When I was at Scient (“We build businesses!”), we had a methodology that should look familiar to any developer—strategy, design, detailed design, build.

Whether the customer was a Fortune 500 company, a startup with a big check, or something in between, we were fanatical about our process.

But without fail—usually at the beginning of ‘design’—clients would question the need for the customer experience team we were bringing onto the project. And within that team, the target that got singled out most was ethnography.

Say what?

If you’re not familiar with ethnography, it’s a type of qualitative research that involves immersive study of people in their natural environments. It relies on extensive observation and interviews, focusing on understanding the "why" behind behaviors within a subject’s context.

While true ethnography may be overkill for some projects, I’m amazed by the number of companies that still balk at basic primary user research—aka talking to potential users…and actually listening to what they say.

For some reason, the idea of investing a little money before investing a LOT of money seems ‘excessive’, ‘unnecessary’, and ‘bloated’ to certain people.

“We already know what our customers want!”

“Can’t we just get something out there and see what happens?”

“Users won’t even understand what we’re asking them!”

Seriously?

And before you think that having an LLM spit out an interview guide for a junior staffer to ask some questions or doing a couple of focus groups qualifies as primary research, think again.

Experienced user researchers are like scientists with a microscope. They’re curious. They’re skilled with their tools to reveal what’s hiding in plain sight. They don’t accept answers at face value. And they know that a great question is often more important than the answer.

They’re the sort of people you don’t want to play at poker because they’ll spot your tell.

And yet—despite the proven benefits and the countless books, articles, and podcasts begging people to understand the problem they’re solving before building a solution—primary user research is routinely skipped.

But why?

I feel the need. The need … to build!

Keep in mind, most founders are builders. And builders want to build. And anything that keeps them—and their impatient investors—from scratching that itch is considered a waste of time. And time is the enemy.

What’s so shortsighted is that every wrong assumption that could’ve been corrected, every unnecessary feature that could have been deleted, and every insight that might be the key to your ‘secret sauce’ easily justifies the time and money spent on user research.

Those insights also help you know the difference between the movable vs. load-bearing walls of your strategy. And that keeps you from doing something dumb that brings everything down on your head.

Yes, entrepreneurs have very strong opinions. They have to be stubborn enough to push through barriers where others have failed. But those same strong opinions can just as easily get in the way of healthy curiosity, simple listening, and a little humility that help you recognize solid assumptions from wild-ass guesses.

So, before you rush to build your next great idea, take a pause and acknowledge that your understanding of the problem and the solution is probably a little…fuzzy. Then spend some time listening to a handful of potential users to challenge your assumptions, fill in gaps you may not even see, and give your idea more resolution.

And appreciate that primary user research is the first line of defense protecting you…from yourself.

There was a time when true leaders were quick to remind everyone that they were in charge. “The buck stops here” was a common phrase that may have fed a leader’s ego, but it also acknowledged accountability for everything that happened on their watch.

How times have changed.

‘Me’ Is Now ‘We’

These days, you can’t hear a story about a company in crisis without someone quickly attributing the issues to its culture—a toxic environment, misplaced priorities, putting profit above safety. No doubt these are accurate assessments of many companies’ issues.

But the not-so-subtle insinuation is that the problems are a collective issue. What was once a single seat of accountability has devolved into an amorphous goo that drifts through the organization like San Francisco fog.

Personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’ have been replaced by ‘we’ and ‘they’. In the worst cases, there’re no pronouns at all. Just a master-of-the-obvious statement that ‘mistakes were made’.

The way these stories are told, culture isn’t a waterfall propelled by gravity, but rather a volcano, where the lava is constantly pushed upward by each employee until it reaches the executive floor, consuming the poor leader.

The innocent bystander.
Maybe even a victim.

In For a Penny, In For a Pound

In 1965, the ratio of CEO compensation to the average worker was 21-to-1. In 2023, it had ballooned to 290-to-1. That’s a 1281% increase (and worthy of a separate post for another day).

