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In today's newsletter:
Latest Podcasts: What You Missed
Ambitious… But Lazy - What if the real goal of building a business isn’t doing more… but getting things to work without you?
10,000+ Customers With 15 People – How SweepBright scaled to over 10,000 customers with a team of just 15. A practical conversation with Raphael Bochner on leverage, focus, and designing a business that grows without growing headcount.
Hiring without Hiring – How to scale without adding payroll or burning out.
Want to Scale? ICP: Do You Know Me? – Stop selling to everyone. This episode focuses on defining your ICP so you can scale with better clients and less chaos.
The 10 Money Skills Every Microteam Should Master – You’re great at what you do. But if the money side of your business feels confusing, stressful, or weirdly fragile, this episode is required listening.
Systems Thinking Resources: Books, Frameworks & Mapping Tools for Microteam
You're firefighting. Again.
A customer complains about slow support response times, so you tell your team to prioritize support. Now product development slows down. Product roadmap falls behind, so you tell the team to focus on shipping. Now support response times balloon again.
You're stuck in a loop. Every solution creates a new problem. You're playing whack-a-mole with your own business.
This is a systems problem.
Most founders think in straight lines: Problem → Solution. But businesses are systems, not sequences. Everything connects to everything else. When you pull one lever, five other things shift in response.
Systems thinking is how you see the whole game instead of just the next move. It's how you identify feedback loops, bottlenecks, and leverage points that unlock disproportionate results.
For microteams, this matters even more. You can't brute-force your way past bad systems by hiring more people. You need to fix the system itself.
This list isn't theory. It's 30 resources, books, frameworks, mapping tools, and courses, that teach you to think in systems, design better processes, and stop fighting the same fires every month.
Let's fix the system.
What Success Looks Like for Microteams
For a microteam, good systems thinking means:
Seeing patterns, not just problems. You recognize that late invoices and customer churn are symptoms of the same root issue: poor onboarding.
Fixing systems, not symptoms. You stop manually reminding customers to pay and start automating invoices with payment links.
Designing for leverage. Small changes to key systems create outsized results across the business.
Common failure modes:
Treating every problem as unique when they're actually variations of the same system failure
Optimizing one piece without understanding the whole (e.g., faster sales close rates that overwhelm delivery capacity)
Adding complexity instead of simplifying (more tools, more people, more chaos)
Success for a microteam is identifying the 1-2 system changes that solve 10 problems at once.
The Resources
Organized by foundational books, frameworks, mapping tools, courses, and case studies.