Process Design

When a Facebook Page connection failed in Radi8, my software told people the same thing every time: you don't have the right admin role. It was right... sometimes. But under that one message were three different failures, and two had nothing to do with anyone's permissions. So the message sent people off to fix something that wasn't broken — and quietly told them the problem was them. I went looking for the real cause. Now it names which of the three actually hit. Fixes like that land in hours, not release cycles. This isn't really about software. When your process fails a client, whose fault does your language imply? "You didn't send the intake form" and "my intake form is confusing" are the same event described by two different people. Default blame is a design choice... usually one nobody examined. Genuine question — where does your process quietly blame a client for something you could have made clearer? Link in the first comment. #IndependentConsultant #Coaching #Solopreneur #CustomerDiscovery #Positioning …more

It’s time for my daily dose of marketing caffeine. Today I’m talking about the customer journey and the theory of constraints. First, what is the theory of constraints? To keep it really simple, it’s a bottleneck that’s preventing you from achieving your goal. For example, if you want to pour soda from a bottle into your glass it has to pass through the bottleneck. You can’t pour it any faster because the bottleneck is small. But the interesting thing is actually how most people try to solve this problem. They get a bigger mug, they shake the bottle, they ask someone else to do it!! It doesn’t matter what you change, if you don’t deal with the bottleneck you can’t speed up the process. Now what does that have to do with marketing and the customer journey? Your customer is on a journey right now. First they need to become aware of your product or service. Then they can consider and compare you to arrive at a buying decision. If you’re a good fit you acquire them and take their money. Then they move to the adoption phase, they start using your product or service. If they’re happy they end up at the end of their journey in the advocate stage where they tell others. This journey has a bottleneck. It’s different for each business, and only you know where it is. The key is for you to put all your energy into fixing the bottleneck, nothing else. If you’re successful the bottleneck will change and you can repeat the process. Where people go wrong is they put energy into marketing that has zero impact on the bottleneck. If nobody knows about you, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. …more

"Good Judgment Required" https://www.axios.com/2026/09/08/googles-gemini-enterprise-legal-halimah-delaine-prado 1 big thing: Google's general counsel just drew the line every enterprise AI buyer needs to understand AI can democratize access to good legal advice. It cannot replace the exercise of good judgment. Google's own general counsel said so — while launching an AI product built for law firms. Why it matters: The same principle applies to B2B marketing. AI can surface information faster, draft more efficiently, and scale content production. It cannot replace the judgment that decides which of two reasonable-sounding strategies will actually move pipeline. Driving the news: Google launched Gemini Enterprise for Legal, an AI platform for law firms and in-house legal teams covering briefs, contract management, regulatory monitoring, and data discovery. → General counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado: "The practice of law will always fundamentally rise and fall on the exercise of good judgment" → More than 2,000 cases involving AI-generated hallucinations have been identified by legal researcher Damien Charlotin — lawyers sanctioned for false citations, misattributed quotes, and misrepresented cases Zoom in: Goldman Sachs CIO Marco Argenti argued enterprises should not rule out open-weight models — including Chinese models — so long as they follow a four-layer security framework: model testing, secure inference environments, monitored agent permissions, and controlled data access. Yes, but: Goldman's current open-model usage is mostly US-based. The framework exists precisely because the risk is real. Be smart: The legal sector's AI hallucination problem is a preview of what happens in any professional domain when speed replaces judgment. Build the review layer before you need it, not after. The bottom line: AI gives you more time to think. Use it. https://www.axios.com/2026/09/08/googles-gemini-enterprise-legal-halimah-delaine-prado #AIGovernance #B2BMarketing …more

Every decision routes through you. And it feels like being needed. It isn't really, though. It's the system failing quietly. I call it founder-as-bottleneck, and once you can see it, you can't unsee it. The tells: Approvals stack up on your desk while everyone waits. The team stalls the second you're heads-down or out. Nothing ships without your sign-off, even the small stuff. That's not a sign you're indispensable. It's a sign the work has nowhere else to go. Here's why it happens. No one owns ops. Nothing is written down. So the process lives in your head, and your head becomes the only door every decision has to walk through. You're not the leader in that setup. You're the choke point. The reframe that changes everything: this is a systems gap, not a work-harder problem. You can't out-hustle a missing structure. Longer hours don't fix an undocumented process, they just make you the bottleneck for more hours a day. The fix isn't you doing more. It's the decision having somewhere to go that isn't you. An owner. A documented path. A default that doesn't require your name on it. Being needed for everything and being trapped by everything look identical from the inside. That's the part nobody warns you about. Drop your take in the comments. Which of the tells hit closest to home. …more

