A quick update from Greg & Taylor: We have a busy fall ahead of us as Section continues to grow quickly. We’ll be scaling back Personal Math to once a month (for now) to free up some time and allow us to launch a few new AI-focused channels (look out for a new newsletter from Greg soon). If you have ideas for something you’d like to hear about in 2026, reply to this email or comment here. Otherwise, see you in a month.
There’s a small habit that’s essential to your credibility as an executive: Knowing the right numbers to report on, and reporting on them honestly and regularly.
It’s easy in theory, but VERY few people do it well.
I’m no exception. When I got back from maternity leave, I heard we needed faster progress on the product roadmap. So I jumped in to fix it, and my updates reflected that. Every week, I reported on all the activities I’d done to drive progress. But last week, Greg asked me how much it cost to serve a ProfAI user - and I had no idea. That’s a core metric for us, especially when Greg contemplates ideas like giving away tens of thousands of licenses to drive enterprise leads. And in the rush to show progress, I lost sight of the impact of the work.
In my experience, most people are good at one or the other. Either they know which numbers are important but don’t surface them regularly or honestly, or they consistently report a slew of metrics, but don’t know which actually matter.
When you report the right numbers regularly – good news or bad – people trust you more. The key is picking the right ones, then holding yourself accountable for surfacing them. Here’s how to do it well.
- Taylor
Report on the right numbers
You’re probably responsible for a lot of metrics in your role that don’t really drive the business. For example, if you’re a content marketer, you might be responsible for LinkedIn follower growth - but (unless you derive most leads from LinkedIn) that follower growth probably isn’t a direct lever to revenue or cost.
The key is isolating the 1-3 numbers that most directly drive revenue (topline) or margins (bottom line) for the company.
In sales and marketing, it’s easier. Your work more clearly drives revenue, and the second-order levers are obvious: CAC, CPL, ACV, CVR, pipeline velocity. If you generate leads or close deals, you report these.
But if you don’t - either your work is one layer below that (i.e. you’re a social media manager) or you’re in a less revenue-driven function - it's harder, but just as important.
In these roles, you have to find the 1-3 metrics that most closely influence revenue or margins. If you're in customer success, you might track retention rates or support ticket resolution times. In product, it could be code commits or user engagement.
Pro tip: If you can’t find a metric that clearly links to revenue, try to report on the time or cost to deliver. Improving the speed or cost to execute whatever you do (process tickets, commit code, or deliver courses, etc.) is likely an important lever.
Here’s an example from ProfAI. There’s lots I could (and will) track, but here are three I’ll consistently report on, because I can link them to our top/bottom line:
Completion rate: Higher completion rates should make conversion and renewal easier (which directly influences revenue)
Inference costs: Inference cost per user (or the LLM cost of we incur for a user using ProfAI) affect our margins
Cost per lead: We’re running a freemium playbook - with a hypothesis that some portion of free ProfAI users will be enterprise leads that convert. But this won’t work if our cost to acquire those leads isn’t economical.
Good leaders identify these metrics once - great leaders re-evaluate and adjust every 2-3 months. For example, if we’ve shown we can efficiently generate enterprise leads from ProfAI, in a few months I’ll need to swap CPL for conversion rate, since that’s what we’ll need to validate that freemium strategy.
I like this example because it shows that choosing the 1-3 most important metrics is somewhat subjective, and requires you to build your own conviction first as to how and why these link to the top and bottom line for the business.
Report regularly and with candor
Once you have your numbers, track and report them weekly - first to yourself, then to your team, then up to your boss / leadership.
Even if no one is looking at your numbers, the habit of reporting will build your confidence and conviction on your progress against the plan - and make you more capable of strategic conversations and quick, data-backed decisions.
Here’s an example from this week at Section. For the last six months, our marketing and sales team has been running a series of in-person dinners for AI leaders. We’ve reported on attendance, but aren’t consistently tracking the number of large deals closed from these dinners.
My marketing leader needs that at her fingertips (even if the answer is “None, yet”) so that when Greg says, “Should we keep doing this?”, she has a clear POV on the cost/benefit.
Here are tips for reporting on your numbers:
Develop a team habit. Build reporting into a regular meeting or update, so you feel accountability to report even when you’re busy or don’t feel like it. At Section, the leadership team does 3Ps (progress, priorities, problems) and I expect to see key metrics updated there every week.
Add context, not excuses. When you report, give brief context: “Our CAC has been trending higher in the last 3 months, so we're testing more targeted campaigns in Q2.”
Include your target. If you tell me CAC but don’t tell me the target that makes the business work, it’s not useful. Always include a target.
My advice
Reporting even just one high-impact metric every week, through the good and the bad, builds you a LOT of credibility. When you do this, other leaders see that you:
Understand what drives your part of the business
Track it religiously
Report on it honestly
Have a plan when things go sideways
I've seen this play out dozens of times. The people who get promoted aren't necessarily the ones with the best results.
They’re the ones who are constantly thinking about and tracking their part of the business - and who always provide an honest accounting of how things are going. Remember: crisp, firm, flexible.
Have a great week,
Greg & Taylor