Operational Gains
This layer helps you keep the narrative clean: ask the right questions, involve the right people, and articulate value in business language.
Questions
- Where is friction slowing teams down today?
- What breaks when you scale traffic, features, or customers?
- Where do incidents or defects drain time?
- Which processes are manual and should be automated?
- What prevents predictable releases?
Relations
- Engineering leaders
- SRE / Platform
- Product operations
- Support / CX
- Delivery / Implementation teams
Value
- Productivity (less firefighting)
- Reliability (fewer incidents)
- Speed (faster releases)
- Predictability (stable operations)
- Customer trust (less churn)
Signals to look for
- Hiring surges (Eng/Platform/Data/Security)
- New executive hires or re-orgs
- Pricing changes / packaging shifts
- Major product launches
- High-profile outages or trust events
Metrics to watch
- Activation → Adoption → Expansion
- Retention / churn drivers
- Release frequency & lead time
- Incident rate & MTTR
- Unit economics: CAC, LTV, gross margin
Talk-track template
- Context: what changed in the business / market?
- Impact: what cost / risk / delay does it create?
- Decision: what must be true to win?
- Next step: define a proof + timeline.
Obsidian note structure
Create one note per layer and keep the same headings: Questions • Relations • Value. Your vault becomes a consistent thinking system.