GTMcraft Plays · The 60-day leadership test play

A 150k to 250k euro leadership hire is a bet against your runway, and month 9 is too late to find out it failed; score it at day 60 instead.

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The 90-second read

Your next leadership hire costs 150,000 to 250,000 euros a year, and you cannot afford to find out in month 9 whether it worked. Most founders wait for a feeling: a missed forecast, a tense one-on-one, a rep who quietly stops trying. By then you have paid a full year in salary and lost a second year rebuilding the context that walks out the door. Jason Lemkin names a cleaner test. At day 60, a real leader has hired one great person, moved the one metric you hired them for, taken real work off your plate, and earned the team's belief. Fail one check and there is no partial credit. Write the four checks before you sign the offer, and book the day-60 review the day they accept.

• A leadership hire is judged on four checks at day 60, with no partial credit.
• Waiting for a feeling instead of a test costs you the better part of a year.
• On a 3-month notice period, day 60 is your last honest exit before it gets expensive.
• The four checks live on one page, sent to the candidate before they sign.
• The review goes in the calendar the day they accept, not when it feels needed.

Read time: about 5 minutes. First step runnable Monday morning.

The #1 move this week

Write the four checks on one page, send it to the finalist before they sign, and book the day-60 review the day they accept. Naming the test before the offer removes the sunk-cost pressure to wait once they have started. You now have a date and a standard, instead of a hope you will check on eventually.

Start here: draft the one-page four-check test, tied to the one metric this hire owns.

Ignore this week: the full 30/60/90 onboarding plan, the culture deck, and the org chart redraw. One page, four checks, one date.