Most founders read their business emotionally, while operators read it mechanically.
Founders say things like:
“I feel like we’re behind.”
“I think the team’s overwhelmed.”
“Something feels off with delivery.”
“We need to hire more people.”
Operators don’t rely on feelings.
Operators read signals: data, patterns, indicators, friction points, timing, rhythm, and the invisible “tells” inside a company that show what’s actually happening before it turns into a fire.
Tools matter.
Scorecards matter.
ClickUp structure matters.
But they’re only inputs.
The real sophistication is in how an operator interprets those inputs.
If you can’t read the signals, you can’t run the system.
And most founders don’t read anything at all—they react.
That’s why their companies feel heavy.
Let’s fix that.
Operators Don’t Guess — They Interpret
Most founders jump from task to task, message to message, fire to fire.
They know a little about a lot, but they’re not tracking patterns, trends, or recurring breakdowns.
Operators live in the opposite world.
They don’t ask:
“What happened today?”
They ask:
“What’s changing?”
“What’s recurring?”
“What’s slowing?”
“What’s accelerating?”
“What’s starting to wobble?”
“What is the system trying to tell us?”
This distinction is everything.
A founder sees a team member struggling and thinks:
“They’re overwhelmed.”
An operator sees the same thing and thinks:
“Why isn’t the load balanced? What broke upstream? Which lane is poorly defined? Why did this slip pattern show up two weeks in a row?”
Founders react to the fire.
Operators trace the smoke.
Reading ops is reading cause, not effect.
Scorecards Are Not Dashboards — They’re Contracts
Most founders treat scorecards like weekly homework.
Operators treat scorecards like contracts—a reflection of the business’s health, its execution rhythm, and the true behavior of the system.
A weak scorecard is broad and vague.
A strong scorecard:
- Exposes friction
- Highlights bottlenecks
- Forces accountability
- Reveals patterns
- Predicts breakdowns
- Identifies lagging and leading indicators
Richard and Tiago aren’t checking KPIs because they like numbers.
They’re checking KPIs because performance without measurement is superstition.
A distributed team across six time zones only works when the scorecard acts as the single source of truth.
Without it, you’re leading blind.
Signals Decide What Breaks Next
Every business produces signals.
Some are loud:
Missed deadlines.
Client complaints.
Declining output.
But good operators never wait for loud signals—they look for quiet ones:
A task that used to take 2 days now takes 4
A team member stops asking proactive questions
A ClickUp status changes but the work doesn’t
A deliverable hits “in review” too many times
A recurring blocker shows up every Thursday
A decision gets escalated that shouldn’t have
A handoff breaks in the same place twice
Founders call these things “small issues.”
Operators know they’re the earliest warning signs of execution breakdowns.
Signals don’t appear randomly.
They appear consistently.
And when you know how to read them, you can prevent 90% of your operational fires before they start.
It’s not magic.
It’s discipline.
ClickUp Templates: The Difference Between Chaos and Order
This is where most founders destroy their operations:
They treat ClickUp like a whiteboard instead of an operating system.
They freehand everything.
They manually build tasks.
They reinvent flows every week.
They rely on memory instead of structure.
They allow chaos inside the environment that should be enforcing clarity.
Templates fix this.
Templates remove variability.
Templates standardize execution.
Templates reduce cognitive load.
Templates create predictability.
Templates eliminate bottlenecks.
Templates allow teams across six time zones to execute the same way every time.
A template isn’t a task.
A template is a blueprint.
Shockwave doesn’t “use ClickUp.”
Shockwave runs ClickUp like an actual operating system.
That’s the difference.
Reading Everything Isn’t Micromanagement — It’s Mastery
This was one of the most important points Richard and Tiago made in the episode:
Ops leaders don’t skim.
Ops leaders read everything.
Why?
Because context drives accuracy.
And accuracy drives execution.
Founders review tasks.
Operators review patterns.
Founders look at updates.
Operators look at implications.
Founders look at what’s being said.
Operators look at what’s not being said.
Reading everything doesn’t mean hovering over the team.
It means you’re gathering full context so you’re never blindsided, never guessing, never making emotional decisions.
When you’re running a team across six time zones, context becomes a weapon.
A lack of context becomes a liability.
The Right Tools Don’t Make You Better.
They Make Your Weaknesses Obvious.
Founders love to blame tools.
“Slack is overwhelming.”
“ClickUp is too complex.”
“We need a better dashboard.”
“Our tools aren’t working.”
Tools don’t fail.
Your system does.
Tools expose:
- Gaps in process
- Unclear responsibilities
- Missing documentation
- Lack of cadence
- Poor workload design
- Missing templates
- Decision bottlenecks
- Misaligned priorities
Shockwave’s tools don’t run the business.
Shockwave’s system uses the tools to run the business.
And when you use tools like infrastructure, global execution becomes simple, stable, predictable, and scalable.
Tools aren’t the strategy.
Tools are the environment where the strategy lives.
If You Want to Scale, You Need to Learn to Read the System
An operator sees the architecture behind the outcome.
They look underneath the symptoms.
They look between the lines.
They look into the patterns.
They let the system tell them what’s happening.
Reading a business is not a talent.
It’s a discipline.
A discipline made of:
- Scorecards
- Templates
- Tools
- Cadence
- Alignment
- Ownership
- Context
- Signals
And that discipline is what makes Shockwave’s global ops run like a machine—no matter the time zone, no matter the workload, no matter the week.
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