Build, Launch, Repeat

From talk to action in meetings

David Almazán — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:27:15 GMT

Imagine two identical teams: same talent, same resources and the same goals. One moves fast and makes good decisions. The other gets stuck and fails to move forward. What sets them apart? Why does one move ahead and the other does not?

We usually attribute a team’s progress to the experience and capability of each member, but I believe there is a less visible and much more decisive factor, the team’s ability to collaborate. When that ability fails, meetings drag on and decisions get watered down. And it is not because intelligence is lacking, it is because leadership is missing in the collaboration process. What do I mean by that?

Essentially, a meeting is a method for making decisions. But not all meetings are the same. Some are for exploring, others for deciding and others for informing. Mixing objectives in the same meeting is a recipe for disaster. That is why, before you start, ask yourself: What is the goal of this meeting? Are we here to think, to decide or to inform?

When the objective is clear, important things start to reveal themselves: who speaks, who decides, what information is missing and, above all, why we are not moving toward the expected outcome. With that information, it becomes easier to take on that invisible but crucial role, being the person who helps the group navigate from chaos to certainty, with clear decisions, next steps and owners.

What is interesting is that the more people assume that role, the more the impact of the meeting multiplies. And that does not mean everyone has to decide about everything. Having clarity about who collaborates, who decides and who executes reduces friction and accelerates results.

In short, a good meeting needs clear boundaries (time, objective and roles), and it also needs someone who takes responsibility for the collaboration process. Without collaboration, talent does not matter much, because that meeting will not have been very useful.

Can AI replace human judgment?

David Almazán — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 08:00:40 GMT

We are living through an exponential change in our work. So profound that, in all likelihood, future generations will read about or watch our daily tasks in virtual museums and ask themselves, “How could they do this or that in that way?”

Whether we like it or not, this is how complex systems evolve. Our present is the result of many small changes that have been happening over time. And today, as participants in this stage of our existence, we can also contribute to a better future.

Does small mean irrelevant? No. But do you often think about the contributions of Archimedes, Mandela, Galileo, Curie, Gandhi, Ashoka, Turing or Gutenberg? Probably not. One day we will all be relevant in our irrelevance. And it is fine for it to be that way. Because the world is not about us. It is about how we serve the world.

Artificial intelligence is, and will be, extraordinary in helping society evolve in an exponential way. It will become more and more powerful, faster and more capable. It will help us make better decisions and free our creativity for new occupations. But there is one thing I am sure of, an AI will never be able to make decisions with human judgment.

A million years from now, no AI will be as incredible as the human brain. The machines of the future will be able to identify and learn patterns, analyze data and make decisions autonomously. But they will not have intuition, they will never have feelings or human judgment. They will not be able to be amazed by everything we cannot even explain or understand and that gives meaning to our life in this universe.

That meaning and judgment give relevance to our irrelevance. And with that judgment we will always govern what is artificial, to put our advances at the service of future generations, as we have already done, time and again, over thousands of years in the past.

Why being busy is overrated

David Almazán — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:39:36 GMT

“I’m too busy” has become a symbol of value in many professional environments. Back to back meetings. Dozens of emails. Constant deliveries. But what if being busy were precisely the problem? What if that apparent productivity were hiding a lack of real impact?

The rise of AI is amplifying this tension. Because, for the first time, many visible tasks, summaries, emails, reports, documentation, tickets, can be done faster, or even fully automated. And yet, in many organizations, visible effort is still rewarded more than results.

However, the tasks with the greatest potential share a very interesting characteristic, the disconnection between effort and outcome. This idea is key. It is closely linked to wealth and abundance. A well made decision can generate a disproportionate impact. And this disconnection between effort and outcome can be applied to any job.

When you start thinking about your daily tasks based on an impact and effort matrix, everything changes. When you stop asking how much work do I have, and instead ask what result am I seeking, you gain much greater clarity about what you should stop doing, because it generates no impact, delegate, because it does not require your judgment, automate, because it is repetitive, or simply eliminate, because no one will miss it.

Being busy is comfortable. It gives a sense of progress. But real advancement requires choosing impact, regardless of whether your effort is more or less visible. You will see how you gain far more time for what truly matters

Less noise for more Mindful leadership

David Almazán — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 09:27:34 GMT

Think back to your last “important” meeting. Were you really there, or were you mentally answering emails, going over tasks, or checking chats? In medium and large companies we spend so many hours in meetings that giving people our full attention has become the exception, not the rule.

