Shift focus from 'value' (a lagging indicator like profit) to 'utility' (a leading indicator of your team's capability). This fosters a proactive, "glass half full" perspective on what the organization can accomplish, rather than fixating on past results.
Prioritize sustainable, long-term growth and value creation over immediate, expedient gains that could damage the business's future. This philosophy guides decisions from product development to strategic planning, ensuring the company builds a lasting competitive advantage instead of chasing fleeting wins.
Businesses should focus on creating repeatable, scalable systems for daily operations rather than fixating on lagging indicators like closed deals. By refining the process—how you qualify leads, run meetings, and follow up—you build predictability and rely on strong habits, not just individual 'heroes'.
A key differentiator for companies that scale successfully is their focus. Failing companies obsess over and incentivize leading indicators like MQL volume. Successful ones use them only as directional guides while remaining fixated on lagging indicators like revenue.
Many companies focus only on growing revenue, which is an output. A high-performance culture focuses on the inputs: the personal and professional growth of its people. Investing in employees' skills, confidence, and well-being is what ultimately drives sustainable financial success, not the other way around.
Don't measure momentum solely with metrics like revenue. At its core, it's a shared state of mind and belief system within the team. Its true strength is determined by how many people actively participate in that belief, not just by the leader's individual optimism.
Instead of fixating on lagging outcomes like final scores, leaders should identify and replicate "golden hours"—periods where inputs, behaviors, and strategies were working perfectly. This shifts focus from results to the controllable process that creates them.
Shift your team's language from tracking output (e.g., 'deployed XYZ API') to tracking outcomes. Reframe milestones to focus on the business capability you have 'unlocked' for other teams. This small linguistic change reorients the team toward business impact and clarifies your contribution to metrics like NPS.
Escape the trap of chasing top-line revenue. Instead, make contribution margin (revenue minus COGS, ad spend, and discounts) your primary success metric. This provides a truer picture of business health and aligns the entire organization around profitable, sustainable growth rather than vanity metrics.
The most durable growth comes from seeing your job as connecting users to the product's value. This reframes the work away from short-term, transactional metric hacking toward holistically improving the user journey, which builds a healthier business.
Shift the team's language and metrics away from output. Instead of celebrating a deployed API, measure and report on what that API enabled for other teams and the business. This directly connects platform work to tangible results and impact.