124 Posts Found

Product-market fit is all about finding a product that solves a problem and a message that resonates with your target customers. Evaluate internally and externally whether your current message is consistent and effective.

Internal Evaluation: How consistent is your sales team in communicating product value?

The following exercise is a great way to get a quick understanding where your sales team stands. Send each of your sales … [ Read more ]

Author: Myk Pono | Source: “Effective Value Messaging: The Definitive Guide” | Original Publication: Medium | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales

Consider giving new recruits a small project they can accomplish during their first month on the job. Have them all spend five minutes presenting whatever it is they did at the next All Hands following their first day. It’s an opportunity to make immediate impact and introduce themselves to everyone in a positive light. It’ll also build camaraderie between folks who started within the same … [ Read more ]

Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the first things I always do when joining a product team is to setup a feedback river — an open channel for anyone who is interested to get direct access to primary feedback on the product from across various channels. This has typically taken the form of an internal company mailing list in Gmail or Outlook, but I’ve also seen it as a feedback channel … [ Read more ]

Author: Sachin Rekhi | Source: “Designing Your Product’s Continuous Feedback Loop” | Original Publication: Medium | Subjects: Management, Project Management

An event loop is a management checklist to run through periodically — every day, week and month. “The objective is to ensure you’re making time for the important activities that can get lost in the noise. The weekly and monthly ones are particularly tough because you cycle through less frequently, but they’re as important to make a habit.” Here’s an example of an event loop … [ Read more ]

Author: David Loftesness | Source: “This 90-Day Plan Turns Engineers into Remarkable Managers” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Productivity/Work Tips

A failure rate is the number of times your company is unable to deliver on its promise. A failure rate is a shared operational metric for all businesses — not just security. “To get the failure rates for your company, find them in each department first. Every function will have a different failure rate to assess their work. For customer experience it’s how many times … [ Read more ]

Author: Lloyd Tabb | Source: “I’m Sorry But Those Are Vanity Metrics” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer-Related, Management, Operations | Company: Venmo

One multinational company built greater agility into its incentive system by keeping some investment funds in reserve until the middle of the year, then releasing them for successful initiatives requiring more resources in order to grow. In return for the funding, initiative leaders had to agree to raise their performance targets.

Authors: Kyle Hawke, Matthew Maloney, Mita Sen, Ronald Falcon | Source: “Build a reinvestment machine with zero-based budgeting” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Management

When clients, customers and other end users express feedback and appreciation, employees develop stronger beliefs in the impact and value of their work. Interaction also increases empathy for customers, even when the interaction is virtual.

Action Steps:

1. Identify groups of people who benefit from your team’s work but have never shared their feedback, such as clients, customers, suppliers, or coworkers and managers from different divisions and departments.
2. Arrange

… [ Read more ]

Author: Adam Grant | Source: “Employee Engagement: Making a Difference” | Original Publication: [email protected] | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

When you say thank you, you increase your own happiness. I know of one executive who puts 10 pennies in his left pocket every morning. Every time he thanks someone or expresses gratitude, he moves a penny to his right pocket. He won’t go home until his left pocket is empty. Whatever you need to do to remind yourself to say positive things at work, … [ Read more ]

Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: “Here’s Why Founders Should Care about Happiness” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

To get delegation right, begin by scheduling one-on-one conversations with each of your direct reports. Ask each direct report to list his or her key areas of responsibility. Then ask them, “Within this area of responsibility…

• Are there areas where I need to ‘let go’ or delegate more to you?
• Are there areas where I need to get more involved or provide more help to you?”

If you … [ Read more ]

Author: Marshall Goldsmith | Source: “Disastrous at Delegating? 4 Tips to Become a Pro!” | Subjects: Management, Personal Improvement, Productivity/Work Tips

One important milestone during the first six months is to get your new hire’s perspective on your operation. It seems like an obvious thing to do, but getting information from someone less experienced can be annoying. They have all these ideas and they question everything: why you do what you do and why you do it the way you do it. So we fight it … [ Read more ]

Author: Whitney Johnson | Source: “If you want your new hires to succeed” | Original Publication: LinkedIn | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

IBM dedicates three teams to drive the company’s innovation agenda by focusing separately on innovation strategy, technology trends, and innovation operations. To ensure an emphasis on both current and future priorities, IBM organizes business opportunities across three different time frames: short-term core business opportunities, medium-term growth opportunities, and long-term emerging opportunities. IBM made a conscious decision to maintain a set portion of funding (about 10 … [ Read more ]

Author: Mike Hales | Source: “Great innovation starts with the fundamentals” | Original Publication: A.T. Kearney | Subjects: Innovation, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: IBM

One of the biggest challenges in fast-growing companies is silos. Imaginary walls spring up between departments. Before you know it, the sales team and the engineering team, for instance, feel like two totally different companies. They’re not meshing socially and — just as worrying — they’re not collaborating or exchanging information on projects. This lack of coordination inevitably hurts the final product and the customer’s experience.

