CV > EV > TV > ME: The Prioritization Hierarchy
Rank every decision by Customer, then Enterprise, then Team, then self — and detect managers who invert it
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
A prioritization order HubSpot literally put on the wall to counter the natural drift of scaling managers who optimize for their own team (or themselves) at the expense of the whole company. The hierarchy: solve for the Customer first, then the Enterprise (company), then your Team, then Me (yourself).
Origin
Created at HubSpot by Brian Halligan; it started as EV > TV > ME and later added CV in front. Halligan links it to Steve Jobs's line 'you don't work for your boss, you work for Apple.'
Core principles
- 01Immature managers who don't scale solve for TV (their own team) or ME (themselves), sub-optimizing for peers and the company.
- 02TV-over-EV behavior is fine in the short term but shows up later — often as a collapsing employee net-promoter score.
- 03The problem doesn't appear in the first ~100–150 employees; it emerges once the CEO is layers removed from staff.
- 04You work for the company first, then your boss.
How to run it
- 1
Publish the hierarchy: CV > EV > TV > ME
Make it explicit and visible — HubSpot put 'solve for CV over EV over TV over MV' on the wall: customers first, then HubSpot, then the employee's team, then themselves.
- 2
Bake it into the review form
Explicitly score each person (e.g. 1–10) on whether they solve for enterprise value over team value, as a named part of the performance review.
Pro tip Reinforce it constantly in words — repetition is required before it sinks in.
- 3
Instrument it with quarterly eNPS by department
Run a quarterly employee net-promoter survey rated by department. A department NPS that drops sharply (e.g. 65→30) with negative comments about the leader is the signal that the leader is solving for TV over EV.
Pro tip Give the VP the raw comments and a quarter to fix it — but expect that once a leader loses their team it 'almost never' recovers.
Watch out A leader who inflates their own numbers (e.g. sales bookings) while dumping downstream problems on other teams looks fine short-term but corrodes the company.
- 4
Reward EV behavior publicly
Celebrate people who optimize for the whole company — HubSpot gave 'champagne awards' (a signed bottle) at well-produced company meetings, usually including an EV-oriented team.
Pro tip Halligan also gave blunt public feedback in large meetings, deliberately criticizing TV-over-EV behavior so everyone absorbed the norm.
In the wild
A sales VP maximizes bookings (what they're paid on) and lets the service team absorb the downstream problems they created. It works short-term, but the department's quarterly eNPS drops from the 60s to 30 with negative comments, then to negative-5 the next quarter after feedback.
→ The team was effectively lost and never recovered — illustrating why Halligan pairs this with 'hire slow, fire fast.'
Common mistakes
Letting managers optimize their own team's metrics
A VP who maximizes their comp-driving metric while offloading costs onto peer departments sub-optimizes the enterprise; it's fine in the short term but shows up as collapsing team morale and unrecoverable trust.
Assuming the norm holds without instrumentation
Because TV-over-EV drift only appears once the CEO is layers removed from employees, leaders who don't measure department-level eNPS and score EV in reviews miss the problem until a team is already lost.
Is it for you?
Best for
CEOs scaling past ~150 employees who need managers to optimize for the whole company, not their fiefdom.
Not ideal for
Very small teams where everyone already shares company-wide context and incentives aren't yet siloed.
From the transcript
“EV is enterprise value. TV is your team's value. Me is your value.”
“we always put on the wall, solve for EV over TV over MV, and then we added CV in front of EV. Solve for the…”
“Steve Jobs had an interesting line he says you don't work for your boss you work for Apple”
From the episode
Sequoia CEO coach: Why it’s never been easier to start a company, and never been harder to scale one
Brian Halligan (co-founder, HubSpot)