Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life

00:00:00 - 00:30:00

Brian Balfour, founder and CEO of Reforge, shares 10 important lessons he has learned throughout his career. The podcast emphasizes the value of focusing on the work rather than judging a person based on a conversation. It discusses the importance of looking at a person's actual work and creations for hiring and performance evaluation. The guest also highlights the need for continuous iteration and alignment within teams, and the importance of working with product visuals and experiences for effective decision-making.

Show more

00:30:00 - 01:00:00

The podcast explores the idea of compensating captains in IC roles higher than managers and the concept of smaller teams with super ICs empowered by AI tools. It emphasizes the importance of focusing on the first six months of the year for growth goals and the interconnectedness of acquisition, retention, and monetization. The podcast also discusses the challenges of implementing good friction in products and the strategy of standing out by doing the opposite of what others are doing. Various topics including Airtable's shift, Zoom's product strategy, and HubSpot's category creation are also touched upon.

Show more

01:00:00 - 01:30:00

The podcast discusses the importance of focusing on use cases rather than personas when developing products and marketing strategies. It emphasizes the need to define who you are not solving for and the dangers of trying to solve for everyone. The conversation also touches on trade-offs in work and life, the significance of defining values, and the role of product managers in building successful products. The concept of sparring partners is explored as a beneficial approach to personal and professional development.

Show more

01:30:00 - 01:41:59

The podcast hosts discuss the challenges of rebranding and overcoming inertia in the market, using HubSpot as an example. They emphasize the importance of first principles thinking and express interest in learning more about HubSpot's journey. They also share their favorite movies and TV shows related to the financial crisis. The guest discusses problem-solving and decision-making, their preference for Viori clothes, and the importance of learning and independence in parenting. They provide insights into their approach to raising children and conclude with information on where to find them and how listeners can support them.

Show more

I think historically I've gotten really caught in this trap where at any moment in reforged,

it's like, ah, if I just solve this one thing, this X problem, everything's going to get easier.

That might be landing like some big hire, some executive hire or figuring out, you know,

some major lever or defining like some strategy. But the reality is that the opposite is true.

The more problems you solve, you just end up taking on bigger and bigger problems over time.

And hoping it gets easier is the thing that just sets you up for this frustration, this anxiety,

this stress. And I think switching to that mentality of like getting rid of that hope

and more of like, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder thing,

I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress.

Today, my guest is Brian Balfour. Brian is the founder and CEO of Reforge, which is by far the

best place in the world to get in-depth training on growth and product and related topics. Previously,

Brian was VP of growth at HubSpot, co-founder of three other startups. And in my mind,

Brian is the sensei of growth. With Brian on the podcast, I wanted to do something special. So,

instead of going into the typical stuff that he writes about and speaks about,

we instead talked through 10 of the biggest and most interesting lessons

Brian has learned from his career and from his life. These come from a list that he keeps,

where he gathers lessons that he learns over time, which turns out is over 100.

We only have time for 10. There is so much gold in this episode. And I believe there is something

for everyone. I can't wait for you to listen to it and to hear what you think. With that,

I bring you Brian Balfour after a short word from our sponsors.

You fell in love with building products for a reason, but sometimes the day-to-day reality

is a little different than you imagine. Instead of dreaming up big ideas, talking to customers,

and crafting a strategy, you're drowning in spreadsheets and roadmap updates,

and you're spending your days basically putting out fires. A better way is possible.

Introducing Jira Product Discovery, the new prioritization and road mapping tool built for

product teams by Atlassian. With Jira Product Discovery, you can gather all your product ideas

and insights in one place and prioritize confidently, finally replacing those endless

spreadsheets. Create and share custom product roadmaps with any stakeholder in seconds,

and it's all built on Jira, where your engineering team is already working,

so true collaboration is finally possible. Great products are built by great teams,

not just engineers. Sales, support, leadership, even Greg from finance.

Anyone that you want can contribute ideas, feedback, and insights in Jira Product Discovery

for free. No catch, and it's only $10 a month for you. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets and the

never-ending alignment efforts. The old way of doing product management is over. Rediscover what's

possible with Jira Product Discovery. Try it for free at Atlassian.com slash Lenny.

That's Atlassian.com slash Lenny. This episode is brought to you by Koda.

You've heard me talk about how Koda is the doc that brings it all together,

and how it can help your team run smoother and be more efficient. I know this firsthand,

because Koda does that for me. I use Koda every day to wrangle my newsletter content calendar,

my interview notes for podcasts, and to coordinate my sponsors.

More recently, I actually wrote a whole post on how Koda's product team operates,

and within that post, they shared a dozen templates that they use internally to run

their product team, including managing the roadmap, their OKR process, getting internal

feedback, and essentially, their whole product development process is done within Koda.

If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets

and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Koda. Koda puts data in one centralized

location, regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down.

Koda allows your team to operate on the same information and collaborate in one place.

Take advantage of this special limited time offer just for startups.

Sign up today at koda.io slash Lenny, and get a thousand dollar startup credit on your first

statement at cod.io slash Lenny to sign up and get a startup credit of $1,000, koda.io slash Lenny.

Brian, thank you so much for being here, and welcome to the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

So instead of going deep on the typical topics you go into, growth loops and frameworks and all

that kind of stuff, what we're going to do is we're going to go through 10 of the most important,

interesting, unique lessons that you've learned from your career, your work, and your job.

And as we were aligning on these topics, I learned that you keep this notion doc

of lessons that you learn throughout your work. Tell us about this notion doc.

I think one of the things that I've learned over time for me, I don't know about you, is that

I just don't tend to remember things unless I write them down.

And in an effort to not repeat mistakes, I basically just started keeping this notion

doc that I call lessons learned. And some of these are from things that I've picked up from others,

as we'll talk about. Some are things that I've learned the hard way. Like myself,

they're kind of OG Brian lessons, and some of them from others, but I've experienced all of them in

some way, shape, or form. And what I do is I literally write down a one liner of what the

lesson is, and then a few sentence description. And then the way I use this is that whenever

I'm thinking about a big maybe strategic question at Reforge or something else,

I kind of return to this notion doc. And usually it's like two or three lessons jump out to me

as relevant to that specific situation, and help either unblock me or guide me to a better answer

or one of those pieces. And so I started only doing this, maybe I call it a few years ago.

And I think there's 100 and some lessons in there at this point, which so we're not only

working on the cover, like maybe 10% percent of them today. But I found it very useful just as

a mechanism to unblock or ignite some new thoughts when I'm getting stuck.

I love that we have 10 more episodes we can do after this to go through all of them.

There you go. It's also amazing that you do two things that people wish they did. Like I imagine

everybody wished they had a list of all their lessons. It's like, oh, I should have been doing

this. And then you actually use them, which is also the thing most people don't do if they have a

list like this. So it's pretty incredible. They actually find a way to optimize it.

That's why you have to keep it light. That's what I learned because when I read books,

I used to take a ton of notes and all that kind of stuff. But it's not only creation friction,

but it creates friction in actually using it as well. Because then it's like I got to sift

through all of these notes. And so now I'm just like, well, what is the one liner? What is the

essence of this thing, whether it comes from a podcast or a book or a conversation I've had,

like those types of things. And so that's what I found is it's quick to create,

quick to return to, reducing friction. Maybe that should be the number one growth lesson

we should talk about. But yeah, that ends up being the key.

Amazing. Okay, well, let's just get into it. What is lesson number one?

I think the first ones we're going to cover are more related to startups, founder life,

company, which I've been in the seat in the past seven years as founder CEO of Reforge.

We'll cover some growth ones later. But one of them that I have just felt so strongly with

in my entire career and what a lot of Reforge was founded on, but I didn't find the words for

until I was listening to something by Frank Slutman is just inspect the work and not the person.

And what that really means is, and the way that kind of Frank puts it is,

I just think it's really hard to judge a person from a conversation, whether that's a hiring

conversation, a performance conversation, or something else. Like that just like never

resonated with me. And what it's saying instead is like actually trying to draw a conclusion

just from a conversation is honestly like kind of bullshit. You just have like all these biases

involved. And instead of trying to just inspect the person from the conversation,

it's like how do you go to the work? Like how do you see what their output is, the things that

they've either historically created or currently created, because that's in the work environment.

Ultimately, the thing that shows you what this person is capable of, like how they approach the

work, who they work with, all of these things that are much more meaningful signal than asking

tell me about a tough situation you faced in your career, those types of things. And so

I've always applied this from day one of reforge of like, even in our hiring combos,

80 to 90% of the decision is based on either some type of portfolio review or some type of what we

call a simulation. A lot of people call them exercises. And I get a lot of pushback from

that internally from my team, because it's a lot of work to come up with these things.

It creates friction in the hiring pipeline, like all of these types of things. But every time

I've like made an exception on one of those things and said, okay, not do it. I have regretted it.

I have flat out regretted it. And so I think this is one of those things is like when you're

actually trying to make a decision, so much of our work is based around people trying to judge

a person or come to a decision just from a conversation on the surface, almost always

misleads you. And instead, it's really like, just how do you just go look at the work, the actual

assets and things that they have helped create and bring to life in this world? Because I think

that tells you so much more about the person. You touched on this is useful for hiring, but also

performance, like how they're doing at the job, right? There's always just like, here's what I've

done, but you look at what they've done. It's like, yeah, well, because even, you know, especially

as a company grows, you know, there's all sorts of processes to put somebody up for a promotion

and all that kind of stuff. And the way a lot of those processes are designed as the individual

that's going up for promotion tries to like tell a story about what they have accomplished.

And then the manager's going, you know, to advocate for them. And I think in that process,

there's just too many opportunities to either twist what actually happened or there's all sorts of

biases that end up involving. And so me as a potential decision maker on a yes or no on that

decision, all I have to go off of, you know, being multiple steps away from this person's work

is essentially these words that are being promoted. And how can I actually make an accurate yes

or no decision on that? I can't. And it works in the reverse direction too. People who are

doing amazing work, but maybe not the best at advocating for themselves, or maybe have managers

that aren't doing the best job at advocating for themselves, end up feeling, you know,

disenfranchised and like forgotten in a lot of, you know, just like a lot of bad feelings

emerge. And that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. So even in processes like

that, it's like, how do you surface the person's work over the past time period so that the ultimate

decision maker can look at that work kind of go straight to the source rather than relying on

this game of telephone that's happening as well. And so, you know, something that

we've started to try to implement at Reforged, what we're doing it very slowly is building in

regular processes for people to record the work that they've accomplished internally,

kind of keep a log of it, the things that they've helped create in ship, so that when it comes to

those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part of that process.

