20 Most Recent Ideas
How Effective Is Your Current Message?
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
Make Job Descriptions More Inclusive
You can attract more diverse applicants if you avoid using male pronouns and stereotypically masculine words or attributes when outlining desired qualifications. Tools like Textio can help identify if language in job descriptions is potentially disqualifying.
Source: "The Best Advice We Overheard at First Round's CTO Unconference" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources
Nurture Your Talent Pool With Drip Email Marketing
Most of the time we can only hire one person for a position. That means we may have to turn down some really talented people. Don't let the work you did finding that talent go to waste. They can become a stable of potential employees ready to fill your next position.
One easy way to make this work is through drip email marketing. Once you've made … [ Read more ]
Author: Adam Seabrook | Source: "19 Recruiting Strategies to Make Hiring Your Top Growth Hack" | Original Publication: Betterteam | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources
Assign New Employees an Early Win
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
Develop a Feedback River and System of Record
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
Find — and Slash — Your Failure Rates
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
Pick Up the Phone and Call Outliers
Every time Lloyd Tabb finds an outlier in Looker’s user base he looks up the customer’s contact information and calls. During the early years, he did this daily. “I call people because I want to know how they feel using our software. If they aren’t using Looker, I want to know why. Is there something wrong? Are they stuck? If they are active users, I … [ Read more ]
Author: Lloyd Tabb | Source: "I’m Sorry But Those Are Vanity Metrics" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer-Related, Market Research | Companies: LiveOps, Looker
Not sure if an employee can "hack" the startup environment? Try freelancing first or do what companies like Automattic do - figure it out by having potential employees do real (paid) tasks with the team before making it official.
Source: "Recruiting Strategies" | Original Publication: Betterteam | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Automattic
Reverse Mentoring: Putting Personal Advantage to Collective Good Use
To address inequality of opportunity, we need to acknowledge and address the systemic advantages and disadvantages that people experience daily. For leaders, recognizing their advantage blindness can help to reduce the impact of bias and create a more level playing field for everyone. Being advantaged through race and gender come with a responsibility to do something about changing a system that unfairly disadvantages others.
[...]
Use … [ Read more ]
Author: Ben Fuchs | Source: "Do You Have 'Advantage Blindness'?" | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Market Research, Organizational Behavior
Build Greater Agility Into Your Investment System
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
The Company that Eats Together, Stays Together
Food is a natural bridge builder. But company dinners, especially when you grow to a certain size, can get prohibitively expensive. Not to mention, when you’re stuck at a table it can be a challenge to mix and mingle, which kind of defeats the purpose. We overcame this early on with a pot-luck style strategy that brought together the joys of eating with the thrill … [ Read more ]
Author: Ryan Holmes | Source: "5 cheap old-school hacks for building company culture in 2017" | Original Publication: Medium | Subject: Organizational Behavior | Company: Hootsuite
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:
- 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.
- Arrange
Author: Adam Grant | Source: "Employee Engagement: Making a Difference" | Original Publication: [email protected] | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior
Quickly Build Trust and Understanding on a Team
One hurdle to people doing and saying any of these [relationship enhancing] things is that they don’t feel comfortable enough with their colleagues to even start. Scott Crabtree ran into this at Intel when his division reorganized and he suddenly had to work with people he didn’t know very well. Things got competitive and confrontational fast, and he felt his happiness and productivity drop in … [ Read more ]
Author: Scott Crabtree | Source: "Here’s Why Founders Should Care about Happiness" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior | Company: Intel
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
Here’s the good news: The new, bigger role of learning allows you to save money in hiring. When I launched my first company in 2008, one of my first hires was a CTO. I chose an experienced developer who was in huge demand and was an expensive hire.
I also hired an entry-level employee who demonstrated enormous potential and ambition, although he had only rudimentary development … [ Read more ]Author: Nick Gidwani | Source: "How to Support Employees’ Learning Goals While Getting Day-to-Day Stuff Done" | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources, Training
Identifying the Ideal Employee
Claire Hughes Johnson, COO of Stripe, occasionally finds it helpful to plot members of the team on a Venn Diagram with three circles: People who are good at their work, people who are making great impact, and people who love what they do. The ideal employee fits into all three circles. Make a list of all the people who fall into this bucket. What other … [ Read more ]
Author: Claire Hughes Johnson | Source: "To Grow Faster Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO" | Original Publication: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Stripe
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
In hiring, what most leaders do is they have a set of criteria, they evaluate a bunch of candidates through interviews and resumes and other information available, and then they make decisions based on their gut. You could actually turn that process into a much more scientific approach, where you lose none of your experience but you add a lot of data.
The way I would … [ Read more ]Author: Adam Grant | Source: "Six secrets to true originality" | Original Publication: The McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources
Too often, managers don’t know enough about what work people enjoy. It spills out in exit interviews — a standard practice in every HR department to find out why talented people are leaving and what would have convinced them to stick around. But why wait until they’re on their way out the door? Instead, use entry interviews. In the first week on the job, managers … [ Read more ]
Author: Lori Goler | Source: "Why People Really Quit Their Jobs" | Original Publication: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Human Resources