YouSaid · the spoken record

Brian Balfour

lines on the record: 124
first: 2023-10-05
most recent: 2023-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think there will be an artifact on this soon if there isn't live today, but we can get one live. But this actually is so fundamental it's in almost all of our growth courses now. But the one we go deepest on this is our retention engagement program.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we might need to do to actually sequence and capture all of that value. So that's kind of like how that whole thing flows. And then some people solve start to layer on and solve multiple use cases over time. But the biggest thing that we find in reforge when we have people go through this exercise, which is the next thing we'll talk about is that they end up mapping out like eight different use cases. And we're like, whoa, like that's like that's way too much. You're obviously solving trying to solve for too much here.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, we call it the use case map. And this was actually developed originally in our retention program with Casey Winners and Sean Clause. But it's essentially what you describe. It's essentially a set of rows and there's a specific order. I might get the order slightly wrong right now, written off it alive, but it starts with you define the problem. You then have a simple statement of who might have this problem. You then say, well, what are their alternatives to solve this problem? That leads into the why. Why are they going to choose you over the alternative? It's kind of calling out differentiation, essentially. And then it flows into, okay, well, what is the natural frequency of this problem, which flows into all of your retention and activation metrics? You can also ask, what is the natural frequency of adoption, which starts to help you understand more around your acquisition metrics, what percentage, how many people might be in market for this given year?”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have identified through any sort of persona research, but we can make those people successful. We can capture those people as part of the process.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to go to HubSpot, and they were like, oh, I've already have a relationship with this brand. And that ended up reducing quite a bit of friction. The reality is that most products today are actually adopted by multiple personas. And that leads to trying to solve for multiple use cases, multiple problems across these personas. And I think that is the way more detrimental thing than narrowing in on a single use case that might be adopted by multiple personas. So it's kind of like flipping it on its head. So that's how we defined everything in ReForge is essentially what are the different use cases that we're trying to build against? And then we might go ask the question, who has those problems? Who has those use cases? And most of the time, we've actually been surprised that there are people in the market that have those problems and that have those use cases that we would not.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lot of people don't think about that, right? Especially in SaaS tools, which is for most SaaS products, your persona, your target customer, it's actually only in market for that once every Jewish years or so. And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture that small sliver of those that are in market. And they don't think about, well, how do I capture the attention and build a relationship with folks that aren't in market yet but are going to be eventually? And that was HubSpot's biggest thing when they developed the whole inbound marketing playbook and content marketing is that most people thought of HubSpot. They just thought of them as a blog. They didn't even know that there was a SaaS tool. If you asked our audience, but what that created was the moment they were in market for that tool, where was the first place that they were going to go?”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is the value prop that you're trying to create against that problem? What's the alternative for the user? And then most importantly, why are they choosing you over the alternative that often goes mixed? Those components, once you define them with the extend into, are the things that actually start to help you on the growth side of the equation, which is once I understand what the problem is, I can start to ask questions, well, what is the natural frequency of mybody encountering that problem? That starts to define your retention metrics, which then starts to define your activation metrics, and it kind of works all the way downstream. You can also ask the question, well, what is the natural frequency of adoption of a solution around this problem?”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson seven is use cases, not personas. So the trope, I think, is always to talk to your customers, know your customers, and it just puts a lot of emphasis on understanding the person or category of person. And then this typically results in creating some type of persona definition and segmentation that the team orients around. But I actually think most of the meat that is actionable that helps you define not only what to build from a product perspective, but how your growth, motion and growth model should work is actually defined in the use case that you're going after and the different uses of your product. Some people kind of relate this to jobs to be done. We think about it a little bit differently internally in ReForge, which is a use case is simply a combination and starts with what is the problem that you are trying to solve.