You would think, or at least hope, this obscene land grab might warrant a modest increase in accountability. But in our bizarro universe, compensation appears to have zero direct correlation with accountability. In fact, the opposite seems true.

Abusive behavior by a key executive?

Kickbacks in the sales org?

Unreported security breaches?

Injured customers due to defective products?

You guessed it—blame the culture.

Then, to top things off, the CEO brings in a consultant to do a deep dive on culture. A few workshops later, a recommitment to “our shared values”, the obligatory quiz, and poof, mission accomplished. Culture fixed.

Except it isn’t.

Because the same person is still gripping the wheel. And the culture is still off course.

Maybe It’s Just Time To Go

Edgar Schein, an expert on org culture and leadership said it best: “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is create and manage culture.”

He wasn’t referring to speeches, posters, or mission-vision-values statements. He was referring to actions.

• Who you hire

• Who you promote

• Who you fire

• Who reports directly to you. Who doesn’t

• What gets rewarded

• What gets tolerated

Messages are meaningless without actions. And leaders’ actions—large and small, good and bad—are studied, internalized, and cascaded through an organization. Those actions define the culture. Period.

Shouldering the responsibility for defining a culture can feel overwhelming. Guess what? It’s supposed to feel that way. It weighs on you. It keeps you up at night. It prematurely ages you. It ensures that a leader remains keenly aware of the downstream impact of their behavior.

It would be nice to say that most leaders learn this with time.

Some do. But most don’t.

And if you’re stuck in an organization where the leader consistently recasts their own shortcomings as everyone else’s fault, you have a choice to make:

Stay, and hope for the best.

Or find a new place with a different leader.

Every company—no matter how well run—will occasionally need a heroic effort. A sleepless night. A canceled vacation. A last-minute “planes, trains, and automobiles” scramble to save a deal, make a delivery, or hit a number.

But when those situations become normal instead of rare, it’s no longer heroism.

It’s dysfunction.

We’ve All Been There

It’s Friday evening. The project’s already behind. Then the customer asks for a “small change” (that’s anything but) before they’ll sign off. But if the delivery slips by 24 hours, the company can’t recognize the revenue and will miss its forecast. So the CEO hits the “all hands on deck” button.

After a lost weekend and 48 sleepless hours, the team pulls it off. The product ships just in time. And a heartfelt email goes out praising the team for going “above and beyond” to satisfy a key customer and show what it means to have a “can-do” culture.

But you know what would’ve been better than the recognition?
Not needing the heroics in the first place.

Yes, S**t Happens

No amount of planning can prepare for everything.

And for early-stage companies, planning often feels like it prepared you for absolutely nothing.

Products fail. Customers change their minds. You overpromise to land your first huge account. Disasters strike with no warning.

In those cases, heroics are absolutely necessary—and sometimes even energizing. They build trust, sharpen instincts, create team pride. Some employees thrive on the adrenaline of pulling off the impossible.

But that’s only healthy when it’s the exception.

When heroics become routine, something is deeply broken. And like any emergency brake, if you pull it too often, it stops working.

When Heroics Become the System

There’s a cognitive trap at play here—survivorship bias.
We see that a team pulled off a miracle and assume it’s proof of a repeatable strategy.

Instead of being punished for poor planning, leadership gets rewarded with results.
Instead of examining what went wrong, they start planning around heroics.

And just like that, the company begins to normalize dysfunction:

• Fire drills become launch plans

• Crunch time becomes all the time

• Urgency replaces process

Heroics shift from rare exception to expected routine.

The Hidden Message

Many leaders are quick to send a glowing “thank you” note after a heroic push. It demonstrates humility and appreciation. Their executive coach will likely praise them for “doing the recognition thing.”

And sure, public praise is appropriate. But if that’s where it ends, the wrong message gets sent:

• “Thanks for working the weekend” = we didn’t plan this well

• “Amazing effort under pressure” = we count on burnout to deliver

• “It took a Herculean push, but we made it” = we ignored early warnings

Heroics are part of business. But repetitive heroics are a symptom of failed systems and poor management, not just signs of a committed team.

