Brian Balfour: 10 lessons on career, growth, and life

1. 0:00 – 4:29

   Brian’s background

   1. BBBrian Balfour0:00

      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 gonna 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, 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, "Hmm, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder (laughs) thing," I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky0:56

      (instrumental music) 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 a hundred. 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 imagined. 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 teams are 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/lenny. That's atlassian.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Coda. You've heard me talk about how Coda 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 Coda does that for me. I use Coda 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 Coda'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 Coda. If your team's work is spread out across different documents and spreadsheets and a stack of workflow tools, that's why you need Coda. Coda puts data in one centralized location regardless of format, eliminating roadblocks that can slow your team down. Coda 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 coda.io/lenny and get $1,000 startup credit on your first statement. That's C-O-D-A dot I-O slash Lenny to sign up, and get a startup credit of $1,000. Coda.io/lenny.

2. 4:29 – 7:35

   His Notion doc of lessons

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky4:30

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

   2. BBBrian Balfour4:34

      Thanks for having me.

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky4:35

      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 gonna do is we're gonna 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.

   4. BBBrian Balfour5:00

      I think one of the things that I've learned over time for me, I- I don't know about you, is that I- I just don't tend to remember things unless I write them down. (laughs)

   5. LRLenny Rachitsky5:08

      Same.

   6. BBBrian Balfour5:08

      And so... (laughs)

   7. LRLenny Rachitsky5:09

      100%.

   8. BBBrian Balfour5:09

      And, and in an e- effort to, uh, not repeat mistakes, I basically just started keeping this Notion doc, uh, that I call, like, Lessons Learned. And some of these are from things that I've, like, 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 just, 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, 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, I started only doing this maybe, I'd call it a few years ago. And, uh, I think there's a hundred and some (laughs) lessons in there at this point. Which, so we're not only, we're gonna only cover like maybe 10-ish percent of them today. But I found it very useful just as a mechanism to unblock or ignite some new thoughts when, when I'm getting, when I'm getting stuck.

   9. LRLenny Rachitsky6:36

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

   10. BBBrian Balfour6:40

       (laughs) There you go. Yeah.

   11. LRLenny Rachitsky6:42

       I, 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 operationalize it.

   12. BBBrian Balfour6:55

       But, but that's the, that's why you have to keep it light. That's what I learned 'cause I used to, you know, take, when I read books, I used to take a ton of notes and all of that kind of stuff. But that also just cre- it's not only creation friction, but it, it's, it creates friction in actually using it as well 'cause then it's like I gotta sift through all of these notes. And so, so now I'm just like, well, what is, what is the one-liner? Like what is like the, the essence of this thing, whether it's, comes from a podcast or book or a conversation I've had. Like those types of things. And so that's what I found is like 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, but yeah, like that's, that, that ends up being the

3. 7:35 – 12:39

   Lesson 1: Inspect the work, not the person

   1. BBBrian Balfour7:35

      key.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky7:35

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

   3. BBBrian Balfour7:40

      I think the first ones we're gonna cover are more related to startups, founder life, company which I've been in the seat in as the past seven years as founder and CEO of Reforge. Uh, 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 Slootman 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 kinda bullshit. You just have like all of 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, 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. Like all of these things that are much more meaningful signal than asking, "Tell me about a tough situation you faced in, in your career." Uh, tho- those types of things. And so I've always applied this from day one of Reforge of like, uh, even in our hiring convos, 80 to 90% of the decision is based on either some type of portfolio review or some ty- 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, I'm not, not doing..." 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 or, 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 'cause I think that tells you so much more about the person.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky10:19

      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 and it's like, I don't know.

   5. BBBrian Balfour10:28

      Yeah. Well, 'cause even e- 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 is 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, uh, 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, from this person's work is essentially the- these words that are being promoted and, and how, how can I actually make an accurate yes or no decision on that? I, I can't. And, 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, and like forgotten. And a lot of, you know, just like a lot of bad feelings emerge, and that's how you lose essentially these really talented people. And 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 Reforge but 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 and ship. So that when it comes to those conversations, it's already easily packaged and can be surfaced as part, uh, part of that process. Uh, so I think this works in... uh, 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.

