People, process,
product.
Strip away the titles and the nuances, and the work has been generally the same. You spend enough time with the numbers that they stop being abstract and start telling you what is actually happening, you notice patterns that are easy to miss when you are moving too fast, and you learn how to sit in the middle of messy systems long enough to understand how the pieces fit together.
The frame I keep returning to is people, process, product. Good people. A process they trust. Products that accelerate both. Get those three right and the business starts to move on its own. When they are not, everything feels more chaotic than it should, and the instinct is usually to push harder rather than step back and see what is actually off. Data has always been there in the background, pointing to what is working and what is not for anyone willing to pay attention without trying to force the answer they hoped to see. I have been guilty of that more than once.
I've worked the frame from every seat I could: as an individual contributor pulling the levers myself, as a manager building the team that pulls them, as a GM who owns the whole P&L and has to live with the outcome. Each seat teaches you something the others can't, but over time the lessons start to converge into something pretty simple: be kind and useful to the people around you, say what is true even when it is inconvenient, stay close enough to the work that you do not confuse movement with progress.
That practice has shown up across Red Ventures (Business Ops, Finance, Strategy), Three Ships (Director of Strategy and Business Ops on Home Solutions), Craftwork (Head of Growth through seed and Series A, YC23), and now MODIS Dental Partners as VP of Growth.