Hi, I'm Nicole

A few years ago, when I'd just stepped into the operations director role at a new business, the team was just me and one other member. A few Google Sheets and a template platform — that's how we started doing business. Merchant acquisition, marketing, orders, logistics, customer service, systems and operations: every part had to be built from zero.

What frustrated me most back then wasn't how much there was to do — it was that every single thing looked like it had to be done. Only two people, only so many hours, yet new problems appeared every day. Deciding what to do first and what could wait turned out to be the hardest part.

Later, I joined a fast-growing e-commerce brand. Like many growing companies, when the team was small one person decided and everyone else executed — it was fast. But as more people came in, the old way of working started to run into problems.

Revenue had to grow, costs had to be kept in check, processes had to change, the founder's time was limited, and the team needed to start making its own judgements and decisions. By then the hard part was no longer getting things done — it was that, with so much going on, which things to change first and which could wait.

Later still, I moved into the AI industry, working on new products and new directions. The company had built up plenty of customers and hard-won expertise, but AI was changing the market fast, and the existing products couldn't necessarily answer the new demand.

This time the problem was different again: there were plenty of directions to go, but what should the next product actually be?

They looked like three completely different problems, but they all came back to the same thing: what to choose.

Time, money and people are always limited — you can't do everything at once. The real difficulty is usually not failing to find a method, but judging, out of a pile of options that all sound reasonable, which one is most worth doing right now.

So a website that isn't working doesn't mean the first move is to rebuild it; flat revenue isn't always a traffic problem; AI matters, but that doesn't mean every company needs to adopt it now.

That judgement in the middle often matters more than whatever method you end up using. That's why I started CROSSING IDEAS.

To make the process of choosing a little simpler.