Orion Playbook is a weekly newsletter for operators reinventing mid-market software and SaaS businesses for the age of AI without breaking the engine that pays the bills. CEOs, presidents, GMs, product and go-to-market leaders.
One issue per week, five minutes of reading, one central idea, written from the operating seat. The promise: by the end of each issue, you should have something you can argue about, something you have learned, and something you could actually do at work that week. If a piece does not clear that bar, it does not ship.
The work covers what the operating job has always covered, looked at through what AI is now changing under it: how strategy meets execution, how product, go-to-market, and operations have to be orchestrated as one system rather than three, how to manage the tensions that come with every reinvention. Always grounded, always specific, never hype.
About me
I am Gérard Métrailler. Two decades building and leading mid-market software companies, most recently as SVP and General Manager of the software business unit at Altium (acquired by Renesas in 2024). Before that, I led the perpetual-to-SaaS transformation of CorelDRAW, delivered without the J-curve that transition usually carries. Across the run, my teams and I have driven north of $7B in shareholder value. I have been using AI in product since well before the current cycle (we shipped CorelDRAW LiveSketch, an industry-first AI-based drawing capability, in 2017), and I still build with the tools myself.
This newsletter is where the operating lessons get written down.
Why Orion
Orion is the constellation that has guided navigators across cultures and centuries. Its stars are not, strictly speaking, near each other in space; the pattern is in the relationships, in how the eye connects them into something that points the way home.
That is the right metaphor for the work. The companies that reinvent themselves well are not the ones with the brightest single star (the genius product, the heroic CEO, the magic AI deployment). They are the ones that get the constellation right: product, go-to-market, operations, and governance in the right relationship to each other. The pattern is in the connections.
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Disclaimer. The views expressed on this site, in my newsletter, and on my podcast are my own. They do not represent the positions of any past, present, or future employer, client, or board on which I serve. Nothing here is legal, financial, or investment advice.