A Better Way

Smart companies know how and when to praise heroics without relying on them.
They look at the conditions that led to last-minute chaos—and fix them.
They reward consistency, not just dramatic recoveries.

They ask:

• Why did we need the rescue?

• What warning signs did we miss?

• What would have prevented the crisis in the first place?

Because the goal of good leadership isn’t just to recognize heroics—it’s to make them unnecessary.

What Does This Have to Do with Growth?

Heroics might save the quarter.
But they rarely build the kind of foundation that drives sustainable growth.

When companies rely on last-minute effort to hit targets, they’re managing for survival—not progress. They confuse short-term recovery with long-term capability.

Real growth requires systems that scale.

It requires consistency, predictability, and constant reflection—especially after a heroic sprint. Otherwise, the same problems come back. So do the same fire drills. And over time, teams burn out, dealing a major blow to the company’s growth.

Heroics can create special moments.
But growth is a habit.
And habits come from design, not desperation.

During one of my corporate stops, our executive team was reviewing a go-to-market plan for a new product that was still months away from launch. Partway through the presentation, the product manager paused and sheepishly apologized for his team’s decision to omit some features from the initial release.

He thought he was admitting a weakness.
I saw it as a strength.

His team had made deliberate tradeoffs—cutting features that weren’t essential for their target segment. Not everyone. Not every possible customer. Just the specific group of people at the center of their design.

And that’s exactly what good segmentation enables.

Let’s back up for a second and look at the textbook definition (hang in there, it’ll pay off in the end):

“Market segmentation is a strategic marketing process in which a heterogeneous market is divided into smaller, homogeneous groups of consumers or businesses that exhibit similar preferences, behaviors, or needs. This enables firms to develop and deliver more targeted value propositions, positioning, and go-to-market strategies.”

Sounds great, right?

The problem is, most companies either skip segmentation entirely or treat it like a box to check—usually with a couple personas, a catchy name, and no real data. Then they wonder why the campaign underperforms, why sales keeps chasing the wrong leads, or why no one’s quite sure who the product is actually for.

Segmentation isn’t glamorous. It’s not something you can show off in a board meeting. But done right, it quietly powers everything else—product design, messaging, targeting, pricing, growth.

Done poorly? It guarantees wasted time, wasted budget, and missed opportunities.

But We Want to Sell to Everyone, Right?

Companies resist segmentation because it seems limiting. They fear that by choosing one audience, they’re turning away all the others. Rather than “leave money on the table”, they default to trying to serve everyone.

The result is almost always the same:

• Too many product features

• Slower development timelines

• Vague messaging

• Bloated support infrastructure

• Sales teams chasing low-conversion leads

In trying not to exclude anyone, they end up connecting with no one.

No Segment = Wasted Sales Time

When you don’t have a clear, defined target segment, your sales team ends up flying blind. Reps default to chasing customers based on size or location, but who were never part of the core audience. Conversion rates drop. Messaging gets diluted. Time gets wasted on the wrong prospects.

But the damage doesn’t stop with direct sales.

It also makes channel development and management almost impossible.

How do you choose the right distributors or partners (or retailers in a B2C model) if you don’t know who you’re actually trying to reach? What capabilities should you prioritize? Which regions matter most?

I once worked with a country manager who had deployed 80% of his sales team in a region that didn’t align with the actual location of the target customer segment. Why? Because the local team had glossed over the segmentation section of the marketing plan.

The result: a costly, disruptive scramble to redeploy the field team before the product launch date.

Segmentation isn’t just a marketing slide with a bullseye on it. It’s the map that tells your entire organization where to go and how to win.

What Segmentation Actually Means

Let’s clear something up: Focusing on a specific segment doesn’t mean you can’t sell outside of it.

