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 Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.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.
Every way that a product or company grows has a ceiling. Some ceilings are lower and closer than others.
In this post, Reforge Alum Andrew Krebs Smith looks at audience saturation for paid acquisition — one of the fastest ways to grow, and also one of the fastest ways to hit that ceiling — and presents 8 ways to break through.
