Rethinking Management for the Reality of Work: Creating Organizational Clarity with CPO Noam Mantel

Rethinking Management For The Reality Of Work

In sports, assessing success is beautifully straightforward. You train for a game or match, either win or lose, then analyze the performance, iterate, and train some more for the next one. Goals are stated outright, and every team member has a crisp understanding of roles and expectations for themselves and their teammates. 

When I played professional basketball and later when I coached, progress was the natural result of this cycle. But the longer I have spent leading teams in the corporate world, first at ABinBev, then at Slack, the more I realized: 1) shared context is the foundation of high performance, and 2) most companies lack this shared context. 

This lack of context makes work, especially management harder. We have tasked our managers with translating multiple layers of goals and continuously redefining roles and priorities in a complex ecosystem. 

It’s not that coaching can’t work at large companies, it’s that the modern workplace is too nuanced and complex an ecosystem for any leader to have the full context. 

That’s not a human failing; it’s a structural one. And with AI coaching, it’s now a structural limitation we can overcome by giving managers and teams both the context and coaching to perform like the best sports teams.

Where Traditional Coaching Has Fallen Short

Traditional corporate coaching has always promised transformation, but it has rarely fit the way organizations actually operate because this coaching has provided individualized guidance but operated with an incomplete picture of how work gets done. 

Every company contains a full spectrum of working styles and responsibilities and roles. Some orgs operate in tight co-located teams; others work asynchronously across time zones and cultures. Some roles require structured planning; others thrive on improvisation and ambiguity. Even within a single team, no two people navigate work the same way.

Even the most well-intentioned leaders struggle with this. Feedback often comes too late. Expectations aren’t consistently shared. And people don’t experience the organization the same way: not across functions, not across levels, not across personal backgrounds and different ways of working. 

To build coaching that matches the complexity of real work, we don’t just need AI that knows you. We need AI that understands your environment across all its facets - you, your role, your team and your organization.

That kind of intelligence isn’t about remembering every detail of your professional life. It’s about knowing which details matter in the moments when they matter. That’s why we’ve built Nadia. 

An AI Coach That Understands the System, Not Just the Individual

Nadia is engineered to understand both the individual and the environment shaping them, and to move fluidly between the two. Because the truth is, the intersection of personal strengths and organizational context is where growth actually happens and where most coaching today falls apart. 

Coaching becomes meaningful when it can show up at the exact moment that alignment begins to fray: before a difficult conversation, during a period of ambiguity, in the lead-up to a performance review, or when someone is navigating a new role.

For example, it doesn’t help anyone if Nadia knows that Alex from Marketing owns a terrier named Mr. Pickles. But it helps a great deal if Nadia understands that they are naturally conflict avoidant. Or knows exactly what their org’s goals are for this quarter. Or that their functional leader prefers reading docs over meetings in order to make decisions.   

Those small, specific, contextual distinctions are the ones that allow coaching to adapt from one person and role to another in ways that markedly impact performance. And that context is impossible to scale with human effort alone.

With Nadia, we’re not replacing the systems organizations rely on, we’re creating a clearer, more human path through them so that managers and teams can better connect the dots and remove obstacles.

This is the frontier of AI: not just reasoning, summarization and automation of common workflows, but context and the ability to understand the many-layered environment a human operates within and make sense of it in real time. It’s an entirely new class of intelligence, and we’re only at the beginning of what it makes possible.

If that challenge excites you, we’re hiring.

Join us →