Everyone must move upstream

Every week I have conversation after conversation about how work and business is getting completely turned on its head because of AI. The tactical side of work is getting easier by the day. What used to take weeks can now be done in hours with the right tools. It’s exciting, but it also means the bar has moved significantly. If everyone can do the tactical work, then value no longer lives in execution alone.

The real value is in framing the right problems, making smarter bets, and delivering measurable outcomes for customers and the business. This goes for everyone. Marketing, product, IT/Tech, sales, operations, finance, HR, etc. If you stay in the task lane, you’re replaceable with AI. If you move upstream and focus on outcomes, you’ll be indispensable.

The rules have changed.

AI has rewritten the rules of value creation. Fast and easy is status quo. Research, prototyping, and even full builds can be done in a fraction of the time. But with that speed comes a new problem.. sameness. When every team is pulling from the same playbook of tools and patterns, products and experiences start to look and feel identical.

In this world, customers don’t reward “good enough.” They reward clarity, usefulness, and trust. Leaders who can tie work directly to business and customer outcomes will rise. Everyone else risks being left behind.

Putting this into action

• Look at your work from the customer’s perspective. What’s different, and why should they care?

• Audit your last three projects. Were you measuring impact by the things you/your team got done, or the actual outcomes you achieved?

• If you somehow are in a business or function and not required to track both customer outcomes (satisfaction, adoption, loyalty) and business outcomes (revenue, cost, risk), do it now.

The skill shift.

Every role is shifting from task doer to outcome owner. That means no longer just accepting a task list, but instead reframing problems into sharp questions with clear measures of success. It means making bets you can test quickly, facilitating cross-functional alignment, and using AI to reduce cycle times.

And most importantly, it means doing the impact math. Leaders who can tie their work directly to how the business makes or saves money, reduces risk, or improves customer experience will stand apart.

Putting this into action

• Write down the business outcome your current project will achieve. Can you measure it?

• For every meeting, walk in with a hypothesis: “We believe X will drive Y outcome.”

• Practice explaining your work in terms of dollars saved, revenue gained, or customer growth.

The five “ups”

Here’s a simple way to think about moving upstream.. the five “ups.”

• Move up the timeline. Get in before solutions are assumed. Shape the question.

• Move up the stack. Learn enough AI, data, and automation to build yourself.

• Move up the business. Understand how the company actually makes and saves money.

• Move up in understanding the customer. Spend time with real users every single week.

• Move up the scoreboard. Own a metric that matters.

If you’re not moving upstream in these ways, you risk being stuck downstream where the work is easiest to automate.

Putting this into action

• Ask to sit in on a strategy or planning meeting you’d normally miss.

• Learn one AI tool well enough to ship a working proof this month.

• Shadow a customer call to hear pain points firsthand.

• Write down the top three metrics leadership cares about and tie your work to one of them.

The process shift.

The old way of working relied on phase gates, handoffs, and progress measured in documents and meetings. The new way is weekly value drops that customers can actually touch. In this model, evidence beats opinion.

Teams that thrive will build a rhythm of rapid experiments. Each week starts with a clear outcome, ends with a working proof, and creates a feedback loop that accelerates learning and decision-making.

Putting this into action

• Kick off every week with one clear business outcome and one clear customer outcome.

• End each week with something real that customers or users can test.

• Keep a public backlog of bets with owners, assumptions, and results.

The Gretzky test.

Wayne Gretzky famously said, “Skate to where the puck is going.” I quote it often because it’s so relevant right now. The puck is at faster execution and cheaper experiments. But where it’s going is differentiated experiences that feel unmistakably yours.

As more tools standardize design and development, uniqueness becomes the moat. The brands that stand out will be the ones that inject personality, trust, and real customer resonance into everything they deliver.

Putting this into action

• Identify one interaction or customer moment only your brand would create.

• Replace two opinion-driven decisions with data-backed decisions this month.

• Write a one-page outcome brief before starting any new initiative: problem, bet, metric, proof plan.

Your 60-day upstream playbook

Moving upstream doesn’t have to take years. In two months you can establish yourself as someone who frames problems, drives impact, and gets results.

Pick a broken flow you influence. Write an outcome brief. Build a prototype with AI. Put it in front of customers. Measure results. Share them. Then do it again at a bigger scale, and mentor someone else to follow the same path.

Putting this into action

• Weeks 1–2. Pick a broken flow and write an outcome brief.

• Weeks 3–4. Build a prototype with AI and test it with five customers.

• Weeks 5–6. Launch a pilot and measure impact.

• Weeks 7–8. Publish results and mentor a teammate to do the same.

Risks to watch

The shift upstream comes with risks. Tool worship is a big one (i.e., shiny demos that never connect to business outcomes). Another is silo drift, like small wins that never make it into the core systems. And then there’s metric theater. Things like celebrating numbers that don’t actually matter.

The way around these pitfalls is to anchor everything in impact. Tie every experiment to a financial or customer outcome, involve finance or ops early, and make sure demos always drive decisions.

Putting this into action

• Pair every experiment with a finance or ops partner.

• Audit your metrics. Cut any that don’t tie directly to revenue, cost, risk, or customer impact.

Wrapping up

AI made doing stuff easier. It did not make choosing which stuff to focus on better.

The leaders who thrive will not be the best deck builders, spreadsheet analyzers, and product builders. They’ll be the ones who move upstream and frame better problems, tie work to outcomes, and deliver measurable impact week after week.

If you want to test this shift, start small. Pick one project this week. Frame the problem. Own the metric. Ship the smallest proof. Share the result.

If you made it this far, I leave you with this motivational speech from Shia LaBeouf to “just do it"

Onward & upward,
Drew

P.s. If we haven’t met yet, hello! I’m Drew Burdick, Founder and Managing Partner at StealthX. We work with brands to design & build great customer experiences that win. I share ideas weekly through this newsletter & over on the Building Great Experiences podcast. Have a question? Feel free to contact us, I’d love to hear from you.