It starts with a decision, not a questionnaire.
Most products that promise to understand you open with forty questions about yourself. There is a good reason not to: people are poor witnesses to their own reasoning, and the research on that is unusually clear. So the first thing Five Peers asks for is a call you are actually facing, and the profile is inferred from what you do with it.
First session in about four minutes.
Four minutes, and every question earns its place.
Each step below names the instrument behind it. Where an instrument is a shortened form of a longer validated scale, we say so, because a short scale trades accuracy for completion and you should know which trade we made.
The decision you are facing
One box. The hire you are unsure about, the price you keep not raising, the client you should probably let go. Nothing is locked behind a form: this is the product starting, not a gate before it.
Five trade-offs, inside that decision, timed
Speed against more information. Which kind of loss you would least accept. Evidence that cuts against the position you just took. Whether you keep comparing after you commit. And how you actually reached a call you got right. How long you take is part of the signal.
How you handle a fact that contradicts you
The one thing measured head-on, because it determines how hard your board should push before you stop listening to it.
Your board assembles, seat by seat
Each answer locks one seat, on screen, with the reason it is there, phrased as what it adds rather than what you lack. You cannot end up with five methods that all do the same thing, because the diversity floor prevents it.
A test on two real calls
Before anything is charged, your five seats argue two decisions every founder meets, and you see exactly where they split. Then you decide whether it is worth paying for. Your own decision from step one is the first thing the board takes afterwards.
Calibration, spread over the next few sessions
Blocks of four to six items, each one presented as a board adjustment and each one changing something visible. That is where the longer instruments live, once you have a reason to spend the time.
What actually happens when you bring a decision.
First sales leaders work out roughly a third of the time, and the failures cluster in the first six months. Budget for the median outcome, not the one you are picturing.
They will rebuild the pipeline you currently rely on. For one to two quarters your numbers get worse before they get better. Who explains that to the board?
A year out, this failed. The most common cause by a distance: the role was never written down, so nobody could tell whether they were succeeding.
At least one person already believes that job is theirs. If you hire over them you will likely lose them, and that cost is not in your model.
If the constraint is the offer rather than the coverage, no hire fixes it and you will repeat this in nine months. That is testable this week, before you commit a salary.
Hire now · wait for the round · promote internally and scope the role · test the offer first.
Pipeline dip for two quarters · losing the internal candidate · an unscoped role, which is the failure mode with the highest base rate.
If the bottleneck is the offer, hiring is an expensive way to postpone finding that out.
Nobody has asked what this person is supposed to have achieved in ninety days.
Write the role and its ninety-day outcome before opening the search, and run the offer test in parallel. If the offer test fails, you have saved a year and a salary.
The methods argue with each other. They do not argue at you.
- Groups that argue a decision out through structured dissent produce better recommendations and surface better assumptions than groups seeking agreement. That is a measured result, from 1986, replicated since.
- The same studies found those groups came out less satisfied and less committed to what they decided. Also measured, and rarely mentioned by anyone selling contradiction.
- So the disagreement runs between the methods, inside the session, and what reaches you is the output. There is a bluntness setting. It is yours, and it does not switch the methods off.
The point is not to make you uncomfortable. It is to make the decision better and still have you come back next week.
Bring the call you have been turning over since Sunday.
Four minutes to the first session. One hundred places, and nothing to pay.