4. 12:39 – 16:01

   Implementing lesson 1 and a recap of Reforge Artifacts

   1. BBBrian Balfour12:39

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky12:39

      Amazing. Uh, just one more question before we get to our next lesson. Along that same line you just mentioned of just, like, how 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, uh, lesson?

   3. BBBrian Balfour13:04

      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. 'Cause even if it's not a win, right, it's possible that you, 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, however else it's being judged. And you just, you just never, you never do that. Um, 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, um, it's not about, you know, writing a book about your work every couple weeks, right? It's like grabbing a couple screenshots and writing down a few bullet points of how you participated in create- creating and shipping this piece. I will 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, uh, where their customers are the internal employees. Versus, I think... oh, ev- we even had a pattern of this in the past at Reforge, is people put a lot of emphasis on creating, like, the awesome internal document.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky14:29

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BBBrian Balfour14:29

      And it's like, look, you can create an awesome internal document but if you're ultimately not, and it... that's not translating to shipping something that's, uh, 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... placed in the wrong places. The last, and I... and the quick plug is, you know, Reforge has 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, um, different way as well, similar to, like, open source code.

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky15:37

      On Artifacts, how do people find that?

   7. BBBrian Balfour15:39

      You can just go to reforge.com and sign up. It's right there on the, on the homepage. You could 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 a... it's an interesting blast from the past around that to see, like, what I got right, what I got wrong, and, uh, some of the lessons we'll talk more about today.

5. 16:01 – 18:17

   Lesson 2: Tell me what it takes to win; then tell me the cost

   1. BBBrian Balfour16:01

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky16:01

      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?

   3. BBBrian Balfour16:07

      Lesson two, tell me what it takes to win, then tell me the cost.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky16:12

      Mm-hmm.

   5. BBBrian Balfour16:12

      And I couldn't remember quite where I picked this up, the language for this up. It might be from Bezos, so somebody I... you know, some listener can probably credit for me. But a problem that I've experienced, especially as the... my team at HubSpot grew 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, they would be thinking, "Well, I don't wanna, I don't wanna propose something that's going to get, you know, denied." Or, "This might sound a little bit too wild and I don't want that... I don't, I don't want it to be, like, interpreted that way." Or, you know, "Somebody else in the organization told me that this is gonna be a lot of hard work." Right? And so by the time it gets to the person that is either green lighting 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 wanna be having. But if I've got to be pushing the team of, like, "Hey, like, this is too conservative." Or, "This isn't gonna be enough." Or, "I don't know if it's gonna be worth the resources," I don't wanna be pushing the team. I want the team pushing me and then we can start to pare it back to figure out how to actually achieve this thing.

6. 18:17 – 20:25

   Why you should revisit your ideal end state often

   1. LRLenny Rachitsky18:17

      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.

   2. BBBrian Balfour18:31

      In my 100 or so lessons, I have a different version of that the- that one is, which is, yeah, like 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-

   3. LRLenny Rachitsky18:46

      Mm-hmm.

   4. BBBrian Balfour18:47

      ... 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 all of the... And, and iterate on that as well. Um, because you, you identify, you define this thing, you iterate towards it, you learn some things, and you're like, "Mm, 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." Um, but so the, the key on those things is how do you land that ideal end state to align the teams to, 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 gonna build this exact feature, but it... You, you said X, but we're actually now doing Y." And it's really hard to land that, like, in between of we're not gonna do this exact set of things and this is about directional alignment, but I- 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, 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.

7. 20:25 – 23:50

   How planning works at Reforge

   1. BBBrian Balfour20:25

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky20:25

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

   3. BBBrian Balfour20:29

      We started working this way about, I'd say, like, four or five months ago. You know, 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 in tech, like, a- 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 (laughs) .

