Before the first cut
In Part 1, I argued that the first decomposition axis you choose — audience, channel, product, business model, geography — determines almost everything downstream. And that the right choice depends on identifying your binding constraint before you start slicing.
Which leaves an obvious problem. You need a framework to find the framework.
Except — I don't think you do. What you need before the first cut isn't analysis. It's vitals. An ER doctor doesn't walk in and order a full cardiology workup. She takes vitals. Not to understand the problem, but to understand what kind of problem it is so she knows which specialist should take over.
I've been trying to figure out what the strategic vitals actually are — not "what's useful to know" (everything is useful), but what's structurally necessary to determine the first cut. I keep landing on four questions. Not a checklist. A sequence, where each one narrows the space for the next.
Scope: is it everywhere, or somewhere?
The first thing to look at isn't why growth is stalling. It's where.
Revenue by segment, by region, by cohort, by customer size — whatever natural cuts you already have. Don't analyze them strategically yet. Just look for heat. Where is the line going up unexpectedly? Down unexpectedly? Where is there variance?
If performance is roughly uniform — stalling everywhere, growing everywhere, churning everywhere — you likely have a systemic constraint. Brand, product, business model. Something that affects everyone equally. If it's concentrated — growing here, dying there — you have a localized problem, and the pattern of concentration starts pointing toward which dimension matters. Losing solo developers but growing with teams is a different signal than losing in DACH but growing in APAC.
This question doesn't diagnose anything yet. It scopes. It tells you where to point the next question.
(Finance people read variance instinctively. Marketers, in my experience, look at averages first and wonder why everything seems fine. Averages hide the signal. Variance is the signal.)
Mechanism: where in the journey does it break?
Within the scope you've just identified, the second question: where does the energy die?
Map the journey — not in elaborate detail, just the big stages: never heard of us → heard of us → considered us → tried → paid → stayed. Where's the cliff?
Three angles on the same thing. Quantitatively — look at conversion between stages and find the steepest drop. Qualitatively — talk to the people who almost chose you and the people who left, and listen for where in their story something broke. Financially — look at where you're spending money and energy without proportional results. In marketing, as in manufacturing, the bottleneck reveals itself by the pile of inventory sitting in front of it.
"I didn't know you existed until a colleague mentioned it." — The cliff is at reach.
"I tried it, but $99/year when the alternative is free?" — The cliff is at conversion, and it might be pricing, not product.
"I loved it. But my whole team uses the other thing." — The cliff is at adoption, and it's a social problem, not an individual one.
"I tried it three years ago and it was slow." — The cliff is at consideration, and it's a stale belief, not a current reality.
The mechanism tells you what type of constraint you have. And each type points naturally toward a decomposition axis — consideration problems point toward audience-first thinking, reach problems toward channel, conversion problems toward product or business model. You don't have to force it. The mechanism implies the axis.
Direction: is it you, or the landscape?
The third question reframes everything that came before.
Is this constraint something you created (or failed to fix) — or is the ground shifting underneath you? Are you losing because your positioning went stale, or because the competitor genuinely got better? Is your trial conversion dropping because your onboarding is broken, or because a new cohort of users arrived with different expectations and defaults?
A stable 50/50 competitive split is an equilibrium — forces are balanced. A 50/50 that was 60/40 two years ago is erosion — forces are shifting, and you need to understand what changed before you can respond. Often the shift isn't about you at all. This is where competitive dynamics live — not as a decomposition axis (you still respond through one of the five), but as a diagnostic that tells you whether you're fixing an internal failure or adapting to external change.
This matters because the same mechanism reads completely differently depending on direction. A consideration problem caused by your stale positioning calls for repositioning — new messaging, new proof points, new community presence. A consideration problem caused by the competitor getting genuinely better calls for product investment, or a strategic retreat to segments where you still have real advantage. Same cliff, different response.
Trying to out-execute an erosion without understanding the underlying force is how companies spend their way into decline.
Capability: can you actually reach it?
The first three questions diagnose what's broken. The fourth asks what you can move.
This sounds obvious. It isn't. I've watched teams correctly identify an audience problem — the diagnosis was sharp, the data was clear — and then spend a quarter trying to act on it without research infrastructure, without the skills to run qualitative studies, without access to the segment they'd identified. The binding constraint and the addressable constraint are often different things.
Can you actually reach this audience, or do you need to build that muscle first? Can you touch the product, or is engineering locked for three quarters? Do you have pricing authority, or does that require a conversation with leadership that hasn't happened yet?
This is where Rumelt's idea of "the crux" becomes practical. The crux isn't just the hardest problem — it's the hardest problem you can actually work on. A diagnosis that points to the right axis but ignores what the organization can actually do in the next two quarters is an academic exercise, not a strategy.
Sometimes the fourth vital changes the answer entirely. The primary constraint might be product, but if product is frozen, the strategic move is the second-best axis where you can actually make progress — maybe repositioning for a segment where the current product already wins. Not ideal. But real.
Four vitals, then cut
Any growth constraint has a where (scope), a what (mechanism), a why (direction), and a can we (capability). The sequence matters — each one constrains the next. Scope narrows where to look. Mechanism identifies what's broken. Direction tells you whether you're fixing an internal failure or responding to an external shift. Capability tells you whether you can act on it.
Scope without mechanism gives you "we have a problem in DACH" with no idea what's broken. Mechanism without scope gives you "trial conversion is weak" when maybe it's only weak in one segment. Either without direction gives you a diagnosis that might already be obsolete. And all three without capability gives you a plan the org can't execute.
I should be honest: this is closer to a theory than a tested process. A way of making sense of what seems to happen when strategic decomposition goes right, and what seems to be missing when it goes wrong. The experienced strategists I've watched seem to do something like this intuitively — they read the system before committing to a lens. The less experienced ones jump to their favorite axis immediately.
One more thing. In reality, growth is almost never single-axis. You identify a primary constraint, but there are always secondary ones running in parallel. A sales team and a marketing team look at the same organization along different dimensions — and that tension is productive when it's conscious, destructive when it's accidental. The vitals help you find the primary axis. The one that gets resourced, measured, owned. The others don't disappear. They just stop competing to be first.
Most teams skip the vitals. Not because they're not smart enough. Because the meeting has an agenda, the quarter has a deadline, and someone already put "Grow Channel X +20%" on a slide.
The first cut is the one that matters. And the only way to make it well is to look at the whole thing — just for a moment — before the knife goes in.