There is a phrase that quietly kills more startups than bad product decisions: 

“Everything’s on track.” 

It sounds reassuring. It sounds professional. It sounds like progress. 

It is also, very often, complete fiction. 

The Comfort of the Green Status 

Every dashboard has it. Every board slide has it. Every weekly update has a version of it. 

Green. On track. No major issues. Minor blockers. 

It creates a strange psychological safety: 

If everything is on track, nothing urgent needs attention. 
If nothing is urgent, you can move on to the next meeting. 
If you can move on, you must be doing your job. 

The problem is that “on track” usually means: 

• No one has raised a red flag yet 

• The deadline hasn’t arrived yet 

• The customer hasn’t complained yet 

• The system hasn’t forced reality to surface yet 

It does not mean:

• The work is actually progressing 

• The commitments are actually being followed through 

• The dependencies are actually resolved 

• The risks are actually shrinking 

It means: nothing has exploded so far.

How Projects Drift While Everyone Feels Fine 

Drift is quiet. 
It accumulates in small, invisible ways: 

• A follow-up that didn’t happen 

• A decision that wasn’t fully captured 

• A dependency that stayed implicit 

• A customer concern that lived only in a call 

• A “we’ll handle it” that never became an owner 

All of this lives in:

Threads. Transcripts. Attachments. Calendars. Side conversations.

So the system keeps saying “on track” while reality slowly diverges.

By the time the dashboard turns red, the damage is already done. 

The Executive Blind Spot 

At Series A, velocity is everything. 

At C-level, leverage is everything. 

And neither leaves time to read everything. 

You cannot: 

• Read every thread 

• Watch every call 

• Parse every doc 

• Reconstruct every context switch 

So you rely on summaries. Statuses. Roll-ups. Optimism. 

This creates a dangerous dynamic: 

Leaders are making decisions based on representations of work, not work itself. 

Second-hand reality. 

And second-hand reality is how “on track” survives long after it stopped being true. 

Why “On Track” Is a Feeling, Not a Signal 

Humans are wired to smooth. 

We round up. We avoid conflict. We compress complexity into simple narratives. 

“On track” is the ultimate compression. 

It hides:

• Open loops 

• Fading commitments 

• Misaligned expectations 

• Silent blockers 

• Work that exists only in conversation 

It feels good. It sounds controlled. It keeps anxiety down. 

It also removes the only thing leaders actually need: friction with reality. 

What Changes When You See the Work Itself 

When you stop relying on what people say is happening and start seeing what is actually happening, a few things shift immediately:

• “On track” gets replaced with “what’s planned vs what’s done” 

• Optimism gets replaced with commitments and owners 

• Confidence gets replaced with evidence 

• Status gets replaced with signal 

You need the work picture to be built from: 

Requests. Tasks. Meetings. Decisions. Follow-ups. Deadlines. 

The actual objects of execution. 

Where Belt Comes In 

Belt exists for one reason: 

To close the gap between perceived progress and real progress. 

Instead of:

• trusting typed statuses 

• relying on memory 

• chasing updates 

• reconstructing context manually 

Belt builds reality directly from where work happens: 

Email. Meetings. Calendar. Commitments. 

So “on track” stops being a vibe and starts being verifiable. 

You can see: 

• What was decided 

• What’s required next 

• What’s blocked 

• What’s overdue 

• What changed since last week 

• What you need to ask in the next meeting 

And when that happens, something subtle but powerful changes in leadership: 

You stop managing narratives. You stop managing optimism. You stop managing comfort.

You start managing reality. 

Because in fast-growing companies, the biggest risk is thinking you’re on track when you’re not. 

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