The 5% Problem

Courtney Cherry Ellis, now Founding Product Architect at Sol, spent years running People like a product organization — feedback loops, sprints, roadmaps, programs built for the 95%. Then she noticed how much of her team's time went to the other 5%: the complex offer, the immigration case in limbo, the promotion outside the merit cycle, the employee dealing with a house fire. What looked like noise keeping them from the real work turned out to be the clearest signal they had.

Her piece makes an argument worth sitting with: exceptions aren't what keep you from the work, they're how you find out whether the system works at all. When one org saw a spike in what her team called "battlefield promotions," the pattern said more about internal mobility than any survey could — getting a competing offer had quietly become the most reliable path to a raise. In Product, she found a name for it: she'd been running evals for twenty years and calling them fire drills.