Read time: 3.3 min.
TOGETHER WITH ROKU ADS MANAGER
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
{{First Name | My friend}},
She said it calmly. “We can move forward with this, but something else is gonna slip.” It wasn’t a challenge. Just an observation.
The decision had already been made and the direction was clear. The team had aligned, and work was underway across product, engineering, and go-to-market. On paper, everything looked clean. But now that execution had started, something felt different.
When the cost of a decision shows up
To steal a page from Digital Underground, it’s the “Same Song.” What sounded manageable in the meeting starts to feel different once the work gets underway.
In the room, tradeoffs often feel abstract. They’re discussed, acknowledged, sometimes even agreed to. In other cases, they’re not fully surfaced at all. But once execution begins, those tradeoffs don’t stay theoretical.
They show up.
And they don’t arrive all at once. They surface in small, specific ways that are easy to rationalize in the moment.
A timeline that once felt achievable now requires something to be deprioritized. A team that agreed to expand scope starts asking what work gets paused to make space. A product decision starts to affect operations in ways no one fully accounted for.
Sometimes two priorities that both made sense in the meeting now compete for the same resources.
It’s nothing unusual.
Just the normal reality of work meeting constraints.
What leaders do in response
This is where something subtle happens.
Leaders don’t push back on the decision. They don’t reject it. Instead, they start working it.
They adjust timelines. They revisit pieces. They reframe parts of the plan. Not to undo the decision but to make it work in the context they’re now facing. And they do it for good reasons. To protect their teams, to reduce risk, to maintain credibility, to avoid absorbing more cost than their function can carry.
So the decision doesn’t get challenged.
It starts getting adjusted.
The decision included tradeoffs. That part is not the issue.
What’s often less clear is how those tradeoffs are meant to be carried once execution begins. Who absorbs the timeline pressure? Where does the resource strain sit? How do cross-team impacts get handled when they show up in real time?
When those answers aren’t explicit, something predictable happens.
How the system responds
When no one is explicitly carrying the cost, the organization starts working it out in real time—through small adjustments, added coordination, and repeated conversations.
It starts to sound like this in meetings:
“Let’s just adjust this one piece so we can keep moving.”
“We’ll take this on for now and figure it out later.”
“Can we revisit the timeline now that we’re seeing this?”
“I don’t think we fully accounted for this dependency.”
Each move is reasonable.
Each one helps in the moment.
But over time, they add up.
The decision doesn’t get reversed.
It gets revisited—piece by piece—as leaders try to make it hold.
A weekly product sync shifts from reviewing progress to working through what the timeline actually requires. A Slack thread starts with a quick clarification and turns into a back-and-forth about what each team can realistically absorb. A go-to-market plan moves forward, then pauses when the downstream impact of one decision becomes clearer than it was in the room.
No one escalates it.
But the work starts to move differently.
Momentum becomes uneven. Timelines stretch in small increments. Coordination increases quietly.
The cost of the decision doesn’t disappear.
It shows up as the effort required to keep it in place.
A clearer way to see it
Revisiting decisions is rarely random.
It’s often a response to tradeoffs that were acknowledged but not fully absorbed.
As those tradeoffs show up in execution, leaders start working them in real time, revisiting parts of the decision to make it hold.
Not because the decision was wrong.
But because something about the cost wasn’t made explicit and fully taken on when the decision was made.
Once you start to see it this way, the pattern becomes easier to recognize.
And much harder to ignore.
Until Next Sunday,
Shawnette Rochelle, MBA, PCC
Founder, Excellence Unbounded
Executive decision alignment for faster strategic execution
If you’re curious to learn more about my work with executive teams, you can find it here.
If you want to have a conversation to learn more, schedule it here.