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky21:04

      (laughs) Oh, no.

   5. BBBrian Balfour21:04

      To, to, to be p- They were all, they were all disasters. And we had so many smart people-

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky21:09

      Mm-hmm.

   7. BBBrian Balfour21:09

      ... 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 marketing fit mode, kind of closer to that end of the spectrum, I think you're much better served by incredibly light planning processes where 90, 80 to 90% of the assets produced are actual, like, visuals of the experience. It doesn't have to be product visuals either. I've started forcing teams to, you know, marketing teams to show me what the potential, like, marketing assets might be rather than giving me a Notion doc. Or we do a bunch of stuff on, like, the supply side of our network, and I'm like, "Well, what is a customer facing asset? Like, what might, how might they experience this?" 'Cause we're gonna have a way more productive conversation over that type of asset than a bunch of words on a Notion doc. And so we have started working i- like this in the past six months, and we found it way more effective. Now, how f- long that can last and how long that can scale, huge question mark, right? Uh, you know, all, all of these processes, OKRs, all these kinds of things, they've been created for a reason in, in scale, but I think where we're at as a company, you know, 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.

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky22:40

      And it doesn't matter if it can't scale because you're gonna change it anyway, right? Like, the way I thought about planning always is just like it's, like, the best idea you have at the time. Let's just do it this way.

   9. BBBrian Balfour22:49

      Yes.

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky22:49

       In terms of org and strategy. Like, this is the best idea right now. We're gonna rethink it anyway in six months if we're- things are going well, especially if they're not going well. So-

   11. BBBrian Balfour22:57

       Yeah.

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky22:58

       ... I think that's

   13. NANarrator22:58

       Very important.

   14. BBBrian Balfour22:58

       And that's why you wanna get it out as fast as possible.

   15. LRLenny Rachitsky23:00

       Mm-hmm.

   16. BBBrian Balfour23:00

       Right? And 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-

   17. LRLenny Rachitsky23:11

       Mm.

   18. BBBrian Balfour23:12

       ... ultimately don't matter in the end.

   19. LRLenny Rachitsky23:13

       (laughs)

   20. BBBrian Balfour23:13

       Right? (laughs) And I think that's the piece that feels just awful to the, to the team and ma- 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-

   21. LRLenny Rachitsky23:28

       Mm-hmm.

   22. BBBrian Balfour23:28

       ... when you ultimately do change things, like, uh, 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? (laughs) Like, move on. Start, start shipping. Start iterating towards that ideal end state because, uh, that, that's gonna, that's gonna help you update whatever that new ideal end state will be

8. 23:50 – 26:31

   Lesson 3: Problems never end (and that’s okay)

   1. BBBrian Balfour23:50

      in the future.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky23:50

      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.

   3. BBBrian Balfour23:59

      Nailed it.

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky24:01

      What is lesson number three?

   5. BBBrian Balfour24:03

      Ooh. Lessons number three is, like, a hard one that I've, I've learned the hard way, and I'm still, like, trying to improve at 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 have talked to a lot of founders about this as well, where I just, 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 that's X problem, everything's gonna 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, 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, "Hmm, if I solve this thing, I get to take on an even harder thing," (laughs) I think is the thing that actually reduces the stress. And so this was, uh, one that I've also felt, uh, 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 bullseye, and so his passage, which we've actually worked into the cultural values at Reforge, is, "Every day there's gonna be problems, some big, others small, sometimes in waves, sometimes slowly, but they're never gonna 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 I, you know, when I find myself getting caught in this, "Oh, if, uh, we just solve this one thing, life will be so much easier," I kind of return to this statement, (laughs) not only to remind myself that that's not true, but to try to, like, switch my framing around of how, how to think about the problem. But learning this is like a, it's a grind. It's a, it's a hard mentality switch for I think a lot of,

9. 26:31 – 30:24

   The “players, coaches, captains” framework

   1. BBBrian Balfour26:31

      a lot of founders.

