Your product defined you once.The next ten years are aboutwhat you stand for beyond it.

LINKEDIN POST — CONTRARIAN-WITH-DATA

HEADLINE
The "data-driven" decision-making narrative is making us worse at decisions, not better — and the failure mode is now visible enough to name.

OPENING
"Data-driven" was supposed to be the post-gut-instinct era of management. In the operating teams I've worked closely with for the past six years, the actual outcome is that decision quality has gotten worse, not better. The failure mode is specific and worth naming.

ARGUMENT
The dashboards are now too good. Every decision gets justified post-hoc by selecting the metric that frames it favourably. Pre-decision, the same dashboards make every decision look defensible because some metric somewhere supports any direction.

What replaced gut instinct was not data-driven judgment. It was metric-shopping with extra steps.

The teams that have stayed crisp at decision-making in this environment are the ones that pre-commit to a small set of metrics before each decision, do not allow new metrics into the conversation after the framing is set, and force the decision-maker to state the falsification condition before the data gets pulled.

CLOSE
The fix is not less data. It is more discipline about which data gets consulted when.

I'd like to be wrong about this. I'm currently not finding the counter-cases.

INSTAGRAM REEL — 45 SECONDS (FOUNDER FACE)

VISUAL CUT 01  (0–4s)
[Founder, direct address, no over-styling]
"The piece of hiring advice I give that nobody likes is: never hire someone you can already manage."

VISUAL CUT 02  (4–18s)
[Continued]
"If you can already manage them, you don't need them at the level you're hiring for. You need them at one level lower. Hire the person you don't fully know how to manage yet — the one whose work will require you to grow as a manager."

VISUAL CUT 03  (18–35s)
[Walking shot]
"This is uncomfortable advice because it asks the founder to commit to growth they have not yet done. Most founders prefer to hire below their comfort line. That's why most leadership teams plateau at the founder's comfort line."

VISUAL CUT 04  (35–45s)
[Closing frame]
"The hires that scale companies are the ones that scale founders. Pick accordingly."

SUBSTACK POST — BEHIND-THE-SCENES OPERATING

HEADLINE
The metric I track every Monday that nobody on my team sees.

OPENING
Most metrics that show up in board decks are after-the-fact. They tell you what already happened. The Monday metric I track personally is a leading indicator — it tells me what is about to happen if nothing changes.

THE METRIC
I track: number of one-on-ones I had last week where the report brought a problem I hadn't seen yet versus number of one-on-ones where I brought a problem to them they hadn't seen yet.

A healthy ratio is something like 2:1 in their favour. They should be surfacing more emerging problems than I am, because they're closer to the work and there are more of them than there is of me.

When the ratio inverts — when I'm the one surfacing more emerging problems than the team — the organisation is degrading in a specific way: the team is operating downstream of me instead of forward of me.

WHY IT MATTERS
The fix is rarely the team. The fix is usually one of three things: I am over-managing, I am under-trusting them with strategic context, or I am hiring below the level the organisation needs.

When I see two consecutive months of inverted ratio, I take that as the warning signal it is. By the third month it shows up in the after-the-fact metrics the board sees.

CLOSE
The metrics nobody sees are usually the ones worth tracking.