Sometimes we confuse leadership with information: more meetings, more updates, more dashboards, when in reality it is much more about presence, connection, and deep reflection on what the team, users, or the organization need at that moment. Without that mental clarity, without that presence, it is easy to end up exhausted in irrelevant meetings, irrelevant micro decisions, and unproductive time.

So what does it actually mean, in practice, to lead with presence? Presence is uncomfortable because it forces you to stay in the moment, without distractions, without a mask. It is about deliberately deciding where you place your attention when you are with other people. And you can set the stage for every participant’s presence to show up. How can you do that?

Set objectives: Why are we here?
Reduce the noise: You cannot be present if you are doing something else at the same time. You might feel “unproductive”, but presence and productivity are not opposites, presence is what makes that moment valuable instead of corporate theater.
Hold your presence: You cannot ask others to be present if your mind is full of self criticism, comparison, and distractions, which makes you impatient, interrupt, and want everything done your way. So before each meeting, pause for a moment. Notice your mood and come back to your center so you can sustain that presence and pass it on to others.

In the end, the difference is not in your calendar, but in how you choose to show up in every conversation. You can keep piling up meetings, or you can start using each one as a real space for attention, clarity, and decision. That choice, repeated many times, is what eventually defines your leadership.

Why AI needs new product managers

David Almazán — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 09:28:55 GMT

Imagine this: you have a clear idea for a digital product you want to build. You know what the user’s problem is, you see the opportunity, but between decisions, dependencies and meetings, months go by before you see anything real. Meanwhile, the market moves faster than your roadmap. Do you really need that many steps to move forward?

In many product teams, the work itself is not that complex, what has become complex is the process. Every stage adds a brake: no time in calendars to validate, successive approvals, the need to rely on multiple data sources. All of that turns into slow delivery cycles, diluted responsibility, a lot of activity but little impact. Yet the paradigm shift is close.

If you work in digital product, you will have to leverage AI to evolve your profile into a product maker or a product builder. What do I mean by that? Someone who can take an idea from insight to launch, relying on agents and tools to automate a large part of validation. And what will happen to your role? Do not worry, the work that AI cannot do will be more important than ever.

The vision to formulate a clear stance on the product, the empathy to deeply understand user needs, the communication skills to align every stakeholder around that vision, the creativity to imagine solutions beyond the obvious and, maybe most important, the judgment to make high quality decisions in complex contexts. In all of this, you are better than any AI.

Everything else, exploratory analysis, early sketches, design tests, interview summaries, even functional prototypes, can be accelerated with AI. This is why product work will stop being a heavy sequence of tasks and deliverables and will become a fluid interaction between you and your tools. That is where a new space opens up, for those who not only use AI but reinvent themselves as product builders in this new world of work. And that opens up a world of possibilities.

Let’s break it: Why OKRs fail

David Almazán — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 15:20:37 GMT

You have defined a roadmap, you have assigned squads, you have created OKRs, and yet you still feel that each team is doing its own thing. Marketing wants one thing, product wants something else, and technology prioritizes another. If everything is theoretically aligned, why does it seem in practice that each team is rowing in a different direction?

It is not always easy to find a shared direction among so many presentations and documents. You can have the mission and quarterly goals very well defined, but if there is no clear and visual common objective that everyone understands, it is very likely that each area will work on its own KPIs, priorities will shift suddenly due to internal politics, and strategic decisions will get blocked because no one wants to compromise on their own goals. In short, without a concrete and global target, each person invents their own.

And it is completely normal for this to happen in large and small organizations. Your job as a leader is to define strategic objectives that are so clear and concrete that they cannot be misunderstood. How?

Make the objective concrete, measurable, and relevant: You only need to answer as clearly as possible. What do we want to achieve? Why does it truly matter for the user and for the business? What deadlines and constraints do we have to meet it?
Connect each team to the shared objective: Once defined, each team can ask itself, How can we contribute to that objective?
Drive collaboration between teams: Having one or several shared objectives does not eliminate conflict, it makes it useful. Instead of arguing about who is right, the discussion shifts to which decision brings us closer to the common goal.

With these three actions, you will help teams listen carefully before deciding, promote solutions for the common good, and be willing to give up part of their agenda in favor of the whole.

Obviously, you should not be naive and you will surely encounter resistance. You will have to repeat and return to the objectives many times, and you will not always find easy answers to difficult decisions.

