Turn monthly portfolio reviews from "gut feeling + sunk-cost attachment" into natural selection: judge by outcome data, fix winners into default recipes, kill losers without sentiment, and budget exploration. Distilled from a real 4.5-month AI-music business (307 releases, ¥95 total revenue) where it ran as an evolution mechanism — the business failed, the mechanism survived.
Why this skill exists
- Prior lock-in: creators keep funding their favorite direction regardless of data (sunk cost + self-image)
- Fake reviews: most retrospectives produce vague "direction A feels right" conclusions — no kill decisions, no budget reallocation, next month repeats
- No extinction = no selection: a review without kill decisions is a diary; a review without fixation (distilling what won) is just venting
- Single-month whiplash: one hit or one flop triggering a direction change = being led by noise
Core mechanism (six steps)
| Step | Action | Key discipline |
|---|---|---|
| ① Inventory | Full portfolio × dual metrics (a revenue-type + a reach-type metric) | Data must come from platform settlements / analytics, never self-report |
| ② Fixation | Winners' common traits become a reusable "recipe", next period's default | Two consecutive winning periods before fixation; single-period signals are logged, not fixed |
| ③ Extinction | Items without revenue/growth validation get killed (unlist / archive / stop investing) | Record the failed recipe to prevent repetition; check for unreconciled confusion before killing |
| ④ Mutation quota | Reserve 15~20% of resources for new-hypothesis experiments | A quota is a ceiling AND a floor — prevents direction drift and stagnation |
| ⑤ Rolling window | Judge on a 3-month rolling window; single-month swings never change direction | Single-month breakouts and single-month disasters both wait for the window |
| ⑥ Diversity check | Review portfolio diversity: is everything riding on one niche? | Single-niche = total loss on environment change; keep 2-3 niches alive |
Iron rules
- Data over self-report: review inputs must come from platform settlements / analytics / reconciled numbers, never "I feel"; items without data are marked "unreconciled" and down-weighted in extinction review
- Two-period confirmation before fixation: a single-month breakout does not become a rule; only directions winning two consecutive periods get fixed as default recipes
- No single-instance conclusions: same-day rule-making plus same-day reversal ("flip-flopping") is a mechanism-failure signal — return to the rolling window
- Kill without sentiment: record the failed recipe instead of mourning — failure records are assets that prevent repetition
- Priors are hypotheses, not conclusions: every "I always believed" is a hypothesis in front of data; boundary testing beats prior veto
- Mutation quota is both ceiling and floor: >20% = direction drift; <15% = stagnation; unspent quota expires (hoarding quota = avoiding experiments)
Ledger template
| Item | Revenue metric | Reach metric | Verdict | Action | Recipe fixed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| work / experiment / product line A | ¥ / conversion | plays / exposure / installs | Fixed / Observing / Extinct | scale / park / kill | winner traits (two-period) |
| … | … | … | … | … | … |
- Verdicts are three-valued: Fixed (won two consecutive periods → default recipe) / Observing (single-period signal, wait for the rolling window) / Extinct (no validation within the rolling window)
- Keep a rolling 3-month ledger as the next period's comparison baseline
Provenance (optional reading)
The mechanism ran a complete selection cycle in a real solo business — an AI-music side project (4.5 months, 307 releases): the vocal-poetry line was fixed as the only stable recipe (67% of revenue), the instrumental line went extinct (≈¥0/month), paid-follower operations went extinct on negative ROI. Details live in the author's private project notes.
Relationship to other skills
- Single task/project retrospectives (Keep-Problem-Try) →
learn-and-improve - This skill owns portfolio-level monthly selection — who gets scaled, who gets killed, who gets budget. The two chain well: portfolio selection first, single-item retrospective second