"Too early for ops" is the most expensive thing you'll believe. Not because it feels expensive right now. It doesn't. That's the trap. Right now it feels responsible. You're conserving. You're focused on the product, the raise, the next milestone, and ops reads like a bigger-company problem you'll get to once you're a bigger company. The bill just doesn't come due right now. It compounds. It shows up later as rework, the same decision made three different ways by three different people. It shows up as misalignment, where everyone's moving fast in slightly different directions and nobody notices until it costs you a quarter. It shows up as you, the founder, being the only place certain things can happen, which means the business can't move faster than you can personally answer Slack. Ops isn't a maturity milestone you graduate into. It's not a reward for surviving long enough. It's the layer that decides whether growth makes you stronger or just heavier. Building it right while you're small is cheap. Rebuilding it under load, while you're growing and everything's already on fire, is not. Same foundation. Very different price tag depending on when you pay for it. The moment you're convinced you're too early is usually the exact moment it's cheapest to get right. …more

Today's post is 301 words, a 2-minute read. Sources: Generative AI Enterprise — "McKinsey Unveils AI Profit Lessons" 1 big thing: We just entered a new phase of enterprise AI — here's what that means for B2B marketers The question is no longer whether AI works. It is whether your organization can actually deliver on it. Why it matters: McKinsey's 2026 State of AI confirms what most enterprise leaders already sense — AI investment is surging, individual productivity gains are real, but P&L impact remains elusive for most organizations. Driving the news: McKinsey surveyed 1,719 participants across 97 nations. → 80% say AI has improved their individual productivity → Only 37% attribute any EBIT impact to AI — roughly flat year over year despite surging investment Zoom in: Companies breaking through share two practices: they redesign workflows alongside the model rather than layering AI on top of existing ones, and they measure in business outcomes rather than accuracy metrics. → McKinsey anchors this with two case studies — a global manufacturer scaling with AWS and a conglomerate deploying agentic AI at speed Yes, but: 20% of respondents say AI operating costs — tokens, infrastructure, compute — are already constraining usage. Cost management is becoming a real strategic variable, not a footnote. Be smart: If your AI initiatives are measured in time saved or content volume produced, you are measuring the wrong things. Tie AI output to pipeline influence, conversion rate, or content-attributed revenue. That is the only measurement that survives a budget conversation. The bottom line: Technology is rarely the binding constraint. Delivery, adoption, and measurement are. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai #AIStrategy #B2BMarketing …more

Today's post is 318 words, a 2-minute read. Sources: Every.to — "Our Agents, Ourselves" 1 big thing: How forward-thinking teams are turning institutional knowledge into reusable AI skills The best thinking in your marketing organization lives in someone's head. Every.to is running an experiment to change that. Why it matters: In B2B marketing, your most valuable asset is not your tech stack. It is the judgment of the people who know your brand, your buyers, and what actually works. That knowledge walks out the door every time someone leaves. Driving the news: Every.to is capturing the decision-making patterns of their best employees and encoding them as reusable AI skills. → Their best editor's headline instincts, their top strategist's brief methodology — documented and accessible via AI → One Walleye Capital CEO now requires AI use for all 400 employees — not as a suggestion, but as a baseline operational standard Zoom in: Companies spent months answering the same 33 questions from executives on how to roll out AI — covering strategy, tool selection, governance, and winning over skeptics. → Every.to published those answers publicly for the first time this week Yes, but: Encoding institutional knowledge takes deliberate documentation most teams defer indefinitely because it does not show up in this quarter's deliverables. Be smart: Start with your highest-leverage knowledge holder. Document how they think about one recurring decision — a content brief, a headline, a channel call — and build from there. One reusable skill that reflects real expertise beats a hundred generic prompts. The bottom line: Your best marketer's instincts should not be a single point of failure. https://every.to/context-window/the-case-for-cloning-your-coworkers #AIMarketing #B2BMarketing …more

