What to Do Next

You now have the diagnosis, the framework, and the mechanism. The design problem is not mysterious, and the path through it is not complicated. The only question is where to start.

Start With Signal

The first thing to do is not select a tool, hire a consultant, or schedule a team training. It is to run Signal on your own organization. Find the real constraint. Name it precisely. Quantify what it costs. That single step — done honestly, without rushing to solutions — is what separates companies that produce results from AI from companies that produce a second round of the same experiments.

If you have read this book and done the work it asks of you, you probably have a sense of what your most important constraint is. You may even have it named. The next step is to sharpen it: to move from a general area of concern to a specific, validated problem statement with a cost attached.

The free Compound AI Maturity Diagnostic is built to help you do exactly that. It is a conversational tool — structured around the Signal methodology — that walks a CEO through the process of identifying their primary operational constraint, locating where it lives in the organization, and estimating what it costs. Work design before tool selection: that is the principle the diagnostic is built on. It does not ask which AI tools you use. It asks what problem your organization is actually trying to solve.

The diagnostic measures where your organization sits in the Signal → Source → Design sequence — which of the three is the binding constraint right now, and what the appropriate next step is. The output is not a software recommendation. It is a constraint statement you can take into a sprint.

It takes roughly twenty minutes, it is free, and the output is yours regardless of whether you ever engage with Compound further.

If you have a constraint you are ready to act on, the Compound Sprint is the mechanism for addressing it. The Sprint is available to run independently — the framework is in this book — or with Compound’s direct support through the membership, which pairs the sprint structure with weekly coaching, the agent bench, and a cohort of peers running the same framework.

Either way, the right next step is the same: take the free AI Maturity Diagnostic, surface the Signal, and name the constraint clearly enough that you can commit a sprint to it.

Take the free AI Maturity Diagnostic at compoundorg.com