Focus

Dashboards hide the truth. Obsessing over clicks and cost per lead feels safe while your brand erodes. Trade vanity metrics for signs of trust, pricing power, shorter sales cycles.

Candid confessions from marketers reveal why your spend stalls. Spreadsheets lie, agencies push what's convenient, urgency is manufactured, and trust beats flash. Real growth comes from patient brand building.

**If you make it to the top, you'll have one of the best and most delightful products in your market** The product design and user experience design industries are full of vague phrases like "delightful experiences" without a lot of specifics about how to get there. Many designers find themselves fl…

Customers will not study your product. This piece shows how sharp positioning, emotional cues, proactive feedback, and relentless messaging create attention fast and convey your value proposition before interest fades.

It’s a little disturbing to realize how much of what we do is simply imitation. If you start analyzing your business objectively, you’ll probably come to the (somewhat depressing) realizing that a lot of it is simply rehashed ideas and behaviors adopted from your competitors, the way you did things …

Skip vanity metrics and chase real relationships. Engage, listen, and give value. Grow steadily without viral fantasies. Show up where your audience lives. Create original work people actually care about.

At larger companies, the phrase “maximize shareholder value” has become a trite summary of what they believe is their core purpose. At smaller companies, it’s usually translated into plain English: “Make the owners a bunch of money.” If you dig deeper, the actual purpose is almost always different. …

Stop hemming and hawing. A clear purpose turns messy choices into reflex, rallies your team, justifies tough sacrifices, and keeps you advancing like a disciplined chess player while competitors scramble.

Rediscover roots. Trade trend chasing for clarity by answering tough questions about purpose, values, positioning, audience, style, and vision that realign teams, sharpen decisions, and build momentum.

One of the hardest questions we ask in our discovery workshops is also one of the simplest and most fundamental: “Why does your company exist?” You’d think most CEOs would have a ready (and passionate) response to that question, but most don’t. When asked that question, they usually keep their compo…

There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly obsolete. It’s called “design thinking,…

Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they want, add it to their cart, a…

Haiku’s limits reveal a creative superpower. Embrace real world constraints, balance freedom with discipline, and watch work sharpen, teams align, and surprising solutions emerge where budgets, timelines, and purpose collide.

Why identical outcomes spark love or fury. Explore how dopamine, clear communication, and expectation management turn projects into loyalty. Discover healthcare inspired habits that keep customer experience steady.

Inexperienced marketers tend to fall back on a benefit-focused approach, believing they’ll win customers by listing their virtues (better products, better customer service, technical improvements, etc.) Unfortunately, most practical benefits don’t address the issues that really frustrate consumers: …