So I think this works in, it works in a bunch of different avenues, but it just kind of comes

back, there's so much more you can glean from inspecting the actual creations of somebody

than just like a surface level conversation. Amazing. Just one more question before we get

to our next lesson. Along that same line you just mentioned, I've just like had to actually

do this. So you mentioned like exercises in the interview. I think the extreme of that is

something linear does, which I recently learned about where they have a work trial where they

work with the team for like five days, one to five days. You just mentioned keeping track of your

wins. Is there anything else you can share of just like how you actually implement this sort of

lesson? Well, I don't, I think it's not even wins. It's like a log of what you've helped ship and

your role in that, in that piece. Because even if it's not a win, right, it's possible that

you did some really amazing work, but there's all sorts of other possible circumstances for

why it ended up not being a win. And that's kind of, that's also what gets lost, I think, a lot

in these, a lot in these processes is that somebody could be doing really amazing work,

but maybe it's not an obvious win from the metrics or some other perspective, however else it's

being judged. And you just, you just never, you never do that. And so I think where we started

with this, the question is, is how do you make it super lightweight? And I think internally what

we've been trying is, and we've been trying to figure this out is it's not about, you know, writing

a book about your work every couple of weeks, right? It's like grabbing a couple screenshots

and writing down a few bullet points of how you participated in creating and shipping this piece.

I would also say that it, this also keeps the emphasis on things that have shipped to end

customers, which is the ultimate goal of most functions, you know, finance is a little bit

different, like some of these internal functions, where their customers are the internal employees,

versus, I think, we even had a pattern of this in the past that reforges people put a lot of

emphasis on creating like the awesome internal document. And it's like, look, you can create

an awesome internal document. But if you're ultimately not, and that's not translating to

shipping something that's impacting the customer, that's a loss for the company. And I think once

again, a lot gets, gets caught up in these, these processes of where the judgment gets placed in the

place in the wrong places. The last and the quick plug is, you know, reforges created this product

called artifacts, which is a place to both store and showcase the things you've actually created

in your work, you know, you can think about it as like a portfolio or GitHub for everybody.

And that could be, look, if you're a manager and creating performance review processes or career

ladders or interview simulations, all these types of things, that is work that showcases

what you're capable of as a leader or manager, or you might be an individual PM and be involved

in shipping a feature. And, and so we've created that place to not only store and showcase that

stuff, but for folks that are coming along and solving a similar problem after you,

they can use those things as ingredients to potentially solve, you know, their problem in a,

in a slightly similar, but different way as well, similar to like open source code.

On artifacts, how do people find that? You can just go to reforge.com and sign up. It's right

there on the, on the homepage. You can also just go to artifacts.reforge.com. And I have a bunch of

mine posted up there, including like the original doc I wrote for my hypothesis around reforge seven

years ago. It's like, it's an interesting blast from the past around that to see like what I got

right, what I got wrong, and some of the lessons we'll talk more about today.

Awesome. Okay. And we'll link to that in the show notes. Okay. Lesson one, inspect the work,

not the person. What is lesson two?

Lesson two, tell me what it takes to win, then tell me the costs. And I couldn't remember quite

where I picked this up, the language for this up. It might be from Bezos. So somebody, you know,

some listener can probably credit it for me, but a problem that I've experienced, especially as my

team at HubSpotGru or the team at Reforge has grown is that as the team grows, a lot more of the

initiatives and ideas obviously come bottoms up from the organization. But oftentimes by the time

it would get to me, the person would have taken an approach or all of these filters would have gotten

put in place. They would be thinking, well, I don't want to, I don't want to propose something

that's going to get, you know, denied or this might sound a little bit too wild. And I don't want

I don't want to be like interpreted that way. Or, you know, somebody else in the organization told

me that this is going to be a lot of hard work, right? And so by the time it gets to the person

that is either greenlighting the project or funding the project or making that decision,

it loses the ultimate thing that you need to achieve, which is in startups, you basically just

have to do whatever it takes to win. And so the saying is like, well, just tell me that first.

And then we can, even if the costs seem really high, now, now we can collaborate on what might be

a way to approach this where the costs aren't so low. But I don't want my team spending time on

watered down things that aren't going to ultimately help us win. That's just like a waste of time and

a waste of resources. I would rather be having the conversation on, well, here's what I think

it's going to take to win at this particular item. Now we can be having the conversation of, well,

how do we actually go do that? That's the conversation I want to be having. But if I've

got to be pushing the team of like, Hey, like this is too conservative, or this isn't going to be

enough. Or I don't know if it's going to be worth the resources. I don't want to be pushing the team.

I want the team pushing me. And then we can start to pair it back to figure out how to actually

achieve this thing. This touches on a lesson that comes up a lot on this podcast is this idea of

working backwards from the ideal instead of working forwards and incrementally getting to

something. And then it's just like, here's the perfect world. What would it take to get there?

Maybe we'll never get there. But it's a nice forcing function. In my 100 or so lessons,

I have a different version of that. That one is, which is, yeah, I kind of define the ideal end

state and then iterate towards it. That ends up being a little bit tricky in teams to implement

because people can very much attach themselves to that ideal end state. But the thing is,

you have to revisit that ideal end state every so often and revise and update and iterate on that

as well. Because you identify, you define this thing, you iterate towards it, you learn some

things, and you're like, that ideal end state isn't quite right, or I need to push the horizon out

a little bit more. And so I need to update and redefine it. But so the key on those things is,

how do you land that ideal end state to align the team to iterate forwards it? But not in a way

where folks are like, well, the pixels didn't end up like this. Or we said we were going to build

this exact feature, but you said x, but we're actually now doing y. And it's really hard to

land that in between of, we're not going to do this exact set of things. And this is about directional

alignment. But we want you to work towards making this thing a reality. And then the second part

is just finding the time to take the step back to re-update that ideal end state. I think that's

the other component of that, that there's a lot of friction there. It's just hard to find that time

in those types of things. But I actually think that is a better version of yearly planning

than what most people do with OKRs and stuff. I think most people would be better served,

just working in product visuals saying, ooh, how might we want the product or the user to

experience the product a year from now and giving that to the team? That is way more meaningful,

I think, for folks, those visuals than a nicely formatted set of OKRs.

Wow. I love that. Do you work that way? Do you try to work that way?

We started working this way about, I'd say, like four or five months ago. We went through a few

crazy years at Reforge where everything we were shipping was working and we were just trying to

keep up with all of the growth. And then, of course, when all the macro stuff hit a year or so ago,

we were kind of in the bullseye of it being in the L&D space, a lot of our customers and tech,

like all of these types of components. And I think in that crazy period, we had taken multiple shots

at different planning processes, and they were all disasters.

Oh, no. They were all disasters. And we had so many smart people around the table who had gone

through these processes before. But I think when you're in that incredibly fast growing stage or

you're in the earliest stage where you're landing a bunch of new bets that are a bit ambiguous and

it's more like product market fit mode kind of closer to that end of the spectrum,

I think you're much better served by incredibly light planning processes where 80 to 90% of

the assets produced are actual visuals of the experience. It doesn't have to be product visuals

either. I've started forcing teams to, marketing teams to show me what the potential marketing

assets might be rather than giving me an ocean dock. Or we do a bunch of stuff on the supply

side of our network. And I'm like, well, what is a customer facing asset? How might they experience

this? Because we're going to have a way more productive conversation over that type of asset

than a bunch of words on an ocean dock. And so we have started working like this in the past six

months. We found it way more effective. Now, how long that can last and how long that can scale?

Huge question mark, right? All of these processes, OKRs, all these kinds of things,

they've been created for a reason in scale, but I think where we're at as a company, 75 people

still landing a bunch of new product bets, trying to iterate, ship quickly, keep the coordination

costs down low, all those types of things, we're finding this method to be far more effective.

And it doesn't matter if it can't scale because you're going to change it anyway, right? Like the

way I thought about planning always just like it's like the best idea you have at the time. Let's

just do it this way. Yes. Org and strategy. Like this is the best idea right now. We're going to

rethink it anyway in six months if things are going well, especially if they're not going well.

Yeah. And that's why you want to get it out as fast as possible, right? Whereas I think in a lot

of planning processes, you get those things out really fast. And then 80% of the process is like

churning on the last little bits that ultimately don't matter in the end, right? And I think that's

the piece that feels just awful to the team and it makes these things drag on for a really

long time. It's also what gets people really attached to the plan and more upset when you

ultimately do change things like you're saying. So I think that's why you need to find methods to

just get those big chunks out incredibly quickly and then move on, right? Move on, start shipping,

start iterating towards that ideal end state because that's going to help you update whatever

that new ideal end state will be in the future. There's always bonus lessons that are coming

up as we're going through these lessons. But just to close the loop on this lesson,

it was tell me what it takes to win and then tell me the costs. Nailed it.

What is lesson number three? Lessons number three is like a hard one that I've learned the hard way

and I'm still trying to improve that myself. And this one's very much for founders, which is

just problems never end and that's okay. Here's what I've personally experienced and I've talked

to a lot of founders about this as well. I think historically I've gotten really caught in this

trap where at any moment in Reforge, it's like, ah, if I just solve this one thing, this X problem,

everything's going to get easier. That might be landing like some big hire, some executive hire,

or figuring out, you know, some major lever or defining like some strategy. But the reality

is that the opposite is true. The more problems you solve, you just end up taking on bigger and

bigger problems over time. And hoping it gets easier is the thing that just sets you up for

this frustration, this anxiety, this stress. And I think switching to that mentality of like

getting rid of that hope and more of like, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder

thing, I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress. And so this was a one that I've also

felt like for many, many years, but had a tough time finding the words for. And then Ray Dalio

had this passage in one of his books that just like hit the bull's eye. And so his passage, which

we've actually worked into the cultural values at Reforge, is every day there's going to be problems,

some big, others small, sometimes in waves, sometimes slowly, but they're never going to end.