   2. LRLenny Rachitsky26:32

      This reminds me of a number of things. One is just, I heard someone describe basically any leadership job as your professional firefighter.

   3. BBBrian Balfour26:39

      (laughs)

   4. LRLenny Rachitsky26:39

      You're just putting out fires all day. ?

   5. BBBrian Balfour26:41

      It is true. It, it, it is true, 'cause, like, those are the things that bubble up, right?

   6. LRLenny Rachitsky26:47

      Yeah. (laughs)

   7. BBBrian Balfour26:47

      (laughs) The things that are going easy, the things that are going great do not bubble up, right?

   8. LRLenny Rachitsky26:50

      Right.

   9. BBBrian Balfour26:50

      Uh, and, and so as a result, yeah, you, you end up being like this, this catcher for, 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, th- they just hate them. They're, they're, they're not-

   10. LRLenny Rachitsky27:05

       Mm-hmm.

   11. BBBrian Balfour27:05

       They're not good at them. And they're not good at them because they don't like it. Uh-

   12. LRLenny Rachitsky27:09

       Mm-hmm.

   13. BBBrian Balfour27:09

       ... uh, both, 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 that, there's three components of that, right? There's title, right? Like most people view that as a higher social capital thing. Most people see that's the only way that I can get, you know, 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 flattened the org. We converted a lot of managers back into, uh, what we call Captain IC roles, and-

   14. LRLenny Rachitsky27:58

       Captain IC, ooh.

   15. BBBrian Balfour28:00

       Yeah, yeah. We call it, we have this framework called Players, Coaches, Captains, um, and we talk about-

   16. LRLenny Rachitsky28:04

       Cool.

   17. BBBrian Balfour28:04

       ... a little bit of the differences.

   18. LRLenny Rachitsky28:06

       So interesting.

   19. BBBrian Balfour28:06

       And it helps kind of distinguish the different type of leadership between a Senior IC and a manager. A manager's more of a coach. They're kind of coaching from the sidelines.

   20. LRLenny Rachitsky28:15

       Mm-hmm.

   21. BBBrian Balfour28:15

       An IC's like leading from by n- being on the playing field. And those two things are very different. We kind of put that in place. Uh, we changed our entire compensation structure so that there is zero compensation trade-off, whether you just want to keep growing as an IC and stuff. There's more of these captain roles internally than there are manager roles, uh, internally. We've created the same, like, titles for all of the levels so people don't feel like they're making a trade-off on, you know, that external, uh, signaling factor. We give all the strategic problems to the captain level IC roles. The 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 the things that's really bothered me for a long time is that you, is you just, 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 uh, 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 'cause that's what managers are supposed to do, and then they coach their team as like, "That's the way you progress in this org," and the whole thing repeats itself, and it 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, um, but we've, 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, uh, i-i-you know, that type of work, uh, as part of it.

10. 30:24 – 34:13

    How AI will allow for smaller teams

    1. BBBrian Balfour30:24

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky30:24

       I feel like that's also just like a very common theme now across companies. I feel like-

    3. BBBrian Balfour30:27

       Yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky30:27

       ... if you haven't written about this, I think just sharing this in-depth would be really useful to a lot of people, 'cause I think a lot of startups are trying to think about this.

    5. BBBrian Balfour30:34

       I, 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, the, 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 did. And that's, 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 gonna see happier people, happier companies, and more creative output as part of it. And so, I don't know, it... I think this is where the future, I think the future favors the super IC types over those, over the manager types.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky31:57

       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.

    7. BBBrian Balfour32:12

       It is so hard. This is something we've also put in our cultural values which is we just, uh, the, our second cultural value is 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, we funded some of those things and we had to, we had to unwind them.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky32:50

       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 gonna plant all these seeds, we're gonna try stuff, see if anything blows up, and then we double down, so...

