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L500 · Latina Leadership Summit

Build Your Boat

By the end of this worksheetYou will be able to name the bottleneck in your own work, and write a specification for an agent that removes it.

Four letters. Work them in order, because each one depends on the one before it. Give it twenty minutes and one real task, not a hypothetical. Print this page and write on it.

BBottleneck

Find the thing your team is waiting on you for. Not the thing you dread.

The testNot “what do I hate doing?” but “what stops moving when I’m busy?”

  1. List three things people came to you for in the last two weeks.
  2. For each one, write down what could not move forward until you did it.
  3. Which one had the longest queue behind it? That is your bottleneck, even if it is not the one that annoys you.

My bottleneck is

 

 

 

OOutcome

Name the finished thing before you name a single step.

The testCould someone else look at the result and tell you whether it is right?

Not thisHelp me with my board update.ThisWrite a one-page board update for the September meeting, covering revenue, headcount, and the two risks I flagged last quarter, in the voice I use for these, ending with the three decisions I need from them.

  1. What is the finished thing called, and what format is it in?
  2. Who receives it, and what do they do with it?
  3. What must be in it? Name the pieces.
  4. How will you know it is right rather than merely finished?

Done looks like

 

 

 

AArchitect

Start at the outcome and walk backwards to the inputs.

The testName the destination first, then plan the route. Never the other way around.

  1. What has to happen immediately before “done”? Write that step.
  2. And immediately before that? Keep going until you reach something that already exists.
  3. What does it need access to along the way? Files, calendar, inbox, a document, a list.
  4. What could go wrong, and what should it do when that happens? Name the stopping condition.

The steps, written backwards

 

 

 

 

TTrain

You train it, and you train yourself to train it.

The testWould you fire a new hire over their first draft? Then do not quit over this one.

  1. Run it once. What was actually wrong with the first output? Be precise, not general.
  2. Show it an example of good work rather than describing one.
  3. Which of your instructions was only about seventy percent clear? That is the half a person would have quietly filled in for you.
  4. Write the correction down. It sticks, and it never leaves for a competitor.

What I will correct, and how

 

 

 

Come back to this

Two short check-ins. Put them in your calendar now, before you close this page. Spaced recall is the difference between a worksheet you filled in and a skill you actually have.

Seven daysThree to five minutes

  • Without looking, name the four letters and what each one asks.
  • Which letter did you get wrong when you tried it for real?
  • Did the thing you handed off actually stay handed off?

Thirty daysFifteen minutes

  • What have you handed off since the summit? Write the list.
  • Now that the first bottleneck is gone, what is the new one? It will have moved.
  • Run BOAT on it. This is the loop, and it does not stop.

Because you were in the room at L500

Take $500 off.

It applies to whichever package you choose.

Start with a Discovery Call. Twenty minutes, and we talk about where you are, what you are trying to build, and whether there is a fit. No pitch, no pressure. Just mention L500 when we talk.

Set up a Discovery Call

BOAT: Bottleneck, Outcome, Architect, Train.   More at darkhorseops.com

© 2026 Dark Horse Ops LLC. All rights reserved. BOAT and this worksheet are the original work of Max Tuchman and Dark Horse Ops LLC. You are welcome to use this worksheet on your own work and to share it with your team in full and unaltered form, with attribution. Reproduction, adaptation, or use in paid training or consulting without written permission is not permitted. For licensing, write to max@darkhorseops.com.