The more successful we are, the bigger our problems will be. And how we react to those

problems is up to us to achieve our goals. Each individual must be a problem solving machine.

He calls it the problem solving machine. I think there's some adaptations in there.

But I thought that like captured it so well. And, you know, when I find myself getting caught in

this, oh, if we just solve this one thing, life will be so much easier. I kind of return to this

statement, not only to remind myself that that's not true, but to try to like switch my framing

around of how to think about the problem. But learning this is like a, it's a grind. It's a

hard mentality switch for, I think, a lot of founders. This reminds me a number of things.

One is just, I heard someone describe basically any leadership job as your professional firefighter.

You're just putting out fires all day. It is true. It is true because like,

those are the things that bubble up, right? The things that are going easy, the things that are

going great do not bubble up, right? And so as a result, yeah, you end up being like this

this catcher for all of the problems. And I think that's why a lot of people end up in these

management and leadership roles. And then they just hate them. They're not good at them. And

they're not good at them because they don't like it. Both of those things end up being true.

And a lot of that has just been driven by our construct of how people think they have,

what they have to do in order to progress in their careers is like the only way to progress in my

career is through management. And there's three components of that, right? There's title, right?

Like most people view that as a higher social capital thing. Most people say that's the only

way that I can get higher compensation as part of that, as well as getting more compelling roles

in my career. So this is also something that we've recently changed in the past six months

at Reforge, which is through a lot of the macroeconomic changes, we massively flatten the

org. We converted a lot of managers back into what we call Captain IC roles.

Captain IC, ooh. Yeah. We have this framework called Players Coaches Captains. We talk about

a little bit of the differences. And it helps kind of distinguish the different type of leadership

between a senior IC and a manager. A manager is more of a coach. They're kind of coaching from the

sidelines. And IC is like leading from buying, being on the playing field. And those two things

are very different. We kind of put that in place. We changed our entire compensation structure so

that there is zero compensation trade-off, whether you just want to keep growing as I see and stuff.

There's more of these Captain roles internally than there are manager roles internally. We've

created the same titles for all of the levels so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off

on that external signaling factor. We give all the strategic problems to the Captain

level IC roles that managers and coaches are purely around hiring, coaching, positioning players on

the field, identifying problems, but then handing those problems off for others to go solve,

all of these types of things. But one of those things that's really bothered me for a long time is

that you end up on this manager death cycle where when people think that's the only way that they

can progress or the only way that they don't have to make these trade-offs, you end up with a lot of

folks in those roles who are neither good at them or don't really want to do at them. And oh, by the

way, you've also taken your star IC players off the field in the process of all of that. And then

they go and just repeat the cycle, right? They create meetings and processes and all those things

because that's what managers are supposed to do. And then they coach their team as like that's the

way you progress in this organ. The whole thing repeats itself and ends up being a really big

mess. And so I think a lot of these principles are not new, especially in software engineering.

I think that's where they've been around the longest. But we've applied it to every single

function within the organization. And I think we'll take further steps in the future to even

like compensate the captain IC roles higher than the managers to essentially really provide a

counteracting force. And people have to make a negative trade-off to become a manager to make

sure that people who end up in those roles are the ones who truly want to be there and truly do

that type of work and be like the problem catcher, you know, that type of work as part of it.

I feel like this also just like a very common theme now across companies. I feel like if you

haven't written about this, I think just sharing this in depth would be really useful to a lot of

people because I think a lot of startups are trying to think about this. I think a lot of folks

have really come to this realization, you know, through some of these hard times where a lot of

pressure gets put on prioritization and budget cuts and stuff. But I would also say I would go as

far to say is I think this is where the world is headed. All of this AI tooling is going to give

these like super ICs, these captain level ICs, even more leverage in solving problems

and their creation abilities as part of that. And so I think in the future what we're going to see,

and I'm not the first one to say this, there have been others like Scott Belsky and others that

have written about this, which is just, I think the future is actually companies that are, they're

much smaller teams where, you know, all these AI tools are giving one person a wider set of

creation abilities. And as a result, you don't need as many people to solve the same size problem

as you once do. And that's great. There's less coordination. There's less all of the things

that people end up hating their jobs over, whether that's, you know, writing updates and,

you know, reviews and like all of that type of stuff. I think it's a very positive thing. And

as a result, we're going to see happier people, happier companies and more creative output as

part of it. And so I don't know. I think this is where the future, I think the future favors

these super IC types over those, over the manager types.

I'm so curious if that's how it ends up playing out. Like it all makes sense that that's where

things would head if AI gets powerful enough. But there's also these incentives that just drive

companies to hire. It's like, oh, right, we could do more. Why don't we hire more engineers? Oh,

we could build this team. We could go faster. It is so hard. This is something we've also put in

our cultural values, which is we just the our second cultural values, small teams do bigger

things. And we have some guidelines on there of like, we only add somebody to the project when

we feel like it's absolutely necessary. We know what the right next steps are, like all those

types of things. But I think if you could sum up the last two years is that we basically funneled

a ton of capital and people into things that were kind of working, but not like fully working.

And I think that's where a lot of companies found themselves, including Reforge, we funded

some of those things and we had to we had to unwind them. Which makes sense. Like as a company,

you're looking for new things that will grow and become huge opportunities. So I don't think

there's anything wrong with that, right? It's like, we're just going to plant all these seeds,

we're going to try stuff, see if anything blows up, and then we double down. So like in a good way.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's really normal. Yeah. Right. Like I think a lot of people diss like

all these companies investing in all these new ideas and random things when like, that's really

how you you build another business seed line, or you find an unlock for growth, right? That's

like pretty normal. Totally. When we went from one product to multi product at HubSpot, we seeded

multiple bets at once. And only like a couple of them ended up making it through the filter,

which ended up being the CRM and the sales tool as part of that. And then there was projects we

ended up killing and unwinding as part of that. But the key about each of those bets was that

we seeded each of those bets with a very limited amount of funding in a very small team. Like

there was still the constraints involved. And I think where the mistake ends up happening is like,

you kind of have this thing that's working, but not really. And because you've got all these other

people sitting on the sidelines or this cash sitting on the sidelines, you end up piling that

stuff in there. And when you tend to add those things to stuff that are only kind of working,

it gets worse. It doesn't get better. And that ends up creating a lot of issues.

Which is that value? What is it that you have about small teams?

Yeah, just small teams do bigger things. We felt like we needed to like encode this

in us to be like a forcing, you know, to be a forcing function for us going forward.

All right, all these bonus lessons, you're just full of lessons, Brian. So I'm going to

close the loop on lesson three, which is problems never end and that's okay.

All right, lesson four.

All right, now we're getting into the product and growth lessons. This one I actually learned at

HubSpot, which was the year is made in the first six months. And where this really comes from is

that I think, especially when you're going through planning or thinking about growth and

milestones and hitting those goals and looking forward in that way is that this is particularly

relevant as everybody's probably going through yearly planning right now. I've seen a lot of

plans where you realize in the first three to six months, you kind of have a line of sight to

what the constraints are and what you can actually do and the limitations of those things.

And so in the first three to six months of a year, your growth goals end up being kind of

realistic, kind of on target. But then you're like, oh, I've got to hit this ambitious target.

So I'm going to build, you know, this inflection point in the back half of the year to like hit

that goal. The reality is, is like, that's just not how it works. To make your year, it's really

about the first six months and the things you accomplish in those first six months. And the

reason is this for quite a few products, most products, this isn't true for all products,

is that the buying cycle or the decision window for a lot of customers is so long that by the time

you get to the second half, and you do the calculation of like, well, if we put this thing

in place and the time it takes to impact a customer, and then the time it takes for that

customer to make the buying decision, you're already into the next year, right? When you put

those things in, this is really true for SaaS, right? Where the buying windows could be anything

from a few months to up to like a year long, depending on what type of market that you're

tackling. And so if you don't do the things in the first six months, the options you're left with

to actually influence the numbers in the back six months of the year is incredibly small,

incredibly, incredibly small. Now, this might be different for, you know, a consumer social

product where the friction is very low and there is no buying things and maybe I can pull some levers

like paid acquisition or stuff that have really short time windows. But even in those products,

when those products tend to be more influenced by things like viral loops and working on engagement

and retention, the amount of times it takes to build and ship those things and then have it

propagate through the user base and actually impact your numbers ends up being longer than most people

think about when they're thinking through the next, like the next year. And so anyways,

if you want to hit your year numbered, it's all about the first six months. Otherwise,

you're being a little bit unrealistic with these very, you know, back weighted second half plans.

Something you didn't mention, which is also just reorgs, like you often just like rethink

everything halfway through, right? Like, oh, shit, the world has changed. And so you're probably

not even going to get to that back half the way planned. Yeah, that's fair. I think it's just a

human tendency to essentially overestimate how fast, not only how fast you can do something,

but how fast it will take in effect, especially this becomes even bigger, the larger your customer

base becomes, right? Because the larger the baseline you're working with, the larger the number

you need on the new thing to actually show a meaningful impact. And so I think it's just

very easy for us to overestimate those things when we're going through that type of forward-looking

thinking. Awesome. Okay. Lesson four, the year is made in the first six months. What is lesson five?

Okay, this is probably one that I think about the most. It comes up the most often, not only in

reforged courses, but in like investing and advising, which is growth is a system between

acquisition of retention and monetization. You change one, you affect them all. We've written

about this a ton. You've written about this to some degree. But I think people underestimate

how deep this lesson goes. And it's not just about understanding your system, which is the

growth model, understanding that if you do change one thing, you have to change the other one.

