In the past decade since The Lean Startup’s introduction, many seasoned entrepreneurs have come to believe that it largely fails at the very thing it sought to accomplish: enabling entrepreneurs to more predictably and successfully bring new products to market.
Startup veterans from the likes of PayPal, Wealthfront, Pinterest, Netscape, and more, have identified four core challenges with the Lean Startup. Let’s now break down each of these four challenges in more detail.
As a Growth Leader, accurately evaluating your organization and team members is a very important, and time-consuming, part of the job.
But if we plan on creating an engaging career path for future Growth Leaders, we need a process to provide objective feedback across the whole team. This is where the Growth Competency Model comes in.
The Growth Competency Model provides a framework that can be used by Growth Leaders to identify and close gaps in their team, as well as to provide direct feedback and career development advice to their team members.
As your company scales, it will naturally approach market saturation. Growth rates will start to slow, and you’ll need to expand into new user segments, use cases, or geographies.
Saturation is natural, and actually something to be (momentarily) celebrated, as it’s usually a marker of initial product market fit.
At this point, many companies choose to invest in international growth. Yet most struggle to effectively grow their reach beyond their primary domestic market, due to three key factors…
Top talent now has the power to go to a new company or a team that fits their personal and professional goals.
It seems like they are planning on exercising that power too. With 72% of tech workers saying that they are exploring a new opportunity in the next year. In fact, lack of career progression was the top reason stated for leaving.
We are not surprised. The old playbook of career progression was already on its way out the door as the world shifted to a remote-first workforce. Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.
But what are the new rules? No one is really sure yet.
Thankfully we talked to some of our EIRs recently about the best ways to up-level your role this year.
Building and growing a business is a team sport that requires everyone to be on the same page. This is especially critical for product and marketing teams, who cannot move the business forward without each other.
To improve cross-departmental collaboration between these two pivotal teams, Reforge OIR Natalie Rothfels and EIR Adam Fishman reveal the three threads that weave marketing and product teams together to create something stronger and more durable than what each individual team could create on their own.
Most companies don’t make it past the ten-year mark. And all too often, it comes down to one thing: They’ve lost sight of the customer.
There’s lots of advice out there about customer-centricity and why it’s important — but few resources that talk about how to get there. This post seeks to help.
Product Managers are ultimately responsible for figuring out what to build and ensuring it is impactful.
Simple in theory, but not easy.
PMs have to source and process ideas from every direction, rationalize and advocate for which investments make sense, and hold steady in conviction about their roadmap while staying flexible for things to change as they learn.
For decades, the Product Requirement Doc (PRD) has been the instrument of the trade, the single source of truth for what to build and why.
In the 90s, PRDs spanned 20-30 pages and were meant to be the definitive record of every detailed change. With the evolution of agile development and the acceleration of software-centric businesses, product teams realized that static documents aren’t the best tool to represent dynamic creative work.
PRDs have miraculously prevailed, but Product Managers are still relying on the outdated concept of a single static document, which lands them in one of two ineffective camps.
At one extreme, the anxious Product Manager will spend too much time trying to create a perfect document that resembles a doctorate dissertation awaiting approval. This common failure mode shows up in teams that lack internal trust or have unclear ownership. The PRD becomes a process tool to solve a people problem.
At the other extreme, the overzealous Product Manager will spend too little time articulating their thinking, bypassing writing as a superfluous process that slows everything down. This common failure mode happens on teams that see a process as a barrier to progress, only to be met with a bunch of unresolved questions and problems to navigate downstream.
Neither view is ideal for modern product teams, whose work resembles any other creative pursuit: requiring enough constraints to get started, but also enough flexibility to enable new approaches or solutions as exploration gets underway.
The gospel of testing has spread far and wide, and today you'd be hard pressed to find a company that isn't actively experimenting in some form.
Many of the world’s most valuable and fast-growing companies — Google, Uber, Amazon — credit their success to running thousands of experiments.
Yet in private, most marketers are worried about the returns they’re seeing from their testing programs. To highlight just one recent example in one of our DMs: “[senior management] expect us to find huge wins within every test, when the vast majority of them are inconclusive”. Even when you do achieve hard won victories after months of grinding — +20% here, +10% there — the inevitable question from the CEO always comes: “why can’t I see it in the bottom line?”.
Here’s a secret: Marketers aren’t getting the big returns they expect from testing, because they don’t make big enough bets.