    9. BBBrian Balfour33:02

       (laughs)

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky33:02

        Like in a good way.

    11. BBBrian Balfour33:03

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughs)

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky33:05

        And so...

    13. BBBrian Balfour33:05

        I was gonna say, yeah.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky33:05

        So I think it's really normal.

    15. BBBrian Balfour33:06

        Yeah.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky33:07

        Right?

    17. BBBrian Balfour33:07

        Yeah.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky33:07

        Like I think a lot of people dislike all these companies investing in all these new ideas and a- and random things when like that's really how you, you build another business line or you find and unlock for growth, right? That's like pretty normal.

    19. BBBrian Balfour33:20

        Totally. When we went from one product to multi-product at, at HubSpot-

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky33:24

        Mm-hmm.

    21. BBBrian Balfour33:24

        ... 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, uh, 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 and 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 there's 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, a lot of issues.

11. 34:13 – 34:37

    Small teams do bigger things

    1. BBBrian Balfour34:13

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:13

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

    3. BBBrian Balfour34:17

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

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky34:19

       Small teams do bigger things.

    5. BBBrian Balfour34:20

       ... encode this, um, in us to be like a forcing, you know-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky34:25

       Awesome.

    7. BBBrian Balfour34:25

       ... to be a forcing function for us going forward.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky34:27

       All right. All these bonus lessons. You're just full of lessons, Bryan, I'm...

    9. BBBrian Balfour34:30

       (laughs)

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky34:30

        Okay. So I'm gonna close the loop on lesson three which is problems never end and that's okay.

    11. BBBrian Balfour34:36

        Yes.

12. 34:37 – 38:20

    Lesson 4: The year is made in the first six months

    1. BBBrian Balfour34:37

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky34:37

       All right. Lesson four.

    3. BBBrian Balfour34:39

       All right. Now we're getting into the product and growth, uh, lessons. This one I actually learned at HubSpot which was, uh, 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, and looking forward in that way is that this is particularly relevant as everybody's probably going through yearly planning right now, is that I see a- I've seen a lot of plans where you realize in the, in the first three to six months you, 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 gonna build, you know, this inflection point in the back half of the year, right?

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky35:33

       (laughs)

    5. BBBrian Balfour35:33

       To like hit that, to 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, is 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, and you do the calculation of like well, if we put this thing in place and then 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, 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, 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, uh, like, the next year. And so anyways, if you want to hit your year number, 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.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky37:33

       Something you didn't mention, which is also just re-orgs, like you often just, like, rethink everything halfway through, right? Like, "Oh, shit. We... The world has changed." And so you're probably not even gonna get to that back half the way you planned.

    7. BBBrian Balfour37:43

       Yeah, that's fair. I think, 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, the, 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, I think we... It's just very easy for, for us to overestimate those things when we're going through that type of forward looking thinking.

13. 38:20 – 40:44

    Lesson 5: Growth is a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization

    1. BBBrian Balfour38:20

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky38:20

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

    3. BBBrian Balfour38:28

       Okay. This is probably one that I think about the most, um, and comes up the most often, not only in Reforge courses, but in, like, investing, advising, which is growth is a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization. You change one, you affect them all. We've written about this a ton. You've written about this, um, to some degree. But I think people underestimate how deep this lesson goes. And it's, 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, 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, it might actually be something within there. Maybe we just have terrible pricing pages or, or, uh, 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. Uh, 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 mult- multiple time degrees. Yeah.

14. 40:44 – 46:21

    Examples of engagement and retention problems from HubSpot and Reforge

    1. BBBrian Balfour40:44

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky40:44

       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, uh, guest retention. They're just like, "How do we get people to travel more and come back to Airbnb more?"

