Ciaran Foley

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The most dangerous thing you can have in a high-growth environment is a team that is too good at following directions.

I saw this play out last year with a founder who had a world-class engineering team. They were shipping features every two weeks. The code was clean. The UI was beautiful. The velocity was higher than any startup I had seen in months.

But the revenue was flat.

When we looked at the data, we realized they were building exactly what the founder asked for. And the founder was asking for things based on a vision that the market had already moved past.

The team was so efficient at executing the wrong plan that they burned through eighteen months of runway in six.

This is the "Execution Trap." It happens when you optimize for speed of output instead of speed of learning.

In the age of AI, this trap is getting deeper. When you can generate code, content, and campaigns in seconds, the cost of moving in the wrong direction drops to zero. Which means you can get lost faster than ever before.

The best teams I work with now are the ones who have the courage to stop the line. They don't just ask "how do we build this?" They ask "why does this matter to the person paying us?"

If you can't answer the second question, the first one is a waste of time.

What is your team building right now that you haven't validated with a customer in the last thirty days?

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