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 Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.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

Tech Debt Isn't a Burden, It's a Strategic Lever for Success

One of the most common points of tension between product and engineering is prioritizing technical debt. Why, when, and how to handle tech debt can be particularly challenging questions for an organization and individual teams.

Many of these common questions stem from the belief that tech debt should be as low as possible and close to zero. But, companies and products never win by having as little as possible tech debt. Speed to delivery, being first to market, and constantly adding value to the product are things that lead to winning. And, most tech debt can make sense to accumulate as a tradeoff in order to get more of the things that lead to winning.

Top Product and Growth Insights From Reforge's EIRs and OIR's

Top Product and Growth Insights From Reforge's EIRs and OIR's

World class operators tend to move from one role to the next. Unless you are one of the lucky few to work directly with them, the knowledge and insights remains trapped in their heads. We view it as part of the Reforge mission to unlock these earned insights, and pass them to the next generation.

This was part of the reason we created our EIR (Executive In Residence) and OIR (Operator In Residence) program, a rotational part-time program for experienced operators transitioning companies, over a year ago. EIRs and OIR's lead Reforge Programs, sharing their earned insights and giving mid-career professionals an opportunity to learn from the best.

EIRs get the time and space to choose their next endeavor, synthesize their insights, build their personal brand, develop relationships with peers, and a lot more.

Rethinking Your Operating Cadence

Rethinking Your Operating Cadence

In almost all operating conversations, OKRs come to the forefront to solve for the company level operating cadence. But, OKRs don't solve for the team level operating cadence. In practice, most leaders look to syncs and standing meetings to solve for team level operating.

When it comes down to it, they think of the value of team operating mechanisms incorrectly. The biggest mistake is holding team operating processes around syncing meetings to solely gain alignment. Rather than alignment meetings, it's necessary for team operating systems to solve for an underlying growth need like accelerating velocity of feature rollouts or evolving strategy based on new audience expansion. This is where rituals come in, as the building block for growth-oriented team operating.

How To Manage Up - Lessons From Scaling Teams at Credit Karma & Lyft

How To Manage Up - Lessons From Scaling Teams at Credit Karma & Lyft

Many people use the phrase "managing up" to mean influencing your boss or other leadership to support you and your projects. Instead, "managing up" is about driving and maintaining alignment among your goals, your manager's goals, and the organization's goals. Support for you and your projects is what follows.

Unfortunately, many professionals are stuck in the mindset that managing up is just a tactic to achieve their individual goals. This mindset causes them to develop their managing-up skillset incorrectly, establishing bad habits that have negative ramifications for their careers.

Marketplace Supply Strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated

Marketplace Supply Strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated

One of the key questions for a marketplace is: how do you achieve this? "Demand efforts" like SEO, SEM, CRO, and amazing UX are necessary but not sufficient; ultimately, the key to owning Demand is through your Supply strategy.

The right supply strategy will vary based on the product you offer and your customers' needs. If your users value consistency and predictability (e.g., UberX), the path to long-term success generally lies in being both better AND cheaper than the competition.

The Reverse Interview: How To Choose Your Next Company

The Reverse Interview: How To Choose Your Next Company

Interviewing with a new company for a new role is a big choice, with bad odds. To make great career decisions, you need to find a way to conduct a reverse interview — flipping the odds and putting them in your favor.

Unfortunately, the consequence of a bad career decision is bigger for you as the individual than it is for the company. The brutal truth is that from some company perspectives, candidates are replaceable. Whereas for a candidate, the wrong career opportunity may cost you both future opportunities and valuable time.

A reverse interview can help remove the informational disadvantage you have when evaluating the company as a prospective employee.

Upsides to Unshipping: The Art of Removing Features and Products

Upsides to Unshipping: The Art of Removing Features and Products

Teams are praised whenever they release a new feature (or product) to their customers. Imagine the internal 'pat on the backs' and recognition that occurred when Gmail fully launched dark mode for the mobile app, Figma released multi-account to switch between personal and work design spaces, or Apple announced their M1 chip. Employees on these teams likely felt proud to share something new with the world and maybe even posted their accomplishment on LinkedIn to spread the word and celebrate.

The Scaling Data Framework: Data Informed to Data Driven to Data Led

The Scaling Data Framework: Data Informed to Data Driven to Data Led

One of the most common questions I get from founders is: ‘When should I hire my first data person?’ Invariably, the same types of questions are asked over the lifecycle of the company. At the core of these questions is the common mistake of viewing data as a team to hire or set of tools to implement rather than as a strategic lever for growth. The answers to these questions are dependent on your product, business, and points of leverage.

Announcing the 2021 Spring EIRs and OIRs

Announcing the 2021 Spring EIRs and OIRs

Most modern business knowledge is trapped in the heads of a small group of frontier leaders working on the fastest-growing companies. They go from operating role to operating role, not being able to take the time to pause and synthesize what they know to pass it on. As a result, unless you are one of the few lucky people to work closely with these frontier leaders, that knowledge tends to remain trapped.