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm on the disagree side of it. But that being said, that's what HubSpot did, right? Which is they did create a category around inbound. And the way that you get traction around those things is. You define the opposite and you play off of it, right? So their whole messaging was hey, everybody's doing outbound marketing. Here's the problem. There's a better way. It's called inbound marketing. And then they set themselves up for that. But you have to do that in category creation because you have to start with the thing that people understand and then pivot off of it to teach them what the new thing is. And that was something that HubSpot did amazingly well. But even Dharmesh, the founder, talks a lot about category creation. He's like, look, even though we did it, it rarely the right answer to go do it. So I probably shift on the other end of the spectrum, which is I'm not sure I think it can create a lot of value, but I'm not sure I agree with the ultimate premise.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we just recently released today one with Alena Verna breaking down Airtable Surprising Shift from PLG to Enterprise. So there's definitely some hot takes in that one. So that's the most recent one. That's a fun one. But we've covered Zoom's product strategy. We've Slack's most recent announcement, a few others.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you just Google unsolicited feedback podcast, it'll come up. You can also go to reforge.com slash podcast slash unsolicited feedback as well. You can find it on our website. But we're on Apple, Spotify, all the main pieces. But yeah, we've had some spicy episodes so far. So hope you all enjoy”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're kind of experimenting with something similar. We just released a podcast called Unsolicited Feedback. We kind of looked at it and we were like, there's already a ton of great interview podcasts, you know, like yours. We could do another one, but how is that going to work? How is that going to stand out? How can we do different? So we tried to figure out, we explored areas that would be the opposite. And so the format of the podcast is totally different. We do bring on a guest, but we don't interview them. We actually bring in like two or three product or feature releases from the past couple weeks that have been out there. And then we kind of pretend that we are like the VP of product at that company. And we just like analyze it and break it down and talk about what we like, what we don't like off the time. We give unsolicited feedback on it. And I don't know if it's going to work yet. It's gotten some good traction so far. It's been a lot of fun.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they're actually not using AI to generate the content, they're using it to lower the friction to more UGC driven content, which ends up being a more unique and like ranking more highly. So they actually looked at that and said we could probably generate a ton of content using AI and just use our domain authority to rank for these things. But they're like, oh, actually, we're going to use AI to try to figure out how to extract more of the opposite of what everybody else is doing, which is actually human-generated content. So I thought that was like another interesting recent example of somebody I've seen doing something very clearly distinctly opposite of what everybody else is doing.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. You can see this now too with all the AI stuff is like you see a news kind of trending towards a similar set of things. And I think the real winners are going to be the ones who kind of look at that and be like, actually, we're going to set that up as a guardrail of what we're not going to do. I actually thought that was an interesting, I did a LinkedIn post about this because I saw LinkedIn doing this. You know, the playbook right now with AI is, oh, I'm going to use AI to generate a ton of content for content marketing to rank in Google and all that kind of stuff. I thought it was actually interesting. LinkedIn has this new feature.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson here is like if you're trying to get traction in something, whether a new product, a new growth tactic, a new channel, the goal of learning what everybody else is doing is not so you can mimic them. It's actually to figure out how you can do the opposite of it. That's the ultimate goal of that behavior.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pumping out like 10 articles a day. It was something crazy, right? And that worked at the time because they were like early in the game. They had the domain authority to rank for each one of those. And a lot of people followed that playbook. But then I and a few others in the space started writing really low volume, very long content. And I think as a result it stood out and it performed much better among the noise and most of my email subscribers probably came from all of those early things because it did stand out. And this is a constant game because of course like as you figure something out and you do the opposite of some piece, some other people are going to start to copy you. And then you got to take a step back and be like, well, what is everybody doing? And how do I flip the pendulum back to how do I flip the pendulum back to the other perspective? But the major lesson.