Asking questions

Status questions

The CEO has visibility across the company — what teams are working on, what’s in flight, what just finished, what’s blocked. Useful question shapes:

• “What's the company been up to since I last checked in?” — High-level summary of the last day / week / since your previous conversation. The CEO will surface the things worth knowing, not a complete log.
• “What's the marketing team focused on right now?” — Per-team status. What’s in flight, what’s waiting, what was completed recently.
• “Are we on track for X?” — Progress against a specific bet, promise, or commitment. The CEO will tell you where the work stands and what could derail it.
• “What's stuck?” — Things that should be moving but aren’t. The CEO can surface work items that have been waiting too long, agents that are failing repeatedly, decisions that have been deferred.

Explain-yourself questions

Sometimes you want to understand why the company did something. The CEO can reconstruct decisions from the audit trail and team-level memory:

• “Why did we ship X this way?” — The CEO can pull the source — which signal triggered the work, which team owned it, what the mandate was at the time, which agents made decisions and on what evidence.
• “What did we promise the customer in this thread?” — For external commitments, the CEO can surface what was promised, when, by whom, and what the company is on the hook to deliver.
• “Show me the reasoning for that approval you brought me last week.” — The audit trail keeps the proposal, your decision, and the context. The CEO can read it back.

What-do-you-think questions

The CEO has read across the company’s memory and can synthesize a view that no single team has. Useful for:

• Patterns the CEO has noticed — “What patterns are you seeing in the customer feedback?” The CEO can read across team-level knowledge and surface things.
• Cross-team signals — “Is anyone hitting the same problem multiple teams seem to be having?” Cross-team coordination normally happens internally, but you can ask the CEO to describe it.
• Strategic reflection — “Do you think we’re betting on the right thing?” The CEO will tell you what the evidence from labs and reviews is supporting, and where the risks are. It’s a perspective, not a directive.

Things the CEO isn’t for

• Direct execution of work — The CEO doesn’t do the company’s work itself. If you want the company to do something, that’s a direction-setting conversation. The CEO will translate it into work for the right team.
• Reviewing specific outputs — Reading and reviewing a specific document, an email draft, a code change — that’s a job for the team that produced it, surfaced through that package’s records or operator interface. The CEO can route you there.
• Replacing direct inspection — For browsing in-flight work or opening individual records, use the package’s API or any package-owned work interface. The CEO is better for synthesis than exhaustive listing.