People are the business model, by design

Juliana Fernandes, COO, on the room we protect by design and what it costs.

For most of my career I have watched companies present the same choice: take care of your people, or hit your numbers. Pick one. The generous companies frame protection as a cost they absorb. The honest ones admit it is the first thing they cut.

I used to half-believe the choice myself. Early on, when a project was on fire, my instinct was the same as everyone’s: add hours, add weekend, apologise later. It worked, in the sense that the thing shipped. It also taught me what a team looks like the quarter after you do that to them, and I have spent years unlearning the instinct.

Full capacity is not the same as full potential.

The belief we wrote into how Matter works says it plainly. A team running at one hundred percent can deliver what it already knows how to deliver. It cannot surprise anyone, including itself. And in creative work, a team that cannot surprise anyone is a cost centre with good taste.

Engineers named this before we did. Tom DeMarco wrote a whole book called Slack about it in 2001: a company running at full utilisation is efficient and cannot change. Traffic engineers know the same thing about highways. A road at capacity is a parking lot. Operations people learn it the expensive way, one burned quarter at a time.

So we leave room by design. In the plan, in the calendar, in what we say yes to. We turn work down before growth starts consuming what makes growth possible. That sentence sounds romantic until you operate it. Operating it means saying no to real revenue, with a reason, in writing, and the room you protected shows up as a number someone has to defend at the table.

I defend it. The logic is unglamorous. Ideas either gain direction or lose force, and what decides between the two is almost never talent. It is conditions.

A tired team repeats itself. A cornered one plays safe, ships the acceptable version, stops arguing. The work starts to look like it could belong to anyone, and work that could belong to anyone is the first thing a client learns to stop paying for.

The room is where the opposite happens: a third pass on a piece because there was time for a third pass, an argument that was possible because nobody was drowning, curiosity that outlives the deadline. None of it appears on a timesheet. All of it appears in the work.

I will admit the doubt that comes with the job: some quarters, protecting the room costs us something visible and what it buys stays invisible for months. I have signed those quarters. They do not feel strategic while they are happening. They feel expensive.

But twenty years inside fast-moving creative environments keep returning the same answer: the way we work shapes what we deliver, and a company that consumes its people delivers consumed work. No hiring plan fixes what the operating model keeps breaking.

When someone asks what operations does at a creative house, this is it. I design the conditions that allow creative ambition to endure. Clarity, rhythm, shared responsibility, and room. Especially room.

Protecting people was never the cost of the business. It is how you get one worth keeping.

Juliana Fernandes is Chief Operating Officer at MATTER+ENERGY, in São Paulo.