The Patrick Collison
Framework
Progress Theory & Systems Thinking
Patrick Collison built products and companies by reasoning from first principles in industries that the incumbents considered mature. Patrick Collison's product and strategy thinking, captured in this framework as mental models, decision heuristics, and the signature questions they would ask.
The progress theory & systems thinking framework distils Patrick Collison's documented approach into a .md skill file you can load into Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM in seconds.
Where most AI personas generate generic output, this framework is grounded in real documented work: interviews, writing, published frameworks, and the specific decisions Patrick Collison made when it mattered. Use it for decision-making, writing, strategy, or any situation where you want your AI to think with Patrick Collison's distinctive patterns rather than a default model voice.
A glimpse of Patrick Collison's thinking.
Progress is neither automatic nor linear—it emerges from specific institutional arrangements, measurement systems, and incentive structures that can be engineered. The most important work happens at the intersection of what's technically possible and what institutional frameworks will sustain, with particular attention to how knowledge accumulates across generations.
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Five specific models, each named and explained with concrete examples, unlocked with purchase.
What institutional arrangements produced the golden ages we admire, and which elements transfer to current contexts?
4 more questions in Patrick Collison's voice are unlocked with purchase.
Full list of anti-patterns unlocked with purchase.
The full framework adds: detailed explanations of all five mental models with real-world examples, the decision heuristics Patrick Collison actually used, remaining signature questions, the complete list of anti-patterns, a copy-paste activation prompt, and a worked example.
Unlocked the moment you purchase. ~2,000 words total. Delivered as a Claude Skill and plain .md within 60 seconds of checkout.
- ✦Core philosophy: 2–3 sentences grounded in Patrick Collison's documented worldview
- ✦Five signature mental models: each named, with concrete examples from their work
- ✦Decision heuristics: the concrete rules they actually used
- ✦Signature questions: five questions that sound like Patrick Collison, not a generic MBA
- ✦What they would NOT do: the anti-patterns this framework rejects
- ✦Copy-paste activation prompt: drop straight into Claude or ChatGPT
- ✦Worked example: the framework applied to a realistic scenario
- →patrick-collison.zip: a native Claude Skill. Upload to Settings → Skills in Claude, or unzip to
~/.claude/skills/ - →patrick-collison-framework.md: plain markdown. Works in ChatGPT Custom GPTs, Gemini, Claude Projects, agent system prompts, anywhere
What it does with a real question.
A founder is deciding whether to take a large but difficult client.
Take it only if the difficulty teaches you something you can reuse. A large, painful client is a bet on whether your company's weakest process gets stronger or snaps. Revenue is the least interesting part of that bet.
Here is the lens I would apply: treat the client as infrastructure rather than as an account. Ask whether the hard things they demand, such as custom integrations, bespoke reporting, or tight response times, are things you would eventually have to build for your next fifty customers anyway. If yes, this client is an unusually well-funded forcing function, and the pain is tuition. If the demands are idiosyncratic to their org chart, you would be building a one-off that taxes every future decision, and you should walk away or price it so the one-off is paid for in full.
The failure mode I would watch for is quiet. A dominant client reshapes your roadmap, your hiring, and your sense of what "good" means, and you rarely notice until the company has become a services arm for one buyer. Concentration risk is really institutional risk: your ability to learn from the rest of the market degrades.
Concrete next move: before signing, write down the five hardest requirements and mark each as "reusable" or "bespoke." Then propose a short scoped pilot where the reusable ones are the deliverable and the bespoke ones are explicitly billed. Their reaction to that proposal will tell you most of what you need to know.
The full framework carries five models, decision heuristics, signature questions and a worked example.
Written by claude-sonnet-5-5 with this framework loaded, 2026-10-11. Checked automatically for length and for copied framework text.
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Ten thinkers for the decisions only you can make
Get Patrick Collison plus nine more for $29.99 →Inspired by the documented thinking of Patrick Collison. A mental-model toolkit, not a literal representation. Delivered as a .md file compatible with Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and any LLM.