Audio Read-Along

Click the link below to play the audio accompaniment.

The investor update was due in an hour, and Jonah Mercer still hadn’t figured out how to explain the company’s sudden stall in pipeline without sounding like a rookie CEO. His Series A board had been fairly patient so far—“patient” being Silicon Valley code for one quarter away from replacing you if this doesn’t turn.

Jonah ran GrowthForge, a 40-person SaaS startup that helped mid-market ops teams automate forecasting. The product worked. Customers loved it. Reviews were strong. Yet somehow revenue had flatlined, and no one on Jonah’s team agreed on why.

He flipped through Slack messages for clues. Sales said Marketing wasn’t generating enough leads. Marketing said Sales ignored 80% of them. Product said Sales was selling vapor. Customer Success said Product didn’t understand real customer needs. And Engineering said nothing, because Engineering had been told nothing, because no one could decide what mattered anymore.

It was all very encouraging.

The real mess surfaced that morning during the “quick sync” that was never quick and never synced anything. Lena, the newly hired VP of Marketing, showed a slide Jonah had never seen. Apparently she had re-segmented their entire ICP.

“We’re going mid-market and up,” she said confidently. “Bigger deals, longer runway. We move upmarket starting Monday.”

Jonah blinked. Sales froze. Customer Success slid lower in their chairs.

“Wait,” said Aaron, the Head of Sales. “My team just built a quarter’s worth of pipeline targeting SMB. You told us last month that was the strategy.”

“I said probably,” Jonah muttered, realizing instantly that this would be quoted back to him for the next year. “We needed flexibility while we gathered data.”

“No data was gathered,” Aaron said flatly.

Silence. Then a few awkward coughs.

Lena pressed on. “Look, the board wants velocity. Bigger deals mean faster ARR growth. This is the logical move.”

It might’ve been logical if anyone had validated it, aligned around it, or even mentioned it outside her team. Instead, it hit the room like a mild explosion.

By the end of the meeting, Sales was rebuilding their messaging, Product was guessing which roadmap items mattered now, and Customer Success quietly panicked about renewal conversations they were no longer prepared for.

Jonah knew the pattern. Every leader assumed they were compensating for someone else’s gap. Everyone was making decisions in isolation. He hadn’t slowed the churn of “probably” statements long enough to turn them into real commitments.

Now he was staring at a half-finished board deck, trying to summarize why his company—full of smart people—kept tripping over itself.

He typed: “Q1 challenges were driven by a lack of unified direction.”

He deleted it. Too honest. Too vague. Too true.

After a moment, he replaced it with something safer, something that sounded like leadership but explained absolutely nothing.

The cursor blinked. It seemed unimpressed.