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get the performance, but most things have these gravitational forces where everything converges, right? There used to be this meme where like every SaaS product had the same exact like character design that Slack had. And I can't remember. I think maybe Intercom had it. Anyways, that was like the thing. And so you can visually see this. But this dynamic, I think, actually takes place everywhere, whether it's in a strategy within a category, a design of a product, add creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic as part of it. A third quick example is that about 10 years ago, when I probably really started to write a bit more on my blog is the playbook at the time that was really developed by HubSpot was that you would do a lot of high volume short content. At one point, the HubSpot team was, I think,”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Looking at what everybody is doing and then try and the purpose of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand those best practices so that you can repeat them. Your goal is to understand them so you can ask the question, well, what is the opposite? Because in every kind of major trend that everybody's pointed to, there's almost always an opportunity on the other side, on the 180. A couple other places this applies is that if you're trying to figure out a new ad channel as an example, new paid acquisition channel, one of the best things that you can do is you can look at what all the other advertisers who are advertising to your audience are doing, like look at their creative, all that kind of stuff, and then basically figure out how to do something completely opposite, completely different. And that's how you probably will stand out. That's how you will get the CTRs. That's how you.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when Andrew and I did the first growth series, we essentially did all the opposite of that. We didn't let everybody in, it was for a small group of people. It wasn't purely online. We did some stuff in person. We priced it super high. It wasn't purely self-serve. We had like these live components. We essentially did the exact opposite of what's out there. And so I think for, you know, if anybody was looking at at the time, it was just very counterintuitive. It was like, who's going to really actually be interested in this? But of course, the first one that we did, it just like we had an amazing response to the first one and then, you know, the rest is history with ReForge and then cohort based courses became a thing and all those things. But I think the real lesson in here is that if you want to gain traction around something, you often should be.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I like this one. Do the opposite. So I think a story from very early reforged days. So when we started reforge, the norm in the education space online, that thing that everybody was talking about at the time was essentially these short form, self-serve, low-priced, available for everybody courses. That was like that was the thing, you know, I don't know if you remember the term MOOCs or massively online courses, right? That was like, that was the rage. It was like, oh, this thing is going to like revolutionize our world, right? And there was just so many people going after that.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Implement and even advocate for inside of organizations and products. And I think that's why you tend to see these things get chipped away out over time.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I think we both mentioned it in here, but. We have this concept in ReForge that we teach around calling it good friction. And I think that I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction. But actually, oftentimes the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel is just all the incentives internally are not aligned to doing that because almost every time you add good friction in a product, in the very short window, it's like conversion will go down and stuff. And you have to wait for those down funnel things to propagate. But people love quick wins, right? People love looking at those short term metric boosts and are often rewarded and applauded for it. And so I think.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Order to create this better down funnel experience. Now, over time, we've evolved the programs as COVID hit and we got rid of the in person component and all of these other changes that rendered those lessons not relevant in today's environment. But those are two, those are like two quick examples that I can think of off the top of my head. We're now in a place where we've started layering on marketplaces to reforge. And so the system level thinking is coming up more and more daily because as you know, every conversation we have about demand that we end up talking about supply in every conversation we end up talking about supply, we end up talking about demand because that's just how it works.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Similarly, I think in early reforged days where we had a lot more in person collaborative dynamics as part of our programs, we had this application process. And we learned over time that there were different behaviors and mindsets of coming or desires for what somebody wanted out of a program that actually created one of those compelling, like created those peer-to-peer compelling experiences, right? And so sometimes people wanted to come into the program and all they wanted to do was like network with peers, right? And they didn't want to engage with the content at all. And then sometimes we had the opposite. And they just kind of wanted to be on like their own little solo journey and not engage and not engage in stuff. And so over time, we iterated on that and we started to learn like what are the right questions to ask.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This type of persona or this type of company, you will not get comped on it, and that immediately changed behavior, right? And we started selling the right. So that was an example where engagement and retention problems were created up at the top or up at the top of the funnel.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, examples, I think early HubSpot sales days, the renewal figures on our early paid product were only okay. And I think the team we initially wanted to work on, what feature could we add to all of these things. But when we actually went into customer combos, what we found was that a lot of the people that the sales team were selling to ended up being either not the persona that we ended up building for or they were selling a use case that we hadn't actually, we actually hadn't designed for. And that's because, look, salespeople are there. They're cranking, right? They're just trying to close deals, which Eve, right? Is like, that's what their role there is for. And so at some point, we had to redesign the incentives for the sales team. I don't remember exactly how it worked, but I think we did something as drastic at some point as saying, hey, like if you sell.