The Product Strategy Stack

The Product Strategy Stack

As software has eaten the world, product has become the most important lever for a company's success. In the past, companies gained a strategic advantage by excelling in supply chains, logistics, manufacturing, and other operational capabilities. Today, companies win or lose based on the quality of their products—and this puts enormous pressure on product teams to not just deliver products, but deliver products that drive the company's strategy.

But strategy is often misunderstood. The word "strategy" has been stretched to a point where it is almost devoid of meaning. Too often, the terms "vision," "mission," "strategy," "goals," and "roadmap" get conflated into a jumbled mess — leaving product leaders without the context they need to focus their work on the difficult task of moving the company forward.

The Power User Trap

The Power User Trap

Most companies have an overly simplistic view of their Power Users, defining them as the most frequent users on their product. Knowing when, how, and what to build for them is tricky. Teams either over-optimize for them or neglect them, ultimately killing their products: this is The Power User Trap. Product leaders end up in this trap because Power Users aren't necessarily the most frequent users of your product, but rather those that are outliers in influence and behavior within your product ecosystem. Having a more clear definition of who Power Users are, what specific impact they have on your ecosystem, and how they change over time is what lets you avoid The Power User Trap.

We've Raised $21M To Grow Reforge

We've Raised $21M To Grow Reforge

We are excited to announce that we are raising $21M from Andrew Chen and Anish Acharya at Andreessen Horowitz along with a group of leaders to help us build the place where top tech comes to scale.

Traditional education institutions have tried copying and pasting their university online for professionals and it hasn't worked. For the past 4 years, Reforge has been rebuilding education for professionals from the ground up based on what is important and relevant today. Our participants have grown into executive leaders at companies like Roblox, Plaid, Github, Adobe, Dropbox, Shopify, Credit Karma, Google, and more.

Impact = Environment x Skills: How to make career decisions

Impact = Environment x Skills: How to make career decisions

Impact powers career progression. When thinking through these situations, people often solve for the wrong things. Most often, people think about career advancement as increases in compensation. Compensation and career advancement are correlated, but not the same. Your compensation increases because you are creating a lot of impact. Compensation is the output, impact is the input.

Scaling Product Delivery: The "Dirty" Secret of High Performing Product Teams

The dirty secret of Silicon Valley is that most great product teams follow a system that resembles waterfall (gasp!) to launch new innovative features/products repeatedly. The system starts with high conviction based on judgment, intuition, and instinct rather than relying on iterative customer feedback to build conviction over time.

The process of going from 0 to 1 with a first product is an innovation. It’s what allows the company to get off the ground. Sometimes, that original innovation is enough to carry a company from seed to IPO. But that is incredibly rare. What’s more common is that companies need to ship big bets over and over in order to create step changes that help them scale.

The Racecar Growth Framework

If you’re building a consumer business, these are your only three choices for long-term, sustainable growth. But picking the right “lane” is just one of many decisions on the way to building a winning business. In this post, we partnered with the Reforge team to expand on this framework and provide more practical advice on developing your holistic growth strategy.

The Hidden Freemium Advantage

When freemium products first became popular in the early- to mid- 2000s, they were considered valuable if the free product generated enough new paid users to offset the cost of developing and maintaining the free product. The problem is that times have changed. It's not the early- to mid- 2000s anymore, and this reductive view of when freemium makes sense is no longer valid.

Even though times have changed, a lot of companies' mindsets haven't. Many companies still only consider freemium models if they think they will pay for themselves. They take an approach similar to this article, "A simple formula to gauge a freemium model's success," where the author boils a freemium model's value down to a few key factors.


The Top Product + Growth Strategy Posts Of 2020

Almost every team at some point says "Our data is a mess!" A lot of times it is true, and creates serious negative consequences like a lack of shared language, slow transfer of knowledge, lack of trust in the data, and more. The solution is almost never what people think it is - better tooling, more training, or hiring more technical people. Instead, it is how you abstract the data at the right level. In this post, Crystal talks through her step by step process she developed while helping Gojek scale from 20K to 5M orders per day.

Why most analytics efforts fail

From 20K orders per day to 5M. 0 to 100 people in business intelligence. 8 to 85 people in growth. All in 4.5 years. It was a wild ride, but not one that many in the US startup scene are familiar with. This wasn't Uber or Lyft, but rather Gojek, Southeast Asia's largest Super App.

How To Calculate Your Word of Mouth Coefficient

One of the key assumptions for the WOM Coefficient is that active users are predictive of new word of mouth users. To test that assumption, we will do a simple correlation analysis. If the R^2 is high (close to 1) then we know that we can use the metric to forecast goals that are realistic. If it is low, then we know that we need to do some additional refinement (which we’ll talk about later).

The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn’t

The Entertainment Value Curve: Why TikTok is On Fire 🔥 and Quibi Isn’t

In the summer of 2017, Jeffrey Katzenberg touched down in Sun Valley, Idaho. Each year, business moguls and the financial elite go on a pilgrimage to the Allen & Company Conference that’s been held in the mountains of Idaho since 1983. Frequent attendees include Bill Gates, George Soros, LeBron, Oprah, and Jeff Bezos—whose famously buff vest picture was taken in Sun Valley.