But one thing is clear. Designing clear shared objectives is the foundation for leading product, teams, and impactful decision making. If you do not have that foundation, good luck.

Reduce confusion, not uncertainty

David Almazán — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 08:10:43 GMT

Have you ever felt that you are working a lot but not really moving forward? When we do not see clear progress in our projects, we usually assume that something is going wrong, but is it actually bad not to know how to move forward? It can feel frustrating or uncomfortable, yes, but not having a plan does not always mean something is wrong. In conditions of uncertainty, chaos is not an error. It is the sign that you are building something without data, information or certainties. And it is completely normal.

In these circumstances, the most agile path is to reduce confusion, not uncertainty. Uncertainty will always be there. And in the middle of all that noise, you can find clarity by going back to the basics: what problem you are solving this week, what you learned this week and what you need to validate next week.

This simple cycle helps a lot because when there is a clear discovery rhythm, when you reflect, decide, test and adjust, chaos turns into movement. And that dynamic is essential. A team without clear movement, with an irregular rhythm, gets frustrated more easily than a team that has a habit of navigating uncertainty.

Clarity is not only strategic, it is also emotional. It is simple and powerful at the same time. When the team is in motion, its pace becomes more regular, more stimulating and here is the important part: the teams that move forward are not the ones who always know what to do, but the ones who have built the habit of advancing even when they do not know.

When you maintain that rhythm, the feeling of stagnation fades away and something much more valuable appears: confidence. Confidence in the process, in the team and in your ability to find the solution along the way.

What makes a product truly indispensable

David Almazán — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 07:35:40 GMT

Have you ever wondered why some products keep us coming back while others —even if they’re useful— quietly disappear from our lives? The difference lies in an emotion that’s rarely mentioned in product design: the sense of achievement.

In a world saturated with apps and tools, there’s a truth we often overlook: people return to a product when it helps them feel better about themselves. Not faster. Not more efficient. Better. But what does “better” really mean? Among the emotions tied to product use, feeling better usually means feeling your own progress —that sense of having advanced, learned, created, or solved something that once felt difficult.

And here’s the key: our deepest motivation doesn’t come from finishing things, but from becoming someone who can do them better.

In the tech world, companies often compete on speed, features, or precision. But the real competition happens somewhere else: in how the user feels after using your product. On this, Apple has always been a step ahead —whether you like it or not— and it’s hard to deny.

If you work in technology, your challenge is not to build products that do more things, but products that make people feel they can do more things. That difference —small but fundamental— is what separates a useful product from an indispensable one.

Your leadership story is already written

David Almazán — Fri, 14 Nov 2025 09:24:25 GMT

Many managers have an impressive list of skills… but what happens when someone asks you: What was the hardest moment in your career, and how did you solve it? If this question blocks you, I’m sure you don’t lack skills. You lack clear stories.

In leadership roles, you’re not evaluated only by what you know, but by how you think and make decisions under uncertainty. And that can’t be measured through course lists — it’s revealed through stories: launches, conflicts, failures, pivots… a path that isn’t built by adding skills, but by turning experiences into narratives that show how you think, who you are, and how you act.

When you collect good stories: well-structured, aligned with the problems companies want to solve, supported by metrics, you stop being just another manager and become someone with a clear narrative of impact and learning. And who wouldn’t want someone like that as a colleague or leader? The art of communication is one of the two most important skills a leader can develop.

Think about it… a leader is rarely the most technical person, the most creative, or the one with the longest list of courses. What sets them apart is something deeper: a collection of decisions that reveal their judgment, presence, and ability to communicate and drive teams and decisions forward.

I’ve been lucky to learn throughout my career from very good and very bad leaders. I can’t give names or clues, but I respect all of them. They showed me which ways of being, which judgments, and which actions truly move people through trust, passion, and a genuine desire to help your team grow. Judgment is not something you can learn from a book. It’s a consequence of something deeper: the true desire to grow with your team toward goals greater than yourself.

And here’s the final idea: leadership stories are not born from success, but from difficulty. It’s there, in that uncomfortable territory, where judgment is forged. It’s where your real professional story begins.

You don’t need more skills. You need to shape the experiences you’ve already lived and expose yourself to new ones! Because your stories don’t just explain who you are today… they reveal who you are becoming. And in leadership, that means everything.

