Sachin Rekhi
4 Major Problems With The Lean Startup ...

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.

4 Major Problems With The Lean Startup Methodology
Adam Fishman
The Growth Competency Model: Build Stronger ...

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.

The Growth Competency Model: Build Stronger Growth Teams
Valerie Wagoner
How The Best International Growth Decisions Are ...

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…

How The Best International Growth Decisions Are Made
Ryan McCready
5 Ways To Boost Your Career Progression In 2022

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 Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.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.

5 Ways To Boost Your Career Progression In 2022
Natalie Rothfels & Adam Fishman
3 Ways Marketing and Product Teams Can Improve ...

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.

3 Ways Marketing and Product Teams Can Improve Collaboration — And Drive Better Business Outcomes

The Word of Mouth Coefficient

It’s pretty standard advice. Word of mouth is critical to growing a successful product. Despite its importance, word of mouth has always been hard to measure and therefore hard to influence.

In 2014 I (Yousuf Bhaijee) worked at Zynga with Tomas Pueyo (author of coronavirus articles with 50M+ views) where we started looking at word of mouth acquisition. Through our journey, we created a simplified way of measuring word of mouth that was stable enough to use in forecasting and insightful enough that teams could figure out how to influence it. Since Zynga, I teamed up with Mike Taylor (co-founder at Ladder) to apply this method to products across a range of categories and have found it to be impactful for teams.

Announcing Our Fall 2020 Executives-in-Residence

Announcing Our Fall 2020 Executives-in-Residence

Making Monetization Your Superpower

Two of the most popular questions from our career panels this summer for Product Managers and Marketers were 'How do I stand out in my career?' and 'How do I make myself more valuable to my company'?

One of the most overlooked strategies for PMs and Marketers is to become a person who delivers what organizations really want, which is more revenue. That statement might seem obvious, but few individuals deeply understand how to actually create revenue systems for their companies and use monetization as a springboard for their careers. So a great way to put yourself in the driver's seat is to develop your company's Monetization strategy. Monetization is a high-visibility topic that will draw attention from executives to you and your recommendations almost immediately. And over the long term, those who drive revenue tend to lead companies.

You Cannot Be Data-Driven Without Experimentation

Many product managers, marketers, and engineers think they know how to run an experimentation program, but in most cases, they don't. What they know how to run are tests.

A test is an action that generates an output. Experimentation is a broad, repeatable system that happens to include testing as one of its steps.

As part of the Growth toolkit, Experimentation has long been associated with optimization — a tool to help you improve the edges of a product experience. But the most successful tech companies build Experimentation into the very heart of their culture, treating it as an integral part of the product development and marketing processes.

Crossing the Canyon: Leading Your First Marketing Team

There are many types of marketers and countless marketing career paths. But for marketers in technology companies, one profile increasingly fills the ranks of rising VPs and CMOs: the marketer who starts with a single acquisition or retention channel before broadening scope and responsibility beyond that channel. We've both made that climb and can say without a doubt that the most difficult step was the transition from Senior Channel Manager to Marketing Leader running our first multi-channel marketing teams. And we've also seen countless other careers fail at this point. A couple of weeks ago, Casey Winters and Fareed Mosavat referred to a similar point on the Product Management career path as "Crossing the Canyon" rather than just taking another step. The analogy also applies to marketers making the leap from Senior Channel Manager to Marketing Team Leader.

On-demand Webinar: Crossing the Canyon for PMs

The leap from Senior Product Manager to Product Leader is so difficult that we call it "Crossing the Career Canyon". As we’ve discussed before, what helped you to succeed as a Sr PM won’t make you a great Product Leader. It's a trap, right in the middle of your career, just when you thought you had it all figured out.

So how do motivated PMs avoid flaming out when making this difficult transition? What new skills and abilities to they need to survive and thrive as a Product Leader?

Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit

Product Work Beyond Product Market Fit

One Approach Creates Many Problems

The life of any company starts with going from zero to one on initial product-market fit. It is a requirement to reach before any other types of product work become a priority. But after product-market fit, there are four categories of product problems.

  • Feature Work - Creating and capturing value by extending a product's functionality and market into incremental and adjacent areas.

  • Growth Work - Creating and capturing value by accelerating adoption and usage by the existing market.

  • Scaling Work - Focusing on bottlenecks to ensure the team can continue to move forward and take on new levels of feature, growth, and product-market fit expansion work.

  • Product-Market Fit Expansion - Increasing the ceiling on product-market fit in a non-incremental way by expanding into an adjacent market, adjacent product, or both.

Crossing the Canyon: Product Manager to Product Leader

Everyone seems to have their own definition of what product management actually is, and as a result, navigating a career in product management can be incredibly ambiguous and frustrating. Job titles and descriptions vary greatly across companies. The criteria for advancement within organizations can seem vague and subjective. Even worse, there's a hidden trap right in the middle of the PM career ladder where many of the brightest PMs fail — we've seen numerous careers stall at the transition from Senior Product Manager to a Product Leader (sometimes referred to as a Group Product Manager, Dir of Product, or Product Lead). Let's explore why this is the most difficult career transition for PMs.

Retention in the Times of COVID-19

Are you tired of reading about COVID-related things? We hear you. It's exhausting. It's likely that you, your team, and your company have worked hard to make some immediate changes in the changing environment. Maybe it feels like the pressure is easing. But we are here to say that the real work is just beginning.

We've been singing from the rooftops for years that retention and engagement determine category leaders. Retention is also the silent killer of products and companies. Those things haven't changed, but the underlying and surrounding factors that drive retention and engagement for your product have. You may have completed work to react to the initial environment changes, but whether you are experiencing headwinds or tailwinds, there is a lot of work ahead to continue to adapt.

On-demand Webinar: From Senior Marketer to Team Leader

Do you want to better understand the different titles and levels for Marketing careers? Are you a senior individual contributor or a new manager who wants to know what it takes to run a marketing team? Would you like to know how top marketing leaders navigated their careers and climbed the ladder? Do you want to know how to identify the most common career traps so you can avoid them?

Leadership in Turbulent Times

This post focuses on insights provided during our CEO webinar by Cyan Banister (Venture Partner @ Long Journey Ventures, ex-Partner @ Founders Fund, & early investor in Uber, Postmates, Niantic, and SpaceX), Russell Glass (CEO @ Ginger), and Elena Verna (EIR @ Reforge & ex-SVP of Product & Growth @ MalwareBytes). You can watch the entire webinar here. Dan Hockenmaier (Founder @ Basis One) is also cited.

B2C Growth in Turbulent Times

Over the past month, many businesses pulled back on media spend while consumers on quarantine have been spending more time online. Due to the increase in supply (available ad impressions) and decrease in demand (ad budgets), CPMs have been dropping across Facebook and Instagram, where Noah Freeman and the team at Social Fulcrum focus most of their time. (You should follow the Social Fulcrum blog for the latest changes in the ad markets.) Through the week of 3/22, Facebook and Instagram CPMs & CPCs declined about 45% for B2C companies in the US before a slight recovery the week of 3/29. Prices vary based on the specific strategy of the campaign.

B2B Growth in Turbulent Times

Some SaaS businesses, especially in the work from home space, are booming. While others are seeing strong headwinds as businesses pull back on incremental spending. SaaS as a whole is trending slightly down as of 3/26 (according to the Profitwell Growth Index). But there are significant warning signs on the horizon. It's likely we're going to see substantial increase in cancellations as we move into April billing cycles and some businesses may begin actively cutting SaaS costs. As Guillaume Cabane (Growth Advisor, G2 & ex-VP of Growth @ Segment & Drift) points out, a substantial portion of SMBs are experiencing massive revenue declines during shelter-in-place orders. Those SMBs are facing the first order effects of the coronavirus impact. SaaS companies will be impacted when those businesses actively cut costs or go out of business, which are second order effects. The impact to SaaS may just be delayed. Unless your business is thriving, you should be prepared for what second and even third order effects may mean for your revenue.