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The average good folks get all of the simple levers of like how to reduce friction, increase reward. They might understand things around growth loops, all that type of stuff. But system level thinking is, I think, the thing that separates the great from the good even more so in marketplace and network products because the system dynamics are, you know, amped up multiple times degrees. Yeah.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so what I've often found teams to really do is that they narrow, they identify the problem, which is like, hey, we might have low revenue retention or low revenue conversion or something like that. And they go straight to, okay, trying to work on levers within that specific part of the system. But without taking the step back to say, well, actually, what part of the system is creating this problem? It might actually be something within there. Maybe we just have terrible pricing pages or something of that nature or terrible dunning flows. But I think oftentimes the actual solution, the actual lever to move that problem ends up being in a different part of the system. And so this system type of thinking is probably the number one thing that I think separates great folks who work on growth from like your average good folks.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, this is probably one that I think about the most and comes up the most often, not only in reforged courses, but in investing in buzzing, which is growth is a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization. You change one, you affect the model. We've written about this a ton. You've written about this to some degree. But I think people underestimate how deep this lesson goes. It's not just about understanding your system, which is the growth model, understanding that if you do change one thing, you have to change the other one. But it's also understanding like when you have a problem in one area, sometimes the solution is in a different part of the system, right? So a lot of times retention problems are created because you're acquiring the wrong folks. Or a lot of times monetization issues are stemming from engagement problems.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's fair. I think it's just a human tendency to essentially overestimate how fast, not only how fast you can do something, but how fast it will take in effect, especially this becomes even bigger, the larger. The larger the baseline you're working with, the larger the number you need on the new thing to actually show a meaningful impact. And so I think it's just very easy for us to overestimate those things when we're going through that type of forward-looking thinking.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This might be different for a consumer social product where the friction is very low and there is no buying things and maybe I can pull some levers like paid acquisition or stuff that have really short time windows. But even in those products, when those products tend to be more influenced by things like viral loops and working on engagement and retention, the amount of time it takes to build and ship those things and then have it propagate through the user base and actually impact your numbers ends up being longer than most people think about when they're thinking through the next year. And so anyways, if you want to hit your year number, it's all about the first six months. Otherwise, you're being a little bit unrealistic with these very backweighted second half plans.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Most products, this isn't true for all products, is that the buying cycle or the decision window for a lot of customers is so long that by the time you get to the second half and you do the calculation of like, well, if we put this thing in place and the time it takes to impact a customer and then the time it takes for that customer to make the buying decision, you already into the next year, right? When you put those things in. This is really true for SaaS, right? Where the buying windows could be anything from a few months to up to like a year long, depending on what type of market that you're tackling. And so if you don't do the things in the first six months, the options you're left with to actually influence the numbers in the back six months of the year is incredibly small, incredibly, incredibly small.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To hit that goal. The reality is just not how it works to make your year, it's really about the first six months and the things you accomplish in those first six months. And the reason is this for quite a few products.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, now we're getting into the product and growth lessons. This one I actually learned at HubSpot, which was the year is made in the first six months. And where this really comes from is that I think, especially when you're going through planning or thinking about growth and milestones and hitting those goals and looking forward in that way is that this is particularly relevant as everybody's probably going through yearly planning right now is that I see I've seen a lot of plans where you realize in the in the first three to six months you kind of have a line of sight to what the constraints are and what you can actually do and the limitations of those things. And so in the first three to six months of a year, your growth goals end up being kind of realistic, kind of on target. But then you're like, oh, I've got to hit this ambitious target. So I'm going to build, you know, this inflection point in the back half of the year.