Early Systems Snapshot

Origin Story

The seed for this project landed on a long flight to a company meeting in India. I was replaying in my head how sales was pushing late stage deals with optimistic promises, marketing was lining up a campaign window, engineering was juggling a release branch, and QA was triaging edge cases that nobody wanted to slip. All of those teams were pulling on shared reality but seeing different slices. I kept asking what I would do differently if I were the CEO with a single dashboard that made those tradeoffs visible early. That thought kept unfolding into a small systems sketch in a notebook. By the time we landed I wanted a management game that made those cross team frictions readable and gave you space to practice better calls.

In The Build

• Basic company selection with a few contrasting profiles
• Early simulation tick for cash, runway and a first churn pass
• Department placeholders with simple maturity and throughput values
• Training data model (budget plus limited booster slots)
• Difficulty presets feeding starting capital and taxes
• Event hook structure ready for future incidents
• Prototype KPI panel for cash, churn trend and hiring pace

In Progress

• Cause and effect tracing for metrics
• Overdraft and failure rules by difficulty
• Feature lane prioritization impacting throughput allocation
• Advisor card prototypes
• Incident queue translating neglect into timed problems

Feels Decent

• Quick read decide react loop
• Distinct starting company flavors
• Training budget versus booster tradeoff concept

Needs Work

• Better visual chains showing why metrics moved
• Thinner staffing choices without roles or traits yet
• Events lack presence and preview clarity
• Industry differentiation still light

Near future

• Add metric cause chain highlights
• Introduce morale loops and retention risk panel

Possible Stretch

• IPO preparation track
• Pricing experiment history panel
• Light audio cues for risk spikes

Feedback Welcome

Let me know which tension you enjoy most or want sharper: growth versus quality, staff versus runway, pricing experiments, something else. Also what usually makes you drop other management sims early.

Thanks for following along. More soon.