Advertisers are losing control. As platforms like Meta and Google automate most targeting, attribution, and optimization decisions with machine learning, soon the last growth lever left will be creative testing: Which concepts, copy, colors and artwork drive the best results?Most every marketer is familiar with A/B testing, but few have a consistent framework for prioritizing what to test. As experiment backlogs spiral out of control, the process devolves to just do whatever the CEO says.
But you can avoid this fate by breaking creative ideas down to their component parts, or “memes,” and systematically remixing creative elements to drive growth.
If you’re involved in cross-functional work, it’s easy to fill your calendar with 1:1 meetings. They can be a high-fidelity way to build relationships and collaborate.
The problem is that most of us have no idea how to make them useful — or we’re embarrassed to cut the cord when they’re not — so we end up with a bloated calendar full of ineffective conversations that we dread.
I know this first hand because I’ve personally made all the 1:1 mistakes in the book. I’ve learned a few key lessons that have now helped me develop the confidence and clarity to own my calendar and scale my work.
In the past decade since The Lean Startup’s introduction, many seasoned entrepreneurs have come to believe that it largely fails at the very thing it sought to accomplish: enabling entrepreneurs to more predictably and successfully bring new products to market.
Startup veterans from the likes of PayPal, Wealthfront, Pinterest, Netscape, and more, have identified four core challenges with the Lean Startup. Let’s now break down each of these four challenges in more detail.
What comes to mind when you hear the word “memo”? Is it Gary Cole’s obnoxious prodding about TPS reports in Office Space? Or maybe for my elder millennial peers out there, it’s Melanie Griffith typing away on a real-life 80’s typewriter in Working Girl?
Despite fond memories of your favorite office comedies of yesteryear, when I bring up the topic of memos it's usually met with an eye roll and a scramble to change the subject.
I get it. But I have news for the haters out there: Memos haven’t gone the way of the cubicle. They’re alive and well. They’re still used by savvy strategists — at both Fortune 500’s and Series A startups — as a way to quickly and comprehensively cover complex topics, build consensus, and drive action.
Let’s start with the obvious. You can’t have a successful product if too many customers churn.
But if you’re tasked with reducing churn rate, it can feel almost impossible to actually move your metrics in a positive direction.
When stuck in this metrics trap, Product Managers often try anything possible to keep customers around so they don’t walk out the door.
That’s how we end up with cancellation flows filled with steep discounts or the option to pause your subscription indefinitely.
Reducing churn is frustrating because most product teams approach it incorrectly.
Instead of focusing on reducing something negative, like churn, they should try to increase something positive, like retaining the right people.
Product teams that take this approach will have a much higher chance of changing the trajectory of their customer’s journey and, ultimately, their business.
In this piece, we’ll bust these common myths about churn and share some tips to increase your chances of success!
Every startup begins with a close-knit team. Imagine a dozen people sitting in the same room where everyone knows what everyone’s doing, and everyone is aligned on what’s most important. There’s a deep understanding and sense of shared responsibility for the company vision.
One team, one purpose.
Then comes growth.
Early success drives innovation, excitement, momentum, and more success. Additional roles are opened to sustain growth and teams rapidly expand. And as teams get bigger, one of the first things to fray is the shared vision.
In an attempt to drive efficiency, silos naturally begin to form and bureaucracy quickly follows to slow erosion of that singular shared vision. Soon after, people are pining for the good old days where teams were tightly aligned, but still had autonomy to move quickly.
Luckily, there’s a solution — and you’ve likely already heard of it. It’s a core component of Netflix’s well-known culture manifesto called “Dream Teams.”
Managers often neglect supporting the growth of their reports because they are too focused on business tasks. As a result, they lead disempowered teams.
On the other side of the coin, managers too focused on individual development at the expense of delivering against company goals will be seen as ineffectual and soon be replaced.
To not over-index on either skill, managers need to develop a new one: coaching.
Coaching is the toolkit that helps employees see more options and make deliberate choices about what they want to do next — and it’s one of the highest leverage skills managers can build to navigate their varied responsibilities and retain employees more effectively.
Unfortunately, the tech industry has done very little to effectively train managers with this skill set.
We want to see that change.
If we asked a hundred marketers to define growth marketing, we would likely get a hundred different answers.
And all of them might be correct. Over the last two decades, growth marketing has continued to grow in popularity even though most executives and many marketers continue to maintain a fuzzy – at best – grasp of the concept.
The vagueness of this domain has turned it into an overused buzzword. And it doesn’t help that the nature of growth marketing work continues to change as marketing tools and tactics evolve.
So we turned to a handful of marketing experts to help capture what the growth marketing function looks like in 2022.
