Clear answers for leaders learning to see the whole business.

Published articles

1. Leadership

   A performance problem is not a diagnosis

   Six things to score green, yellow or red, and the two my client got wrong on the first pass.

   9 min read

2. Commercialization · Leadership

   Even I won’t skip the process

   Executives promise customers features because they want to help. Product stops getting overruled when the most senior people defer to the process, and when Sales would rather bring Product in than go around it.

   6 min read

3. P&L

   A strong P&L can hide a struggling R&D program

   A P&L will show you that growth has stopped. It will not show you why. One figure that does is how much of your revenue you built recently.

   10 min read

4. Leadership

   Whoever read it runs the meeting

   A pre-read is more than a courtesy. What happens in the first ninety seconds decides whether anybody honors it.

   7 min read

5. Leadership

   Don’t bring me solutions. Bring me the problem.

   If they could solve it, it would not be on your desk. Demand two other things instead: the actual problem, and one sentence about what they need from you.

   8 min read

6. Leadership

   Nobody is a zero

   Everybody brings something. That is exactly why “good at X” can never be the reason you keep someone.

   6 min read

7. Leadership

   Three questions I ask when I take over a team

   Everybody is busy. The answers tell you who is delivering, and who owns it when they are not.

   8 min read

8. Leadership

   Nobody sets out to be a firework

   The skills that earn the promotion are not the skills the job requires. Closing that gap is hard, and worth the investment.

   8 min read

9. P&L · Commercialization

   A discount is an investment in your customer’s business

   Which means it should have terms. If you are giving something up and getting nothing back, you have not negotiated. You have lowered your price.

   8 min read

10. Commercialization

    AI makes building easier. That alone is not reason to build.

    When every product and feature is cheap to build, the constraint moves from engineering capacity to organizational attention.

    6 min read