There's a question that shows up constantly in PM interviews and in H-planning conversations: "How do you set goals for your team?" Most people answer it by describing SMART goals or OKRs. That's the wrong level. Those are frameworks for documenting goals. They're not a diagnostic for figuring out what the target should actually be in the first place. This post walks you through a diagnostic framework - the inputs and thought process for setting targets once your north star is already...

The most common career stall I see in senior leaders has nothing to do with performance. It has to do with visibility. Here is a pattern I see constantly in executive coaching: a leader who is clearly operating at the next level, with bigger thinking, broader influence, and better judgment than their title would suggest, who is not getting the recognition, the promotion, or the comp that reflects where they actually are. When I dig in, the problem is almost never capability. It is a gap...

Most leaders are sprinting to close the AI knowledge gap. That is the wrong race. Here is something worth sitting with: every one of your competitors is sending their teams to the same AI trainings, reading the same AI newsletters, and deploying Copilot on the same schedule. If the race is "who learns AI fastest," you are not going to win by much. And even if you do, it is a race to a commodity. The leaders who will separate themselves in the next three years are not the most AI-fluent. They...