The Question That Changed How My Team Talks to Me

There are a lot of ways to measure performance.

Velocity. Output. Burn rate. Conversion. Retention.

But the one thing I kept missing was… weight.

Not in the P&L. In the room.

You can feel it.

A team that’s moving, but heavy. People doing the job, but quietly checked out.

Slack messages getting shorter. Feedback getting delayed. No one breathing during the all-hands.

The business was fine.

But the energy was off.

So I started asking one question in every 1 to 1:

That’s it.

No KPI. No setup. Just that question, then silence.

And the answers?

• “Honestly? Our Monday meetings. I leave more confused than clear.”

• “I feel like I’m failing at home, and it’s bleeding into work.”

• “I keep reworking the same doc because I’m not sure what ‘done’ looks like.”

Stuff they never would’ve volunteered if I led with metrics.

We’re trained to manage outcomes.

But momentum lives in emotion.

In friction. In fatigue. In stories people don’t think they’re allowed to tell the founder.

This one question gave me a new dashboard.

Not a dashboard of tasks, but of truth.

No fancy tool. No “framework.”

Just a founder actually listening — without trying to fix it all.

Try it.

You’ll learn more in 30 seconds than most execs learn in a whole offsite.

— Peter