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The Value Path - Jul 2, 2026
July 2, 2026
Champion, Part 1 opens the Value Path's eighth stage — "I am a raving fan." Joshua Oakes (Who-First) and Chris Carolan introduce the red/green-flag board and walk the RED column: platform limitation, community ownership, and the gamified systems that always get gamed. Part 2 takes the green side.
Key takeaways
A Champion is not a filled-out referral form or a tweet — it is a customer transformed by the work who has taken on your approach as partly their own (Joshua Oakes / Who-First).
The RED flags of the Champion stage are the usual approaches that backfire: platform limitation, recognition exploitation, community ownership, and gamified systems that always get gamed.
The single distinction under the whole board (Joshua Oakes / Who-First): red flags give you control over the OUTPUT and are easy to measure; green flags give you control over the INPUT and are hard to measure.
Restricting champions to a vendor-owned community trades reach and authentic influence for measurability you control. Chris, on HubSpot's ideas community: "I don't need a badge to prove that I am a HubSpot champion."
Champions are outliers — killer implementers and deep-use-case experts whose championing is not easily upvotable, so leaderboards and points will never surface them (Joshua Oakes).
Every individually-sensible move toward measurable, owned community can stack into what Joshua Oakes names as perverse incentives: each decision makes sense, and the aggregate outcome is not what you were trying to accomplish.
The outsized risk leaders fear from champions only exists where the trust wasn't there, or where the relationship was transactional. Invest relationally, not extractively (Chris Carolan).
The meta-conversation — asking a client how it really went and reflecting their words back — unlocks the relationship. That "Went great" is champion language (Joshua Oakes).
Part 1 walks the red column. Part 2 takes the green side.
Keep learning
You just watched the work. Now build it.
The next step is doing it yourself — live, with people on the same path.
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