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.