Cat Lo spent 20 years learning that execution excellence can actually hold you back. After burning out at Amazon doing beautiful work that nobody noticed, she distilled her hard-won lessons into five tenets, a framework that helped her shape billion-dollar opportunities and drive $218 million in impact. |
What if the very thing that made you a great designer is the reason you're being left out of the decisions that matter most?
The better you get at execution, the more execution you're given.
And the less you're involved in deciding what gets built in the first place.
Sound familiar?
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Cat Lo spent 20 years figuring out why great designers get stuck in the executor lane, most importantly for you, and what it actually takes to break out of it.
After burning out, doing excellent work that nobody noticed, she distilled everything she learned into five tenets:
⇢ Find the smallest testable truth
⇢ Let customer data be the only tiebreaker
⇢ Achievable now beats perfect later
⇢ Alignment means agreeing on the problem, not the solution
⇢ Look around the corner for the problems nobody's been assigned
Don’t assume, for a second, that these are simply soft-skills talking points. Cat used this framework to identify a $7.8 billion market opportunity at Amazon hiding in plain sight. And she did it as an IC with zero direct authority.
​This week, Cat joins me to break down all five tenets and share exactly how she built influence without a title at one of the most demanding companies on the planet.
Here's what she wants you to know:
- Your skills are knobs, not an on/off switch—learn when to turn each one up or down
- Customer data is the one tiebreaker nobody can argue with
- Ship small to build trust, then ask for bigger problems
- Alignment means agreeing on the problem, not the solution
- The invisible problems nobody's been assigned? That's where your influence lives
If you've ever felt like you're doing great work that just isn't landing, this one's for you.
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You iterated, pivoted, circle-backed, and made it out of Q4 (barely).
You’ve earned a Merit-ish Badge!
Choose from four sets:
​• Soft Skills, Sharp Tongue
• Cult of Figma Initiation
• Pixel Pusher Survivor Kit
• Field Notes & Frayed Nerves
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They don't teach this stuff in school
Learn the things they left off the syllabus.
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