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. When we went from one product to multi product at HubSpot, we seeded multiple bets at once. And only like a couple of them ended up making it through the filter, which ended up being the CRM and the sales tool as part of that. And then there was projects we ended up killing and unwinding as part of that. But the key about each of those bets was that we seeded each of those bets with a very limited amount of funding in a very small team. Like there was still the constraints involved. And I think where the mistake ends up happening is like you kind of have this thing that's working, but not really. And because you've got all these other people sitting on the sidelines or this cash sitting on the sidelines, you end up piling that stuff in there. And when you tend to add those things to stuff that are only kind of working, it gets worse. It doesn't get better. And that ends up creating a lot of issues.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is so hard. This is something we've also put in our cultural values, which is we just our second cultural value is small teams do bigger things. And we have some guidelines on there of like, we only add somebody to the project when we feel like it's absolutely necessary. We know what the right next steps are, like all those types of things. But I think if you could sum up the last two years is that we basically funneled a ton of capital and people into things that were kind of working, but not like fully working. And I think that's where a lot of companies found themselves, including ReForge. We funded some of those things and we had to unwind them.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's great. There's less coordination. There's less all of the things that people end up hating their jobs over, whether that's writing updates and, you know, reviews and like all of that type of stuff. I think it's a very positive thing. And as a result, we're going to see happier people, happier companies and more creative output as part of it. And so I don't know. I think this is where the future, I think the future favors these super IC types over those over the manager types.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of folks have really come to this realization through some of these hard times where a lot of pressure gets put on prioritization and budget cuts and stuff. But I would also say I would go as far to say is I think this is where the world is headed. All of this AI tooling is going to give these like super ICs, these captain level ICs, even more leverage in solving problems and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future what we're going to see, and I'm not the first one to say this, there have been others like Scott Belsky and others that have written about this, which is just, I think the future is actually companies that are, they're much smaller teams where, you know, all these AI tools are giving one person a wider set of creation abilities. And as a result, you don't need as many people to solve the same size problem as you want to.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really provide a counteracting force. And people have to make a negative trade-off to become a manager to make sure that people who end up in those roles are the ones who truly want to be there and truly do that type of work and be like the problem catcher, that type of work as part of it.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where when people think that's the only way that they can progress or the only way that they don't have to make these trade-offs, you end up with a lot of folks in those roles who are neither good at them or don't really want to do at them. And oh, by the way, you've also taken your star IC players off the field in the process of all of that. And then they go and just repeat the cycle, right? They create meetings and processes and all those things because that's what managers are supposed to do. And then they coach their team as like, that's the way you progress in this organ. The whole thing repeats itself and it ends up being a really big mess. And so I think a lot of these principles are not new, especially in software engineering. I think that's where they've been around the longest. But we've applied it to every single function within the organization. And I think we'll take further steps in the future to even compensate the captain IC roles higher than the managers to essentially”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it helps kind of distinguish the different type of leadership between senior IC and a manager. A manager is more of a coach. They're kind of coaching from the sidelines. And I see like. Leading from being on the playing field. And those two things are very different. We kind of put that in place. We changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade-off, whether you just want to keep growing, as I see and stuff. There's more of these captain roles internally than there are manager roles internally. We've created the same titles for all of the levels so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off on that external signaling factor. We give all the strategic problems to the captain level IC roles. The managers and coaches are purely around hiring coaching, positioning players on the field, identifying problems, but then handing those problems off for others to go solve, all of these types of things. But one of those things that's really bothered me for a long time is that you just, you end up on this manager death cycle.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, we call it we have this framework called Players Coaches Captains, and we talk about a little bit of the differences.