    3. BBBrian Balfour40:59

       Mm-hmm.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky40:59

       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, they're like, "Okay, there's not much we can do as a retention team. We gotta 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, uh, was mostly around tri- uh, host, uh, response rate-

    5. BBBrian Balfour41:21

       Mm-hmm.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky41:22

       ... reviews, things like that. And so it was just like, "Okay, we... We sh- This team should not exist. We should not have a retention team. We should work on trip experience."

    7. BBBrian Balfour41:29

       So examples, I think early HubSpot sales days, you know, the, the renewal figures on, like, our early pay, uh, 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, uh, eh, 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 hadn't actually... We actually hadn't designed for. And that's because, look, like, salespeople are there. Th- They're cranking, right? They're, they're just trying to close, to close deals, which I'm, he, right? Is 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?

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky42:28

       Mm-hmm.

    9. BBBrian Balfour42:28

       And that immediately changed behavior (laughs) , right? And we started selling the right... So that was an example where engagement and retention problems were created up at the top, uh, or up at the top of the funnel. Similarly, I think in early Reforge 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, uh, like created those peer-to-peer, um, compelling experiences, right? And so sometimes people wanted to come into the program and all that they wanted to do was, like, network with peers, right? And they, they actually (laughs) didn't want to engage with the content at all. And then sometimes we had the opposite and they just kinda wanted to be on, like, their own little solo journey and not enga- 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, you know, not relevant in today's environment, but those are two, those are like two quick examples that I can, uh, that I can think of off the, off the top of my head. We're now in a place where we've started layering on marketplaces to Reforge and, and so the 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 'cause that's just how it, how it works.

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky44:15

        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 I often hear is just paid users are just innately, everything's gonna be worse basically, retention's gonna be worse, people that you're driving through, like, Facebook and Google ads and, and you just cut that d- off and, like, "Wow, retention went up. Wow, look at us go."

    11. BBBrian Balfour44:38

        Yeah. I mean, I think-

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky44:39

        Yeah.

    13. BBBrian Balfour44:39

        ... we both mentioned it in here, but, you know, we, we have this concept in, in Reforge that we teach around calling it, like, good friction. And I think that-

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky44:47

        Mm-hmm.

    15. BBBrian Balfour44:47

        ... you know, ta- uh, I think a lot of people are taught to a- always reduce, reduce, reduce friction. But actually, o- oftentimes the right thing to do is to add the right amount of friction to, you know, create, create those e- experiences and those right engagement metrics down funnel. It's just, it's, uh... A- all the incentives internally (laughs) 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, to propagate.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky45:21

        Mm-hmm.

    17. BBBrian Balfour45:21

        But people love quick wins, right? People love looking at those short term metric boosts and are often, you know, rewarded and applauded for it. And so I think those types of things are actually hard to imple- implement and even advocate for inside of organizations and products, and I think that's why you, you tend see the- these things get, you know, chipped away at over time.

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky45:42

        I think an example of that is how you... Actually at Reforge, I noticed you turn away a lot of people. You... There's tons of applications and you've just learned, here's who is gonna have a good time and we'll reject anyone that even though they're so excited about joining Reforge, they're gonna have so many... People are gonna join, they're gonna, you're gonna make all this money, but you just know they're gonna have a bad time, they're gonna have l- bad reviews, it's gonna create bad word of mouth. And so I think, to me, that's a really good example of that in action.

    19. BBBrian Balfour46:05

        Yeah.

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky46:06

        Okay. Lesson five, if I can summarize, is basically that growth as a system between acquisition, retention, and monetization, 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 wanna work on?

15. 46:21 – 55:25

    Lesson 6: Do the opposite

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky46:21

    2. BBBrian Balfour46:21

       Bingo. Nailed it. All right.

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky46:23

       All right.

    4. BBBrian Balfour46:23

       Lesson number six?

    5. LRLenny Rachitsky46:24

       Lesson six.

    6. BBBrian Balfour46:25

       Ooh. Uh, I like this one. Do the opposite. So I think, uh, a story from very early Reforge days. So when, when we started Reforge, the, the norm in the education space, like online, ev- 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 or massively online-

    7. LRLenny Rachitsky46:59

       Oh, yeah.

