Course 2 — Revenue as a system

From outcome reporting to trajectory control

Most organizations believe they manage revenue by measuring outcomes.

They track bookings, ARR, churn, margin and cashflow. They review performance at the end of each month and quarter. They explain results and adjust targets.

This approach works — until it doesn’t.

As companies mature, revenue stops being a single outcome and becomes a system of interacting trajectories. Growth can increase while margins thin. Expansion can rise while support load quietly accelerates. Cashflow can hold while risk accumulates beneath the surface. Results may look acceptable, yet leadership feels increasingly constrained.

The problem is not visibility.

It is control.

This course introduces the idea of trajectory control: the ability to see and shape where customers and segments are going over time — not only in revenue terms, but across margin, expansion paths, support load and cashflow. These trajectories are visible continuously across the lifecycle, from first demand signal to long-term value creation, and they carry real consequences: hiring plans, investment timing, capacity decisions and ultimately leadership leverage.

Trajectory control is fundamentally different from outcome reporting.

Outcome reporting tells you what already happened.

Trajectory control tells you what will happen if nothing changes — and what becomes possible if it does.

In a revenue system, no variable moves in isolation. Customer selectivity influences margin. Deal structure affects cashflow timing. Adoption behavior shapes expansion and support load. Segment mix determines whether growth compounds or consumes resources. When these relationships are invisible, leadership can observe results but cannot deliberately reproduce them.

Course 2 explains why revenue must be understood as a system rather than a funnel, a forecast or a set of targets. It shows how customer lifecycles replace linear pipelines, how interactions matter more than isolated metrics and why control emerges only when trajectories are visible together rather than reported separately.

This course does not focus on intelligence engines yet.

It focuses on structure.

By the end of Course 2, one shift should feel unavoidable:

Leadership control does not come from knowing outcomes faster.

It comes from understanding how outcomes are constructed — and how changing one part of the system reshapes everything that follows.

This is the foundation that makes intelligence meaningful.

• support load reveals fit long before churn is acknowledged