π I'm excited to announce @reforge has raised $21M from @andrewchen and @illscience at @a16z along with a group of product, eng, marketing, data, and design leaders...
π« 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 ...
πͺ Our participants have grown into executive leaders at companies like Roblox, Plaid, Github, Adobe, Dropbox, Shopify, Credit Karma, Google, and more and we are excited to be building the place where top tech talent comes to scale. Some history...
In 2015 when I was at HubSpot, my team would always ask for recs on where to use their professional development budget. I'd do hours of research, and come up empty-handed 9/10 times...
At the same time, @andrewchen was experimenting with a cohort-based program called SVBR (Silicon Valley Business Review). We decided to partner up and create the V1 of Reforge...
What started as one simple course, has now become 10 programs across growth, product, and marketing with thousands of top operators as alums...
What we've learned is 3 things:
1. Navigating "The Messy Middle" of our career is critical but chaotic.
2. MBA's, Corporate Training, Conferences, etc are fundamentally broken.
3. Unlocking earned insights of industry leaders creates impact for you, companies and our ecosystem
In his book @scottbelsky defined a concept called "The Messy Middle":
βWe love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored + misunderstood. Creating something from nothing is a volatile journey."
While Scott was talking about creating products, it also defines a core problem in careers. We spend most of our time in The Messy Middle of our careers where the journey is chaotic and volatile...
Part of the challenge in navigating the Messy Middle is that the solutions are fundamentally broken.
1. Masters Degrees Are Broken At Their Foundation 2. Corporate Training Has an Enterprise Software Problem 3. Professionals Are Left To Fend For Themselves
To build something new, we need to solve for the thing that fuels our careers...creating impact.
@iambangaly wrote about this recently in Impact = Environment X Skills
1. Unlock the earned insights of frontier leaders. 2. Help you acquire those earned insights in a meaningful way through cohort-based programs. 3. Help you execute on those earned insights to create impact for you and your company.
The future of professional development isn't a library of videos, but an ever-evolving ecosystem that helps you acquire new insights, execute on what you learn, and solve new problems....
A few special thank yous π
1. @onecaseman and @ShaunMClowes, for being the first two to take a leap and help create our first program beyond the Growth Series.
2. @matt_muffin , who has been not just a CTO, but a true partner.
4. The entire Reforge team, but especially @danwolch, @thisisming, @_buf who were part of the early team and have stuck with me through many twists and turns.
1/ Career decisions about your next role/opp are the most impactful decisions you might make in your career. As an operator, all of your eggs are in one basket at a time, and we get a limited number of swings at the plate. So getting good at these decisions is important...
2/ At FB, Bangaly managed Rotational PM's. At the end of a rotation, he'd have the same convo: How are you going to choose your next rotation/role?
As a result, Bangaly got a lot of reps guiding this type of decision and created a framework to help with it...
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, but these are 6 mistakes I see in defining metrics over and over....
1 - Metrics before Strategy
Your metrics are a reflection of your strategy. They help answer, is the strategy working? Metrics without strategy is looking at a bunch of random numbers. Define the strategy before you define your metrics.
2a - Definition Is More Important Than A Dashboard
People focus on "building a dashboard." 10X more important is choosing which metrics are important and defining those metrics well. Defining is more complicated than people think...
Almost every team I talk to says "Our data is mess!"
@crystalwidjaja (Fmr SVP BI & Growth at Gojek and @reforge Partner) wrote an excellent piece on the real root causes of analytics failures, and a step by step process on how she thinks about it: reforge.com/blog/why-most-β¦
π§΅π
First, if you don't know @crystalwidjaja and the story of Gojek, it's impressive. Crystal joined at 30 people and helped them scale to complete more daily food orders than Grubhub, Uber Eats, and DoorDash combined, and more trips than Lyft per day π€―
There are a lot of symptoms of bad analytics/data:
1. Lack of shared language 2. Slow transfer of knowledge 3. Lack of trust 4. Inability to act on data quickly
The Entertainment Value Curve - Awesome post by @ravi_mehta (Former CPO Tinder, FB, TripAdvisor) on product strategy in the social space and why TikTok is on π₯ and Quibi is π
Word of Mouth is critical, but notoriously hard to measure and therefore hard to influence. @ybhaijee (Former VP Growth @ Eaze) wrote an excellent post on @reforge about The Word of Mouth Coefficient with some analysis: reforge.com/blog/word-of-mβ¦
Full Thread πππ
When @ybhaijee and @tomaspueyo worked at Zynga together, they wanted a metric for Word of Mouth that was:
1. Based on Active Users 2. Stable enough to be used in forecasting 3. Could be influenced with product/marketing initiatives
The result was the Word of Mouth Coefficient
WOM Coefficient: Says that for every X active user, you will bet Y new organic users in that time period.
One key π is that rather than basing the metric on new users (like K-Factor) they based it on active users. Retention is at the foundation of every growth loop...
All product work is not equal. There is a common issue of over-applying one process, measure of success, and strategy to all product problems. @far33d and @onecaseman wrote a monster post talking that is well worth the read -> reforge.com/blog/product-wβ¦
Full thread π
"A common conflict I've seen is when product leaders try to apply a single process to all product work...growth and feature work are different and energy is wasted trying to force-fit into the same process, success metric, and approach." - @far33d
There are four types of product work beyond product-market fit:
1. Feature Work 2. Growth Work 3. Scaling Work 4. Product Market Fit Expansion