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

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“We started working this way about, I'd say, like four or five months ago. You know, we went through a few crazy years at ReForge where everything we were shipping was working and we were just trying to keep up with all of the growth. And then, of course, when all the macro stuff hit a year or so ago, we were kind of in the bullseye of it being in the L&D space. A lot of our customers in tech, like all of these types of components. And I think in that crazy period, we had taken multiple shots at different planning processes. And they were all disasters. They were all disasters. And we had so many smart people.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But we want you to work towards making this thing a reality. And then the second part is just finding the time to take the step back, to re-update that ideal end state. I think that's the other component of that, that there's a lot of friction there. It's just hard to find that time in those types of things. But I actually think that is a better version of yearly planning than what most people do with OKRs and stuff. I think most people would be better served just working in product visuals saying, ooh, how might we want the product or the user to experience the product a year from now and giving that to the team? That is way more meaningful, I think, for folks, those visuals, than a nicely formatted set of OKRs.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That ideal end state. But the thing is, you have to revisit that ideal end state every so often and revise and update and all of those and iterate on that as well because you identify, you define this thing, you iterate towards it, you learn some things, and you're like, that ideal end state isn't quite right, or I need to push the horizon out a little bit more. And so I need to update and redefine it. But so the key on those things is how do you land that ideal end state to align the team to iterate forwards it, but not in a way where folks are like, well, the pixels didn't end up like this, or we said we were going to build this exact feature, but you said X, but we're actually now doing Y. And it's really hard to land that in between of, we're not going to do this exact set of things. And this is about directional alignment.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In my 100 or so lessons, I have a different version of that one is, which is, yeah, I kind of define the ideal end state and then iterate towards it. That ends up being a little bit tricky in teams to implement because people can very much attach themselves.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team. I want the team pushing me, and then we can start to pair it back to figure out how to actually achieve this thing.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In startups, you basically just have to do whatever it takes to win. And so the saying is like, well, just tell me that first. And then we can, even if the costs seem really high, now we can collaborate on what might be a way to approach this where the costs aren't so low. But I don't want my team spending time on watered down things that aren't going to ultimately help us win. That's just like a waste of time and a waste of resources. I would rather be having the conversation on, well, here's what I think it's going to take to win at this particular item. Now we can be having the conversation of, well, how do we actually go do that? That's the conversation I want to be having. But if I've got to be pushing the team of like, hey, like this is too conservative or this isn't going to be enough or I don't know if it's going to be worth the resources. I don't want to be pushing.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A problem that I've experienced, especially as my team at HubSpot grew or the team at ReForge has grown, is that as the team grows a lot more of the initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization. But oftentimes by the time it would get to me, the person would have taken an approach or all of these filters would have gotten put in place. They would be thinking, well, I don't want to propose something that's going to get, you know, denied, or this might sound a little bit too wild and I don't want that. I don't want to be interpreted that way. Or somebody else in the organization told me that this is going to be a lot of hard work, right? And so by the time it gets to the person that is either green lighting the project or funding the project or making that decision, it loses the ultimate thing that you need to achieve, which is”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lesson two tell me what it takes to win, then tell me the costs. And I couldn't remember quite where I picked this up the language for this up. It might be from Bezos. So somebody, you know, some listener can probably credit for me, but.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can just go to reforge.com and sign up. It's right there on the homepage. You can also just go to artifacts.reforge.com. And I have a bunch of mine posted up there, including like the original doc I wrote for my hypothesis around reforge seven years ago. It's like, it's an interesting blast from the past around that to see like what I got right, what I got wrong and some of the lessons we'll talk more about today.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it's like, look, you can grace an awesome internal document, but if you're ultimately not, and that's not translating to shipping something that's impacting the customer, that's a loss for the company. And I think once again, a lot gets caught up in these processes of where the judgment gets placed in the wrong places. And the quick plug is, you know, Reforge just created this product called Artifacts, which is a place to both store and showcase the things you've actually created in your work. You know, you can think about it as like a portfolio or a GitHub for everybody. And that could be, look, if you're a manager and creating performance review processes or career ladders or interview simulations, all these types of things, that is work that showcases what you're capable of as a leader or manager. Or you might be an individual PM and be involved in shipping a feature. And so we've created that place to not only store and showcase that.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things that have shipped to end customers, which is the ultimate goal of most functions. Finance is a little bit different, like some of these internal functions where their customers are the internal employees versus, I think we even had a pattern of this in the past at Reforge is people put a lot of emphasis on creating like the awesome internal document.