Hi, I’m Ruben Ugarte

I help leaders and organizations create their future by making more innovative decisions.

If you’re new here, you can start with latest essay ideas, the weekly newsletter or how to work with me.

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How I Can Help You Make Superior Decisions

Workshops and Training
Workshops, Training and Speaking

I can design custom training and workshops for your team and help you make better decisions.

The training can cover a wide range of ideas including decision speed, frameworks, dealing with risk, strategic decisions and more.

All training includes personalized examples from your own company to ensure the ideas resonate with your team, can be rapidly applied internally and are highly pragmatic.

Sentient Strategy
Sentient Strategy®

I’ll help your organization and team formulate an effective strategy in six hours, in-person or remotely.

Don’t spend weeks or months formulating strategies that are out of date as soon as you put the finishes touches on the document.

Bring together your management team and think boldly about the future. You will also learn how to maximize the success of the strategy implementation and what common pitfalls to avoid.

Ruben’s Just-In-Time (JIT) Advisory
Ruben’s Just-In-Time (JIT) Advisory ™

Work with me to build your Decision Confidence in real situations over 90 days. The JIT Advisory™ provides your with rapid advice on your most difficult situations and decisions.

Get an objective sounding board, accountability and support when you need it the most.

This is the best way to build your Decision Confidence over the long term for yourself and your team

Before we got hooked up with Ruben, we had several questions that we were trying to figure out and didn't have complete confidence in the decisions we were making. We need an expert and Ruben was a fantastic partner. We achieved all of what we outlined in the project, and we're very happy with the results.

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Hunter Hillegas CTO

Ruben helped us understand the weaknesses in how our team was making decisions using data and prepared a strategy that would allow us to solve these challenges and level up your decision-making capabilities. I would highly recommend Ruben to any company that needs an outside perspective on how to solve critical issues like hiring the right people and selecting the right technology.

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Sam Magnant Finance & Strategy

We had an absolute abundance of data available to us through and we didn't know what to do with it and we didn't know how to turn it from a lot of data into actionable decisions and tangible for us to learn as a business, but also for our customers to learn. Ruben helped us create dashboards for our own business insights but also for our vendors and our users. I'm sure we'll work with you again in the future.

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Orrin Benford CTO

Hiba Ganta

Immediately we saw this significant buy-in from the organization and just consistent usage of the reports we were building. Our clients are happy with the type of insights and answers they're getting from their data.

Overall, happy with the results Ruben provided us with. We loved working with him, and I'm sure we'd love to work with him again. So thank you so much for everything the company has been left with at this point.

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Hiba Ganta

Ruben helped us understand how our app (Insights) was performing and how this would affect our redesign efforts. After launching our v2, we were able to see exactly how our users were adopting our new product and the impact of our redesign instead of assuming that something worked or didn't worked. He also served as trusted advisor for our company and always responded quickly to requests or questions.

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Saisai Wright Product

Radan Dabetic

Before working with Ruben, we had some data in our admin panel but did not have all the KPIs we wanted and needed. No dashboards, no KPIs, a little bit of Mixpanel, and just our numbers.

Ruben helped us with the planning, strategy, and implementation of our data tools and dashboard. We selected all the tools in a modern data stack and worked on getting everything connected.

We have a much clearer picture of how our product is doing out in the market. So some of the numbers are just more of a confirmation of our feeling, but there are a lot of figures and then KPIs, which are more of a surprise that we didn't know.

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Radan Dabetic

Before we started working with Ruben, we had struggled to convert our data into actionable decisions. Ruben helped us sort through our priorities, our technology, and our capabilities for our multiple products. Our team is now able to make confident decisions on how to best improve our products for our users.

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Paul Greenberg CEO

A.J. Elliott

I've always brought Ruben in as a great resource whenever I have projects or unique clients with specific funnels requiring more advanced setups.

Everything from setting up at the high level, best practices, project scopes, getting things organized at the high level, and diving into the weeds with developers.

