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Key Takeaways Discover the hidden mindset that separates founders who get stuck from those who scale efficiently.
Learn how a different way of thinking can turn overwhelming complexity into actionable clarity.
We’re fortunate to stand on the work of giants. Every time we cross a suspension bridge or hear a brilliant piece of music, we experience the spark of someone else’s genius. We don’t need to understand every theory to benefit from it — and the same is true in building a business.
You don’t need a computer science degree to think like an engineer — but doing so can help you build smarter, faster and with fewer mistakes. My own career in tech leadership didn’t start with coding. It started by watching my mother translate between aerospace engineers and military generals — two highly structured, high-stakes worlds speaking different “languages” of complexity. Her superpower was deconstructing systems so anyone could understand them. That skill has guided me ever since.
At our firm, we coach founders to adopt an engineering mindset: systems thinking, architectural clarity, constraint-awareness and rapid feedback loops. Here’s how it works and why every founder should use it.
1. Deconstruct complexity with systems thinking
Founders often feel pulled in every direction: product isn’t sticking, funding is tight and teams are stretched. Everything seems like a top priority — and that’s paralyzing.
Engineers never see a problem as one giant black box. They break it into systems and subsystems, each with dependencies. When I led product at a large talent agency, friction threatened to derail the business. The “problem” wasn’t monolithic — it was four separate issues: poor data capture, broken matching logic, clunky workflow automation and outdated CRM tooling. Treating each as its own module allowed us to test, measure, and fix them independently.
Don’t panic. Identify the subsystem that’s the bottleneck, isolate it and tackle it first.
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