Stop telling your team "we'll figure it out." It's costing you.
Three questions that eliminate rework, reduce escalations, and turn "we'll figure it out" into actual direction. Takes ten minutes. Saves weeks.
Someone sent me a message last week: “Anurag, how do you know when your team is actually confused?”
I told him to watch three things. How often they ask for clarification. How many decisions land back on your desk. How much gets built twice.
Confusion does not announce itself. It hides inside a phrase most of us say without thinking:
“We’ll figure it out as we go.”
I used to say this all the time. It felt flexible. Adaptive. Leader-like.
What I was actually doing was avoiding hard decisions and making my team clean up the mess later.
Let’s dive in.
Before We Dive In: A Quick Share
I am building Wisemove to help founders step out of day-to-day execution. Every week, I share frameworks that create clarity without adding complexity—no theory, just what worked when we helped a technology team move their Glassdoor rating from 2.7 to 3.9.
If your team depends on you for everything, this is for you.
What “We’ll Figure It Out” Actually Costs
Here is what that phrase cost us in one project.
We hired a developer to rebuild our client reporting system. In the kickoff, I said: “Make it better. You know what clients need.” No definition of “better.” No examples of what good looked like. No clarity on what mattered most.
Three weeks later, he demoed the work.
It looked great. It did not solve the problem.
He built a dashboard clients would love to look at. We needed a report they could export and send to their board. We rebuilt it. The entire thing.
That is what “we’ll figure it out” costs. Not drama. Not crisis. Drift.
Rework becomes normal. Decisions get escalated. Meetings multiply. Your best people stop engaging.
You do not notice it day to day. You notice it when you look back and realize: same problems, same conversations, same frustrations—just louder.
What Changed
We stopped launching work with hope. Every project started with three questions:
1. What does done look like?
2. Who decides if it is done?
3. What gets sacrificed if time runs out?
For that reporting system rebuild, it would have looked like this:
“Done means clients can export a PDF with quarterly metrics in under 30 seconds. Speed and accuracy are primary. Design is secondary. I decide if it is done. If it is not done in two weeks, we pause and reassess scope.”
One paragraph. Ten extra minutes to write. It would have eliminated three weeks of rework.
This is not complexity. This is definition.
I’m Curious
Most founders confuse flexibility with lack of structure.
Flexibility is changing direction when needed. Lack of structure is never setting a direction at all.
“We’ll figure it out” sounds like the first. It functions like the second.
This is not a people problem. This is a system problem. And the system starts with one decision: stop postponing clarity.
I saw this at a company where I led the technology team. Glassdoor rating: 2.7. Not because people hated working there. Because they did not know if they were succeeding or failing. We kept saying "just do your best," but we never defined what best meant.
Within eight months of changing how we defined work, our rating moved to 3.9.
Same people. Different system.
What To Do Next
Next week I will share how we turned those three questions into a repeatable system. It is simple. Most people skip it. That is why most projects need to be rebuilt.
— Anurag
P.S. – The three questions I shared? I stole them from watching my own confusion. For years, I thought being vague was trusting people. It was not. It was protecting myself from accountability.
Was this helpful? 🧡
If this resonated with you, share it with a founder who’s stuck firefighting. We all grow when someone names what we’re quietly struggling with.
P.P.S. – Join the conversation. I read every comment and reply to founders working through these patterns in real time.
