Working Session Brief · Situation 01
What to expect when we work this problem together · Juan Vegarra
You shipped. The product does what the engineers promised, the early users who lean in get real value, and the demo still wins the room. And the adoption curve is flat anyway. The board is starting to ask whether the market is smaller than the deck said. It usually isn't. I have watched this exact situation in medical devices, in enterprise software, and in industries in between, and the market is almost never the problem.
Adoption stalls for reasons that live outside the product, which is why product teams cannot see them. Someone in the buyer's building loses something if your product wins: a workflow, a budget line, a skill that took years to build. Or the person who feels the pain does not control the money, and the person who controls the money does not feel the pain. Or the product asks the customer to change how they work before it pays them back, and the payback arrives on your timeline instead of theirs. None of this shows up in a feature comparison. All of it shows up in a flat curve.
The most reliable tell: your champions love you and your pipeline still will not convert. Champions are people who decided to absorb the change cost personally. A market is what you have when people who will not absorb that cost buy anyway. The work is engineering the path for the second group.
It starts with one call, an hour, no deck required. Before it, I will ask for three things: your last ten wins and how each actually happened, your last ten losses or stalls and the stated reason, and a picture of the day of the person who has to say yes. Not the org chart. Their day.
Most engagements resolve in one to three working sessions. What a session produces is specific: a map of who loses what when you win, a re-sequenced motion that pays the buyer back inside their own quarter, and usually one uncomfortable finding about where the deal actually dies, which is rarely where the pipeline report says it does. You leave with something your team can run Monday, not a framework poster.
This is not a consulting engagement with a discovery phase and a team of analysts. There is no retainer, no deck theater, and no seven-figure invoice; I built a mentoring practice at UW precisely because I think scaling advice at that price is a racket. If the problem needs more than a few sessions, I will say so, and if it needs someone other than me, I will say that too.
If this is your table, start the conversation: juan@juanvegarra.com · Back to Advisory