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 Now it seems even more outdated because of this increased demand for talent.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

Un-BELT your consumer problems to create successful infrequent products

Un-BELT your consumer problems to create successful infrequent products

In my experience, consumer research has left product people dealing with too many consumer problems.

BELT provides an approach to help classify these consumer problems and insights.

Once you realize that not every consumer problem is on the same level, you can create a compelling outcome for both consumers and businesses by classifying them and subsequently solving them in the right order.

When creating an infrequent consumer product, use BELT to understand and normalize your potential consumer problems.

Beyond Individual Growth: How Team Building & Development Can Give You a Competitive Edge

Beyond Individual Growth: How Team Building & Development Can Give You a Competitive Edge

You’d never expect a soccer team to win a championship with athletes only running drills on their own. Yet that’s how most companies today treat professional development.

As managers embrace putting L&D budgets in the hands of their individual reports, demand has skyrocketed for coaches, training, and skill-based courses. Seemingly hundreds of new companies have popped up to capitalize on the trend to help people grow their careers.

Skill development is more accessible than ever before. But, even if your direct reports are ambitious and working hard to uplevel on their own, your team may still not be performing exceptionally well.

You’re (Probably) Using NPS Wrong

You’re (Probably) Using NPS Wrong

As more and more companies find success through “customer-centric” strategizing, nearly every product or service now asks about your likelihood to recommend it — usually using the industry-standard metric of a Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Despite becoming the poster child for measuring how customers feel about a product, most companies misuse NPS, either by measuring it incorrectly (often at the wrong time), or using it to measure something it can’t possibly measure.

Managing Gen Z Knowledge Workers: An Early Playbook

Managing Gen Z Knowledge Workers: An Early Playbook

Over the past two years, COVID-19 has shifted workplace expectations dramatically. Many managers are struggling to translate the strategies they used in-person to remote and hybrid environments, signaling that it might be time to take a step back and rethink our attitudes towards work.

This is especially important when it comes to Gen Z employees. Aged between 10 and 25 years old, Gen Z makes up the majority of the entry-level workforce but has never experienced work pre-pandemic.

This lack of anchoring, along with major generational shifts, means that Gen Z is primed to bring radical change to workplace expectations. But only if you can keep them motivated and engaged.

In this article, we will dissect Gen Z attitudes while discussing the top 3 strategies to motivate, develop and retain the next generation of talent.

The Rubber Band Theory: Navigating Organizational Conflict

The Rubber Band Theory: Navigating Organizational Conflict

We believe leaders get better outcomes when they can model and embrace good conflict within their teams.

In this post, we’ll introduce the Rubber Band Theory, a framework meant to help you articulate how conflict operates in your organization.

From there, we’ll debunk what distinguishes good conflict from bad conflict, and share some tools to effectively model and move conflict from one state to another.

3 Ways Product and Customer Service Can Work Together to Unlock Powerful Insights

3 Ways Product and Customer Service Can Work Together to Unlock Powerful Insights

Great PMs are always on the lookout for ways to create and capitalize on new points of leverage.

In other words — they work smarter, not harder.

In a product-led organization, one huge point of leverage PMs can cash in on is a deep understanding of your customers’ problems. Yet having your finger on the pulse can also be very time consuming.

Fortunately, many organizations are sitting on a gold mine of customer insights — a group of coworkers that are fully immersed in the customer experience: customer service.

Product and customer teams are traditionally not well-integrated, though. But they could be.

Building an International Growth Team

Building an International Growth Team

International expansion doesn’t happen overnight. It’s the result of intentional investment in the right areas, at the right times. Successful strategy starts with understanding the Pillars of International Growth: establishing strong product/culture fit, ensuring customer accessibility, and investing in universal currencies to help your company grow across international borders.

In order to establish those pillars for your business, you’ll need to build a dynamic international growth model. Your growth model will allow your company to compare performance of its core growth loops across regions and countries as a basis for developing market-specific international growth playbooks.

The final step is the topic of this post: how to build an international growth team capable of executing against the company’s international growth strategy and market-specific playbooks.

A Hype-Free Overview of Web3 Marketing

A Hype-Free Overview of Web3 Marketing

As marketers, we are part of a select group that is constantly staying on top of the latest trends, tactics, and channels. Every time a new channel emerges, we are usually some of the first users to figure out how we can utilize any new terrain for growth.

The latest? NFTs and the rise of web3. Marketers are already experimenting with NFTs to accomplish a wide array of goals — from driving brand awareness to increasing customer loyalty and even monetizing their user bases.

Web3 will do today, what social media did for brands in the early 2010s. This shift will mainly be accomplished through immersive, branded, and VR-enabled realities. Just like brick-and-mortar audiences flocked to social media, they’ll follow the same brands into metaverse communities.

