Three Fundamental Truths
Leading a team through ambiguity to real impact — Wasserman, 2024
Wasserman is a global media company and talent agency. They rep everyone from Bill Maher to John Summit to brands and properties like the NFL. Seventy of us were randomly split into teams, each assigned a market segment the company wanted to investigate. Some groups got streaming as their project. Others got consumer goods in media - a domain where I'd launched a product early in life, so my interest naturally was biased towards it.
Our group drew Non-Traditional Women's Sports.
We were told upfront: almost no structured data existed for our segment. Of all the teams, ours would be the hardest to draw real insight from. So no one knew where to begin, and for a while we didn't. We were peers, assigned at random, so nobody was really in charge. A leaderless group handed an ambiguous problem will wait a long time for a direction until the team or an individual creates one.
I wanted one thing out of our first meeting: to establish three fundamental truths we could build on during the summer.
First: Wasserman is global, so our scope should be too. If we pulled signals from women's sports across every market we could reach - not just the US - would the analysis sharpen? We agreed it would, and made global scope the foundation.
Second: the power law. Was there a monopoly sport, a dominant region running an order of magnitude above the rest? Finding that asymmetry would give us a thesis instead of a survey.
Third: our audience. The Global Insights VP and the COO who audits mergers and acquisitions would receive this. They needed something they could act on the same day - not a verbal appendix with visual aids. So that's what we built: something high signal, with little to wade through.
With those three truths in place, the constraint became much less apparent and created a meaningful challenge. And the arguing stopped too, because what a stuck group fights about is direction, and now we had one.
Eight weeks later we presented a ranked shortlist of six women's sports properties - with valuation ranges and three-year growth forecasts - and named Women's Tennis as the power-law vertical. Viewership was climbing, sponsorship inventory was underpriced against the attention it drew, and money was only beginning to move into women's sports. The gap between what WTA properties were worth and what brands were paying for them was wide open.
The Global Insights VP took the framework into development.
Less than a year later, WTA Ventures appointed Wasserman as agent of record.