Dana Hargis is a mental health counsellor of 25 years and co-founder of Restore of Ada, a practice built around one idea: reset the nervous system and you change the quality of a person's life. Dan and Pia bring her on to unpack why so many workplace problems — burnout, conflict, broken teams, leaders who can't be reasoned with in a crisis — trace back not to bad character or bad strategy, but to a dysregulated nervous system that never learned to calm itself down.

What shifts the conversation is Dana's insistence that this is fixable, and mostly through small, unglamorous levers: noticing your own triggers, breath, sleep, blood sugar, grounding. She reframes self-destructive behaviour not as weakness but as a (misguided) attempt at self-regulation, and pushes the idea further into systems — a team, a family, a company is only ever as regulated as the people leading it. Improve yourself, and you pull the whole system up with you; decline, and it drags the system down too.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Dysregulation isn't a mood, it's a mechanism — Dana argues nervous system dysregulation is behind failed marriages, custody battles and workplace breakdowns alike, because an unregulated nervous system shows up in every role a person holds.
• Trauma is inherited before birth — Dana points to research on maternal cortisol transferring to the fetus, meaning a person's baseline stress response can be shaped before they're born, by trauma they never directly experienced.
• Everyone has a "favourite" stress response — fight, flight or freeze — and the unproductive ones (like shutting down) get misread by colleagues as rudeness or disengagement rather than a nervous system in overload.
• A leader's regulation sets the ceiling for the team — "a team as a whole will be no better than their leader," and an unhealthy system will actively push out anyone who tries to function well within it.
• Self-destructive habits are attempts at self-regulation, not moral failure — Dana's reframe: sugar, alcohol, scrolling, and more serious addictions all light up reward pathways because they're the only regulation tool a person has found that works.
• Ownership beats blame — externalising a problem ("if he would just stop doing that") keeps the person who hurt you in power over you; taking ownership of your response is what actually frees you.
• Regulation is built from unglamorous basics — breath awareness, blood sugar stability, sleep, grounding, and biofeedback do more for a dysregulated nervous system than talking about the problem on repeat ever will.

Three Reasons to Listen

• Listen if you've ever watched a team quietly fall apart under a leader who "seems fine" — Dana explains why the system often can't see its own dysregulation from the inside.
• Listen if you've judged someone's coping mechanism (food, drink, doom-scrolling) without asking what it's actually doing for them — this episode reframes self-destructive habits as a nervous system trying to help.
• Listen if you're tired of blaming the last boss, the last colleague, the last decade for how you feel — Dana makes the case for ownership as the only route out, without ever blaming the victim.

Notable Quotes

Bio

Dana Hargus, M.Ed., LPC, is a licensed professional counselor with over 25 years of clinical experience and the founder of Restore of Ada, a wellness program designed to accelerate healing by targeting the nervous system. After nearly a decade in education, she built a multi-clinician counseling practice grounded in trauma-informed care and whole-person health. Dana’s work focuses on how nervous system regulation shapes relationships, team dynamics, and organizational culture, not just individual wellbeing.

Dana integrates evidence-based approaches with practical, real-world application to help people create safer, more connected environments. Through her clinical work and Restore+, her digital community, she equips individuals and groups with tools to move beyond coping toward sustainable regulation, resilience, and relational health.

Steve McLeod has spent years building Feature Upvote, a small bootstrapped software company, and along the way became fixated on a question most product literature ignores: how do founders with no product manager, no big budget and no army of researchers actually decide what to build next? He set out to write a book about prioritization frameworks — and discovered almost nobody uses one. This episode is the story of what he found instead, drawn from interviews with ten small, self-funded software companies (including Squadify's own Dan Hammond and Pia Lee) about how they really make product calls under pressure.

The conversation lands on the "Hippo" — Highest Paid Person's Opinion — and the reassuring discovery that it's rarer than founders fear: the companies that lasted were the ones who brought their whole team into the decision, even when the founder ultimately had to call it. Steve walks through the recurring traps (chasing every early customer request until the product buckles under its own clutter), the founders who held their nerve on vision anyway, and the practical habit — ruthlessly deleting your backlog — that keeps decision-making sane as you scale.

Key Themes & Takeaways

• Most software is built by small, bootstrapped teams, yet almost all published advice on feature prioritization assumes you have VC funding and a dedicated product management function.
• In companies under roughly 30 people, a dedicated product manager rarely exists — the founder is the de facto product manager whether or not they were ever trained for the role.
• The feared "Hippo" (highest paid person's opinion) showed up far less than expected: the founders who survived were the ones who genuinely brought their team into the decision before calling it.
• Early customer flattery is dangerous — saying yes to every request in the early days can quietly bury a product in clutter, technical debt and UX debt until the simplicity customers loved disappears.
• Some founders held firm to a narrow product vision under customer pressure and it paid off (Balsamiq's low-fidelity-only stance); others drifted toward enterprise features and had to consciously claw back to their original audience.
• Saying no needs a companion habit: regularly deleting (or archiving) your backlog, since an ever-growing "maybe later" list becomes its own source of stress and false hope
• Co-founder decision-making works best with clear domain ownership and transparency about disagreement — naming the tension openly beats either person quietly overriding the other.

Three Reasons to Listen

• Listen if you're a founder secretly doing product management without ever having the job title for it — Steve makes the case that this isn't a phase to survive, it's exactly where you're supposed to be right now.
• Listen if your backlog has quietly become a graveyard of ideas you'll never build — there's a blunt, freeing argument here for deleting almost all of it.
• Listen if you and a co-founder (or any two people sharing decisions) keep circling the same disagreement — Dan and Pia's own way of working through this at Squadify gets picked apart in detail, including what they actually do when they don't agree.

Notable Quotes

Steve McLeod's Bio
Steve McLeod is the co-author of "Kill the HiPPO: How small, bootstrapped software companies decide what feature to build next". The book is a collection of interviews with founders of stable, mature, profitable software companies, telling real stories about how founders make hard product decisions.

Steve is a three-time bootstrapped founder and currently CEO of Feature Upvote, a SaaS platform for managing customer feedback.

After experiencing near burnout in his first company, Steve intentionally keeps his running of Feature Upvote low-stress, aiming for modest, manageable growth, so that he can keep mentally healthy while running it.

Originally from New Zealand, Steve has worked in Australia, Germany, the UK, Spain, and more briefly, in Switzerland and France. He now lives in Barcelona, Spain.

Links

• Kill the Hippo
• Feature Upvote