But it's also understanding like when you have a problem in one area, sometimes the solution

is in a different part of the system, right? So a lot of times retention problems are created

because you're acquiring the wrong folks. Or a lot of times monetization issues are stemming from

engagement problems. And so what I've often found teams to really do is that they narrow,

they identify the problem, which is like, hey, we might have low revenue retention or low revenue

conversion or something like that. And they go straight to, okay, trying to work on levers within

that specific part of the system. But without taking the step back to say, well, actually,

what part of the system is creating this problem? It might actually be something within that maybe

we just have terrible pricing pages or something of that nature or terrible dunning flows. But I think

oftentimes the actual solution, the actual lever to move that problem ends up being in a different

part of the system. And so this system type of thinking is probably the number one thing that

I think separates great folks who work on growth from like your average good folks. I think the

average good folks get all of the simple levers of like how to reduce friction, increase reward,

they might understand things around growth loops, all that type of stuff. But system level thinking

is I think the thing that separates the great from the good, even more so in marketplace and

network products because the system dynamics are, you know, amped up multiple time degrees.

Yeah. I'm curious if there's an example that comes to mind either at Reforge or at HubSpot.

I'll share one from Airbnb that you made me think about. There was a team at one point on Airbnb

that was just like focused on retention, guest retention. They're just like, how do we get

people to travel more and come back to Airbnb more? And they did all this work, all this analysis,

and they just found it's related to how good was their trip. And so it became a thing that they're

like, okay, there's not much we can do as a retention team. We got to focus on trip quality

and host quality. And that actually led to creating a team and putting more resources into

let's improve trip experience, which was mostly around host response rate, reviews, things like

that. And so it was just like, okay, this team should not exist. We should not have a retention

team. We should work on trip experience. So examples, I think early HubSpot sales days,

you know, the renewal figures on our early paid product were like only okay. And I think

the team we initially wanted to work on, well, what feature could we add to all of these things?

But when we actually went into customer combos, what we found was that a lot of

the people that the sales team were selling to ended up being either not the persona that we

ended up building for, or they were selling a use case that we actually had them designed for.

And that's because, look, salespeople are there. They're cranking, right? They're just trying to

close deals, which he's like, that's what their role there is for. And so at some point,

we had to redesign the incentives for the sales team. I don't remember exactly how it worked,

but I think we did something as drastic at some point as saying, hey, like if you sell this type

of persona or this type of company, you will not get comped on it, right? And that immediately

changed behavior, right? And we started selling the right. So that was an example where engagement

and retention problems were created up at the top or up at the top of the funnel. Similarly,

I think in early Reforged days where we had a lot more in-person collaborative dynamics as

part of our programs, we had this application process. And we learned over time that there were

different behaviors and mindsets of like coming or desires for what somebody wanted out of a

program that actually created one of those compelling, like created those peer to peer

compelling experiences, right? And so sometimes people wanted to come into the program and all

they wanted to do was like network with peers, right? And they actually didn't want to engage with

the content at all. And then sometimes we had the opposite. And they just kind of wanted to be on

like their own little solo journey and not engage in stuff. And so over time, we iterated on that

and we started to learn like what are the right questions to ask in order to create this better

down funnel experience. Now over time, we've evolved the programs as COVID hit and we got rid

of the in-person component and all of these other changes that rendered those lessons not relevant

in today's environment. But those are like two quick examples that I can think of off the top

of my head. We're now in a place where we've started layering on marketplaces to Reforge. And

and so this system level thinking is coming up more and more daily because as you know,

every conversation we have about demand that we end up talking about supply and every conversation

we end up talking about supply, we end up talking about demand because that's just how it works.

Good old marketplaces. I think just that lesson alone is really powerful is just how much the

people you bring in impact every other metric and how everything looks like a story often here is

just paid users or just innately everything's going to be worse. Basically, retention is going

to be worse. People that you're driving through like Facebook and Google ads and you just cut

that off and like, wow, retention went up. Wow, look at us go. Yeah. I mean, I think we both

mentioned it in here, but we have this concept in Reforge that we teach around good friction.

And I think that I think a lot of people are taught to always reduce, reduce, reduce friction.

But actually oftentimes, the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to

you know, create those experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel is just,

it's all the incentives internally are not aligned to doing that because almost every time you add

good friction in a product in the very short window, it's like conversion will go down and

stuff and you have to wait for those down funnel things to propagate. But people love quick wins,

right? People love looking at those short term metric boosts and are often rewarded and applauded

for it. And so I think those types of things are actually hard to implement and even advocate for

inside of organizations and products. And I think that's why you tend to see these things get

chipped away at over time. I think an example of that is how you actually at Reforge, I noticed

you turn away a lot of people. There's tons of applications and you've just learned here's who

is going to have a good time and we will reject anyone that even though they're so excited by

joining Reforge, they're going to have so many people are going to join, they're going to make

all this money, but you just know they're going to have bad time, they're going to have bad reviews,

it's going to create bad word of mouth. And so I think to me that's a really good example of that

in action. Yep. Okay, lesson five, if I can summarize is basically that growth is a system

between acquisition, retention, modernization, and basically changing one impacts others. So think

about if you see one thing happening here, is there another part of the system that you may want

to work on? Bingo, nailed it. All right, lesson number six. Lesson six. Oh, I like this one,

do the opposite. So I think a story from very early Reforge days. So when we started Reforge,

the norm in the education space like online, that thing that everybody was talking about at the time

was essentially these short form, self-serve, low priced, available for everybody courses.

And that was like, that was the thing, you know, I don't know if you remember the term

MOOCs are massively online courses, right? That was like, that was the rage. It was like,

ah, this thing is going to like revolutionize our world, right? And there was just so many people

going after that. And so when Andrew and I did the first growth series, we essentially did

all the opposite of that. We didn't let everybody in. It was for a small group of people. It wasn't

purely online. We did some stuff in person. We priced it super high. It wasn't purely self-serve.

We had like these live components. We essentially did the exact opposite of what's out there.

And so I think for, you know, if anybody was looking at the time, it was just very counter-intuitive.

It was like, who's going to like really actually be interested in this? But of course, like the

first one that we did, it just like we had an amazing response on the first one. And then,

you know, the rest is history with Reforge and then cohort-based courses became a thing and

in all of this. But I think the real lesson in here is that if you want to gain traction around

something, you often should be looking at what everybody is doing and then try it. And the purpose

of looking at what everybody is doing is not to necessarily understand those best practices so

that you can repeat them. Your goal is to understand them so you can ask the question, well, what is

the opposite? Because in every kind of major trend that everybody's pointed to, there's almost always

an opportunity on the other side, on the 180. A couple other places this applies is that, you know,

like if you're trying to figure out a new ad channel as an example, a new paid acquisition channel,

one of the best things that you can do is you can look at what all the other advertisers who are

advertising to your audience are doing, like look at their creative, all that kind of stuff,

and then basically figure out how to do something completely opposite, completely different. And

that's how you probably will stand out. That's how you will get the CTRs. That's how you will get the

performance. But most things have these gravitational forces where everything converges, right? There

used to be this meme where like every SaaS product had the same exact like character design that like

Slack had. And I can't remember, like, I think maybe Intercom had it. Like, anyways, like that was

like the thing. And so you can like visually see this. But this dynamic, I think, actually takes

place everywhere, whether it's in a strategy within the category, a design of a product,

ad creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic as part of it. A third quick example is

that about 10 years ago, when I probably really started to write a bit more on my blog is that

the playbook at the time that was really developed by HubSpot was that you would do a lot of high

volume short content. At one point, the blog, the HubSpot team was, I think, pumping out like

10 articles a day. It was something crazy, right? And that worked at the time because they were like

early in the game, they had the domain authority to rank for each one of those. And a lot of people

followed that playbook. But then I and a few others in the space started writing really low

volume, very long content. And I think as a result, it stood out and it performed much better

among the noise. And most of my email subscribers probably came from all of those early things

because it did stand out. And this is a constant game because, of course, as you figure something

out and you do the opposite of some piece, some other people are going to start to copy you,

and then you got to take a step back and be like, well, what is everybody doing?

And how do I flip the pendulum back to the other perspective? But the major lesson here is like,

if you're trying to get traction in something, whether a new product, a new growth tactic,

a new channel, the goal of learning what everybody else is doing is not so you can mimic them.

It's actually to figure out how you can do the opposite of it. That's the ultimate goal of that

of that behavior. I love this one. I feel like you need to write a book, Brian. I feel like there's

so much depth to each of these lessons that we don't have time to cover. This makes me think

about I'm reading Rick Rubin's book right now, the creative act, I think it's called. And he has

a similar concept of just like experiment as you're making things and just try the opposite,

just like instead of where there's quiet at noise when something is blue, I don't know, make it yellow.

Totally. You could see this now too with all the AI stuff is like you see a new gravity,

everybody's kind of trending towards a similar set of things. And I think the real winners are

going to be the ones who kind of look at that and be like, actually, we're going to set that up as a

guardrail of what we're not going to do. I actually thought there was an interesting, I did a LinkedIn

post about this because I saw LinkedIn doing this. The playbook right now with AI is, I'm going to

use AI to generate a ton of content for content marketing, the rank and Google and all that kind

of stuff. I thought it was actually interesting. LinkedIn has this new feature where they're

actually not using AI to generate the content. They're using it to lower the friction to more

UGC driven content, which ends up being a more unique and like ranking more highly. So they

actually looked at that and said, we could probably generate a ton of content using AI and just use

our domain authority to rank for these things. But they're like, oh, actually, we're going to use AI

to try to figure out how to extract more of the opposite of what everybody else is doing, which

is actually human generated content. So I thought that was like another interesting recent example

of somebody I've seen doing something very clearly distinctly opposite of what everybody else is

doing. What's interesting here is it's not like you need to do the opposite. It's not like the

opposite will work. It's that this is just like an interesting area to find new opportunity.

100%. Yeah. And it makes me think about podcasts a little bit. There's always this feeling like

people don't have any attention span. They want short things, TikTok clips, all these things.

And then there's like Lex Friedman who talks for seven hours of biology. That's like the number

one business, number one technology podcast in the world. Yeah. I'm not hooked on Lex, but I'm

hooked on acquired, which is like three to four hours. That was the other one. I was exactly,

I was just going to say acquired is like they release an episode like once a month. It's very

long. They don't have any guests. That's the opposite of what usually the advice is, have guests,

get each other's podcasts, release off like all these things. And they're like the third top.

Yeah, we're kind of experimenting with something similar. We just released a podcast called

Unsolicited Feedback. We kind of looked at it and we were like, there's already a ton of great

interview podcasts like yours. We could do another one, but how is that going to work?

