Insights
The Opportunity You Can Serve
Limited resources make customer selection the first strategic choice, and founders tend to get it wrong in two directions: trying to serve everyone, or reaching for a larger market that needs products they have not built yet. Notes on why the decision deserves more structure, and what I learned building a system to give it some.
Read →When Building Gets Cheap, Framing Gets Expensive
New tools are making it faster and cheaper to build, automate, analyze, and test. That increases the value of systems thinking: defining the target state, understanding how the pieces fit together, and deciding what should be built in the first place.
Read →Define the Target State Before the Roadmap
An ambition such as growth or transformation is too vague to organize investment. A useful roadmap starts with a concrete description of the business that has to exist when the work succeeds, so leaders can decide what belongs on the path and what does not.
Read →A Roadmap Is Not a Project Plan
A project plan organizes execution after the work has been chosen. A roadmap should explain what has to become true between the current state and the target state, including the dependencies, economics, capabilities, and choices that determine the sequence.
Read →Prove the Next Step Before You Fund the Future State
A roadmap can describe the full future state without requiring the company to fund all of it at once. Leaders can often use existing capabilities to prove the next critical assumption, then let that evidence determine what deserves further investment.
Read →When Proxy Metrics Become the Wrong Target
Organizations naturally optimize the measures their systems make visible, even when those measures sit well upstream from the result the business needs. Proxy metrics are useful for diagnosis, but investment decisions should be connected as directly as practical to the outcome.
Read →A business-first view of AI
AI is creating new ways to improve growth, economics, decision-making, customer experience, and operations. The question is where those capabilities can materially improve the business.
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