Nobody wakes up thinking “today I have an HR problem.” Founders wake up thinking: we’re missing targets. I can’t find good leaders. Margins are shrinking and nobody can tell me why. Everything still runs through me. Those aren’t functional complaints. They’re symptoms — and the business function that eventually gets blamed is rarely the actual cause.
The market is organized by function. Problems aren’t.
Business services are sold by category because that’s how the sellers are organized, not because that’s how growth problems actually show up. Recruiters sell hiring. Dev shops sell software. Bookkeepers sell the close. Each of them is very good at the narrow thing they sell — and each of them will, understandably, frame your problem as the kind of problem they solve. Call a recruiter with a vague sense that “something’s wrong with the team,” and you’ll get a search. Call a dev shop with a vague sense that “we need better systems,” and you’ll get a proposal for software.
The founder becomes the one place in the business where all of this has to get reconciled — because nobody they’ve hired is positioned, or incentivized, to say “actually, this isn’t a hiring problem, or a software problem, it’s an org-design problem three steps upstream of where you’re looking.” Vendors sell what they sell. Diagnosis, if it happens at all, happens in the founder’s head, usually at 11pm.
What a constraint actually looks like.
A constraint is the thing that, if you fixed it, would unstick several downstream symptoms at once. It’s rarely the symptom you notice first. A founder who can’t find good leaders might have a hiring process problem — or might have a role that was never clearly defined, so every candidate looks like a mismatch because there was never a “match” to measure against in the first place. A founder with margins that erode without explanation might have a pricing problem, a delivery-cost problem, or simply no reporting system trustworthy enough to say which one it is. The symptom points in a direction. It doesn’t point at the cause.
This is the core idea behind how we work, stated as plainly as we can state it: founders don’t experience problems by business function. They experience them as constraints on growth. The root cause could be hiring, technology, operations, finance, or leadership — or, often, two or three of those tangled together. Treating the first symptom as the whole problem is how a lot of company money gets spent solving the wrong thing well.
Why diagnosis has to come before deployment.
The obvious objection: doesn’t every vendor claim to “diagnose before they sell”? Most do, in the sense of a discovery call. Very few are structured so that the diagnosis can lead somewhere other than the thing they were already going to sell you. A recruiter’s discovery call is still going to end in a search, because a search is the only tool in the kit. That’s not a criticism of recruiters — it’s just what specialization does. It narrows the range of honest answers a vendor can give you.
Diagnosis only means something when the diagnostician has more than one tool to reach for, and no bias toward any particular one. That’s a structural requirement, not a values statement — it’s why we organize the practice around constraints rather than functions in the first place. If the honest answer to “what’s actually causing this” points toward operations instead of technology, or toward a hiring system redesign instead of a single search, the same team that ran the diagnosis has to be able to say so and follow it there.
What this means in practice.
Practically, it means the first conversation should be about the symptom, not the solution. Bring the thing that’s stuck — a role you can’t fill, numbers you don’t trust, a close that’s always late — and expect the first real work to be figuring out what’s upstream of it, before anyone proposes what to build, hire, or run. If a vendor skips straight to a proposal before understanding what’s actually causing your symptom, that’s worth noticing. It usually means they only had one tool to sell you in the first place.
We walk through exactly how this works, step by step, on the How We Work page. And if the symptom you’re carrying right now happens to be a hiring one, Talent is where we talk about what a properly diagnosed hiring problem actually needs.
Not sure which function actually owns your problem?
That’s the point of the first call. Bring the symptom — we’ll help find the constraint.