I spent the last decade building organizations around new products and construct systems to unlock growth for existing products that have touched 10M+ people.

Started a successful boutique consulting firm in 2017, walked away in 2021 to focus on advising ambitious leaders and building products for progress.

User Engagement | Habit Fostering | Venture Architecture | Business Model Development

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Quick Background:
Founded & grew a consulting firm for digital products/business models for 5 years. Specific focus on the interaction between analog user and digital product (https://kadacon.com/).

50+ projects in corporate innovation environment: from incubation to MVP to internationalization of apps & services (B2C & B2B). Biggest complexity: Mercedes me

10+ advisories to start-ups from early stage to traction & growth on user engagement & retention.

Developed framework to construct user engagement in products, which positively impacted metrics of over 10 million users in a wide variety of products. (https://pitch.com/v/the-user-engagement-framework-bsx3qn)

Currently consultant & sparring partner for product-led start-ups primarily on the path to product-market fit and user-centric evolution. (https://www.projectfuze.com/sparringspartner-de)

Everyone I talk to has AI tools now - some in use excessively. Engineers use Cursor. PMs draft specs with Claude. Designers prototype in half the time. Everyone's individually faster.

Yet, I keep hearing the same thing: "We ship more stuff and somehow it still takes the same amount of time."
The work inside each function got faster. The work between functions didn't change at all. Same meetings. Same "wait, what did we decide last week?" Same context re-explained for the 4th time.

The interesting question right now is whether anything changed about how work moves from one person to the next.

For most teams, honestly, it hasn't.

⚡️David Füßer

Product Leader/ Sr PM | Boosted user adoption & retention across 30+ products (B2C & B2B) | Building RadicalDots | 1 exit

Every growing team has one. The person everyone asks before anything moves.

It's usually a founder or a senior lead. They're not hoarding control (well, sometimes they are). Mostly they just have context that nobody else has. They've been in every room, heard every conversation, know why the last three attempts failed.

So they become the routing layer. Every decision passes through them. Every question gets escalated to them. They're in every Slack thread, every doc review, every "quick sync."

They're exhausted. And they're the reason the team can't move faster.

I've seen this pattern at 15-person startups and 150-person scale-ups. The details change but the shape is identical. One person holds too much undocumented context, and the whole org moves at their processing speed.

The only fix is getting the context out of their head and into something the organization can access without them.

That sounds obvious. But it means actually writing down decision rationale, not just decisions. It means making intent explicit enough that someone who wasn't in the room can act on it. It means the founder has to believe that clarity is worth the 20 minutes it takes to write it down properly.

Most don't. So they stay the bottleneck. And wonder why nothing scales.

I'm kinda obsessed with what it actually means for an org to be AI-native.

/ai-readiness - I put what I'm learning into a Claude skill. It asks how your org works for 15 minutes. Then gets you a report on your org's AI readiness across 6 dimensions.

The pattern I'm seeing so far: most orgs adopted AI tools and people are hyped about how much they can do now (or how much faster).
But as a team, we're not actually faster. 

Workflows didn't change. Decisions live in meetings. Handoffs lose signal. Agents could do the work but humans won't let go

I see 6 stages toward the AI-native org. Chat-assisted is step 2 of 6.

On what stage is yours? 

Comment "AI Readiness" and I'll send you the skill.

Preview of the AI-Readiness self-assessment Claude Skill. 

Quick Intro and the first question: Give me the 30-second version - what does your company do, how big is the team, and what stage are you at?  

In the last 2 years, almost every team I've worked with upgraded their tools. Better code editors, AI assistants, design tools, project management software.

In the same 2 years, almost none of them changed how work flows between functions. Same handoffs. Same meetings. Same approval chains. Same "let me check with [person]" bottleneck.

The individual got faster. The system stayed the same speed.

It's like upgrading every musician's instrument in an orchestra but never rehearsing together. Each player sounds better individually. The performance doesn't improve.

I think this is the most interesting gap in organizations right now. Not the tool gap (everyone has tools). The workflow gap. How work actually travels from intent to execution, across people and teams.

That gap is quiet. It doesn't show up in any dashboard. But it determines how fast you can actually ship, regardless of how fast any individual contributor works.

The most expensive sentence in any organization: "Wait, what did we decide?"

It gets said in standups, in Slack threads, in 1:1s, in sprint planning. Someone made a decision. Maybe in a meeting, maybe in a DM, maybe in a Google Doc comment that nobody checked.

A week later, nobody can find it. Or worse, two people have different memories of what was decided.

So the decision gets made again. Or a meeting gets scheduled to re-make it. Or someone just goes ahead with their version and the conflict surfaces three weeks later during QA.

Every decision that lives in someone's memory instead of in the system is a decision that will need to be made twice.

I used to think this was a discipline problem. Just write things down. But it's actually a structural problem. There's no natural place where decisions land and stay findable. Docs get stale. Slack scrolls away. Meeting notes get filed and forgotten.

The organizations that move fastest aren't the ones that make better decisions. They're the ones that make a decision once and it stays made.

Is "show me your Claude.md" the # 1  screening question right now when hiring?

taplio

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