About

What is Management Craft?

Management Craft is a talking management library. Each card teaches a single concept. Cards are organized into packs: hiring, trust, team dynamics, and more to come.

Every card has two modes. Human mode is for reading and discussing with your team. Machine mode turns the card into a step-by-step prompt you can use with an LLM. Copy it into Claude or ChatGPT, and it walks you through the framework. You walk out with an actual deliverable instead of a sticky note you ignore until it “accidentally” gets thrown away.

Why does this exist?

Building a company is relentlessly hard. Not because any single challenge is impossible, but because the challenges never stop coming. Just as a founder gets decent at hiring, they realize they’re bad at managing the people they hired. Get a handle on that, and now it’s conflict. Then feedback. Then strategy. Wave after wave of going from a one to a five on something new. It’s exhausting.

After more than six years of coaching startup founders, I kept returning to the same frameworks, the same mental models, the same prescriptions I’d dispense at the right moment. But founders don’t have time to read all of Barnes & Noble. Management Craft is where I’m putting all of that down on paper: distilling years of books, articles, slides, and phone calls into something useful and accessible. So founders can become effective leaders, so that being a founder can suck a little less, and so they can build really successful businesses.

That line has stuck with me for years. Writing is thinking, but the best writing doesn’t just think for you. It sets you up to think for yourself. That’s the goal with every card.

And now writing isn’t the only way to work with these ideas. For years, working with a computer meant staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor. You’d type something, delete it, retype it, send it, and then someone would misinterpret it anyway. Or you’d leave a meeting and realize you had to go sit down and type up an entire document. We were trying to talk to computers through typing. Now we can just talk to them like we talk to people. I think that changes everything.

Four ideas run underneath this: Doug Engelbart’s vision of augmenting human intellect with computers, John Dewey’s concept of praxis, the idea that real learning happens when you apply knowledge to action, and chiddush, a Hebrew word for the production of genuine new insight from inherited material. I picked up chiddush from Zohar Atkins, who describes a rabbinic tradition holding that the act of reading should produce new insight, not just absorb what’s already on the page. A house of study cannot stand without it. I want this library to work the same way. Talking to a management library the way Tony Stark talks to his AI in the lab, that just makes sense to me. I want more people who aren’t engineers or designers to start working with computers this way.

The fourth idea shapes what the library actually teaches. The Dreyfus model of skill acquisition holds that we get good at anything in stages, climbing from following rules to acting on intuition, and finally, for a few, to a mastery that reinvents the craft. The deeper version, which the brothers who built it grounded in neuroscience, is that deliberate reflection (rules, rubrics, structured analysis) is the scaffolding you use to build intuition. You lean on it to climb, and you let it go at the top. That is what Management Craft is for. Every competency here is a ladder from novice to mastery, the tools are the scaffolding for the climb, and the job is to move people up those rungs, one competency at a time.

How is this made?

Every card starts with years of coaching conversations, reading, and research. I distill a framework down to its essentials, write it in both human-readable and LLM-ready formats, and pair it with illustrations and discussion prompts for teams.

The full story of how I built the writing process, including the role AI plays in editing and refinement, is in the first blog post: Smithing Words.

Who am I?

I’m Andy Sparks. I’ve always thought of myself as a designer, even if I never felt like one. In school I said I wanted to design video games and my parents told me it would take too much math. Turns out design takes no math, but I never studied it. But every project I’ve ever worked on, I found a way to do some design. I’ve always been a writer too. Management Craft is the first thing I’m designing end-to-end, and it feels special to make.

I spent more than a decade as a founder of venture-backed companies. I co-founded Holloway, where we spent years obsessing over how to make expert knowledge useful, and Mattermark, a B2B data and analytics company that became a Harvard Business School case study. I wrote The Holloway Guide to Raising Venture Capital. Now I’m an executive coach to startup founders and CEOs.

I spent 13 years in San Francisco and now live in Columbus, Ohio with my wife Kate. If you have feedback, ideas, or just want to say hi, email me at hi@andysparks.co.