This is a huge … [ Read more ]

Author: Ryan Holmes | Source: “5 cheap old-school hacks for building company culture in 2017” | Original Publication: Medium | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior | Company: Hootsuite

Companies train people in their computer systems, HR policies, and more. They devote energy to optimizing production lines and supply chains. They invest in innovation workshops. Yet they seem to assume that the ability to effectively lead and participate in meetings is somehow embedded in the human genetic code. Perhaps it seems too basic a skill. However, if any organization adds up the amount of … [ Read more ]

Author: Eric J. McNulty | Source: “How to Maximize Meetings” | Original Publication: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity/Work Tips

This reminds me of something our leadership-development team launched last year with behavioral nudging. We created what we call “whisper courses,” which were based on the premise that, as leaders, we have the best intentions yet get so busy and forget to do the many little things that matter so much. I recall us talking about how nice it would be to have this invisible … [ Read more ]

Author: Tamara Ganc | Source: “Getting Ready for the Future of Work” | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Productivity/Work Tips, Training | Company: Vanguard Group

High-performing managers create simple goals, make sure they are clear and transparent, and revisit them regularly. Google, for example, uses an agile goal-setting process called OKR (objectives and key results), which was originally developed at Intel. The process is simple and effective: Each individual (from CEO down) sets ambitious and measurable objectives (like “launch Gmail version X by year end”) and are asked to define … [ Read more ]

Author: Josh Bersin | Source: “Becoming Irresistible: A New Model for Employee Engagement” | Original Publication: Deloitte Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management | Company: Google

Involve a larger part of the organization in a discussion on how the company is doing on strategy and execution. Like the annual employee survey, organizations should take the pulse around the most important strategic topics. Such a survey provides powerful insights about how well your employees — the people who know the company best — think it is positioned for success, how well they … [ Read more ]

Author: Paul Leinwand | Source: “8 Tough Questions to Ask About Your Company’s Strategy” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy

I’m a big believer in teaching leaders to fish. That’s why we’ve rolled out a weekly(ish) email for leaders … that summarizes all the things they need to be thinking about in terms of managing and messaging to their team. We break it down into a few sections: things to know, things to do, things to share. It sounds simple, but let’s be real, leaders … [ Read more ]

Author: Terra Carmichael | Source: “The Top Comms Mistakes Startups Make — And How To Avoid Them” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Leadership, Management

Managers must be evaluated both on what they get done and how they get it done. The “how” is often overlooked and undervalued. In terms of the “how,” determine whether the person works well cross-functionally, represents the company‘s values in both word and deed, receives strong upward feedback, and whether their team of reports has a high level of satisfaction working at the company.

To measure … [ Read more ]

Author: Mike Brown | Source: “What I Learned about Management and Culture from Growing Uber’s Asia Business from Zero to Billions” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Management | Company: Uber

If you manage managers, it’s very powerful to set up a recurring catch up with their direct reports. These are commonly referred to as “skip-level” meetings, and they’re the only way to get an accurate sense of how your direct reports are leading — and how people on their teams are feeling about the business and the strategy you’ve set. It’s also an efficient way … [ Read more ]

Author: Mike Brown | Source: “What I Learned about Management and Culture from Growing Uber’s Asia Business from Zero to Billions” | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Management | Company: Uber

An excess of bureaucracy costs the U.S. economy more than $3 trillion in lost economic output per year. When you look at all 32 countries in the OECD, the cost of excess bureaucracy rises to nearly $9 trillion. To dismantle bureaucracy, the first step is to be honest about how much it’s costing your organization. These costs fall into seven categories:

1. Bloat: too many managers,

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini | Source: “Assessment: Do You Know How Bureaucratic Your Organization Is?” | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior