train teams or mentor newer PMs.

Curriculum

Product Management Fundamentals — Course Framework

The skeleton of the PM course I built at UNO: learning objectives, topic sequence, key frameworks covered, and the case studies that actually work in a classroom. Useful for anyone designing internal PM training or onboarding programs.

Reference

PM Frameworks That Actually Get Used

A curated set of the frameworks I've seen practitioners reach for repeatedly — not the ones that look good on a slide. Prioritization models, stakeholder mapping approaches, and decision frameworks that hold up under political pressure.

Section 04

Field Guides

Operational references built for practitioners running programs in the real world — not the textbook version.

Control Alt Recover

The CAR Field Guide

A hands-on operator's reference for diagnosing program drift and executing a recovery. Covers all 10 drift indicators, the Control / Alt / Recover framework, a 30-day playbook, and the political realities that most recovery guides pretend don't exist.

From the Control Alt Recover consulting practice — free to download, no strings.

Coming Soon

The Stakeholder Alignment Cycle — Pocket Reference

A one-page operational reference for maintaining cross-functional alignment on programs with 50+ stakeholders. Built from the GM divestiture engagement. Print it, laminate it, use it in your weekly.