Like how is that going to stand out? How can we do different? So we try to figure out,

we explored areas that would be the opposite. And so the format of the podcast is totally

different. We do bring on a guest, but we don't interview them. We actually bring in like two

or three product or feature releases from the past couple of weeks that have been out there.

And then we kind of pretend that we are like the VP of product at that company. And we just

like analyze it and break it down and talk about what we like, what we don't like off the time.

We give Unsolicited Feedback on it. And I don't know if it's going to work yet. It's gotten some

good traction so far. It has been a lot of fun to create. But it's just like another example

of trying to find the white space. Amazing. How do people find that podcast? That's awesome.

Let's make sure people know how to find it. Yeah. If you just Google Unsolicited Feedback

podcast, it'll come up. You can also go to reforge.com slash podcast slash Unsolicited Feedback

as well. You can find it on our website, but we're on Apple's Spotify, all the main pieces.

But yeah, we've had some spicy episodes so far. So hope you all enjoy them.

What's a good one for people to start with if they want to dive in?

Well, we just recently, we just released today one with Alayna Verna breaking down

Airtable's surprising shift from PLG to Enterprise. So there's definitely some hot takes on that one.

So that's the most recent one. That's a fun one. But we've covered

Zoom's product strategy. We've slacked most recent announcement, a few others.

People should go check out that episode with Christopher Lockhead. Basically,

his pitch is that the most legendary companies always create their own category.

Some people agree with that. Some people don't.

I'm on the disagree side of it. But that being said, that's what HubSpot did,

which is, you know, they created, they did create a category around inbound.

And the way that you get traction around those things is you define the opposite and you play

off of it, right? So their whole messaging was, hey, everybody's doing outbound marketing. Here's

the problem. There's a better way. It's called inbound marketing. And then they set themselves

up for that. But you have to do that in category creation because you have to start with the

thing that people understand and then pivot off of it to teach them what the new thing is.

And that was something that HubSpot did amazingly well. But even Darmesh, the founder,

talks a lot about category creation. He's like, look, even though we did it, it's

rarely the right answer to go do it. So I probably shift on the other end of the spectrum,

which is, I'm not sure. I think it can create a lot of value, but I'm not sure I agree with

the ultimate premise. Yeah, there's many, many camps we're going to have. We're going to dig

deeper into that topic on the podcast coming up. This episode is brought to you by Wix Studio.

Your agency has just landed a dream client. You already have big ideas for the website.

But do you have the tools to bring your ambitious vision to life? Let me tell you about Wix Studio,

the new platform that lets agencies deliver exceptional client sites with maximum efficiency.

How? First, let's talk about advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build

unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience and watch its elements scale proportionately by

default. No-code animations add sparks of delight while adding custom CSS gives total design control.

Bring ambitious client projects to life with any industry with a fully integrated suite of

business solutions, from e-commerce to events, bookings and more, and extend the capabilities

even further with hundreds of APIs and integrations. You know what else? The workflows just make sense.

There's the built-in AI tools, the on-canvas collaborating, a centralized workspace,

the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover, and that's not all.

Find out more at wix.com slash studio. All right, lesson seven.

Lesson seven is a use case is not personas. So the trope, I think, is always to talk to your

customers, know your customers, and it just puts a lot of emphasis on understanding the person

or category of person, and then this typically results in creating some type of persona definition

and segmentation that the team orients around. But I actually think most of the meat that is

actionable, that helps you define not only what to build from a product perspective,

but how your growth motion and growth model should work is actually defined in the use case

that you're going after and the different uses of your product. Some people kind of relate this to

jobs to be done. We think about it a little bit differently internally in Reforge, which is a use

case is simply a combination and starts with what is the problem that you are trying to solve?

What is the value prop that you're trying to create against that problem? What's the alternative

for the user? And then most importantly, why are they choosing you over the alternative that

often goes mixed? Those components, once you define them, what they extend into are the things that

actually start to help you on the growth side of the equation, which is once I understand what

the problem is, I can start to ask questions, well, what is the natural frequency of somebody

encountering that problem? That starts to define your retention metrics, which then starts to define

your activation metrics and it kind of works all the way downstream. You can also ask the question,

well, what is the natural frequency of adoption of a solution around this problem? A lot of people

don't think about that, right? Especially in SaaS tools, which is for most SaaS products,

your persona, your target customer, it's actually only in market for that once every

few-ish years or so. And as a result, what most people end up focusing on is just trying to capture

that small sliver of those that are in market. And they don't think about, well, how do I

capture the attention and build a relationship with folks that aren't in market yet, but are

going to be eventually? And that was HubSpot's biggest thing with when they developed the whole

inbound marketing playbook and content marketing is that most people thought of HubSpot,

they just thought of them as a blog. They didn't even know that there was a SaaS tool. If you

asked our audience, but what that created was the moment they were in market for that tool,

where was the first place that they were going to go? They were going to go to HubSpot and they

were like, oh, I've already have a relationship with this brand. And that ended up reducing

quite a bit of friction. The reality is that most products today are actually adopted

by multiple personas. And that leads to trying to solve for multiple use cases, multiple problems

across these personas. And I think that is the way more detrimental thing than narrowing in on a

single use case that might be adopted by multiple personas. So it's kind of like flipping it on

its head. So that's how we define everything in Reforges essentially. What are the different use

cases? What are the different use cases that we're trying to build against? And then we might go

ask the question, who has those problems? Who has those use cases? And most of the time, we've

actually been surprised that there are people in the market that have those problems and that have

those use cases that we would not have identified through any sort of persona research, but we

can make those people successful. We can capture those people as part of the process.

So the framework you use for this use case just to summarize, which is really interesting,

I imagine it's kind of like this one pager template you use, where you here's the problem,

here's the value prop that would convince someone to try this thing. Here's the alternatives

to what we have. And here's why they would choose us over the alternatives.

Yeah, we call it the use case map. And this was actually developed originally in our retention

program with Casey Winters and Sean Klaus. But it's essentially what you describe. It's

essentially a set of rows and there's a specific order. I might get the order slightly wrong

right now written off and alive, but it starts with you define the problem.

You then have a simple statement of who might have this problem. You then say, well, what are

their alternatives to solve this problem? That leads into the why. Why are they going to choose you

over the alternative? It's kind of calling out differentiation, essentially. And then it flows

into, okay, well, what is the natural frequency of this problem, which flows into all of your

retention and activation metrics? You can also ask what is the natural frequency of adoption,

which starts to help you understand more around your acquisition metrics, what percentage,

how many people might be in market for this in the given year, and what we might need to do to

actually like sequence and like capture all of that value. So that's kind of like how that whole

thing flows. And then some people start to layer on and solve multiple use cases over time. But

the biggest thing that we find in reforge, when we have people go through this exercise, which

is the next thing we'll talk about, is that they end up mapping out like eight different use cases.

And we're like, whoa, that's like, that's way too much. You're obviously trying to solve for too

much here. Before we get to the next lesson, just to keep plugging awesome reforge stuff,

is there an artifact or a course for people to go check out on that specific thread?

I think there will be an artifact on this soon. If there isn't live today, we can get one live. But

this actually is so fundamental. It's in almost all of our growth courses now. But the one we

go deepest on this is our retention engagement program. Awesome. Okay. So lesson number seven,

use cases, not personas. Correct. Awesome. What is lesson number eight, Brian Balfour.

Okay. If there is like one line that I probably repeat the most in a reforge course, it's this

one, which is solving for everyone is solving for no one. I think this extends to everything in life.

And I have a couple of interesting examples from this. So let me let me start with like the product

in the marketing one, because I think that's the one that, of course, I think everybody might be

nodding is like, of course, of course, we can't solve for everybody, right? But that's that's

honestly where a lot of product and growth mistakes, I think come from. It's not about

being specific about who you're solving for. It's about being specific about who you aren't

solving for. I've found like that is the thing that ends up being the one that helps being the

better guardrail for for a team. Because for some reason, when all you do is define who you are

solving for or what you're solving for going back to the use case thing, a lot of people start to

like justify or rationalize like a bunch of adjacent use cases or a bunch of adjacent people.

And it's kind of like, well, yeah, it's like 50% what we're solving were 50% not. And so you have

to you have to like define you have to draw on the lines around it, right? And so there's an

actual HBS case study done on this from early HubSpot, which is early HubSpot, they kind of built

this marketing tool. They sold it to a bunch of people, they were having retention problems.

They went in, did all of this research. And what they found was like, actually, they had ended up

selling into four use cases that on the surface feel very similar, but actually in reality are

very different. And the four use cases was they had this mid market, they call a marketing merry,

a VP of marketing, who was like looking for a solution in like an all in one marketing solution

because she didn't want to aggregate a bunch of point solutions. They have then had this like

enterprise, I think it was like called enterprise ID or something like that, enterprise who was

looking for a more like compliant marketing solutions, secure, like all of these types of

things. Still solving marketing, still trying to solve inbound marketing on the surface seem the

same. But when you when you got down into it was kind of different. You also had like this

very small business owner that looked like the SMB customer. But there's a very big difference

between an owner of a 20 person company using your product, and that business actually having

a head of marketing using the product and their needs and were ended up being very different

beneath the surface. And then they had this like technical marketer who wanted to get in there and

customize and all that kind of stuff. So they ended up focusing on that mid marketing, marketing,

merry persona and use case around all in one. But the bigger thing that they did was they said,

we are not going to serve these three use cases. And going back to what we talked about,

they aligned this was before my time, they aligned all the sales comp behind it, they aligned

the success, they aligned all of the marketing around it. And whenever these folks came up in

the funnel and kind of indicated that they were in one of these use cases, it was like, ah, you

know, HubSpot is not is not for that. But I think this is where most teams get stretched and where

most debate comes from is that if you haven't clearly defined who you are not solving for,

you can almost always make a case for how this person or this use case fits the thing that you

have defined. Now, the thing that I've realized is that this actually extends into a bunch of other

places, hiring culture being one of the biggest ones. And I've seen so many super generic culture

statements, and they end up being generic because they are trying to accommodate for everybody.

