Hello from sunny Wroclaw ☕️
Welcome to another edition of the Positive Experiments newsletter 🎉
Each month I explore topics about growth experiments, financial freedom, and optimizing happiness. If you are not a subscriber, here’s what you missed over the past 30 days:
A quote from Thomas Edison and a note from Kevin Anderson [2 min]
Influencer marketing as a growth engine and skills to 10x [15 min]
Growth Experiments
How do we grow?
Do this exercise — If you're in a product environment, go around and ask people “How does the product grow?”
In my experience, it's both funny and scary how answers are all over the place.
This is not something unique to teams that are too deep in the trenches of daily operations, I've seen firsthand leadership teams struggling to find alignment.
I'm not sure if this example is true, but for the sake of creating the vision let's assume SpaceX is the place where strategy achieved its highest fluency potential.
From Elon Musk to the floor engineer, everyone knows how the mission connects to how the company grows.
Fluency is the keyword
The ability to speak or write a foreign language easily and accurately.
For the business world, I translate this as the organization’s ability to establish a common language across all its workforce.
Symptoms when lacking a common language
When lacking a common language, prioritization is challenging and goal setting less effective.
When organizations fail to meet those three components, randomness and the buy-in struggle kick to push goals way off, even when the strategy foundation is solid.
Does that resonate with you?
Alignment workshop to the rescue
The objective is to transfer knowledge from whoever is thinking in terms of Strategy in the organization to the teams responsible for operations.
In the example below, I explore how I communicate the Growth Strategy of a business unit to a team of Product Managers.
Workshop inputs and objectives
60% of the workshop is now standardized as I’ve run this with different teams, the rest requires homework.
To bring an engaging experience, I go through business discovery, map acquisition engines as I understand operations, and define constraints based on what I hear from senior leadership and business analysts.
We use three hours for the first workshop and it’s all about leveling the playing field.
To spike curiosity and social proof, we go through examples of Tech giants that use the frameworks we are introducing.
To keep the right pace, theory meets exercises and PMs get to model their primary acquisition engine as a growth loop and present their vision.
Once we agree on the steps and metrics involved in the model we add another layer of real data for each identified step and challenge the group to write down initiatives written as solution hypotheses that should address their identified constraints.
In the end, they have the inception for a common language to communicate growth
Subjects we cover:
Funnels vs loops
Creating a compounding growth strategy
Netflix engine example
Components of a growth loop with five examples
Design your growth engine exercise
Initiatives and metric trees
Mapping constraint with high-level data
Writing solution hypotheses
Some screens from our material
Feedback and anecdotes I captured
“The new framework makes storytelling easier.”
“Our team was limited, the past quarter we could only think about constraints in terms of regular conversion ratios!"
“I didn’t know we shared the same growth engine of this tech giant.. we should do more research on what they’ve done..”
The bottom line, communication is key
For me, communicating your growth strategy was the most valuable chapter from Reforge Advanced Growth Strategy.
I believe communication to be a confounding factor in many problems we face in our businesses.
If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it,
does it really make a sound?
I remember Brainly’s Marketing VP saying this and it stuck to my mind.
Communication is key.
Next steps for teams that see value
Some teams will engage a lot more than others with the concepts and exercises.
From my experience, when the group is full of innovators and optimizers we vibe, on the other hand, when the group has a settler characteristic it’s harder to make it fly.
The natural follow-up adds more detail to everything we drafted during the first round. We complete the qualitative growth model with all secondary acquisition loops and start with engagement loops.
Some teams will decide to translate the qualitative model into a quantitative projection which takes longer but it’s very appealing to stakeholders that love data.
Other teams more eager for action will focus on extra data analysis to add confidence to answer what holds their flywheels back to move towards solution design and product initiatives that will make upcoming OKR planning.
Note: Innovators, optimizers, and settlers are the three categories Elena Verna uses to define profiles that exist at scaled growth teams, check my notes and full episode here.
Need help to map how your product grows?
