Management Craft
0.3.0

Rebuilt from the ground up

When Management Craft launched, it was a deck of cards. You opened a pack, flipped through the cards, toggled one into machine mode. It was a good prototype, but the cards were a mixed bag of frameworks and things to avoid.

In 0.3.0, I decided to shift away from cards, while preserving the wizards everyone loved, toward a map of all the things you need to get good at (competencies) and things I’ve seen help people level up (tools). Underneath all of it is a layer of evidence. The entire thing is rebuilt from the ground up. Here’s what shipped.

A map, not a deck of cards

  • The homepage is completely rebuilt to reflect a new way to navigate.
  • The Competency Map is the bird’s eye view: every management competency I cover, rendered as a graph you can browse.
  • The map is broken down into clusters, like Recruiting & Hiring.
  • From either the map or a cluster, you can see the competencies you need, and each competency points to the tools that help.
  • The 0.2.0 cards, packs, and machine mode are retired.

Competency pages, written by hand

  • Each competency page is a deep-dive into a particular human skill great managers need to develop.
  • Pages are structured around the questions you’re likely to ask: what it is, what great looks like, how you get better, how leaders get it wrong.
  • Competency pages take ~30+ hours for me to create and are written entirely by hand.
  • The first two are live now: Defining the role and Knowing what great looks like.

Tool pages you can actually share

Full-screen sharable figures

  • Competency and tool pages feature a range of figures, from charts to tables and matrices.
  • Each figure has a full-screen mode for presenting on a Zoom call or in a conference room.
  • Each figure can also be shared as a downloadable PNG or via its own standalone URL.

Agent Mode

  • Machine mode is now Agent mode.
  • Every page now ships clean, machine-readable markdown, so the model you already work with can actually help you with the tool instead of guessing.
  • On tool pages, Agent Mode gives you several copy-ready prompts: hand one to your own agent and it interviews you and drafts the deliverable.

Evidence you can check

  • My research process is now visible and verifiable.
  • Every tool and competency traces to people and sources that have their own pages, and inline [N] citations open a hover card that decomposes the source (author, work, publisher, year, link) and clicks straight through.
  • This release fact-checked all 149 launch-reachable people and source pages against evidence.

An entirely new design system

  • Underneath all of it is a design system built from scratch.
  • A new color palette (a lighter, cleaner blue as the accent, with plum, green, and rust marking the different kinds of entity) and a real dark mode.
  • A two-typeface system, adding Söhne for the interface alongside Signifier for reading.
  • Navcards and hover tooltips share one note-card grammar.
  • Figures go full screen for presenting, and download as a PNG with a shareable link.
  • Thanks to Alex McDonnell for his Müller-Brockmann grid skill based on Josef Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems.
  • And the whole thing is public: check out the design system.

Also in this release

  • Authorship, on the record: every page states how it was written (by hand, together with AI, or by agents), with the full story on the About page
  • Article versioning: pages carry a version and a dateline, where 1.0 means “first version fully written by hand”
  • Site versioning: full semantic versioning site-wide, with the release ritual that produced this note (see the footer for the live number)
  • A redesigned footer: the brand block plus one newsletter signup, on every page
  • The newsletter: repositioned to follow the work as it ships, with up-leveled signup states
  • A rewritten About page: hand-written, with a figure showing exactly how each kind of page gets made
  • One citation form: every reference on the site is Chicago notes, author-first, and eleven outbound links that had been quietly 404ing were repaired
  • Sidenotes retired: replaced by tooltips and footnotes, running through one citation engine
  • Collapsible section headings on article pages
  • A designed share card for every page, instead of one generic image
  • Accessibility: text contrast brought up to WCAG AA, plus a mobile reading and navigation pass
  • Redesigned 404 and unsubscribe pages
  • A discovery pass: structured data, sitemap, and llms.txt cleaned up for both search engines and agents