And so they just get watered down, watered down, watered down. But culture is really about being

super opinionated and actually acknowledging this is not a place for everybody. And you've got to

encode those values that actually say this is a place for who as well as for who it's not. And so

this is an artifact that we have live, you can see you can see ours. And so half of our values

are defining the value, but actually half of the values doc is saying,

what does this not mean? What are anti-patterns to these values? Because those are the things

that actually help us understand more of who is a right fit for the type of company that we are

trying to build and who is not right for those things. And those things get implemented in

hiring and in all these other places. The last piece is, I've noticed this actually extends to

almost all life as well. I'll give a really strange example. This is something that I've

brought up before, but now a lot of people know about me is that before my life in tech,

I was actually a wedding planner for a few summers in LA. My uncle is a wedding planner down in LA,

and I went and worked with them for a few summers. And it was actually a phenomenal experience. I

got exposed to so many things I probably wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. But one of the

things that I learned in that, reflecting on that experience, is that the most miserable couples

in the wedding planning process were the ones that we're trying to solve for everybody. They're

fiance, both sets of parents, the friends, that annoying uncle Eddie that you might have. And

that's where all the stress of the process came from. And the people who tried to accommodate

all of those things are the ones that didn't have their best experience for that, what's supposed

to be an amazing and magical day. And instead, I think in that process, my uncle would try to get

them to essentially say, who's the most important group here? Is it your family? Is it your parents?

Is that who you're trying? That's okay if it is. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's focus

on that. Or is it your friends? Or is this really an experience for you two? Because what you design

and build around the experience that you build around for a wedding really determines. And then

when all of these edged things came up, you could ask the question, is this really for you? Or is

this for this group of people or set of people that you've distinctly said, we know they're

going to have a say, but we're specifically not designing this experience for them.

So anyways, I think this happens also in relationships too and work-life balance where

people are trying to solve for all the things, friends, the career, the kid, the family, the

spouse, the hobbies, like all the things. And at the end of the day, everything's a trade-off in

work and in life and not acknowledging those trade-offs and not actually specifically saying

what you're not solving for. I think that's where a lot of my stress and anxiety has probably come

from. This one really hits home. My wife often tells me that I'm trying to make too many people

happy at once. And I have this people-pleasing tendency and she's like, you're not going to

make everyone happy and just don't cause all these problems by making sure everyone's doing

great. Well, what have you done with this? Have you gotten better at identifying the groups to

be like, you know what? I'm making this trade-off and that's okay. Mostly I'm like, no, I'm not.

Leave me alone. I don't have this problem. But no, there's definitely some of that. So it's just

realizing that that's something that I try to do and I'm like, okay, I don't need everyone to be

happy. It's going to be okay. That's right. But that's 100%. That random uncle Eddie,

he will be okay if you don't give him what he wants and say it's okay. On the values piece,

I thought I just wanted to double click on that because I think it's really important.

Something that I learned also from this guy, Douglas Atkin, who I worked with at Airbnb that

helped us define our values at Airbnb. And he said exactly the same thing. It's really important

to make it clear who's not a fit. Not being mean or just like exclusionary, but just like,

if this doesn't feel right to you, you shouldn't work here. This is what we believe.

And so like a lot of values are just like integrity, trust, like things that are true for

everyone. And so if those are your values, that's not of any value really, because everyone's like,

every place has that. I think this also comes down to I think a common topic that you probably

get asked about too. Even in all your series about how we do products, you just did one

on linear and there was actually quite a bit of Twitter response to it, which was like,

this only works in this methodology. But there's actually multiple ways to do product,

product management at Airbnb. It was much more designer, from what I understand, much more designer

forward. And in some organizations, it's actually much more engineering led and engineering forward.

And in other cases, it's much more product manager for it. And there's different types of people,

different shapes of people that help you create that environment and are successful and happy in

that environment. But it's when you actually haven't acknowledged and defined those things,

is like when you bring the people who don't fit on the team, and then they're trying to pull the

team in a different direction, and that creates a ton of friction. It creates just a ton of friction

internally. And those are just frustrating conversations. Yeah, that is absolutely true.

I think with the linear post, which we're looking to just if folks haven't seen that,

something I found, so I've done these posts on how many different companies have done product,

maybe 10 at this point. And I think one of the takeaways, and I'm planning to do a little,

what have I learned across all these companies is exactly what you said. There's so many ways to do

it. There's the linear approach. We're not going to hire product managers for as long as we can.

It's going to be designers and engineers running the show. And there's basically every other company

where they often did hire product managers really early and it worked out great. So I think it really,

there are many ways to do it. I think a lot of it depends on who your founders are and whether

they value them, the people you hire, and how much do they want to do product manager.

100% based on founders. I think the second thing is who your customer and who you're building

for, right? The thing in linear's case is that they are building a product for themselves,

essentially, right now, right? That product is designed for modern software development teams

who are most used by engineers and designers. So it makes sense that they have an intuitive

sense of what the customer wants. Whereas if they're building a product for, I don't know,

like call it like sales folks, right? The engineers and designers are just are probably

not connected to that audience in the same exact way. And as a result, you need a specific type

of way of developing product for that specific, that serves that specific customer. But I agree

with you. And a lot of it stems from founder, but I think also a lot of it stems from who

and what you're building. And I think in that case, it's not like the designer and the engineer

couldn't do that well. It's just that is not going to be a fun job. Like if you're a designer,

that's spending time talking to salespeople all day and writing research briefs and PRDs.

Yeah, I think it's time too, right? Like I think when an engineer and a designer are building

for another engineer and designer, they can get to those answers, get to those sense much more

quickly, right? But I think it would consume way more time if they're building for a totally

different audience, right? That they don't really have a lot of experience or intuitive sense for.

And so then at the end of the equation, you have, you're right, it's not just them being unhappy,

but they're spending so little time writing code or doing the design that it ends up being

a less productive way to get to the ultimate goal, which is building a successful product.

Absolutely. The other thing that I think of, because we're going down this thread of linear,

because yeah, I was surprised by the reaction a little bit, is that in my notion, deep dive on

how Notion builds product, one of the interview answers was just like, we should have hired product

managers earlier. They waited a long time for similar reasons. We don't need product managers.

And looking back, they're like, ah, that was probably not a good idea. And I think it was a

similar situation where designer led building for themselves. So it's, it's more of a question,

just like, when does it make sense? There's, I just hate that there's this like anti-product

management. It is that has come up. No product managers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, like everybody's

looking for like that, that data point. I mean, that kind of started with, you know, Brian Chesky's

words kind of getting taken out of, out of context and, but there is like a anti-PM sort of sentiment

at the moment, which is just a fascinating, fascinating thing to watch. So yeah. It's

fascinating. We're actually going to have Brian Chesky on the podcast coming up in sometime November

is the plan. So we'll talk about that. And like my take there is I just feel like there are many

bad product managers that just come in and slow everything down, take over totally. And so,

so I think that's where a lot of this comes from. You ended up working with a bad PM that's just

like, not doesn't help. My feeling is awesome product managers is make everything better.

They help you do the work you want to do, then block you, give you space to do the work you want

to do. Like that's often what I find is just like, great PMs make everything better. Bad PMs

create the sense of like, oh, get rid of product management. We don't need them.

Yeah. All right. Well, we got two more lessons. Our penultimate lesson, Brian Balfour. How do we

got? Lesson nine, find sparring partners, not mentors or coaches. As you can imagine kind of

being in the LND space, I get asked for referrals to mentors and coaches quite a bit.

And I've had mentors and coaches in my career. I imagine you have too. But when I really look

back and I think about where have I gotten the most value, meaning who has helped me progress

the most. It has ended up not being one of those mentors or coaches. It's actually somebody who I

would define as a sparring partner. And so I think about this in the boxing analogy. A coach,

once again, is sort of giving you direction, yelling at you on the sidelines. But a sparring

partner is somebody who's in the ring with you, kind of throwing blows back and forth. And the

thing about that sparring partner is they probably share a common set of goals. They're

probably also trying to get better at the thing that you're getting better at. They're on a similar

level, but maybe have some slightly different strengths to you as part of it. They're not afraid

to push and throw punches to help you get better, which I think is often missing sometimes from

the mentor or coach relationship. And they're playing the same sport, right? So a PM in the

PM or however you want to take this analogy. But the most important thing is they are in the arena

with you. When you find those folks that have that set of dynamics of the right shared set of

goals, they're not afraid to throw punches with you, all that kind of stuff, they are the ones

that I have found have pushed me to a much deeper level than somebody kind of giving me some advice

from the outside. Most mentorship programs are extremely forced and not very fluid. You also

tend to not share a common worker goal. You can pay mentors or coaches by the hour, right? They're

trying to achieve something different in their career than the path that you might be on, even

though there's some similarities. And I think oftentimes those discussions just end up being

discussions about generalities or how to get promoted or one of those things. Whereas a sparring

partner is like, I found that person is helping me create and ship something better in the world,

which is ultimately I think the thing that you're going to get judged on. So I've solved this in

a few different ways over time. At a certain moment in my career, I had what I think a lot

of people would call mastermind groups where I would get people at a similar stage of company as

me together, we would meet biweekly or monthly and all those types of things. Those I think work for

a interesting period of time, but inevitably, some people evolve in a different direction,

and so the group becomes less and less relevant over time to you. And so you basically almost

always have to hit a reset button to blow their groove up and reassemble it. And that can be a

decent amount of work. Oftentimes, these end up being co-founders relationships and starting

a company. There's a lot of times your co-founders are a sparring partner for you. Most recently,

though, I've been, for the past about seven years, been organizing this yearly trip called

Recatalyze to Mexico, which is like this group of founders. We do it in December towards the end

of the year where we're kind of reflecting on the year. And we go spend five days in Mexico,

not only getting to know each other, but inspiring each other with what all of us have been thinking

about and accomplishing for the rest of the year. But most importantly is we have these dinner

combos that just get super brutally honest and deep with each other. And there's tears,

there's laughing, there's yelling, there's all of these types of things. It's probably the most

productive few days out of my entire year at this point. And so I think there's actually a lot of

ways to solve this. But what I often find is that when somebody is like looking, when they come to

me looking for a mentor or a coach, they are actually better served by figuring out how to

surround themselves with somebody that looks more like a sparring partner. Those folks tend to just

be the bonds and the relationships that really push you for many years throughout your career

versus some of these other folks. This group sounds like your own version of the best.