This is one of the topics I have the most fun with taking calls on Growth Mentor.
I’m testing free calls during Q1 2022, reach out 🚀
If you’ve made it this far, I believe you will get value from subscribing.
I dedicate 10 hours so you can read it in about 10 minutes.
Two issues per month packed with value.
Financial freedom
Investing is more art than science
I found many correlations between experimentation and investment as I navigate this new universe. My favorite one: “it’s more art than science.”
Lynch writes:
It’s obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics. Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who’ve been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.
From Morgan Housel, former columnist of The Motley Fool:
Building a valuation model is a science. Calibrating it to reflect the psychology of uncertainty is an art.
Gathering information is a science. Filtering out noise is an art.
Net present value is a science. Identifying the trust and passion of a CEO is an art.
Measuring what worked in the past is science. Understanding why things are different now is an art.
—
To me, solution ideation is where experimentation becomes more art than science.
Great question for interviews.
Q: To you, when experimentation becomes more art than science?
Life as Product
Five hobbies for life
Saw this on Instagram and the mental model resonated with me.
During my last Think Week, I took the time and mapped my five hobbies.
One to keep in shape
The gym has been my therapist for eight years now. I strive to be the healthiest version of myself. A healthy body for a healthy mind.
One to keep creative
I have fun with the content engine, especially this newsletter 🤓
One to build knowledge
Upskilling is my metric for building knowledge, the total amount of time tracked between studying, reading, or audiobooking.
One to grow your mindset
Growth Mindset project coming up next month! 🤩
One to make you money
Here is the one I challenge, one is not enough but three, ideally with two passive! 🤑
This is where I see dividend and growth investing as major keys 🔑
Q1 2022 dividends update coming up next month! 🎉
—
Q: What are your five hobbies? What would you add to this list?
Handpicked from other brilliant minds
#shamelessplug Positive John on decision-making models
Four different mental models for decision-making I keep handy on my toolbox.
Two-door approach
Will I regret it in 5 years?
The full-body yes
This is part of a talk I gave in iTech Media in early January.
Crystal Widjaja on scaling data for startup
I enjoy collecting frameworks and what I call "right questions.”
Crystal Widjaja nailed both with this ever-green on scaling data for startups.
Two quotes I captured:
Answering questions around who to hire, the tools to implement, and the analyses that need to be done are ultimately informed by what the product strategy is and how data plays a role in helping achieve that product strategy. But oftentimes the product strategy isn't well defined.
The most common pitfall at the data-informed stage is being indecisive about the truth (and allowing multiple versions to co-exist). If the company has already reached product-market-fit but is missing one of the crucial capabilities above, teams might think they have a shared understanding and single source of truth for data when in reality, they really don't.
Passive income is overrated
There I was doing my back biceps, listening to the latest My First Million, and the following question grabs my attention for the next 5 minutes:
Shaan: Passive income is overrated. We seek freedom, but what we really want is options for engaging activities. What does that mean? (at 0:40:00)
Alex: And so I had this, I don't wanna say existential crisis, but more like I'm bored out of my mind. I thought this is what I was always optimizing towards which was, you know, quote, freedom which is like, you're always outsourcing all of your activities and buying your time back, and then you have all your time back, and you have nothing to do.
I was like, this sucks.
[...] for me, the shift was going from freedom to optionality.
Shaan: Right?! First you do what you have to do to pay for life, then you take that money you buy back your time. But then you need to spend your time on the thing you want.
Meta-analysis — February 2022
11 days traveling;
26 hrs reading or listening to audiobooks;
19 hrs spent studying the financial market;
20 hrs producing content;
13.5 hrs networking;
25 hrs conditioning the body;
7 hrs conditioning the mind — Meditation;
53 hrs exploring the world because life is good.
There is no good war, or a bad peace.
The cover picture this time is from beautiful Kyiv, capital of Ukraine, seen from the Glass Bridge (Скляний міст).
There is no good war, or bad peace.
🇺🇦
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