How Fast Execution Slows Business Growth: Why Execution Velocity Doesn't Equal Market Traction
Prime Positioning - Episode 1: Your execution velocity is masking your strategic drift
Prime Positioning - Episode 1:
Why execution velocity doesn’t equal market traction
James just discovered his worst nightmare during what should have been the best moment of the quarter. Mid-presentation to his board, he learns his biggest customer is leaving.
Your Best Practices Can Reveal Your Worst Problem
James had rehearsed this moment for months.
Six months ago, the board gave him one directive: evolve Dayanos or risk irrelevance. Every company was adding AI. Customers were drowning in tools.
James’s answer: double down on what Dayanos did best.
Visibility. Meeting intelligence. Team operations clarity. The capability that built their business. Now powered by AI.
He advanced to slide three.
“The feedback has been overwhelming,” James said, watching faces around the conference table. The dashboard showed engagement trending up and to the right. Feature utilization exceeding projections. Support ticket volume down.
“Nearly every customer is using Dayanos daily. Usage keeps climbing every quarter.”
One of his earliest investors, Sarah, leaned forward. She’d championed the AI investment when others questioned it.
Eighteen months ago, she’d warned that visibility alone wouldn’t be enough. The question wasn’t whether customers could see what their teams were doing. The question was whether they could move faster because of it.
Make visibility intelligent, she’d said. Let AI surface patterns, predict bottlenecks, recommend actions.
They’d built exactly that. And customers were using it.
He clicked to the next slide: customer quotes.
“Game-changer.”
“Can’t imagine working without it.”
“Finally, our meetings have clear outputs.”
Meanwhile, the CFO was scrolling through his laptop, something caught his eye.
“One thing I want to highlight,” James said. “We built AI into Dayanos without disrupting workflows. No rebuild required. Immediate value without disruption. Exactly the execution this board expected.”
Heads nodded around the table.
The CFO’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, then looked up sharply.
“James,” he said, tone careful. “I just got word from finance.” He paused. “Ramorian decided not to renew.”
James felt his stomach drop. “What!? When?”
“Email came in about twenty minutes ago.”
Sarah’s expression shifted. “Ramorian is—”
“Half our monthly revenue,” James said quietly. “And the name we drop in every sales call.”
The room went quiet.
James looked at his adoption slides, still glowing on the screen. Record engagement. Indispensable, by their own words.
“They’re using it,” he said slowly, the realization forming as he spoke.
“But they’re leaving anyway.”
Sarah sat back in her chair. Not angry. Not frustrated.
Something worse: disappointed.
“Help me understand what’s happening, James. These numbers say customers love using Dayanos.” She paused. “So what are they actually paying for?”
Another board member jumped in. “If they’re using it daily and still leaving, the problem isn’t execution.”
“We surveyed customers,” James said, hearing the defensiveness in his own voice and hating it. “The feedback was positive. They wanted better meeting tools. They wanted AI-powered insights. They wanted—”
“Visibility,” Sarah finished. “They wanted what Dayanos has always given them. Better visibility into what their teams are doing.”
James nodded.
“And Dayanos gives them that,” she continued. “Better notes. Better summaries. Better dashboards. More visibility than ever before.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment.
“So why are they leaving?”
James had no answer. He looked at the adoption metrics still displayed behind him. Every number telling him things were working. Every number except the one that actually mattered.
“I need to understand this,” he said finally. “I need to figure out what we’re missing.”
Sarah leaned forward. “You have sixty days, James.” Her voice was firm but not unkind. “If we lose another major customer, we’re looking at a major correction to guidance. And a very different conversation at the next board meeting.”
James gathered his materials. The meeting wrapped quickly after that. None of the celebratory energy he’d imagined six months ago. Just a growing sense that something fundamental was wrong. Something he couldn’t see yet.
Know What Summit You're Climbing
As the board filed out, Sarah caught his arm.
“James,” she said quietly. “I still believe in this company. I still believe in you. But these numbers suggest we’re solving the wrong problem.” She paused. “Or optimizing for the wrong summit.”
The phrase stuck with him as he walked back to his office.
He passed through the main workspace. His team was heads-down, focused. Product sprint planning. Marketing reviewing campaign metrics. Engineering debugging production issues. No one looked up. They didn’t know yet.
In six hours, maybe less, word would spread. By tomorrow morning, everyone would know: Ramorian was gone.
James reached his office and closed the door.
Wrong summit.
Solving the wrong problem.
Building for the wrong game.
James saw two paths forward.
Do it himself. Learn every AI tool, rebuild Dayanos personally. But he couldn’t be in product meetings and sales meetings simultaneously. Couldn’t code features and win back Ramorian. That path didn’t scale.
Or delegate it. Hand the problem to his teams. But that’s what got them here. The team had optimized for what they knew how to build: visibility tools. Made their strength stronger instead of developing the capability customers actually needed.
Both paths led to the same place: moving fast in the wrong direction.
He pulled up the quarterly industry report he’d been avoiding.
A few minutes in, the pattern hit him.
Companies that had been struggling were suddenly pulling ahead. These weren’t the ones with the most funding or flashiest features.
While Dayanos spent three weeks aligning Product, Marketing, and Engineering on a single launch, these companies were shipping coordinated moves in days. Pivoting entire go-to-market strategies without the usual organizational chaos.
James scrolled through the company profiles. Names he recognized. A few he didn’t.
One of them might be where Ramorian was looking now.
Whatever these companies had figured out, Dayanos was missing it. Execution speed wasn’t the difference. These companies moved with a precision Dayanos had never achieved. Like they could see something James couldn’t.
The difference wasn’t in their products. It was in how they moved as organizations.
James thought about his own company. Dayanos helped teams see everything happening in their organization with unprecedented clarity. They just couldn’t align or decide any faster. More visibility made the coordination problems more obvious, more frustrating.
Like building a sophisticated dashboard for a car with no steering wheel.
His customers didn’t need better visibility. They needed the ability to move from insight to action. To transform their operations faster. To coordinate without the usual theater that turned opportunity into delay.
Dayanos had optimized for what they already knew how to build. Made their strength stronger instead of developing what customers actually needed.
James opened his laptop and started typing notes. If he was going to solve this in sixty days, he needed to understand what the right approach would look like.
What if the companies pulling ahead hadn’t just built better tools?
What if they’d seen a different summit entirely?
What if they’d built the coordination systems that let everyone move toward that summit without the constant alignment meetings Dayanos was drowning in?
The question felt urgent.
He needed someone who thought in systems, someone who could help him see what he couldn’t yet.
By tomorrow morning, he’d make the call.
PRACTICE: The Strategy-Speed Audit
Think of the last win you shared publicly—in a board meeting, team update, or investor call.
Ask yourself: If my biggest customer left tomorrow, would this win still matter?
Write one sentence about what you notice.
James learned that fast execution doesn't equal strategic traction when you're climbing the wrong summit. His team measured adoption metrics while customers needed transformation capability. Activity looked like progress until the loss revealed what actually mattered.
AI Prompt:
The last win I shared publicly was: [Your win]
If my biggest customer left tomorrow, it would/wouldn’t matter because: [One sentence]
The business outcome I’m actually trying to drive is: [Revenue growth, market position, retention—what matters most]
Based on this:
1. Am I measuring progress toward my actual goal, or just measuring activity?
2. What’s one question I should be asking about my strategy that I’m probably not asking?
Show me what I might be missing.Next Episode: Judgment Speed Is the New Advantage (Now Live)
James discovers why fast execution creates slow growth - and that the companies pulling ahead aren’t just moving faster, they’re seeing a different summit entirely. James has 60 days to figure it out.
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