How to define impact like a CEO

David Almazán — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:25:18 GMT

If tomorrow you were CEO for a day, would you approve your own team’s budget? It’s an uncomfortable question, I know. But that’s exactly why it’s valuable: it forces us to look squarely at the real contribution we make to the business.

Most teams live in a tricky balance: between the necessary support tasks and the product improvements everyone asks for… and the demand to deliver business results. At the end of the cycle, there’s always an executive who asks: how much of all this has truly impacted business growth?

That’s where the conversation gets interesting: what is “impact”? Are we talking about ROI? Direct revenue? Operating margin? User experience? Brand reputation? Early product validation? The list of possible answers is endless, and to address them, we need to take one step back. What is business development? Inevitably, one answer depends on the other, right?

That’s why, if tomorrow you were CEO, your most important task would be to visualize how you want the business to advance from the broadest possible perspective. That vision is what allows you to set definitions of impact that guide every team.

How do you make this concrete? As CEO or area lead, you’ll have to declare one or more impact definitions per business unit. In other words, define different impact metrics so different teams can contribute to different dimensions of business development within that business unit.

In the end, the uncomfortable question—“would you approve your own team’s budget?”—is much more than a mental exercise. It’s a clarity test. Because if you can’t explain in one sentence how your team contributes to business development, it means you’re measuring too much or measuring the wrong things.

Thinking like a CEO—even for a day—forces you to focus on what truly matters and to defend your teams as obvious, clear bets, even in moments of uncertainty.

How to Make a Difference

David Almazán — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 06:46:22 GMT

Hello! Check out this month's top articles to inspire better decision-making. Feel free to share with your colleagues.

Turning insights into collective memory

David Almazán — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 09:21:22 GMT

You’ve probably heard or read the phrase: “knowledge is our most valuable asset.” But doesn’t that knowledge slip away like water through our hands? Meetings, interviews, insights, documents… everything piles up, but very little is preserved or shared. The reality is that each team does its research, stores it in scattered folders, personal notes, or in the memory of a few. And how much of that knowledge is shared?

Organizations don’t fail because of a lack of research, but because of a lack of collective memory. Information is created, but it’s neither consolidated nor effectively shared. This is one of the great dilemmas of research: effort is invested in generating insights, but those learnings rarely cross team boundaries. In practice, this means that different teams repeat the same research, make the same mistakes, or try solutions that were already tested.

How can we stop knowledge from being lost?

Centralize information: Create a single space where interviews, reports, and key learnings are stored.
Build living repositories: Encourage people to update and document what they’ve learned so the information evolves and doesn’t become obsolete.
Make it accessible to everyone: Democratizing access multiplies impact. Anyone should be able to access and learn without barriers.
Foster continuous learning: Artificial intelligence can detect patterns, link scattered insights, and alert when a hypothesis has already been tested. This way, collective memory becomes a competitive advantage.

That’s why knowledge generation is just as important as its management. The challenge is not to accumulate more data, but to transform it into useful and accessible knowledge so that anyone (including new hires) can quickly understand practices, products, and ways of working. Organizations that turn their learnings into collective memory move faster, make fewer mistakes, and make decisions with greater confidence. That’s the real competitive advantage.

Stop calling your plan a vision

David Almazán — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 07:07:59 GMT

If you’ve written or read several sentences that sound nice but don’t move anyone to act, you don’t have a vision. You have a plan. A plan is a roadmap: it states what to do, when, and by whom. (By the way, you can apply this to teams, but also to yourself)

A vision is something else entirely: it’s a story of the future we want to create, capable of inspiring, guiding difficult decisions, and channeling everyone’s energy toward a common purpose. In essence, it’s the bridge between purpose and execution. So, do you have a vision or a plan?

Some teams fall into the trap of calling a set of objectives, dates, or tasks a “vision.”
A vision is imaginative yet plausible, elevated yet unbound, and projected several years ahead. And to build that vision, you don’t need to be a poet—you need to understand how to craft a story:

Start with the why: The first step to building a vision is to answer honestly: Why are we doing this? The purpose is the emotional anchor that connects with people and gives meaning to decisions.
Make the future visible: Visualize the problem and present a solution as if it already existed, in the present tense.
Choose a protagonist: A person or group with their goals, limitations, and context.
Define the impact: Show how that vision will change the lives of those protagonists, users, or society.