It is kind of, there are some eccentric personalities in that group for sure.

Are there any folks that you want to name as examples of some of your best sparring partners

or are they better kept anonymous? Yeah, there's a few folks. Two of my former co-founders from a

previous company, Aaron White, who's now the CTO of Vendor and then Ariel Diaz. I think those two

are both like the blend of, well, they think so differently than I do that every time I

get together with them, I'm kind of energized because they have just completely different

perspectives or they've been playing around with different things. But on the flip side of that too

is they've also given me some of the hardest hitting feedback in my career. Maybe not even

intentionally, but they know me so well that they know how to get straight to the heart of it.

Whereas a coach often is kind of poking around the surfaces trying to get to know you and that

takes an incredibly long time. Whereas I think folks like Ariel and Aaron are like, they just

provide a one-liner perspective to me where it's just like, oh, God, I hate that you're right.

It's like that type of reaction. Usually when people say something and you're angry,

it's because there's a sense of truth in it. And the question is, well, what is that truth?

But getting those statements, getting that feedback is just so hard because everybody

wants to please everybody. So that's kind of it. So I think those two and those two have been doing

that trip with me for the longest, whereas other folks have, we get new blood in there every year

or two. Is there an example of hard hitting feedback that you can share? And second to your

question, is there a way you set up those relationships where people know they can be really

honest with you? Do you just tell them, please be brutally honest with me or you do it in return

? I'm going to keep the examples to myself because we do have, what is it like,

Chatham House Rules or whatever for that trip, which is like, we just don't talk about what we

talk about there. I will say though, if you're going to do something like this, the key is all

about setting the tone. So we do have new folks in there and we do set an expectation of like,

here are some of the types of things that we're going to cover and stuff. But that first dinner

combo, it's like always myself or a few people who have been there before who are the first

ones to open up the conversation or answer the dinner question that we might have.

And they just like really set the tone for like, how open and how deep and how hard hitting

we're going to get. And usually you do two or three of those, people follow suit.

And it opens up everybody else for the rest of the time you have, whether it's a meeting or an

experience like we're talking about. So some folks on that trip have talked about,

they open up with like potential divorces or shutting a company. It's like things that

you're definitely not going to get in a, hello, nice to meet you type of conversation. It's

straight to the point. It's like, hey, nice to meet you. Let me tell you about this

thing that's going disastrous in my life. And then the other person just tends to reciprocate.

And that opens up the whole, that just opens up the whole shebang. It opens people up and

everything kind of flows from there. Sounds like an amazing group. Brian, I don't want this

podcast end, but we're on our very final lesson. Let me summarize lesson nine real quick. Find

sparring partners, not mentors or coaches. What is a lesson number 10? Number 10 we chose because

I felt like it was barely relevant for the times. So I think where we're at in the ecosystem of

things right now, especially among a lot of startups is that people are in this process of

seeing that, look, they had some things that were kind of working, but not working fully. And as a

result, they have to layer on some new bets. They have to figure out some new things. And this also

goes for even fast-growing companies as well. And the principle of the lesson is, essentially,

you need to give 2x plus the activation energy for things that need to change. The mistake is a

lot of times people lean into new things. They kind of dibble and dabble. They dip their toes

in it and they take it super, super incrementally along the way. But let's say you have an existing

business or an existing growth channel or something else and you're trying to layer on something new

or make a change. Well, that existing business, that existing growth channel probably has

some baseline growth rate. Call it 50% year over year. It could be anything. Well, for that new thing

to actually make a meaningful impact and help you drive the whole thing forward, it has to be growing

at a multiple of 50% year over year in order for it to catch up and actually start to show up in the

numbers, start to show up for customers, and all of those things. So an easy example of this is,

I've seen a lot of businesses where it's been primarily driven by paid marketing. And they

have a lot of fast growth. And at some point, of course, they're like, ah, we've got to diversify

away from this. It's too risky, cacks are rising, like all the typical things that we talk about

and problems with paid marketing. And so maybe they try to diversify away and their next bet

is on SEO. Well, you have to inject it with enough activation energy for that SEO to be

growing at a multiple of whatever rate you're growing at paid acquisition for it to grow up

and make a meaningful impact and actually achieve your ultimate goal, which is diversify

away from this channel. Now, the hard part about this is kind of going back to our earlier

one, which is like, you don't pile all of this activation energy on at once, because that tends

to just be too much money, too many people, too many voices in the equation around new things.

And instead, like you, what I always say is like, you can you can flow through the steps faster

when you have like an existing baseline or an existing business to grow off of,

but you can't skip steps on new things. So you still have to start with that small team

getting fit on that new thing, but you have to be very quick to support and continue to provide

that activation energy and not be incredibly incremental as you like step into and lean into

that lean into that thing. But the net result of this is like, I think a lot of folks think

these new bets are going to come and save them in a much shorter time period than they actually

take some to play out because of this dynamic of like, hey, you have this inertia of an existing

machine. Well, guess what? Like if you want the new thing to take an effect, like its slope on

its line has to be a much steeper slope than whatever your baseline thing is. And I think

that's just something that people tend to overlook and in something I've overlooked historically as

well. An example of this that comes to mind is when Airbnb was working on trips. It was this whole

new bet of just like, we're going to allow you to do experiences in addition to find a home.

And Brian basically focused on that full time for a while for like a year. That's the thing he was

focused on. We're going to make this thing work. And I'm going to PM this thing and make it work

and make it awesome. And when they launched, the easy thing to do would have been like,

he comes to Airbnb.com, what it is mostly with like, hey, now we have trips. What he did instead is

like the homepage became trips, plus you could book a home. And it felt crazy because everyone's

coming there to book a home. That's the entire business. But his bet was like, people know

that they know they can book a home. They'll find it even though it became much harder to like search

for homes. He's like, they'll figure it out. But we need to can we need to people to understand

we do this also now. And the best way to do that is just like, bam, this is Airbnb welcome,

you can book experiences, you can also book a home. Yeah, this is especially prevalent when

you're going from single to multi product or you're going through like a messaging and positioning

change, right? Because you've probably invested in one type of message or trying to tell people what

you do for years, probably, right? And just because you launch it new, right, it doesn't,

it's still going to take years, right, for people to learn what you are at the new thing.

And so I was catching up with one of the founders of HubSpot a while back, right? And

many years later, even though they have seven different products now in their product suite,

a lot of them still refer to them as like a marketing automation email marketing company.

And what they're really trying to get people to think about them as is a platform company

starting with your CRM. But in that CRM's, I don't know, seven years old, six years old now,

right? But there was eight years of investment in getting people to know them as a marketing

company before that, right? And so just overcoming that inertia is, yeah, you've got to do things

like what Brian did with the Trips product to really get it to start to take hold.

Yeah, that's always the fear people have when they're starting to start with a wedge

and just like, we're going to win this one thing and then expand and just like, oh,

but maybe people only think of us for that such a fine line. I feel like HubSpot also is just a

story I want to dig into more. It feels like there's so much to learn from their journey.

Yeah, I learned a ton even from my brief time there. But yeah, that company has been through,

has executed so well over a long period of time. It's just like, yeah, so many lessons there that

I took away and I'm sure exist that I don't have knowledge of now because I haven't been there in

some time. Brian, we got there all 10 lessons. Is there anything else you wanted to touch on

or share before we get to our very exciting lightning round? I think as we mentioned,

we love folks to, you know, we have artifacts on Reforge, things that I've actually created

that like our values, like our original business hypothesis doc and stuff that you can go to Reforge

around on this. And so if you want to dig deeper into them, sign for that. It's free.

And would love for folks to check that out. With that, we've reached our very exciting

lightning round. Brian, what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people?

After having two kids, I get barely any time to read a read a full book. So my answer to this is

going to be my answer to this is going to be super old and historic. I will say that there are these

books that feel magical when you get them. I remember when I read Ray Dahlia's PDF before he

even became out of the book, I almost felt like I was like falling into a secret about principles.

I thought it was just like a very interesting structured way of thinking. I don't agree with

all of it in there, but there's I think a lot that I've taken away from that. Of course,

like Peter Teal zero to one book had that impression on me the first time. These are all,

I think, like old, like old recommendations. But I think the ones that get to the root and like

incredible like first principles, thinking and trying to pack an entire life's worth of lessons

into a couple hundred pages versus draw one lesson out over a couple hundred pages, those are

the books that I've walked away with the most. Next question. What is a favorite recent movie or

TV show? My favorite movies for some weird reason are all the movies around like the great financial

crisis. So why? I have no idea, but I love not even the great financial crisis, but Wolf of Wall

Street. There's one from the bank's perspective. Big short. Thank you. Big short. Yeah. I don't

know why, but I just, you know, I think part of the reason is a lot of those movies are about what

we were talking about early is like a small set of people who did the opposite. They took

counterintuitive bets. For some reason, I just like that really appeals to me. In terms of TV

shows, there's a couple of TV shows that I feel like capture the pain of creating something

so well that no other, I have just not found in others, The Bear. Episode seven of season two is

I think probably one of the best episodes of television period that I've watched that episode

specifically multiple times. Is that the one where they're having dinner? No, it's where he goes and

works at Elinia. And he goes through this transformation and you can just, you see both the

pain and the cousin. Yeah. Oh, God, it's so good. The other one is Halt and Catch Fire if you want

something specific to the tech ecosystem, especially the early seasons, I think capture

the pain of creating something new like really well. Next question. What is that favorite interview

question you like to ask candidates? You finally. I actually don't like, as we talked earlier, I

don't like questions. I just like looking at the work. But when I look at the work, the questions

I'm asking are typically breaking down how they thought through the work. What are the steps

that they went through? What questions did they ask? How did they approach it? Because then I get

a sense of how they might approach a similar problem internally at the org. And that's the

thing I'm trying to gain conviction around is that if we give this person similar shaped problems

that they've got the approach and process to potentially solve it. I'm not looking for them

to have the answer to our problems in the interview. I just want to be confident that

they have an approach to find the solution. Is there a favorite product that you recently

discovered they really like, either an app or a physical thing, something about at a store?

