Hello from sunny Barcelona ☕️ — 1.5 min TL;DR
Growth Experiments
Evolving culture is hard.
I started as a consultant in iTech Media in December 2019, working with one of our core products. The goal was to embed experimentation into the product development cycle and move away from the tactical CRO approach.
The objective:
Structure OKRs and Product Strategy considering how to test MVPs.
Guide them on testing big things, server-side via feature flags.
Hey PJ, help us with the culture!
Fast forward to April, and I’m full-time, working across two products and supporting the Experimentation chapter.
The objective becomes twofold:
Continue the process of embedding experimentation into product development.
Map what’s holding our team back from testing more across the business.
The three constraints
Working with Product Managers is how I built most of my experience as an individual contributor.
I prioritized objective one as it felt a lot more like play — until it didn’t because of three barriers:
Experiments are delaying delivery.
We don’t know where to start.
Can we really trust this data?
I will save your time from our root cause analysis.
All the symptoms we diagnosed circled back to “the business is growing fast, and we see a degrading culture of experimentation and data literacy.”
I took my time to get reactions from experiment leaders from giant public companies dealing with scale, and they all seem to face similar challenges.
I reframed the problem in my mind.
I knew how to manage an experimentation program for a single product unit.
Now I have the unique opportunity to learn how to deliver it at scale.
It’s a different problem that requires a different skill set.
Culture what? Hard how?
Culture is the tacit social order of an organization: It shapes attitudes and behaviors in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group.
There is a big challenge in creating an experiment-driven product development culture in an organization.
The quote is from the first Practical Online Controlled Experiments Summit shared by Ronny K. when I asked him about the culture challenge during his ScholarSite program.
Imagine a conference where you have experts from Airbnb, Lyft, Uber, Microsoft, Yandex, Netflix, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, Booking, Twitter, Facebook, all experimentation giants in a round table getting real about their pain points.
Chapters 6 (Culture) and 7 (Training others in the organization to scale experimentation) of this white paper and It takes a Flywheel to Fly: Kickstarting and Growing the A/B testing Momentum at Scale became our references.
The big learning.
Using Lukas Vermeer’s words.
We have to distinguish between the teams that are responsible for running the experiments to inform product development and an experimentation team that is more on the meta-level thinking about how is our experimentation scaling?
What are currently the friction points that our people are having?
What is stopping them from running better experiments?
What are the risks that we have that we see to our experimentation strategy?
Finance
The dividend snowball
I experienced the compound effect in different ways during 2021.
I will share the one that impresses me the most. Let’s talk about dividends.
The passive income saga solving for freedom
Achieved Financial Freedom is the #1 priority on my life’s ultimate OKR.
Naval’s definition of wealth
Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep wealth is the factory that the robots is cranking out things
Wealth is the computer program running at night or serving other customers.
Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets, into other businesses.
Even a house can be a form of wealth because you can rent it out, although there's probably a lower productivity of the land than actually doing some commercial enterprise.
So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that you earn while you sleep. But really the reason you want wealth is because it buys you freedom.
I started investing in dividend-paying businesses with the intention to reach financial freedom in 2020 and I kept tracking quarterly dividends to visualize the snowball effect.
Here you have it, full disclosure.
The YoY analysis is where this gets most exciting — an 1100% increase.
The majority of my dividend holdings increased their dividend for next year, meaning that I’m getting a raise without making a business case. How cool is that? 😎
During Q4 2021 I reached the $1000 dividends milestone 🏆 it’s not much I agree, but I’m just getting started.
I expect to be documenting and sharing more from this adventure here.
The big learning
I have at least three examples of people living out of their investment yields.
I know it is doable, and I can’t wait for my turn.
Solving for freedom.
Positivity
Network works and the content experiment
Wheel of life
I started working with a life coach back in 2020. My objective was to have a better picture of where to dedicate my time and energy.
The most valuable exercise I went through was to map my Wheel of Life. You probably stumbled upon this at some point, I might dive deeper in the future, but it goes like this:
Map all the life dimensions that are important to you — Family, Career, Finances, etc.
On a scale from 0 to 10, write down what being at the extremes means to you — E.g., Finances at 0 could mean I’m reliant on external financial support, and I’m in debt 😬
For each dimension, write down where you’re at in the 0 to 10 spectrum and what it takes to reach the next level.
If you played any RPG in your life, this feels a lot like distributing points for a new character 🤓
Wheel of Life correlations
The following exercise suggests you think about correlations between dimensions, and I learned two things:
The health conditioning dimension can be maximized by pairing it with networking — E.g., going to squash at least once a week with my cofounder, so we have more time to share life and business.
Network is highly correlated with Career and Finance outcomes.
Set a goal. Do it.
Tapping on Reforge Growth Series’ material, I set myself to create a “Company Generated Content” engine to drive more networking.
In Q2 2021, I set the OKR:
Objective: Create a sustainable content engine that drives networking.
KR 1: Publish 30 posts on LinkedIn per quarter (avg. 2.5 per week).
KR 2: Reach 1.5K followers — yes, not a fantastic KR, I learned 😂
Outcome and future thinking
The newsletter became the sustainable engine I needed. Content starts here and repurposed to other socials for engagement and amplification.
I dropped the followers’ goal for 2022. I learned that, for my purpose and mission, quality > quantity. For my creative work, I’ll focus on finding my 1000 True Fans.
Still, it was awesome to reach the goal three weeks before the end of the year 🤩
For 2022 I’m keeping the 30 posts KR with more emphasis on the newsletter.
I’m also crafting a KR focused on networking. After the Conversion Hotel experience, I want to show up and actively contribute to three conferences as well as connect 1:1 with other brilliant minds I admire to ask them a specific set of questions around what “having a growth mindset” means to them.
My lead indicators are # of 1:1s and hours tracked as “Networking” per month.
𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐥𝐬 𝐈'𝐦 𝐮𝐬𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐧𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠?
➤ Growth Chats ☕️ — Series of 1:1s I proactively schedule with like-minded people.
➤ GrowthMentor — At least two calls per month for business exposure and giving back.
➤ Lunchclub — Started after Kacper Staniul's invite. Every Thursday night I chat with interesting people over dinner on Zoom. I got to learn more from the VC universe.
➤ Reforge Slack — Strong community for getting curious about everything growth.
➤ LinkedIn — Posting regularly and connecting more, great learnings from Justin Welsh's operating system.
➤ Experiment Nation — The Brazilian podcast series has been superb to expand the network with Ana Catarina Cizilio. I’ll be also speaking at the next UnConference.
The big learning
On my mind:
Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for.
Keep on seeking, and you will find.
Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you.
Meta-analysis — 2021
63 days traveling, 17% of the year;
1557 hours working and growing someone elses’ empire;
406 hours enjoying life and exploring the world;
297 hours planning — I’m a planner big time;
293 hours conditioning the body and mind;
291 hours producing content;
242 hours reading or listening to audiobooks — 15 books!
231 hours spent studying financial markets;
176 hours studying and being 1% better every day;
163 hours networking;
160 hours of admin — low-hanging fruit for automation and delegation!
Positive 2022 🎉
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