In the end, a vision is not a declaration; it’s a direction that guides both the operational and emotional sides. It’s an answer to how we will change, transform, or improve the lives of users or society—fueling faster decisions and sustaining ambition over time. From there, every delivery should bring real value to the users’ journey. That’s when the narrative turns into results.

So… what’s your vision? Or better yet… what’s your purpose?

The phoenix mindset: How to rise again

David Almazán — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 11:03:57 GMT

We’ve all experienced moments when, overnight, everything falls apart. It could be getting fired, failing a final exam, losing a key client, or seeing a project you believed in get canceled. I could list a thousand examples. And I’m not talking about a simple mistake or obstacle—I mean that blow that abruptly stops everything you thought was certain, both personally and professionally.

And yes, the most common reaction is to break down, because in those moments, our perspective is limited. The emotional hit we’ve just taken clouds our vision and pushes us to believe there’s no other way forward. However, here’s a key belief: the greatest successes often follow the biggest setbacks.

How can we come out stronger from life’s setbacks?

Identify that you’re in a setback: It’s not always obvious. Prolonged stagnation or loss of motivation are signs you’re no longer moving forward. Recognizing it early prevents you from wasting more energy on a dead-end situation.
Accept discomfort as a growth tool: Uncomfortable moments prompt you to reevaluate what you truly want. Instead of suppressing them, use them as a laboratory for new ideas.
Expand your community: Reinvention rarely happens in isolation. Most new opportunities come from interactions. Connect with people who inspire you, distance yourself from environments that don’t support you, and make relationship-building a habit.
Rise like a phoenix: Coming back isn’t “returning to normal”; it’s building a renewed version of yourself. It might mean a professional pivot, a shift in your relationships, or a new personal challenge you set for yourself.

If you’re going through a setback, take this as your guide: the difference between sinking and reinventing yourself is understanding that a setback is not a punishment—it’s an opportunity to cultivate a new stage of success. A setback is not the end of the road—it’s the point where a stronger version of you begins. And the right time to reinvent yourself is not “someday”—it’s right after you get back up. So go on. Start flying.

How to lead innovative minds

David Almazán — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 08:24:13 GMT

If your team includes people who act like entrepreneurs—always eager to learn, innovate, and take risks—you have an incredibly valuable asset. But you also face a challenge: this type of talent is not easy to retain.

They are creative, autonomous, and capable of making decisions in uncertain environments. And in today’s fast-changing job market, intrapreneurs are in high demand. The question is: how can you make them want to stay and give their best within your project?

You can identify this type of talent by some key traits:

Entrepreneurial mindset: They see their career as their own business.
High tolerance for change: They seek meaningful projects and continuous learning.
Adaptability: They thrive in uncertain and competitive environments.

As you might imagine, these professionals don’t work well in environments with micromanagement or cultures that penalize mistakes. They need autonomy, real challenges, and room to experiment. They are outsiders who don’t require supervision but guidance.

However, some organizations make the mistake of hiring disruptive profiles under an old work paradigm: they track tasks through dashboards, lack external openness, and have no structures to reward initiative. The result? These are precisely the dynamics that create the most frustration for high-value talent—and speed up their departure.

That’s why leading these profiles requires a different approach:

Purposeful autonomy: Define the “what” (clear and measurable objectives) but allow freedom in the “how.” Avoid unnecessary controls and encourage experimentation.
Culture of learning: Replace fear of failure with curiosity to learn fast. Publicly recognize attempts, even when they don’t deliver the expected result.
Guidance over supervision: Shift the leader’s role from boss to mentor or strategic partner. Spend time understanding their motivations and aligning their personal goals with the company’s.

Ultimately, entrepreneurial talent is not retained with a contract or a title, but with a value proposition that combines impact, growth, and freedom. Intrapreneurs are not just looking for a paycheck—they want a place where they can grow, experiment, and make an impact.

In a market where the most valuable professionals choose where to invest their energy, effective leadership is not about keeping them inside, but about creating a place they want to come back to every day

A CEO's perspective for product teams

David Almazán — Mon, 11 Aug 2025 07:38:15 GMT

If you work in an established company, your product team’s annual costs likely exceed one million dollars. Think of the investment in multiple squads of developers, designers, and managers… and now ask yourself: What return are you getting?

If you can’t answer that from a business perspective, that team is at risk. Yep… but don’t feel bad. This is the reality many product teams face: a common phenomenon that drains resources, frustrates teams, and puts project continuity in danger.