Introducing Our First Summer Cohort to Up-Level Your Career

Introducing Our First Summer Cohort to Up-Level Your Career

Our motto this summer? Sunny skies, longer days, and more time to invest in yourself. In fact, we’re thrilled to announce our first ever Summer Cohort starting the week of July 18.

Looking ahead to the second half of 2022, many of us are taking stock of the goals we set out to achieve this year. At Reforge, we’re on a mission to ensure you hit both a personal and professional high note by offering 12 of our 16 programs this summer. Consider this new cohort an opportunity to take charge of your career timeline.

The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World

The Attribution Stack: How to Make Budget Decisions in a Post-iOS14 World

Executives have always dreamed of a “single source of truth” to measure marketing performance and avoid wasted ad spend. Then the wakeup call came with iOS14, when Apple let users opt out of tracking. Even before the “privacy apocalypse,” brands like HelloFresh, Monday․com and Harry's (where one of the authors led the Marketing Science team) had started to explore “untrackable” channels like Billboards, Podcasts, and TV, and could no longer rely on digital tracking alone.

In the post-iOS14 era, marketing attribution is about combining methods to calibrate your model of the business, so you know what levers you can pull to drive performance and hit growth goals.

In this post we'll walk through the modern attribution stack, and how each part works together to support budget allocation decisions.

How The Best International Growth Decisions Are Made

How The Best International Growth Decisions Are Made

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…

Why Product Safety Isn’t at Odds with Growth

Why Product Safety Isn’t at Odds with Growth

There is a popular belief that building for safety is at odds with growth. After starting and leading the safety and risk tech team at Lyft, I can confidently say that this is not true.

Growth is about furthering product and business value. Failing to plan for safety measures will erode that product value and certainly cause significant business costs. And in some cases, it’s simply unethical.

5 Ways To Boost Your Career Progression In 2022

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.

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

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

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 Steps to Understanding and Unlocking Your Product’s International Growth Loops

3 Steps to Understanding and Unlocking Your Product’s International Growth Loops

Imagine you are a product leader at a fast-growing US startup that has strong product/market fit and is beginning to turn its attention abroad. You’ve already begun to localize your product in other languages, and you’re starting to see organic adoption pick up in international markets. However, you haven’t been able to reach a tipping point in any one country, international user engagement and retention rates aren’t as healthy as the US, and you’re starting to see your aggregate international growth show signs of decelerating. Sound familiar?

Reforge Raises $60M to Power The Expertise Economy

Reforge Raises $60M to Power The Expertise Economy

We are excited to announce that we raised $60M Series B led by Insight Partners and with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, True Ventures, NextView Ventures, Long Journey Ventures, TCV, and 170+ leading VP and C-level executives.

Making The Leap from Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager

Making The Leap from Individual Contributor to Engineering Manager

The dual track of engineering has grown increasingly popular over the last decade. At many leading organizations, accomplished engineers no longer have to go down the management track in order to advance in their careers. Managers are no longer expected to code in order to build effective technical teams that can deliver.

While giving individuals more optionality about which track to pursue is fantastic, the decision to switch tracks into engineering management is still fraught for many people. Those that make the switch often find the terrain incredibly hard to navigate.


Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy

Marketing is More Than Growth: The 3 Parts of a Complete Strategy

While the tools of the marketing trade may be changing — from direct response mailers to digital-first acquisition loops — the need for an effective marketing strategy has only grown more critical as companies face fiercer competition around the world.

People commonly conflate marketing with the scope of growth marketing because, for many early-stage startups, growth is survival. While growth marketing plays a critical role in any company’s success, it doesn’t capture everything required for an airtight marketing strategy.

Becoming a marketing leader also means moving beyond the traditional definitions of growth and integrating the three domains of marketing: brand marketing, growth marketing, and product marketing. Leaders can then forge stronger strategies by proactively assessing changes in the market, the customer, and the business that necessitate a shift.

Meet Reforge’s Spring 2022 Executives in Residence (EIRs)

Meet Reforge’s Spring 2022 Executives in Residence (EIRs)

We are excited to announce the Spring 2022 EIRs!

Set Better Goals With NCTs, Not OKRs

Set Better Goals With NCTs, Not OKRs

The hallmark of high-performing teams is their ability to effectively set, execute against, and predictably achieve the right set of ambitious goals. A company full of exceptionally operating teams can be the driving engine that separates companies that thrive from those that flop.

Easier said than done. The biggest failure point to product strategy comes not from the strategy itself but from a lack of successful execution on meaningful goals that ladder up to it. Many teams focus on the shallow task of moving metrics rather than the deeper task of understanding how to create value.

Luckily, that’s fixable. To effectively frame, communicate about, and track progress against your goals, you don’t need endless weeks of planning or fancy tracking tools. You need good habits coupled with the building blocks that lead to excellent performance: strategic clarity, well-defined commitments, and an actionable path to your destination.