I appreciate having Ruben as a resource, and it's been great working with him over the last few years, and I look forward to the projects in the coming years.

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A.J. Elliott

Ruben helped our engineering team stay focus on the thing we do very well: building a great product. Ruben helped us decide what technology could make our lives easier over the long term, and he helped us make the right decisions during the implementation.

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John Rush CTO

Ruben helped us design a strategy for our company that could help us accomplish our short term goals while laying a solid foundation for the future. Internally, we understood deeply how to make our product better but we lacked expertise in data and effective decision-making.

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Gaston Blanchet Head of Growth

Ruben helped us lay the proper foundation for different projects by guiding us on the best practices for making better marketing and product decisions with data.

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Richard Chimelis Founder

Airbanq

Ruben was essential for our implementation of a fully functioning analytics program within our company. Without our own in-house data expert, we could not have set up our analytics program without Practico. They started by helping us to analyze all the metrics we were currently tracking across the company, and what data we wished we were tracking. They then helped us to drill down and determine which metrics were essential for the stage of growth we were at. Finally, they helped us to design an automated system for tracking the data from all the disparate sources that our B to C company was dealing with. I cannot recommend them more highly.

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Chris Boas Founder

Blair Ryan

Ruben always delivered at least as much as expected, but almost always more than expected. I'm not a founder here, but I'm a serial founder my whole life, and those people who do that are the ones you like to need to surround yourself with. So that's where the success comes from. So it's been a great help and a blessing, I'd say, to have you around.

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Blair Ryan

Working with Ruben from Practico has been crucial to our business. He started by helping us audit our Google Analytics setup and found critical setup issues that affected our reporting. He then worked with us to sort through our data and helped us create our core reports while avoiding the sampling issue in Google Analytics.

Having him as an expert resource made it easier for our team to understand exactly what our users were doing and how we could present this information to our stakeholders.

LATEST Essays

Stop Thinking Only About What is Good for Your Organization

Every decision that we make has “unspoken assumptions” that shape the final outcome. These assumptions range from personal desires e.g. I want to look good in front of my colleagues, to professional desires e.g. I want the organization to achieve 10% growth this year.  For example, you may greenlight certain projects inside your company because…

Strategy is About Finding Your Organization’s Identity

I recently drove by the location of the last Sears in Vancouver. I remember going into the store as a kid, being amazed at everything it had on shelves. I never shopped there as an adult, instead choosing modern alternatives such as Amazon or Walmart. Much can be said about the poor strategy Sears adopted…

You Can’t Put Arbitrary Limits on the Future

Fedex is in the process of negotiating a new union contract. At the same time, Fedex is trying to deal with fundamental changes to their business. The increase in demand from the pandemic is waning and they now have a glut of pilots, around 700 from a total of 5,800. The future of Fedex will…

Making Decisions like the Soviet Union

Welcome, comrade! Even though the Soviet Union collapsed more than 30 years ago, its legacy can still be seen today. I’m not talking about the modern Russian state but how some organizations make decisions. As you’re well aware, the central planners of the Soviet Union believed they could make all the decisions for the economy….

Sometimes You Just Need to Talk It Out

One of my favorite exercises from workshops is helping others write out their decision-making process. For many people, they have never consciously thought about how they make decisions and the steps involved. By asking them a series of questions, I can map out their decision process into clear steps. Once we have that, we can…

Don’t Let Strategy Get Stuck on Mission Statements

When I help organizations formulate strategy, we start by looking at their mission statement. For most organizations, they don’t have to make any changes. After all, mission statements are broad by design and don’t usually capture specifics. For the remaining few organizations who need tweaks to their mission statement, I put specific guardrails to avoid…

You Make 35,000 Decisions Every Day. How Many Do You Get Right?

We are told from a young age that we should strive to make the right decisions, but we aren’t taught how to do this. I’m excited to announce Bulletproof Decisions: How Executives Can Get it Right, Every Time to help business leaders close this gap. Download chapter 1 for free using the form below.

Download Chapter 1