Tango

Last week I worked on a Car Insurance aggregator case on TikTok. 7-step funnel. Ad Click → 3 qualifying questions → Comparison → Click-Out → Purchase. Target CPA $20. Plus a pitch deck for TikTok Symphony Creative Studio on top. I fed the data to Claude. Pulled the analysis, wrote the recommendations, built the pitch, all in one evening. Without Claude, same work would've taken me 5-8 hours. And that's when it clicked. Claude didn't do the analysis. I did. Claude was a lever. The lever worked because behind it stood 6 years of paid UA. Multi-step funnel logic. Aggregator economics. Why CPA targets behave differently when there's a Click-Out step before the conversion. Strip that out and Claude gives you a confident-sounding deck that falls apart on the second question from a smart CMO. That's the split I keep seeing. One camp burns budgets on "AI implementations" run by people who can't write a basic prompt. Pretty dashboards, broken decisions. The other camp flinches at "AI-assisted" work. As if opening Claude means weaker output. As if the craft disappears when you stop doing things the slow way. Both are wrong. AI is a lever. Levers need expertise to move anything. That's the space I'm writing from. Right now I'm building a UA analyst agent in Make. TikTok, Meta, Google Ads APIs feed into Claude, Claude runs the analysis, output lands as a report with an action plan. Wrapping it this week. Next posts: what this looks like in practice. Real prompts. Make scenarios. Numbers where I can share them. Seeing the same split between AI hype and AI stigma on your side?

Your team doesn't need another "rah-rah" speech about excellence. They need you to stop protecting them from the reality of the business. The biggest mistake leaders make is confusing psychological safety with a lack of pressure. You think you’re building trust by softening deadlines or sugarcoating feedback. In reality, you're just signaling that you don’t think they’re capable of handling the truth. High performers don't burn out from hard work; they burn out from meaningless work. If you want to challenge them without breaking trust, stop managing tasks and start managing context. Give them the "Why" in its rawest form - the bleeding revenue, the churned client, the failed migration. Then, get out of the way. Trust isn't built in the quiet moments. It’s built when you set a bar that feels slightly out of reach and then stay in the trenches until they clear it. Ask the uncomfortable questions. Reject the mediocre PRs. Push back on the "it's impossible" narrative. If they know you have their back when things break, they’ll follow you into the fire. Comfort is the enemy of growth. Your job is to make them uncomfortable in a way that makes them better. #EngineeringLeadership #HighPerformance #TechManagement #EngineeringCulture