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then they just hate them. They're not good at them. And they're not good at them because they don't like it. Both of those things end up being true. And a lot of that has just been driven by our construct of how people think they have to do in order to progress in their careers is like the only way to progress in my career is through management. And there's three components of that, right? There's title, right? Like most people view that as a higher social capital thing. Most people see that's the only way that I can get higher compensation as part of that, as well as getting more compelling roles in my career. So this is also something that we've recently changed in the past six months at ReForge, which is through a lot of the macroeconomic changes, we massively flatten the org. We converted a lot of managers back into what we call Captain IC roles.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Putting It is true. It is true because, like. Those are the things that bubble up, right? The things that are going easy, the things that are going great, do not bubble up, right? And so as a result, yeah, you end up being like this catcher for all of the problems. And I think that's why a lot of people end up in these management and leadership roles.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be problems, some big, others small, sometimes in waves, sometimes slowly, but they're never going to end. The more successful we are, the bigger our problems will be and how we react to those problems is up to us. To achieve our goals, each individual must be a problem-solving machine. He calls it the problem-solving machine. I think there's some adaptations in there, but I thought that captured it so well. And when I find myself getting caught in this, oh, if we just solve this one thing, life will be so much easier. I kind of return to this statement, not only to remind myself that that's not true, but to try to like switch my framing around of how to think about the problem. But learning this is like, it's a grind. It's a hard mentality switch for, I think a lot of founders.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the reality is that the opposite is true. The more problems you solve, you just end up taking on bigger and bigger problems over time. And hoping it gets easier is the thing that just sets you up for this frustration, this anxiety, this stress. And I think switching to that mentality of like getting rid of that hope and more of like, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder thing. I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress. And so this was one that I've also felt like for many, many years, but had a tough time finding the words for. And then Ray Dalio had this passage in one of his books that just like hit the bullseye. And so his passage, which we've actually worked into the cultural values at ReForge, is every day there's”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lessons number three is like a hard one that I've learned the hard way and I'm still like trying to improve at myself. And this one's very much for founders, which is just problems never end. And that's okay. Here's what I've personally experienced. And I've talked to a lot of founders about this as well. I think historically I've gotten really caught in this trap where at any moment in reforge, it's like, ah, if I just solve this one thing that's X problem. Everything's going to get easier. That might be landing some big hire, some executive hire, or figuring out some major lever or defining some strategy.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whereas I think in a lot of planning processes, you get those things out really fast. And then 80% of the process is like churning on the last little bits that. Ultimately, don't matter in the end, right? And I think that's the piece that feels. Just awful to the team and it makes these things drag on for a really long time. It's also what gets people really attached to the plan and more upset when you ultimately do change things like you're saying. So I think that's why you need to find methods to just get those big chunks out incredibly quickly and then move on, right? Move on. Start start shipping, start iterating towards that ideal end state because that's going to help you update whatever that new ideal end state will be in the future.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That type of asset, then a bunch of words on an Ocean dock. And so we have started working like this in the past six months. We found it way more effective. Now, how long that can last and how long that can scale? Huge question mark, right? All of these processes, OKRs, all these kinds of things, they've been created for a reason in scale, but I think where we're at as a company, 75 people still landing a bunch of new product bets, trying to iterate ship quickly, keep the coordination costs down low, all those types of things. We're finding this method to be far more effective.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Around the table who had gone through these processes before. But I think when you're in that incredibly fast growing stage or you're in the earliest stage where you're landing a bunch of new bets that are a bit ambiguous and it's more like product marketing fit mode kind of closer to that end of the spectrum, I think you're much better served by incredibly light planning processes where 80 to 90 percent of the assets produced are actual like visuals of the experience. It doesn't have to be product visuals either. I've started forcing teams to marketing teams to show me what the potential like marketing assets might be rather than giving me a notion doc or we do a bunch of stuff on like the supply side of our network. And I'm like, well, what is a customer facing asset? Like what might, how might they experience this? Because we're going to have a way more productive conversation over.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source