You’re ready for the big meeting when suddenly an exec starts some tangent on slide #2 that completely derails the conversation. You never end up covering the actually important items, and there’s no meaningful next step.
We’ve all been there. Knowing how to engage executives at the right level can be opaque and incredibly frustrating, especially if you need to adjust in real time when the communication doesn’t go as planned.
Executive summaries are a powerful tool — when wielded effectively. Done well, an executive summary is an overview that helps build credibility and align people around the most important priorities captured in a report. Done poorly, it creates chaos from ill thought-out communication.
As a Growth Leader, accurately evaluating your organization and team members is a very important, and time-consuming, part of the job.
But if we plan on creating an engaging career path for future Growth Leaders, we need a process to provide objective feedback across the whole team. This is where the Growth Competency Model comes in.
The Growth Competency Model provides a framework that can be used by Growth Leaders to identify and close gaps in their team, as well as to provide direct feedback and career development advice to their team members.
Depending on your niche, industry, or company size, an engineering manager could be put in charge of a lot of different initiatives and teams.
Some days you may be stuck in cross-functional meetings with other departments, flexing your soft skills. Others might be spent deep in code review or training a brand new engineer.
Each day might bring a new challenge and opportunity to your desk.
Engineering managers, or EMs, drive the most impact by harnessing the power of an engineering team. Not writing lines of code.
But it seems that many companies hear the word “engineering” and forget about the “manager” part — and then they are confused why their new engineering manager can’t do both!
So let’s break down what an engineering manager really looks like!
You’ve probably been there: The teams are shipping, but it’s unclear how much the work will actually impact your overall business metrics.
Product leaders must be able to create clear, opinionated strategies that grow their business today and set up for future growth tomorrow.
Unfortunately, many struggle with balancing their portfolio of different product bets and driving meaningful impact on the top-level business metrics. New product leaders tend to over-index on whatever type of product work they’re most familiar with, instead of approaching different types of work with the appropriate toolset. This leads to being held back by massive opportunity cost: working too much on initiatives with diminishing returns, and missing out on the step-function investments that change the trajectory of the company.
When faced with the challenge of creating a strategic portfolio, product leaders need a framework to ensure they’re spending the right amount of time and effort on the right priorities.
End-of-interview questions are extremely useful for candidates. If done correctly.
But most people don’t know how to ask the right questions.
That’s why coined the Pivot Theory to help the next generation of employees ask better questions.
Our five-step Pivot Theory framework will help you identify your deeper needs while building a strategy around how, when, and who to ask about them.
You’ll walk away with a beautiful document visualizing your reverse interviewing strategy.
More importantly–you’ll reduce churn in your career and understand whether or not you’ll be happy, supported, and successful in your next role.
This July, we’re offering our first ever Summer Cohort where Reforge members can access the frontier knowledge of tech’s best and brightest right at their fingertips — and you can too. Check out the full list of experts today.
Conflict happens when people care enough to disagree. And your choice to embrace or elude these moments is how you shape your organization’s future.
All organizations develop a culture of conflict, whether or not its leaders have a hand in shaping it. Without thoughtful design, behaviors emerge organically and grow wildly — often replicating the temperaments of founders and leaders.
At an early stage, this may feel like a reasonable issue to ignore. Worrying too much about culture before you have a viable business can feel like putting the cart before the horse. Too often, though, leaders never take that crucial step back to design and model the conflict-navigation behaviors they hope to see. When their companies enter hypergrowth, they’re left with a tangled mess: an unhealthy system that squelches innovation and leads to suboptimal decision-making.
Healthy navigation of conflict is crucial for successful teams, but leaders need a playbook to help their teams achieve it.
We see it as our responsibility to our community of working professionals to understand what’s going on, and how it may impact our work. The leaders we partner with help us process and communicate how industries are evolving up to the moment — and we can’t do that unless the best in the field are explaining real-world problems as they arise.
That’s why we asked three industry leaders — true innovators from growth, marketing, and product — about the biggest questions they have in their working lives right now.
A few weeks ago I sat down to check out an event on managing up hosted by Matt Greenberg for our Reforge members. It was full of advice on how to become a better manager, lead a team effectively, and, unsurprisingly, manage up.
Throughout the event, he was dropping a ton of actionable advice and knowledge on all of us. Intertwined with those insightful pieces of advice, he also had a lot of Hot Takes on managing up and management in general.
But instead of just filing those away for a rainy day, we decided to poll our collection of Reforge experts across marking, product and engineering. Thankfully seven of them responded to all of Matt’s Hot Takes in great detail!
So let’s see what they had to say.