Why does this happen? For years, product management has been romanticized, inspired by examples like Google, Meta, or Spotify. But most companies do not operate under the same conditions as these tech giants: they don’t have a constant flow of venture capital, their products don’t “print money,” and every investment is under strict financial scrutiny.

As a result, many teams work on low-impact initiatives: adding shiny new features, optimizing a few metrics, and getting lost in the OKR bureaucracy… while the business keeps asking: Where is the ROI?

To avoid this situation, you must understand how your team’s work drives the business. Adopting an impact-first mindset not only improves results; it also protects your team’s motivation and future.

How can you align your team’s work with business goals?

Draw a direct line between work and impact: Every initiative should be explainable in one sentence connecting effort to business. For example: “If we achieve X, it will generate Y in revenue, cost savings, or strategic growth.”
Think like a CEO: Ask yourself, “What would the CEO do in my position?” (If you are the CEO, this perspective forces you to prioritize whatever keeps the business alive and competitive.)
Finally, make ROI visible: Beyond measuring metrics, tell impact stories. For instance: “The improvement in metric X resulted in Y cost savings.”

In the end, the most successful teams are not the ones that ship the most features; they are the ones that connect every decision to the company’s future. The impact-first mindset transforms the way teams work: they stop measuring success by speed or volume of outputs and start measuring it by the impact they create in revenue, cost savings, and strategic growth.

Protect your time, boost your impact

David Almazán — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 06:22:15 GMT

“Shall we discuss it in five minutes? Sure.” The conversation begins, and almost without noticing, more than half an hour has passed. Does this feel familiar? That extra time is more common than we think.

Modern work culture has normalized the illusion of productivity, where being busy seems synonymous with adding value. However, jumping from meeting to meeting, constantly checking notifications, or replying to messages every few minutes undoubtedly affects our ability to solve important problems.

In essence, solving problems requires time to think, but concentration is an increasingly scarce resource. All these moments of distraction come with a huge cost: slow-moving projects, impulsive decisions, and a chronic sense of unproductivity. In other words, lack of focus is a direct threat to your execution and strategic clarity.

Good time management comes from practicing conscious leadership. Instead of micromanaging hours, you create an environment where attention is treated as a strategic asset.

So, how can you regain control of your time and attention?

Redefine your priorities: Focus on the tasks that create the most impact in your role. Everything else is secondary.
Eliminate multitasking as a culture: Focus on one thing at a time and teach your team to do the same.
Schedule deep work blocks: Dedicate moments of the day —individually or as a team— to work without interruptions or meetings. These are your highest-value hours.
Optimize meetings: Make them less frequent, shorter, and with clear objectives. Every meeting without a purpose is a collective attention drain.
Centralize your planning: Use platforms to organize tasks, deadlines, and projects in one place. Freeing your mind from operational chaos is key to better thinking.
Measure productivity by deliverables, not hours: A finished strategic report is worth more than many “busy” hours with no clear results.

All of this sounds great, but you will likely face cultural resistance. That’s normal. To implement it, you’ll need to become a time ambassador. Little by little, the rest of the team will follow your lead.

And do you know why? Because if you protect your attention as the strategic resource it is, you will not only achieve more in less time: you will also lead with greater impact, make decisions with more certainty, and give your team back the most valuable asset in the modern professional world: time to think

The art of leading with authenticity

David Almazán — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:37:17 GMT

How many times have you felt that your job looks “right” to others but feels empty to you? Some professionals follow socially validated paths—the stable job, the expected promotion, the project that “gives visibility”—but one day they wake up with the feeling of living someone else’s life. This disconnection is no accident; it’s the result of ignoring a fundamental question: How do I feel doing this?

In corporate environments, it’s easy to get trapped in approval dynamics: hitting the quarterly number, achieving a rating, or impressing the committee. But when all our decisions are driven by external validation, authenticity dies. Creativity, innovation, and purpose fade when work becomes just a script to follow.

That’s why answering the question “How do I feel doing this?” might sound poetic, but it’s highly strategic. Leading with authenticity, making decisions that resonate with you, and allowing teams to connect emotionally with their work generate more sustainable results than any KPI.

