How to sell your ideas and rise within your company

When's the last time you used your brain versus followed a process someone else designed at your company? Because I want the former, not the latter.

B2B subscription businesses typically offer predictable revenue, strong customer retention, and net dollar retention (existing customers spending more over time).

Consumer subscription just doesn't have any of these benefits. Consumers are way less predictable. They tend to retain worse than businesses, and they also don't have net dollar retention characteristics.

At Reforge, we're building frameworks that are tools in a toolkit. You pull them out when relevant. They're not a coloring book to stay inside the lines of.

I'm going to give you real scenarios that I expect from the role. I want to hear how you'd approach them. If you can't come up with a few reasonable ideas, figure out how to test them quickly without analyst support or research, I'm just not interested.

You're actually a company exec first and a product exec second. You have to not only truly care, but create the perception that you care about sales, about marketing, about legal, et cetera.

DRI stands for "Directly Responsible Individual" - the single person designated as the final decision-maker for a project or initiative.

Once that person makes the call, it's disagree and commit time. There's no escalation path. If you're not the DRI and you're on the team and they made the call, all right. It's time to sign up and go forward on that decision.

User research is a scarce resource. We have to reserve it for the areas that have extreme uncertainty and high leverage for getting to certain.

Many times, the fastest way to learn is to ship.

A network effect is when a product or a business gets better with more users or customers using it.

The job is not to follow the process. The job is not to learn every framework possible. The job is to figure out how to add value to customers that translates into value to the business.

If what your plan is is to use paid acquisition on top of a freemium model to get a percentage of people to convert, and hopefully, stick around forever, I'd pivot right now. I cannot see it working.

During existential threats, it's like when Nassim Taleb says, 'The only rational reaction is overreaction.' Unless you have a real viable reason to assume otherwise, you got to assume the disruptor is right and base your strategy on them playing an optimal game.