Six-phase decision artifact for Vanta Wireless. The Council scopes the question, generates candidate paths, simulates them through five personas, red-teams the survivors, runs sensitivity on the variables that actually move the answer, and converges on a single recommendation with dated triggers.
The decision is well-framed but gated. The unreconciled $73M budget gap and live Google term sheet keep clarity below the 0.85 commit threshold.
A $73M discrepancy sits between the board-approved marketing envelope and the bottoms-up plan. It is unreconciled and gates any senior marketing hire.
OPENGoogle / Google One term sheet delivered June 12 by Eric Ruiz. Negotiations active — redlines and the Discount Tier Schedule are the live items.
ACTIVELeadership aligned on a hybrid model: the primary Vanta platform anchors all external partner services (Zoom, Google, et al.).
ALIGNEDA dedicated 'product professional' is being hired to clear the workflow bottleneck flagged across the Gemini transcripts.
IN PROGRESSDoes Vanta hire a CMO now, or staff growth functions under the CBO until the budget reconciles?
Can the $73M gap be closed before a CMO signs, or does it become their first mandate?
Does the Google term sheet shift the marketing motion enough to change the hire profile?
Who owns the partner-anchored brand architecture in the interim?
Grounding for Path 3: the Google / Google One term sheet (delivered JUN 12 by Eric Ruiz) and the incoming dedicated product professional hire change the math. The partner motion creates demand for an internal brand owner sooner, while the new operations hire makes a lean engine viable without a full CMO. Select a path to explore its trade space.
Captures most of the In-House upside while keeping Lean's optionality. A thin internal engine owns the partner-anchored brand and the Google launch culture immediately; the full CMO hire is held behind explicit triggers tied to the budget reconciliation and partner delivery. The new product professional clears the operational bottleneck that would otherwise sink a lean team.
Verdicts per persona per path. STRONG / SAFE favor the path; WEAK / FAIL oppose it. The red-team pass is folded into each note as the adversarial case. Tap a cell to read the critique.
Gets the engine started now without waiting on a 6-month search. Best velocity-per-dollar.
The June 15 Weekly Product Sync surfaced persistent TestFlight authentication failures blocking William and John Greene from testing. Stephen Hall owns the fix.
If the TestFlight blockers persist past JUN 26, the Cultural Engine (P3) risks marketing a product leadership cannot itself verify. This dominates the staffing answer — a brand engine running ahead of a testable product is a credibility liability.
P3 leans on the CBO to anchor the interim cultural engine while also carrying the Google negotiation. Bandwidth is the binding constraint on the lean model.
If William's load exceeds capacity, the interim engine stalls and P3 degrades toward Lean by neglect. Mitigated by the incoming product professional clearing the workflow bottleneck.
Stephen Hall's GCP cloud burn rate is trending against plan and interacts directly with the Google term-sheet economics.
A high burn narrows the marketing envelope and widens the $73M gap, hardening the case to defer the CMO comp — reinforcing P3 over P2.
Operating friction between Julian and Glenn raises coordination cost on cross-functional launches and slows decision throughput.
Unresolved friction inflates the cost of any path that needs tight cross-functional execution. P2's single-owner model is most resilient here; P3 needs an explicit RACI to hold.
Blair's throughput is a multiplier on the lean operating model — a high-efficiency Blair makes P3 viable with fewer heads.
If efficiency dips, the lean engine needs backfill sooner, pulling the CMO trigger forward and raising P3's effective cost toward P2.
Stand up the internal cultural engine under the CBO now, anchored to the Vanta platform across all partner services. Defer the full CMO search behind hard triggers. This captures the In-House upside on the Google and Zoom launches while keeping the $73M gap from forcing a premature senior hire.
The recommendation holds only while these stay green. Each is a pre-committed, dated decision boundary — when one fires, the action runs without re-litigating the path.
Open the CMO search immediately — the gating constraint is cleared.