    8. BBBrian Balfour46:59

       ... courses, right?

    9. LRLenny Rachitsky47:00

       Absolutely.

    10. BBBrian Balfour47:00

        That was, that was like, that was the rage. It was like, "Ah, this thing is gonna, like, revolutionize our world," right?

    11. LRLenny Rachitsky47:05

        (laughs)

    12. BBBrian Balfour47:05

        And there was just so many people going after that. And so when Andrew and I did the first growth series we a- done- essentially did all the opposite of (laughs) of that. We didn't let everybody in. Um, 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, it was just, it was just very counterintuitive. It was like, who's, who's gonna, like, really actually be interested in this? Eh, 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, and all those things. 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... 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, uh, 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 and that's how you'll get the performance. But most things have these gravitational forces where everything converges, right? There used to be this meme where like every SaaS (laughs) product had the same exact, uh, 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 a category, a design, uh, of a product, ad creative within a channel, a specific growth tactic, uh, as part of it. A third quick example is that about 10 years ago, um, when I probably really started to write a bit more on my blog, is the- the playbook at the time that was really developed by, uh, 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- 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- and most of my email subscribers probably came from all of those early, those early things because it did stand out. And this is a constant game because of course like as you figure something out and you do the opposite of some piece, some other people are gonna start to copy you and then you gotta take a step back and be like, well, what is everybody doing and how do I, (laughs) how do I flip the- the- the pendulum back to 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. Uh, that- that's the ultimate goal of that, that, uh, of that behavior.

    13. LRLenny Rachitsky51:09

        I love this one. I feel like you need to write a book, Bryan. I feel like there's so many, 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- just like experiment as you're making things and just try the opposite. Just like instead of where there's quiet, add noise.

    14. BBBrian Balfour51:30

        Mm-hmm.

    15. LRLenny Rachitsky51:30

        When something's blue, I don't know, make it yellow.

    16. BBBrian Balfour51:33

        Yeah.

    17. LRLenny Rachitsky51:33

        And, uh-

    18. BBBrian Balfour51:34

        Totally.

    19. LRLenny Rachitsky51:34

        ... and I think-

    20. BBBrian Balfour51:35

        You can see this now too with all the AI stuff is like you see a new like gravitate- everybody's kind of trending towards a similar set of things. And I think the- the real winners are gonna be the ones who kind of look at that and be like, actually we're gonna set that up as a guardrail of what we're not going to do. I actually thought there was an interest, I did a LinkedIn post about this because I saw LinkedIn doing this. You know, the- the playbook right now with AI is, oh, I'm gonna use AI to generate a ton of content, you know, for content marketing to rank in 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, um, more unique and like ranking more highly. So they actually looked at that and said, "We- we could probably generate a ton of content using AI and just use our domain authority to like, to- to rank for these things." But they're like, "Oh, actually we're gonna use AI to- 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, you know, 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.

    21. LRLenny Rachitsky52:53

        What's- 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.

    22. BBBrian Balfour53:01

        100%. Yeah.

    23. LRLenny Rachitsky53:02

        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 Fridman who talks for seven hours with Balaji, that's like the number one business book, number one technology podcast in the world.

    24. BBBrian Balfour53:17

        Yeah.

    25. LRLenny Rachitsky53:18

        Uh, and-

    26. BBBrian Balfour53:18

        I'm not hooked on Lex, but I'm hooked on Acquired, which is like three to four hours.

    27. LRLenny Rachitsky53:21

        That was the other one I was... Exactly.

    28. BBBrian Balfour53:23

        Yeah.

    29. LRLenny Rachitsky53:23

        I was just gonna say Acquired is like they release an episode like once a month.

    30. BBBrian Balfour53:26

        Yeah.
16. 55:25 – 57:39

    Brian’s thoughts on category creation

    1. BBBrian Balfour55:25

       yeah.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky55:25

       People should go check out that episode with Christopher Lochhead, where basically his pitch is that the most legendary companies always create their own category. Some people agree with that, some people don't.