Shifting Product Roadmap in Turbulent Times

As Fareed likes to say, “You can only experiment on the users you have today and on how they are behaving today.” Because of the massive disruptions of COVID-19 users for many products are behaving very differently than they were just a few weeks ago and how they are likely to behave over the long term. So running core product optimization experiments now would be like running an experiment over a major holiday, i.e. not a good idea. The data will be so atypical that it won't be valuable beyond the immediate COVID-19 influenced circumstances. So Fareed suggests pulling back from day-to-day optimizations on your core flows. Or if you continue testing, at least be prepared to retest and rollback when we transition to Phases 2 and 3 of the crisis (more on phases in the intro post).

Your Rapid Response Checklist

The most enthusiastic audience response across all three webinars occurred when Elena Verna (Reforge EIR and ex-SVP of Product & Growth at MalwareBytes) offered the playbook she recommending to her clients. The fastest thing a company can do to adapt is change is the marketing strategy. Here's Elena's checklist for quick wins right now. (You should really watch the entire segment. Elena starts at 44:21 of this webinar.)

Leading Growth in Turbulent Times

Currently, there's a lot of uncertainty around what's happening in the market. Customer behavior has changed so fast it's impossible to know what's next. As an operator, this makes it tough to make decisions, because there isn't a ton of data out there to guide our decision making.

From Einstein to Bezos: What Science Can Teach Us About Creating and Disrupting Growth Models

One of the things that has struck me in my transition from neuroscience labs to tech is the deep connections in tech to the way the world of science operates (including heavy adoption of scientific terms and techniques), but a general lack of depth in the understanding of what science can really teach us about how to do these things well. Even at ResearchGate, the largest platform at the intersection of tech and science, the awareness of the analogy of our work to science rarely extends past experimentation techniques. I believe this misses a great deal of insight; there is a lot more that we in tech can learn from how science has worked for hundreds of years to build knowledge and drive human progress.

Monetization vs Growth? It's a False Choice

Monetization vs Growth? It's a False Choice

There has been increasing sentiment in the tech echo chamber that, instead of growth, companies need to be focused on profitability, unit economics, and monetization. A lot of the shift has been driven by unicorn companies in certain verticals falling flat in the public markets or even going out of business altogether. There are many reasons why each high-profile company has struggled after raising mountains of VC money, but the bigger picture has actually been missed.

It's not about growth or monetization, it's about how monetization feeds growth as part of a holistic system. Additionally, there are macro-economic factors making it more difficult for all tech companies to succeed. The game is constantly changing.

Good Experiment, Bad Experiment

Over the past 10 years as a product leader I’ve shipped hundreds of A/B tests and product experiments to every kind of customer, from social gamers to the most discerning enterprise software buyers. I’ve learned many lessons about building a disciplined and high-impact culture of experimentation.

Great product and growth teams must develop a culture of strategic, rigorous experimentation. When done right, experimentation is a critical tool to move your business and your understanding of customers forward. Unfortunately, many teams use experimentation in misguided ways. I think it’s easier to understand what great experimentation looks like when contrasted with bad experimentation.

Announcing Our 2020 Executives in Residence

At Reforge, our courses are based on proven, actionable frameworks developed by leaders at the fastest-growing companies. We designed our Executive in Residence program to bring more of these leaders into Reforge to help us define and spread the future of Product as a discipline.

We were blown away by the level of interest and the caliber of the applicants we received. Ultimately, the three EIRs joining us are some of the most accomplished leaders in growth today. All of them have been execs at companies that you know and respect, like Slack, SurveyMonkey, and Instagram. They each bring a unique perspective to Reforge that will further enhance the learning experience for our participants.