It just means you don’t build for everyone. And you don’t promote to everyone.

A focused segment tells you whose needs take priority. It drives product decisions, messaging, sales enablement, and launch planning. And it gives the entire organization clarity on who you’re serving and why.

You can absolutely be opportunistic when customers outside your segment show interest. But their needs shouldn’t drive your roadmap. Not at the start.

Segmentation isn’t about being exclusive forever—it’s about starting smart.

Wrong Question, Wrong Segments

One of the most common mistakes I see: teams trying to repurpose a segmentation that was built for a completely different goal. Maybe it was designed for pricing strategy, or post-sale support. But now it’s being used to drive product design, messaging, or channel strategy.

That rarely ends well.

Segmentation only works when it’s designed to answer a specific question. What drives satisfaction with support may have nothing to do with what drives purchase decisions. What helps optimize pricing might be irrelevant when it comes to positioning or feature design.

Just as bad: when segmentation is based on internal assumptions or the loudest voice in the room instead of actual market research. If your segments are born out of wishful thinking, don’t be surprised when they collapse in the real world.

That’s why I’m a strong advocate for using a third party to lead segmentation efforts. An external team brings structure, objectivity, and distance from internal politics. Internal teams should absolutely guide the work—but they shouldn’t invent customer segments from gut feel and guesswork.

Segmentation Enables Smarter, Faster Growth

When done well, segmentation accelerates everything:

• Product teams make better tradeoffs

• Marketing speaks directly to the audience that matters

• Sales focuses on the highest-probability leads

• Launches land with more impact

And once you’ve earned traction in one segment, you’re in a stronger position to expand—because now you’re learning from success, not guessing from the sidelines.

Focus First. Broaden Later.

You don’t need to serve everyone on Day 1. You just need to matter to someone specific. You can still welcome other buyers when they come along—but don’t let their needs dilute your focus.

Growth doesn’t come from trying to be everything to everyone. It comes from being exactly right for the people who matter most.

Pick a segment. Stick to it. Earn the right to grow from there.

And ignore segmentation if you want.
Just don’t act surprised when the stepchild sets the house on fire.

The “On Schedule” Lie

I like dashboards. When used correctly, they provide a clean, high-level snapshot of what matters. They let leadership teams focus on the few things that need attention instead of spending valuable time on what’s already under control.

The key phrase here: “when used correctly.”

After 25+ years in companies of all sizes, I’ve sat through too many meetings where the product launch dashboard or the initiative status spreadsheet said “on schedule.” Green dot. No concerns. Everyone exhaled.

But that wasn’t…completely accurate.

The project team was already behind. They’d been under-resourced from the start. And they didn’t feel safe asking for what they needed, because doing so might make them look incapable or risk their standing in the company. So they reported what they believed leadership wanted (or expected) to hear.

The timeline was only “on track” because no one was allowed to say otherwise.

And of course, the project slipped. Several times.

No one should have been surprised. But they were—because the truth was never on the dashboard to begin with.

Reducing Complexity to a Dot

Green/yellow/red dashboards are corporate equivalents of a Tweet. Short, simple, and easy to browse.

But they come at a cost: meaningful complexity is erased. Or worse, just ignored.

A single dot can’t communicate cross-functional risk, hidden interdependencies, vague assumptions, or morale problems. It just papers over them.

And that’s the point. Dashboards like these aren’t designed to surface complexity—they’re designed to make leaders feel like things are under control.

But here’s what too many leaders forget: leadership is hard. If it were easy, you wouldn’t get paid to do it. Leadership requires you to wrestle with ambiguity and complexity—not reduce it to a dot so everyone can feel better and move on.

Dashboards Reflect What Leaders Are Willing to Hear

Dashboards don’t show the truth. They show what people feel safe reporting.

When leaders reward green and punish red—even indirectly—teams will find ways to keep things looking “green enough.” The coloring becomes performative.

