Before you create, you have to extract

This is the premise of the first moment in any project involving brand strategy, product definition, or business direction.

The goal isn't to formalize an opinion about what that brand or product should be.

It's to build a format for extraction: of ideas, perceptions, suggestions, and opinions that, together, open space for discoveries neither party would have reached alone.

Naming a product, structuring how a brand will communicate across different phases of its goals, or finding a workflow that's genuinely more innovative than what the market already does — all of it starts from the same principle: you need to deconstruct what exists before building what should exist.

This first moment is a skill of active listening and precise questioning. You're in contact with clients and stakeholders, paying close attention to why previous decisions were made, what motivated that product's existence, why this context hadn't been thought through strategically before. It's not an environment for dismissing anything said. It's an environment for understanding that existence in depth, seeing where each detail lives — not from your own vantage point, but from the other person's.

Thinking should float. The cards take note. What's between the lines gets stored among the possibilities of what's still to come. This is the moment where everything accumulates so that, in the next stage, everything can be organized.

The second moment is where chaos begins to take shape.

Here you need to intervene. Not aggressively, but precisely. It's the moment to bring your background and repertoire into the process, to infer your own analysis of what works and what doesn't, and to start organizing those thinking cards in ways that reveal connections that weren't visible before: by category, by interconnection, by timeline, by line of questioning.

What was scattered now needs to form what the product is. And from every word, every piece of writing, and every conversation captured in the previous stage, you start pulling new points that no longer stem from what the other person is saying. They stem from your own, settled analysis of the market in relation to that product's, brand's, or business's decisions.

No decision here is based on guesswork. That's non-negotiable. Every decision needs a reason: whether aimed at a final creative execution, or at mapping out a goal more clearly for a diagnostic meeting or audit with the client. Keeping that mindset as an inherent part of the process is what guarantees the inputs from the first step are real and coherent enough to sustain the second.

The third moment is where attention shifts direction.

If the first two steps were about thinking and organizing, the third is about checking what's actually being implemented in practice. Even if you haven't followed the previous steps closely, understanding that they exist, validating their criteria, and checking how they're being executed is the central point of this phase.

Organizing processes isn't simply about having coherence in how flows and playbooks are presented. It's negotiating with real people. It's setting deadlines based on the real perception of each person's skill and competence. It's formalizing guidelines and work formats that will function for each team member's daily routine — not for the ideal routine you imagined during planning.

There's no point having a good plan if no one can execute it. The team's capacity shouldn't be measured only by what you want for the project. That's a massive inflection point. The team is an ecosystem in constant evolution, and it's you, as decision-maker and manager, who directs that evolution. The team moves forward. You time it, understand the adjustments, notice who needs more pressure and who needs less, and redistribute the weight consciously.

Each person is an individual. That needs to be taken into account. And that only happens when you build real relationships with the team, make agreements, listen to what they have to say, and also listen to what others have to say about them. Let problems surface so you can understand, in practice, what needs to be solved. And, whenever possible, have already gone through at least some of those obstacles yourself, so you have real context for how to face them.

Being a good manager isn't about controlling. It's about noticing that the environment as a whole evolved after your arrival in ways it hadn't before. Not necessarily because you created a process for every team, but because you created new parameters, showed that there are different ways to coordinate actions and mitigate pressure on specific projects.

Getting management right means getting right the way you elevate people to different levels. It's seeing your role not as the one carrying the project, but as the one who makes sure the team can carry it together.