what’s your team’s “Top 5”? (ask them!)

Why aren’t we all doing this?

As companies scale, leaders inevitably become more disconnected from the day-to-day realities on the front lines. Information gets filtered, nuance gets lost, and decisions get made based on lagging indicators instead of real-time insights.

But what if there was a simple way to tap into the collective intelligence of your entire team?

Consider Jensen Huang's approach at Nvidia. Every couple of weeks, he asks each of his 30,000 employees to send a “Top 5 Things” email to their team, which is also available to him. These emails outline the five most important items employees are thinking about — things like progress on key projects, operational challenges, emerging market trends, competitor movements, interesting research, or new technologies.

Jensen reportedly reads over 100 of these emails daily, allowing him to spot patterns, opportunities, and issues bubbling up from anywhere in the organization.

Three things strike me about this simple yet powerful practice:

Writing forces clarity

The act of writing is thinking. Regularly nudging your team to pause, reflect, and articulate their top five priorities creates a more thoughtful and focused culture. It forces distillation and helps individuals (and you) see what truly matters amidst the daily noise. For CS teams juggling dozens of accounts, this forced focus is invaluable.

Leaders need unfiltered insights

Information gets watered down as it travels up the org chart. Executives need raw information—the ground truth—to make good decisions. As David Senra puts it, leaders need "information from the edge." The real magic, the critical details, often happen on the front lines with customers. This simple email provides a direct channel, bypassing layers of summarization.

Simplicity scales

Most of us overcomplicate how we gather feedback from customers, teammates, and partners. Do we really need complex third-party survey tools, employee "pulse" apps, and elaborate reporting dashboards for everything? Sometimes, the most effective tool is the simplest one, consistently applied. This approach requires minimal overhead and gets straight to the point.

And you don’t need to be the CEO to implement this. You could start tomorrow within your own CS team. Ask your direct reports to share their "Top 5" weekly or bi-weekly. What obstacles are they hitting? What customer feedback are they hearing? What process improvements are top of mind?

How are you gathering insights from your front lines? Because that’s where the action is happening.

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