See through the politics
You're about to make an expensive call about someone on your team, on evidence you don't trust.
Someone on the team isn't delivering, and you need to know why before you act. But everyone who can explain it has a position in it, and sometimes there's no manager in between at all. Guess wrong and you lose either the person or the team's confidence in you.
How we'd handle it
We get credible in the actual implementation first, which is what gets us taken seriously when we talk to the people. Then we give you the straight version: a skills gap, a breakdown in communication, or something structural that no one owns, and the concrete move it calls for. Sometimes that's a hire. More often it's something you can fix without one.
Where we've done this
At Band, a company building infrastructure for AI agents, the CTO pulled me past the database-scaling work I'd come in for, into exactly this. What I told them ended in a hire.
Recognize this on your team?
Let's talk