Case study · Health tech
Too much work, not enough people—and the AI slop is bloating you, not speeding you up
Everything is changing, chaos and disengagement are the norm, and the pressure compounds anyway. AI comes in from the side: huge disruption, huge time waste, slop invading the company. Too much work. Not enough people. Not enough tooling or way too much.
That’s what I walked into at a healthcare company this spring. I’d been told there were some challenges; the team was falling apart—nobody knew what their job was, everything was reactive, and strategy was getting built via decks. Very little infrastructure.
Then the squeeze: a reorg was coming. Absorb more work, prove you can’t, or get more efficient.
So we ran a sprint. Five days, together, out loud, 90 minutes every morning for a week, building a foundation that team could deliver against, even as the next wave of changes approached.
We rebuilt the intake so a request is about the business. Requests get scored: distance, a fact base, and a bar for what qualifies as a project. It’s a model decision, not a personal favor.
The job of the GTM team is the narrative spine and the connective tissue of the story, not the deck or the outputs, necessarily.
The team started delivering workshops, to land strategy and influence outputs without owning the pen for the final deliverable. Demystifying AI by building and integrating together, out loud, instead of everyone quietly asking a bot and pasting in the slop.
And coaching. A ton of it. An external person helping manage the message via an external perspective.
A month after the sprint, they fully own the system and have fundamentally changed how new work and change are approached. Decisions get made by people in a room, instead of async comment threads—or bots talking to each other, which is coming. They’re building their own tools and thinking in workshops. A team that was falling apart is energized—they can see it working. Engagement and morale followed.
What they keep: a way to design the team, the workflow and the structure to stay highly adaptive in a bananas environment—and a model to run it themselves. That was the design goal. It runs without me.
“A lifesaver for the team and exactly what I needed for positioning in the AI era for our brand.”—Scale-up Healthtech CMO