So, how can you listen to how you feel while doing what you do? Applying emotional awareness to leadership and decision-making involves a few things, such as:

Listen before you decide: Just like a musician tunes their ear before playing, observe and respect your emotional intuition before acting.
Filter the noise: Learn to differentiate external pressure from what truly drives impact and meaning in your work.
Redefine success from within: Replace external validation with the satisfaction of the creative process and the learning that comes from doing.
Act from authenticity: Decisions aligned with your purpose are born from inner commitment, never from obligation.

In a world full of metrics and comparisons, your competitive advantage can be something as simple—and as powerful—as regaining the ability to listen to your intuition and act with authenticity. And if you can inspire the same in your teams, connecting progress metrics to purpose… please, write to me because I want you on my team.

How to rebuild a strategic team

David Almazán — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 07:10:22 GMT

Behind every successful company, there is always a team capable of making tough decisions and staying on the strategic course. If you think about it, a company is nothing more than a collective of people making decisions. That’s why the performance of any project is directly linked to the team's health. An aligned team makes better decisions, and those decisions have a direct impact on results.

However, as the company grows, so does its internal complexity. Many teams end up trapped in internal politics, complacency, or mediocrity—three silent enemies that erode execution speed and innovation. How can leaders break this cycle and turn their team into a true growth engine?

The first step is to observe and listen. Identify whether there’s a lack of critical debate, open conflicts, or “power struggles” in meetings, whether execution is slow, or there’s a lack of new ideas. These signs indicate that the health of your executive team is in decline.

How to change your team’s dynamics?

Redesign the dynamics and culture: Define a clear and shared purpose. Establish visible behavior norms in every meeting and foster structured debates: more idea confrontation, less personal politics.
Empower your current team: Clarity in roles and expectations is the first step to attracting and retaining the right people. First, reflect on whether the problem is a lack of communication and clarity or an attitude issue.
Make bold talent decisions: If, after trying the above, you detect toxic members or those incompatible with the purpose, you’ll have to let them go to protect your team’s health.
Rebuild your strategic team: Design a team diverse in experience but aligned in values. Only then can you strike the balance between healthy competition and collaboration that drives strategy execution.

As a leader, you are not only responsible for the strategy but also for the human space capable of executing it. That’s why, if you detect your team’s health is at risk, you must change dynamics, make tough decisions, and raise the talent bar to transform your team into a true engine of growth. If you do it with responsibility and purpose, you will succeed.

Which strategy drives growth?

David Almazán — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 06:31:23 GMT

The day has finally arrived. Imagine that tomorrow you’re launching that product you designed, hoping it will “sell itself.” You have a freemium plan, an attractive onboarding flow, and you’re confident users will start coming… but nothing happens. This is the reality many startups face when trying to implement a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy.

In recent years, PLG has become a mantra in the startup world: letting the product itself drive acquisition and monetization. Sounds great, right? However, most companies make the same mistake: they confuse having a freemium model and a slick onboarding experience with being truly product-led.

So, can your product sell itself, or do you need a sales team to generate opportunities? The answer to this question is one of the most critical decisions for growth: choosing the wrong approach between a Product-Led (PLG), Sales-Led, or hybrid strategy can slow your company’s scalability for years. Let’s explore the Product-Led path.

What Product-Led Growth is (and isn’t)

If you offer a free trial or a freemium plan but users never reach the “aha moment,” you’re not doing PLG.
If you see PLG only as a commercial model and not as a customer experience transformation, you don’t understand PLG.
If marketing, sales, support, and product are not fully aligned toward a single goal, it’s not Product-Led Growth.

How a Product-Led Strategy Works

For the PLG model to succeed, you need to build what Wes Bush calls a product-led organization, based on the following:

Start with strategy, not tactics: Focus on a single niche until you dominate it. Define the market you want to win and why your product is 10x better than the competition.
Simplify the product: PLG works best with intuitive, fast-adopting products. The easier it is to try and see value, the more organic your growth will be.
Define the “aha moment”: Users should experience tangible value in minutes, not days. Identify the action that triggers their first real transformation.
Focus your KPIs on PLG: Track activation, retention, and conversion to paid. If the product creates value on its own, growth will be organic and scalable.
Align the whole team: Marketing, sales, and product should operate under the same indicators and vision, ensuring the user gets value before any sales pitch.

In short, adopting a Product-Led Growth strategy is not about launching a free plan and waiting for users to show up. It’s about designing your entire organization so the product delivers value before any sales conversation.

That’s what truly creates an organic, efficient, and hard-to-replicate growth engine, where every satisfied user becomes your best acquisition channel.