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 Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.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.
Martech is a misunderstood and neglected part of most marketing organizations, but if you’ve ever used a third party tool in Growth, then you’ve tango’d with martech.
We define martech as the practice of standing up and managing technical systems comprising of tools, capabilities, roles, and people that lie at the intersection of marketing, growth, product, and engineering.
As globalization accelerates, international growth has become a top priority for tech companies everywhere. Yet most fail to realize their full potential even after extensive investment.
Why? International growth is inherently complex, and many believe there’s no reliable playbook for success. That leaves every company to chart its own unique course, burning time, money and other resources in the process. However, I’ve found that many companies run into the same challenges — and the smartest ones adopt the same best practices.
We use some products more than others. Zoom may be part of our daily lives while TurboTax appears once a year. The latter is an example of an infrequent product, which we detailed in this post introducing ICED Theory. If you’re new to ICED, consider reading that first.
At Reforge, we’re dedicated to making it easier for professionals to navigate the messy middle of their careers. Whether you work in product, growth, engineering, or marketing, we’re here to help you with tools and frameworks that you can use today.
In 2021, we learned hard-earned wisdom from expert EIRs, OIRs, and partners more than ever before. Before we head into 2022, we’re taking a moment to reflect on the most popular pieces from this year, all of which have pushed the frontier of knowledge on how to build and grow lasting technology companies.
Early in our careers as engineers, we’re told to invest in technical skills. We learn languages, implement patterns and frameworks, architect across the stack, and learn how to scale. Getting into the weeds of the work is what gets you credibility and clout with your teammates.
But to make more successful technical calls and advance careers, engineers actually need to develop better strategic decision-making skills — not just technical execution skills. In fact, an overreliance on technical execution skills early in a career leads to untapped impact and stalled growth opportunities down the road.
Growth teams are frequently misperceived as optimization squads who run experiments to increase product or marketing KPIs.
In reality, the best growth teams are like the best baseball teams. They know when to bunt, when to hit a single, and when to swing big for a home run.
We're thrilled to announce the dates for our Spring '22 Cohort and the launch of 3 brand new programs. In addition to our 14 existing programs across Growth, Product, Marketing, and Engineering, next year we will introduce 3 new programs and 1 updated program inspired by input from our members. Applications for membership are now open, with enrollment beginning in early February.
As tech companies go all-in on growth, growth marketers are emerging as a critical component of winning growth models. But most people couldn't even tell you what growth marketing is, much less how to execute it well.
In this post, we'll share our definition of growth marketing, including how it powers the growth model and relates to other growth and marketing domains.
How long does it take to hire the right Growth Leader?
An executive search can take up to 12 months to find the right candidate, regardless of whether you are looking for a VP of Product, Head of Engineering, or Chief Marketing Officer.
The problem is those 12 months can be wasted entirely. You may think you have found the right person, only to realize 3 to 6 months later they were the wrong person.
This ends up hurting both the company and the individual. The company loses invaluable time, money, and sets the culture in the wrong direction. The individual is set back in their career and will have to pick themselves up by restarting at a new company. It's a bad experience for everyone.
The ICED theory presents a mental model to help address the challenges faced by infrequent products and facilitates the crafting of a growth-oriented approach.
At Reforge, our members are the guiding force behind everything we do. From the intensive design of each lesson to determining which new programs to launch, everything is designed with your experience top of mind. That's why our team is always hard at work behind the scenes looking for ways to improve our membership offerings. This fall, we’re proud to announce our latest enhancement with the launch of the Cohort Viewer.
In the tech world, the Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Sales functions have each had specialities for years. But, Product Management has not yet defined specialities. This leads people to think a Product Manager (PM) is a PM — meaning we hastily assume all PM roles are created equal and the best PMs are those who know everything across different types of product work/stages. Since distinct PM specializations haven't been formally codified, we'll lay them out in this article.
In the tech world, the Design, Engineering, Marketing, and Sales functions have each had specialities for years. But, Product Management has not yet defined specialities. This leads people to think a Product Manager (PM) is a PM — meaning we hastily assume all PM roles are created equal and the best PMs are those who know everything across different types of product work/stages. Since distinct PM specializations haven't been formally codified, we'll lay them out in this article.
Momentum is everything in startups. It creates the Universal Growth Loop. But just like with any growth loop, the loop can work for you or against you. The effects aren't linear, they compound. That means losing momentum doesn't make things incrementally harder, it makes them exponentially harder. Maintaining momentum requires anticipating future problems, and making sure you are planting the right seeds today.
Tech leaders need to focus on business value above all else, which includes what's best for a user and what's best for business growth. How to balance the two (user & business) is one of the most pressing questions in tech.
Organizations are always seeking great engineering leaders — leaders who do more than just execute strategy. But technical strategy is often overlooked and underdeveloped as engineers advance in their career.
We're excited to announce that applications are now open for the Fall 21 Cohort Programs. In addition to our 10 existing programs across Growth, Product, and Marketing, we have also added four NEW programs that will serve product leaders, engineering leaders, and founders.
In this post we challenge you to think about your career as a 'product,' focusing on creating a sustainable, predictable, and fulfilling growth system for you.
In this article we'll give you framework to figure out if this channel is worth your time and energy.