I’ve seen CEOs browbeat product managers into committing to launch dates they wanted to hear. The progress was great on paper. Wall Street was satisfied. But in reality, the team was struggling. And instead of getting help, they got pressure.

Very quickly, people learn the simple lesson: be honest, get punished. Be optimistic, get promoted.

That’s how a culture starts to blindly embrace its own dashboards…but loses touch with reality.

Soft Metrics, Hard Consequences

The problem isn’t the dashboard itself—it’s what we choose to measure.

Velocity, pipeline coverage, percent complete—these are easy to track and look great in a slide. But they often hide the signals that matter most.

• Velocity says you’re busy, but not whether you’re solving the right problem.

• Pipeline coverage says you have action, but not whether the deals will close.

• “80% complete” sounds reassuring, until you realize the last 20% contains all the hard work.

You can have a green dot and still be weeks behind. You can be “80% complete” and still 6 months away from launch.

Soft metrics lull teams and leaders into a false sense of clarity, that is until the deadline passes, the customer churns, or the revenue doesn’t show up.

False clarity is more dangerous than honest uncertainty.

Better Questions > Better Dots

The fix isn’t fancier dashboards. It’s better leadership behavior around them.

Bob Howell, former CEO of Scient and a mentor of mine, had a simple mantra that we tried our best to follow: bad news first.

That phrase set the tone. It told everyone: honesty isn’t punished here—it’s expected. And it made meetings a LOT more productive. Instead of spending the bulk of the time talking about what was going well, we used the time to share and solve problems.

That’s what great dashboards should do.

Not just present a color. But spark a conversation.

If Everything’s Green…

If everything’s green and nothing’s working, your dashboard isn’t broken—your leadership is.

Dashboards should clarify, not conceal.
They should help leaders engage, not disconnect.
They should reflect reality, not shape it.

So instead of asking for cleaner slides, start asking for harder truths. Then reward honesty.

Because growth doesn’t come from green. It comes from clarity.

More than a few times, I’ve been at companies that hit a wall. Growth had stalled. Market share was flat. Our response? Swing harder. We spun up an internal search for ‘bold new ideas’—conceiving a wild array of new products, spinning up innovation labs, even exploring adjacent segments or entire industries where we had no real advantage. From the outside, it looked bold and brave. Internally, it was chaos.

We weren’t short on ideas. We were short on discipline.

What we lacked wasn’t vision or boldness—it was the willingness to say no. No to the new “pretty good” product that distracted from the under-resourced great one. No to the executive pet project with no strategic rationale. No to the initiatives that pulled resources away from the work most likely to move the needle.

The truth is, saying no is often the hardest part of leadership. It’s also the most essential for growth.

The Myth: Growth Comes From Saying Yes

Most companies—especially those struggling to grow—equate progress with expansion. Add more features. Enter new markets. Launch new initiatives. The word “yes” gets mistaken for ambition. “Yes” makes people feel collaborative. Supportive. Open-minded.

New initiatives unburden you from the nagging, known problems that’ve been keeping you up at night. They’re not weighed down by inconvenient things like facts…or math.

But unchecked yeses are a trap.

Every “yes” comes with hidden costs: complexity, distraction, operational strain. What looks like growth often turns into organizational clutter that slows you down and obscures what actually matters.

The Reality: Growth Comes From Focus

One of my good friends is co-founder of the fashion brand Cuyana, whose tagline is “Fewer, better”. It's meant to evoke minimalist elegance and reduce mindless consumption, but it might as well be a corporate strategy mantra.

The most successful companies aren’t the ones with the most ideas—they’re the ones that know which ideas not to pursue. They create focus. They say no to distractions. They channel energy into the few moves that truly matter.

Saying no frees up resources, sharpens strategy, and aligns teams. It forces clarity around what’s worth doing—and just as important, what’s not.

Why Saying No Makes You the Bad Guy

No one wants to be the person who says no to a colleague’s initiative. Or tells a team that their project is getting shut down. Or challenges the CEO’s latest “sure bet” or “gut feeling”, perhaps even at risk of derailing their future with that company.

