Every goal I’ve actually reached started the same way. On paper. Write it down, so it’s real. Break it into small steps, so it’s doable. Track it every week, so you know it’s working. ㅤ Be intentional and honest about it! What’s one goal you’re tracking right now?

In an era of AI-generated content, I had a really hard time realizing this wasn't AI-generated! Wild.

One year ago Isabela joined my team. I can’t believe it’s only been one year. She learned the products fast. She took on her own customers fast. She found her place on the team fast. ㅤ @deel Speed, from day one! And it shows in the feedback. Customers love working with her. Colleagues across Deel say the same. For a while now she’s also been helping teammates and mentoring the newer people on the team. ㅤ Doing that since 6 months mark... and that is speaking volumes on its own! Isabela, thank you for everything you bring! We are lucky to have you!

Not a Monday person? Here are 3 things that make it easier: 1️⃣ 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝘁𝗲𝗰𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗳𝗶𝗿𝘀𝘁 𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗿. No meetings. No Slack. Start your week before everyone else starts it for you. 2️⃣ 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗮 𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗰𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝗻. Pick something you can finish in 15 minutes. Getting one thing done gets you moving. 3️⃣ 𝗣𝘂𝘁 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗴𝗼𝗼𝗱 𝗶𝗻 𝗠𝗼𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆. Lunch with a colleague or a friend. A workout. Your favorite coffee place. Give yourself a reason to look forward to it. ⭐ 𝗕𝗼𝗻𝘂𝘀. Go to bed on time on Sunday. Late-night scrolling is why half of the people hate Monday mornings. Monday doesn’t have to be your favorite day. It just doesn’t have to be the worst one. What’s your Monday survival trick? 👇

Every delayed implementation I've seen had at least one of these three problems ⬇️ 🚩 No capacity on the customer side. The person running the project already has a full-time job, and nobody cleared their calendar. 🚩 Nobody knows who owns what. Everyone assumes someone else is sending the data. 🚩 Deadlines that live in one inbox. The main contact agreed to a date. Their team never heard about it. Ask early: Who is doing the work? How much time do they really have? Who signs off? When you see a risk, say it. Even when it's awkward. A risk raised in week one is a conversation. A risk raised in week six is an escalation. What's the earliest warning sign you've learned to watch for? 👇

Next quarter gives you about 500 working hours. Where are they going? If you don't decide, your inbox will decide for you. Skip the "improve my skills" line on your next performance review. Pick where you'll invest: 📚 A skill. Something you're weak at, or something the next role will need. ⚙️ A process. Something slow or broken on your team that you want to fix. 🧠 Product knowledge. The product or feature you avoid because you don't know it well enough yet. Pick one or two. Not five. Write down what done looks like. Then put it in your calendar, or it won't happen. Where are you investing your 500 hours?

My last post about AI landed me on LinkedIn Lunatics 😅. Fair enough. I'll take it. But I'm not walking it back. In every interview I ask one question: "What are the 3 AI use cases you're most proud of?" Not which tools you've heard of. What you actually did with it. Why ask? At @deel we don't use AI just to go faster. It raises the quality of our work. It improves what our customers get. It frees up time for the parts that need a human. So I want to see how someone thinks about it. And there's no answer too small. A automation that saves you an hour a week counts. A prompt that makes your customer emails clearer counts. Curiosity is what I'm hiring for. The use cases are just the proof. So, what are your 3? 👇

Performance review season is here. Let's talk about your self-review. Doing your job well matters. It's also what you were hired to do. At startups and scaleups, the bar is high. Strong work in your core role usually lands you at solid. Solid is good. Nobody should feel bad about it. But if you're aiming for "exceeding expectations", your self-review needs more than your job description. It needs the things you did beyond it. ✅ A process you fixed ✅ Real impact on a customer ✅ A product improvement you pushed for ✅ A side project you owned from start to finish Then write it like evidence. Not adjectives. "Improved onboarding" says very little. "Cut onboarding time from 10 weeks to 4" says everything. Your manager can't reward what they can't see. Don't make them guess. What's one thing you did this cycle that went beyond your role?

2,395 tools. One agent. Meet @get_akai ! That's how many things Akai can do inside the Deel platform alone. And the number keeps growing. Akai connects to the tools teams already use. Slack. Zendesk. Google. Microsoft. Old portals nobody wants to touch. No integration available? It builds one. But for me, the connection that matters most is the one to Deel's platform. Read. Write. Analyze. If I can think of it, @get_akai can automate it. No developer. No ticket. We built it to run our own operations first. Now anyone can use it. Book a demo and see it for yourself! What's the first thing you'd automate?

Took my son Luka to a swimming competition yesterday. He won't win a medal. He knows it. I know it. So why compete? He has one goal. Beat his own time. Not the kid in the next lane. Not the kid on the podium. Just the kid he was last time. When he touched the wall, he didn't look at the other swimmers. He looked straight at the clock. As adults, we forget this. We look sideways. At who's faster. At who got there first. The only race that really counts is against yesterday's you. A second faster. Then another. That's how kids grow. Turns out it's how adults grow too. Who are you racing against this week?

I've worked remotely for 10+ years. I love it. Yet, some things a video call will never give you. A long lunch with no agenda. A conversation that wanders wherever it wants. A baby trying to grab everything on the table 😄. ㅤ Had exactly that with Visar I. and Dafina Shala. And their little one, who stole the show completely. ㅤ We talked about work. The industry. Where things are heading. Life. ㅤ Whenever there's a chance to sit together, I take it. ㅤ Thank you both for a lovely afternoon. 🙏 ㅤ When did you last meet a colleague in person, just because?

End of month. End of quarter. Oh my, Q3 was short. Half of Europe was on holiday in August, so everything got compressed. Sales closed a ton last week. More lands this week. All at once. Volume in onboarding is never flat. Quiet weeks, then a wall. Flexibility isn't a nice trait on an implementation team. It's the job.

Monday morning. 30 live projects. Where do you start? Risk first. Stop what's about to slip. Unblock first. Clear what others are waiting on. Hardest first. Take the ugly one while your brain is fresh. All three are right. None is always right. The skill is reading the week and knowing which one it needs.

GPT-6 Astra is four days old and people are already building wild things with it! Interactive human anatomy, generated on demand. Rotate it, open it up, explore it. Built in minutes. By someone who isn't a developer. The barrier used to be skill. Then it was time. Now it's just imagination.

July. Quiet. August. Quieter. September. NOW. Sales goes dark for two months, then the floodgates open. Deals close. Contracts land. Kickoffs get booked. And the onboarding teams absorb all of it. Sales gets the applause for the spike. Onboarding makes sure it doesn't collapse.