Molly Graham, who worked directly under Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Bret Taylor, has a new management framework called the Waterline Model. It is built to solve a specific, recurring problem: a leader sets a goal, the team moves, and something still breaks. Graham now runs Glue Club, a community for leaders inside early-stage and fast-growing companies, and has spent decades pattern-matching exactly this failure mode.
The Waterline Model gives managers a structured way to diagnose why a team is underperforming, not just identify that it is. Graham is known for translating hard operational lessons into durable metaphors, her earlier piece 'Give Away Your Legos' became a reference text for scaling organizations. This framework appears to be the next one. The original piece unpacks the model's layers, how to use it in real conversations, and where most leaders misdiagnose the problem entirely.
Read the full piece to get the diagnostic questions Graham actually uses, not just the model's structure. The argument is that most team failures are not people problems or strategy problems, they are waterline problems, and knowing which level is broken changes every intervention that follows.
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