But every organization needs that person.

Not because they’re risk-averse, but because they care about protecting momentum. Focus doesn’t happen by consensus. It requires someone willing to be unpopular in the moment to protect the company’s future. To be the realist when magical thinking starts to take hold.

That’s the job. And yes, it makes you the bad guy sometimes.

When “No” Is Fear—and When It’s Strategy

To be clear, not all “no” is created equal.

Some leaders say no reflexively. They resist change because they just don’t like change. They shoot down new ideas to maintain control. That’s not strategic—that’s insecurity.

But when “no” is used to protect focus and execution, it’s a powerful lever. It’s the kind of “no” that creates space for better thinking, deeper work, and stronger outcomes.

The difference comes down to intent: Are you protecting clarity or avoiding discomfort?

Fewer, Better

Growth is often framed as a story of addition. But for most companies, real growth requires subtraction. Fewer priorities. Fewer distractions. Fewer empty yeses.

If you want to grow, stop chasing every opportunity that crosses your desk. Stop treating “yes” as your default setting. Stop trying to keep everyone happy.

Say no more often. Explain why. And get comfortable being the bad guy.

That’s how you lead. That’s how you grow.

We’ve gotten sloppy with language. Social media didn’t start the slide, but it certainly accelerated it—forcing complex ideas into bite-sized phrases, acronyms, and emoticons, all while blurring distinctions that used to matter. Over time, words that once carried precision have been flattened into interchangeable mush, and concepts that barely belonged in the same category have been treated like synonyms.

We confuse attention with influence, hype with traction, and charisma with credibility. We talk about growth when we mean exposure, and treat branding like it’s just a well-designed logo. These aren’t harmless mix-ups—they subtly change how we think, who we trust, and what we celebrate.

One distortion in particular irritates me more than most. For years, we’ve heard too many non-marketers praise a handful of other non-marketers as “great marketers.” And in doing so, they’ve quietly corrupted the meaning of the label—blurring the line between two entirely different characters: the person who creates real value by solving real problems, and the con man chasing a quick buck.

First, if you’re not a marketer, there’s a good chance your concept of marketing begins and ends with promotion. Is promotion part of marketing? Sure. But is it the whole thing? Not even close. (More on that in a separate article.) And if you’ve been trained to think of marketing solely as promotion, you’re probably also wired to confuse good promotion with loud promotion, one of the con man’s most utilized—and sadly—effective tools.

Second, and more importantly, “great marketing” isn’t some vague label you just slap onto anyone who draws attention. It actually means something. Philip Kotler—often called the father of modern marketing—defined it as “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. It is the art of helping your customer become better off.” That’s not what con men do. That’s what they pretend to do.

Contrast marketers with con men. While both may share a profit motive, the path the con man takes to get there couldn’t be more different.

Great marketers look for problems to solve.
Con men look for marks to exploit.

Great marketers earn trust and build lasting value.
Con men chase quick hits and fast exits before they’re found out.

Great marketers dig into complexity to craft real solutions.
Con men sell overly-simplistic answers to problems they barely understand.

Great marketers are proud to stand behind what they sell.
Con men are indignant when they’re held accountable for their con.

Great marketers use their ears—listening to customers to improve and evolve.
Con men rely on their mouths—overwhelming skepticism with noise and bravado.

And as if the original deception weren’t damaging enough, the con man will target the same mark repeatedly—exploiting psychological biases like the sunk-cost fallacy to keep them hooked. This is where our subconscious fights to defend our self-image by downplaying the initial mistake, but also makes us less likely to take protective action—like cutting our losses and walking away once we see the fraud for what it is.

So if we want to glorify con men for how cleverly they separate people from their money, attention, or votes, that’s a choice we can each make. But let’s be clear about one thing: don’t call it great marketing! And don’t rob real marketers of the credit they’ve earned—by solving real problems without resorting to deception.