I am not a things person. I don't like buying a lot of things. But I joke around with Adam

Fishman is that I basically only buy Viori clothes at this point. They're just too comfortable

work from home. I'm wearing some right now. I literally shorts, underwear, t-shirt, and this

shirt. All Viori and they just came out with jackets. And so that's covered as well. Now I

just need them to make running shoes or something. Yeah, do they do underwear? I think so. Yeah,

I'm pretty sure. Or they do like boxer. They also have the shorts with the liner in them.

That's the ultimate life hack. You just reduce one piece of clothing.

Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, I'm wearing Viori pants right now. It's my favorite podcasting pants.

What's a favorite life motto that you like to repeat either to yourself, that you share with

friends? I don't have my place decked out like yours yet, Lenny. I need to do that. But I have

multiple of these of like the man in the arena speech. I do think that is the thing that I

keep coming back to and the thing that I keep finding the value that I resonate with the most.

It's even what we try to build reforge around is like we're trying to build reforge around

the people that we create programs and stuff. These are the folks that have been in the arena.

They've gotten the blood, sweat, and tears to talk about. I just highly respect people who

enter that arena and do that hard work. And those are the folks that I've learned the most from

and want to spend my precious hours building for and spending time with.

I think exactly the same way with this podcast. I try really hard to stick to people that have

done the thing. And when Casey Winters came on the podcast after he's just like, Lenny,

make sure you stay close to people really doing the work and not just quantificators.

What is the most valuable lesson that your mom or dad taught you?

Both my parents were teachers. And so I think probably they did not understand my entrepreneurial

life at all early on. I got that elsewhere. But I do think the things that I took from

my parents were just a lot of lessons around how to learn and that you can learn anything

if you actually want to learn it. And I think that's probably the most valuable

thing that they taught me was just how to learn. And that's something I want to pass down to my

kids as well. Amazing. You mentioned Adam Fishman for our final question. You were on his podcast,

Tech Dads. I think it's called Startup Dads. Yeah, Startup Dads. Startup Dads. Startup Dads.

So we're willing to it. And something you shared that has really stuck with me as a dad now

is one of your biggest lessons as a dad is that your job as a parent is to bring your kids from

being fully dependent to fully independent. Could you just share that lesson for folks?

Because I thought it was really powerful. Yeah, it's like a spectrum. So consider your kid at

age zero on one end of the spectrum and age 18 on the other end of the spectrum. And I think your

job as a parent is to move them along this spectrum where at age zero, obviously, they're

fully dependent. You are making all the decisions for them. And by 18, what you want to do is that

they are making all the decisions for themselves. And what that requires is, I think, a gradual

process of helping them make bigger and bigger decisions over their lifespan. And you just end

up being put into those decisions. That even starts at like an early age where my kids are

still young. They're four and one and a half. But the example I give is like, I start to see a kid,

one of my kids, playing with some toy that he loves really rough. And I know he's going to break

it. And I can do one of two things. I can either go and intervene and stop and take the toy away,

or I can get him to pause and get him to think about what might happen if he keeps playing with

the toy like that and then let him do his thing. If he decides to break it, he decides to break it.

And he learns that lesson. But that framework has just really resonated with me, because

I think as we all do, we probably have people in our lives that have a very hard time

kind of thinking for themselves and making those decisions. And so that's kind of what

my view is. By the time I'm 18, I don't want to be deciding the college that my kids go to.

I want to help create the environment where I'm helping them get the information they need to

make those types of decisions and make decisions for themselves, because I think ultimately that's

what will hopefully set them up for a successful life. Amazing. Brian, this was everything I hope

it would be. I am so thankful they made time for this. Two final questions. Where can folks find

you a line if they want to reach out? And how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, you can find me

in a few places. My website, brianbelford.com, I write incredibly sporadically, so don't expect

that regular. Very high. Very high. Other than that, just check out reforge.com,

Artifacts, I'm pretty active within that product as well. And then Unsolicited Feedback podcast,

join me and Fareed Massavot on a weekly basis where we give unsolicited feedback to all sorts of

products. It's a really fun environment. And other than that, how they can be helpful for me is

just for folks that are in the space that want to be part of a development community, join

reforge, and listen to the podcast. That's it. Amazing. Now, we have 10 more episodes we can do

to go through the rest of the lessons that you've collected over your life. V1 is done. Brian,

thank you so much for being here. This was amazing. Thanks for having me. Bye, everyone.

Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or

leaving a review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all

past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.

Keywords

Activation energy, Growth rate, New initiatives, PLG to Enterprise shift, Use cases vs personas, Problem-solving mentality, Career progression, Product managers, Sparring partners, Planning processes

People

Brian Balfour

Companies

Airbnb, Airtable, Zoom, HubSpot, Reforge, Facebook, Google

Organizations and Institutions

N/A

References

Warning: Undefined variable $clean_references in /srv/www/podtranscript.com/app/podcast_episode.php on line 376

Brought to you by Jira Product Discovery—Atlassian’s new prioritization and roadmapping tool built for product teams | Coda—Meet the evolution of docs | Wix Studio—The web creation platform built for agencies

—

Brian Balfour is the founder and CEO of Reforge. Prior to Reforge, he was the VP of Growth at HubSpot and co-founded three other startups. In today’s episode, Brian shares 10 lessons from his career, growth, and life:

• Lesson 1: Inspect the work, not the person.

• Lesson 2: Tell me what it takes to win; then tell me the cost.

• Lesson 3: Problems never end (and that’s okay).

• Lesson 4: The year is made in the first six months.

• Lesson 5: Growth is a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization. Change one and you affect them all.

• Lesson 6: Do the opposite.

• Lesson 7: Use cases, not personas.

• Lesson 8: Solving for everyone is solving for no one.

• Lesson 9: Find sparring partners, not mentors or coaches.

• Lesson 10: 2x+ the activation energy for things that need to change.

—

Find the transcript for this episode and all past episodes at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/episodes/. Today’s transcript will be live by 8 a.m. PT.

—

Where to find Brian Balfour:

• X: https://twitter.com/bbalfour

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbalfour/

• Website: https://brianbalfour.com/

—

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

—

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Brian’s background

(04:29) His Notion doc of lessons

(07:35) Lesson 1: Inspect the work, not the person

(12:39) Implementing lesson 1 and a recap of Reforge Artifacts

(16:01) Lesson 2: Tell me what it takes to win; then tell me the cost

(18:17) Why you should revisit your ideal end state often

(20:25) How planning works at Reforge

(23:50) Lesson 3: Problems never end (and that’s okay)

(26:31) The “players, coaches, captains” framework

(30:24) How AI will allow for smaller teams

(34:13) Small teams do bigger things

(34:37) Lesson 4: The year is made in the first six months

(38:20) Lesson 5: Growth is a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization 

(40:44) Examples of engagement and retention problems from HubSpot and Reforge

(46:21) Lesson 6: Do the opposite 

(55:25) Brian’s thoughts on category creation

(57:39) Lesson 7: Use cases, not personas

(1:01:18) The use case map

(1:03:38) Lesson 8: Solving for everyone is solving for no one 

(1:11:14) There are many ways to do product

(1:16:52) Lesson 9: Find sparring partners, not mentors or coaches

(1:23:49) Advice on setting the tone for group sharing

(1:25:07) Lesson 10: You need to give 2x the activation energy for things that need to change

(1:32:02) Lightning round

—

Referenced:

• Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/

• Frank Slootman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankslootman/

• Artifacts: https://artifacts.reforge.com/artifacts

• Ray Dalio’s 5 Step Process: https://commoncog.com/dalios-5-step-process-to-getting-what-you-want/

• Building effective teams: https://www.reforge.com/blog/building-effective-teams

• Scott Belsky’s website: https://www.scottbelsky.com/

• MOOCs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_open_online_course

• The Creative Act: A Way of Being: https://www.amazon.com/Creative-Act-Way-Being/dp/0593652886/

• A Breakdown of LinkedIn’s AI Assisted Growth Loop: https://brianbalfour.com/essays/a-breakdown-of-linkedins-ai-assisted-growth-loop

• Lex Fridman Podcast: https://lexfridman.com/podcast/

• Acquired podcast: https://www.acquired.fm/

• Unsolicited Feedback podcast: https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback

• Elena Verna Analyzes Airtable’s Shift to Enterprise and Slack’s Product Roadmap: https://www.reforge.com/podcast/unsolicited-feedback/episode-5

• The ultimate guide to product-led sales | Elena Verna: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led-sales-elena-verna/

• How to become a category pirate | Christopher Lochhead (author of Play Bigger, Niche Down, Category Pirates, more): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-become-a-category-pirate-christopher-lochhead-author-of-play-bigger-niche-down-category/

• Dharmesh Shah on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dharmesh/

• The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework): https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-jtbd-bob-moesta-co-creator-of-the-framework/

• How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-sell-your-ideas-and-rise-within-your-company-casey-winters-eventbrite/

• Target the Right Market: https://hbr.org/2012/10/target-the-right-market-2

• Douglas Atkin on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doatkin

• How Linear builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-linear-builds-product

• How Notion builds product: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-notion-builds-product

• Aaron White on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronmwhite/

• Ariel Diaz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arieldiaz/

• Ray Dalio’s website: https://www.principles.com/

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Notes-Startups-Future/dp/0804139296

• The Wolf of Wall Street on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/70266676

• Margin Call on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Margin-Call-Kevin-Spacey/dp/B005UT29Z0

• The Big Short on Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/80075560

• The Bear on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/series/the-bear-05eb6a8e-90ed-4947-8c0b-e6536cbddd5f

• Halt and Catch Fire on Prime Video: https://www.amazon.com/Halt-Catch-Fire-Season-1/dp/B00KCXIHJG

• Vuori: https://vuoriclothing.com/

• The man in the arena: https://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Learn-About-TR/TR-Encyclopedia/Culture-and-Society/Man-in-the-Arena.aspx

• Startup Dads podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/startup-dads/id1548496077

—

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

—

Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Get full access to Lenny's Newsletter at www.lennysnewsletter.com/subscribe