I've rarely found a company that doesn't think their marketing tech stack is a mess. Austin Hay of Ramp has published a few amazing artifacts to help ↴

Austin Hay is Head of Marketing Technology at Ramp and has advised companies like Notion, Warby Parker, Krisp, and more.

He's published a few amazing Artifacts on @reforge . You can also check out his new Marketing Technology course. 🔗 Links in the thread.

🗺️ Marketing Tech Architecture Diagram 🗺️

Austin says "You really need to offload your mental model of the [Martech] system on paper so other people can see what you’re seeing and get on the same page with you in order to do work."

There are four parts you need to illustrate:

1️⃣ The system's data inputs
2️⃣ Data storage
3️⃣ Data capabilities
4️⃣ Data federation

🔭 Technical Strategy Planning Doc 🔭

Martech is often one of this things that is important to everyone, but owned by no one. You need to get buy-in among execs and a lot of teams which can be complicated.

Austin has made his strategy planning doc that he used to pave a roadmap of the martech stack. He says there are four levers you need to plan for:

➿ Good Redundancy vs Bad Redundancy
🪢 Loose Coupling vs Tight Coupling
🔀 Interoperability vs Incompatibility
⚡ Focused vs Unfocused

💵 Ad Platform Conversion Optimization 💵

Building, assessing and improving a Martech stack is not enough. It’s critical that Martech is adding value to it’s cross-functional stakeholders for it to continue to receive investment.

Austin walks through a project to implement some advanced infrastructure to improve efficiency of paid acquisition across multiple channels.

In this project they were able to implement infrastructure that allowed them to focus their paid programs around bottom of funnel performance across six different channels.

💬 All the links in the thread. Marketing technology architecture diagram
artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts/mark…

Almost every function has gone through specialization except product.

Marketing = performance, brand, product marketing, etc.

Engineering = front end, back end, dev ops, etc.

PM's have historically been PM's. But this seems to be changing: reforge.com/blog/product-s…

🧵👇 Reforge EIR's @fishmanaf, @keyaspatel, @ravi_mehta, @crystalwidjaja wrote the above piece. A summary...

😃 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...

Full Story -> reforge.com/blog/weve-rais…

🧵 On where we've been and what is next 👇 🏫 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 ...

⚡️🧠Impact = Environment x Skill

A framework for making big career decisions by @iambangaly (Reforge Partner, Former Instacart, Instagram)

Full post -> reforge.com/blog/how-to-ma…

🧵 Thread... 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...

🧵 Mistakes In Defining Metrics 🧵

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.

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-…

🧵👇 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 🤯

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 🔥 and Quibi is 📉

Post -> reforge.com/blog/entertain…

Summary Thread 👇👇👇 1/ Social content products are driven by entertainment value. Entertainment value is a combo of:

a: Social Value = the personal connection the viewer has with the content.

b: Production Value = quality of content relative to genre.

This creates The Entertainment Value Curve

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-m…

Full Thread 👇👇👇 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

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-w…

Full thread 👇 "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

"What got you here, won't get you there." @onecaseman and @far33d broke down the transition from Product Manager to Product Leader. Excellent insights from @iambangaly and @ravi_mehta as well.

Article -> reforge.com/blog/crossing-…

Thread 👇👇👇 Great execution as a Senior Product Manager, does not mean you will make a good Product Leader.

"You can continue to put wins on the board and still not make the jump."

Four key transitions that Fareed and Casey talk about...

It seems we are shifting into a new phase of this new world. @far33d and I wrote a piece on how to think about your retention strategy should shift with it (w/ contributions from @iambangaly @ElenaVerna @danhockenmaier )👇

reforge.com/blog/2020/6/2/… There will be different strategies depending on where you sit on the headwind/tailwind spectrum.

Extreme Headwinds = habit has been broken w/ majority of your customers.

Extreme Tailwinds = habit has been accelerated w/majority of target customers and new audiences.

1/ Growth Loops are the new funnels - some thoughts by myself, @onecaseman, @kevinakwok, and @andrewchen. reforge.com/blog/growth-lo… 2/ The MOST important question your team should be able to answer is: "How does your product grow?" This seems like a simple question, but you'll typically find everyone on your team has a different and/or incomplete answer...

1/ Growth wins. Period. Yet distribution strategy seems to not get an equal seat at the table. This is the first in a four post series by @onecaseman @kevinakwok and I. Here we explore why growth wins, and how the game has changed - reforge.com/blog/growth-wi… 2/ "Growth wins" is not new advice. “The best product doesn't always win. The one everyone uses wins” @boztank “Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.” @peterthiel ...