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I don't, I think it's not even wins. It's like a log of what you've helped ship and your role in that piece. Because even if it's not a win. It's possible that you did some really amazing work, but there's all sorts of other possible circumstances for why it ended up not being a win. And that's also what gets lost, I think, a lot in these processes is that somebody could be doing really amazing work, but maybe it's not an obvious win from the metrics or some other perspective, however else it's being judged. And you just never, you never do that. And so I think where we started with this, the question is, how do you make it super lightweight? And I think internally what we've been trying is, and we've been trying to figure this out, is it's not about, you know, writing a book about your work every couple weeks, right? It's like grabbing a couple screenshots and writing down a few bullet points of how you participated and creating and shipping this piece. I will also say that this also keeps the emphasis on”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can look at that work, kind of go straight to the source rather than relying on this game of telephone that's happening as well. And so, you know, something that we've started to try to implement at ReForge, what we're doing it very slowly is building in regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally, kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create and ship so that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process. So I think this works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes back. There's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody than just like a surface level conversation.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Twist what actually happened, or there's all sorts of biases that end up involving. And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no one that decision, all I have to go off of being multiple steps away from this person's work is essentially these words that are being promoted. And how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I can't. And it works in the reverse direction too. People who are doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves or maybe have managers that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves end up feeling disenfranchised and like forgotten. And a lot of, you know, just like a lot of bad feelings emerge. And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. So even in processes like that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate decision maker”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, because even, you know, especially as a company grows, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion and all that kind of stuff. And the way a lot of those processes are designed is the individual that's going up for promotion tries to tell a story about what they have accomplished. And then the manager's going, you know, to advocate for them. And I think in that process, there's just too many opportunities to either”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decision so much of our work is based around people trying to judge a person or come to a decision just from a conversation on the surface almost always misleads you. And instead, it's really like just how do you just go look at the work, the actual assets and things that they have helped create and bring to life in this world. Because I think that tells you so much more about the person.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That are much more meaningful signal than asking tell me about a tough situation you faced in your career, those types of things. And so I've always applied this from day one of reforge of like, even in our hiring combos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on either some type of portfolio review or what we call a simulation. A lot of people call them exercises. And I get a lot of pushback from that internally from my team because it's a lot of work to come up with these things. It creates friction in the hiring pipeline, like all of these types of things. But every time I've made an exception on one of those things and said, okay, not do it. I have regretted it. I have flat out regretted it. And so I think this is one of those things is like when you're actually trying to make.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what that really means is, in the way that kind of Frank puts it, is I just think it's really hard to judge a person from a conversation, whether that's a hiring conversation, a performance conversation, or something else. Like that just never resonated with me. And what it's saying instead is like, actually trying to draw a conclusion just from a conversation is honestly like kind of bullshit. You just have like all these biases involved. And instead of trying to just inspect the person from the conversation, it's like, how do you go to the work? Like, how do you see what their output is, the things that they've either historically created or currently created? Because that's in the work environment ultimately the thing that shows you what this person is capable of, like how they approach the work, who they work with, all of these things.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first ones we're going to cover are more related to startups, founder life, company, which I've been in the CEDAN as the past seven years as founder or CEO of ReForge. We'll cover some growth ones later. But one of them that I have just felt so strongly with in my entire career and what a lot of”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's why you have to keep it light. That's what I learned because I used to take when I read books, I used to take a ton of notes and all that kind of stuff. But that also just, it's not only creation friction, but it creates friction and actually using it as well. Because then it's like I got to sift through all of these notes. And so now I'm just like, well, what is the one liner? Like what is like the essence of this thing, whether it's comes from a podcast or a book or a conversation I've had like those types of things. And so that's what I found is like it's quick to create, quick to return to, reducing friction. Maybe that should be the number one growth lesson we should talk about. But yeah, like that's that ends up being the key.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On block me or guide me to a better answer or one of those pieces. And so I started only doing this maybe I'd call it a few years ago. And I think there's a hundred and some lessons in there at this point, which, so we're not only, we're going to only cover like maybe 10-ish percent of them today, but I found it very useful just as a mechanism to unblock or ignite some new thoughts when I'm getting stuck.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And in an effort to not repeat mistakes, I basically just started keeping this notion DACA that I call lessons learned. And some of these are from things that I've picked up from others as we'll talk about some are things that I've learned the hard way, like myself. They're kind of OG Brian lessons and some of them from others, but I've experienced all of them in some way, shape, or form. And what I do is I just, I literally write down a one-liner of what the lesson is and then a few sentence description. And then the way I use this is that whenever I'm thinking about a big maybe strategic question at ReForge or something else, I kind of return to this notion doc. And usually it's like two or three lessons jump out to me as relevant to that specific situation.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the things that I've learned over time for me, I don't know about you, is that I just don't tend to remember things unless I write them down.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 like some big higher, some executive higher or figuring out some major lever or defining like some strategy. 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.”
2023-10-05 · Lenny's Podcast · Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source