Jon Munson 🎸

Your work is good. The experience isn’t. That’s why you lose clients you should be keeping. I’m building Minimum Viable Excellence: a simple baseline for comms + delivery so clients stop chasing clarity. Founding access (£49): minimumviableexcellence.com

Good operations is silent, repeatable, and boring in the best possible way. Nobody notices it. Until it's gone. More here: jonmunson.co.uk/posts/cheltenh…

Most operational stress isn't caused by pressure. It's caused by ambiguity.

Big events don't run well because someone saves the day. They run well because lots of people know their role and handle the boring bits properly. More here: jonmunson.co.uk/posts/cheltenh…

Tip: You can paste markdown into Google Docs and it will get formatted correctly. You just need to enable support: support.google.com/docs/answer/12… Then you can 'Paste from Markdown' in the edit menu.

The mark of a well-run operation isn't that nothing went wrong. It's that when something did, people knew what to do. More here: jonmunson.co.uk/posts/cheltenh…

Too often, organisations talk about resilience when what they really mean is people coping with preventable mess. Those are not the same thing.

Hiring a full-time PM won't fix your delivery problems. It'll just make them more expensive and more visible.

"Basically it's done." "Basically it'll work like X." That word is how you accidentally sell fiction. If your comms are full of "basically", you're not being clear. You're being reckless.

Hiring a permanent PM and dropping them into a mid-flight project isn't a baptism of fire. It's just bad onboarding with extra steps.

The real killer in delivery isn't the workload. It's the waiting.

Onboarding docs that look thorough but are basically a museum. 50 pages, 12 links, half of it wrong. New people nod along - then DM someone for the real process.

When 'what's next' and 'who owns it' don't have quick answers, everything turns emotional. People defend time, blame scope, and leadership adds meetings because it feels like control.

Delivery is your shock absorber. Every last-minute change, every urgent client wobble — delivery absorbs it so the business feels smooth. From the outside it looks like growth. Inside it looks like juggling plates with no table to stand on.

Sales promises timelines. Clients message devs directly. Account managers just add things in. Leadership calls it a culture problem. It's nearly always an authority problem.

Teams with Jira, Notion, Slack, Asana, and dashboards still missing deadlines. Not because they're lazy. Because nobody owns the handoffs. Work becomes a group project. And group projects slip.

Sales sells promises. Delivery pays the interest. That "yes" doesn't land evenly — it lands on your strongest people. More here: jonmunson.co.uk/posts/hidden-c…

If you can’t say no with clarity, you’ll say sorry with stress.

@MartinSLewis @grok whats the best deal available in the uk currently

Important: If you can get off the Energy Price Cap right now, you should & urgently! - The wholesale gas rate is spiking due to the Iran conflict, and it is a prime driver or UK elec prices. If that's sustained (big if), it will likely push the Price Cap rate up from July - Some of the cheap fixes from before the weekend haven't (yet) been pulled, so you can still lock in a rate at around 14% less than the current Price Cap, both saving you money and giving peace of mind that the rate can't rise. You can do a whole-of-market comparison via cheapenergyclub.com - However, many firms are reassessing their fix prices today and may reprice their deals upward. There's a risk many of the current cheapest fixes will be gone by this time tomorrow - Plus, fix now, and unprecedentedly the rate you lock in at will be reduced on 1 April. This is because govt is changing the underlying way energy bills work and moving some policy costs to general taxation. That reduces the elec & gas unit rates even for those already on fixes. So even if you fix now the amount you pay will drop by 7% to 9% on typical usage on 1 April - Fixes are available for most payment methods except prepay. Those on smart prepay can look at the EDF Simply Tracker tariff, which is effectively a price cap tariff with £100 lower Standing Charges (and £70 extra cashback on top via the link above) PS How to know if you're on a Price Cap? The Price Cap only applies to firms' Standard Variable tariffs. It's the default tariff you're on if you haven't chosen another deal, or your deal (eg a fix) ended and you did nothing. If you're fixed, on an EV tariff, a time of use tariff, or other specialist tariff, you are not on the Price Cap.

Listening to Magnetic Man, for those 2010 vibes. Who remembers this album?

If a “standard” campaign needs 4-5 people to touch it, it’s not standard. It’s fragile. “Collaboration” often means ownership diluted until nobody’s responsible. Tools won’t save that. Design will: fewer touchpoints, clear owners, proper gates, no freebies.