Busy founders and stalled founders often look identical from the outside. Both are working constantly. The difference is what happens to all that effort. Here's the pattern I've watched for 25 years: activity that isn't built on a system doesn't compound. You do the outreach, the post, the follow-up, the demo — and then next week you start from zero and do them all again. It feels like progress because it's exhausting. But nothing accumulates. You're not building an engine; you're pushing the car. A system is just the opposite. It's a motion you run once, learn from, and improve — so the next turn is a little sharper than the last. That's what compounding actually is: the same effort producing more each time because the thing underneath it is getting better. The trap for a stalled founder isn't laziness. It's the opposite. There's so much motion that you can't tell which of it is worth turning into a system and which is just noise burning the hours. Here's the filter I use. One question separates the signal from the noise: Which single motion, if it got 20% better every time we ran it, would change the trajectory of the business? That's the one to systematize. Not the ten things that feel urgent — the one whose improvement curve actually bends the outcome. Usually it's unglamorous: how you talk to customers, how a lead becomes a conversation, how you decide what to build next. Almost never the thing that's loudest on your calendar. Then be honest about the rest. Most of what fills a stalled founder's week is motion that will never compound no matter how well you execute it. That's not a productivity problem you fix with a better tool or another hire. It's a focus problem. Cutting it isn't losing ground — it's freeing the attention the one motion needs to become a real system. The uncomfortable part: you can't systematize everything, and trying to is its own form of noise. Compounding demands you pick. So the question worth sitting with this week: Of everything you're doing right now, which one motion is actually worth turning into a system — and what would you have to stop doing to give it the attention it needs? #Founders #Startups #Entrepreneurship #FounderLessons #GrowthStrategy …more

The best co-founders aren't two builders - they're a builder and an execution artist. I've noticed the teams that struggle early often have the same problem: everyone wants to build. Nobody wants to build the systems around the building. Which makes sense. Especially in the early stages, momentum feels like everyone sprinting in the same direction. But building the product and building the business are two different jobs. One person is asking, "What's possible?" The other is asking, "How do we do this 100 more times without everything catching fire?" You don't always need another co-founder for that. Sometimes you need someone who can step in, build the operational foundation, and hand owners and founders back the time they're spending putting out fires. That's my favorite part of the job. Ops isn't known to be glamorous - but dang, it is to me. P.S. Did I just make up "execution artist"? I'm keeping it. It's either a COO or a Bond villain. Either way, I'm here for it and just wish it looked less sinister on a business card. …more

"We're too early for operations." I've heard this a lot recently, and get the instinct. When you're still chasing product-market fit or racing toward the next milestone, ops feels like something you can worry about later. But think about building a house. You don't pour the foundation after the second floor is framed. You pour it first, because everything above it depends on how solid it is. Operations is your foundation. The informal, ad hoc ways you work at 5 people won't hold together at 20. If you haven't built basic structure, documentation, and execution habits early on, things don't just slow down. They break. It's never too early to get ops in order. Early is exactly when the foundation has to be built right. …more

If you're solving the same problem every week, you don't have a task problem. You have a structure problem. It's one of the clearest patterns I've learned across four startups and a lot of advising rooms: recurring firefighting is almost never about the fire in front of you. The same issue keeps coming back because something in the system — how work flows, who owns what, how decisions get made — keeps producing it. You can put the fire out beautifully every single time, and it will still be there next Tuesday. W. Edwards Deming made this point decades ago, and it still holds. In Out of the Crisis, he estimated that about 94% of the problems in any operation belong to the system, not the people — only around 6% trace to a true one-off. Read that again: the overwhelming majority of what looks like individual failure is actually structural. So when the same thing breaks over and over, blaming the person doing the task is the most expensive mistake you can make. The fix is slower up front and far cheaper over time. Instead of solving the instance, you step back and ask what keeps generating it — then you change that. Redesign the handoff. Clarify the ownership. Remove the step that keeps failing. Do it once, at the structural level, and the symptom stops recurring instead of demanding your attention forever. Firefighting feels productive because it's visible and urgent. But a leader's real job isn't to be the best firefighter in the building. It's to build something that stops catching fire. What's the problem that keeps coming back no matter how many times you solve it — and what structure might be quietly producing it? …more

Most AI transformation efforts stall because leaders underestimate the organizational redesign required. The technology is the easier part. The harder work is redefining how teams collaborate, which roles need new skills, and what decisions can no longer be made the same way. We see this pattern consistently. Leaders invest in AI tools and then expect existing workflows to absorb them. What actually happens is friction. Teams unsure of their new responsibilities. Processes that conflict with what the technology enables. Decision rights that no longer match the speed or scale of AI-driven insights. This is both a technical problem and It is a leadership problem that requires a different skill set than most organizations currently have. Our workshops at AI Institute of Silicon Valley focus on closing this gap. They walk you through the frameworks for identifying which roles need transformation, how to redesign workflows around AI capabilities, and how to implement change in a way that your organization can sustain. These sessions are built for executives and business leaders who are past the exploratory phase and need practical guidance to move forward. You will leave with tools you can apply immediately to your own transformation initiatives. We offer scheduled workshops throughout the year. If your organization has specific challenges or needs a tailored approach, we also design custom workshops that address your unique context. If you are leading AI transformation and facing the challenge of organizational redesign, these workshops provide the clarity and methods to navigate it effectively. Sign up for a scheduled session or contact us to discuss a custom workshop for your team. https://aiisv.org/ …more