    3. BBBrian Balfour55:33

       I'm, I'm on the disagree side of it, but yeah, yeah.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky55:36

       There's a lot of interesting... (laughs)

    5. BBBrian Balfour55:36

       That being said, that, that's what HubSpot did, right, 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, that was something that HubSpot did amazingly well, but even Dharmesh, the founder, talks a lot about category creation and he's like, "Look, like, eh, even though we did it, it's, it... Rarely the right answer to go, go do it." (laughs) So I'd probably shift on the other end of the spectrum, which is I- I'm not, I'm not sure I g- uh, I think it can create a lot of value, but I'm not sure I agree with, uh, the ultimate premise, so.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky56:29

       Yeah. There's many, many camps. We're gonna have, we're gonna 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, and 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 as elements scale proportionally 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/studio.

17. 57:39 – 1:01:18

    Lesson 7: Use cases, not personas

    1. LRLenny Rachitsky57:39

       All right. Lesson seven.

    2. BBBrian Balfour57:42

       Lesson seven is, uh, use cases, 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, you know, 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, uh, 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, 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 my cust- 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?

    3. LRLenny Rachitsky59:20

       Hmm.

    4. BBBrian Balfour59:20

       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 is 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, uh, uh, eventually. And that was, 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. (laughs) They didn't even know that there was a SaaS tool, if you, 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 gonna go? They, they, they were gonna go to HubSpot and they were like, "Oh, well, I'll, I've already have a relationship with this brand." I- and, and that ended up, like, 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, uh, 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 Reforge, is essentially what are the different use cases, what are the different use cases that we are 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 or 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, we can capture those people as part of the

18. 1:01:18 – 1:03:38

    The use case map

    1. BBBrian Balfour1:01:18

       process.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:01:19

       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.

    3. BBBrian Balfour1:01:36

       Yeah. W- we call it the use case map. And this was actually developed originally in, uh, our retention program with Casey Winters and Shawn Claus. But it's essentially what you describe. It's, it's essentially a set of rows and it, it, there's a specific order. I might get the order slightly wrong, uh, right now riffing it off the top of my head, 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 gonna choose you over the alternative? Um, 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 m- help you understand more around your acquisition metrics, what percentage, how many people might be in market for this in a given year, and what we might need to do to actually, like, sequence and, like, capture all of that value. Um, so that, that's kind of, like, how that whole thing flows. And then, then some people solve for mul- just 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. (laughs) And we're like, "Whoa," like, that, that's, like, that's way too much. You're, you're obviously solving, trying to solve for too much here.

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:04

       Before we get to the next lesson, just to keep plugging awesome Reforge stuff, is there an artifact or course for people to go check out on that specific thread?

    5. BBBrian Balfour1:03:11

       I think there will be an artifact on this soon. If there isn't live today, w- we can get one live. But, uh, this actually is so fundamental it's in almost all of our growth courses now. But the one we go deepest on this is, is our retention engagement program.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:25

       Awesome. Okay, so lesson number seven, use cases, not personas.

    7. BBBrian Balfour1:03:30

       Correct.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:03:31

       Awesome. What is lesson number eight, Brian Balfour?

    9. BBBrian Balfour1:03:35

       Okay. If there's, like, one line that I probably repeat the

19. 1:03:38 – 1:11:14

    Lesson 8: Solving for everyone is solving for no one

    1. BBBrian Balfour1:03:38

       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 interesting examples from this. So l- let me, let me start with, like, the product and the marketing one, 'cause I think that's the one that, of course, I, I think everybody might be nodding, it's like, "Of course, of course, we can't solve for, for everybody," right? But that's k- that's honestly where a lot of product and growth mistakes I think come from. S- 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, and it's kind of like, well, yeah, that's, like, 50% what we're solving for, 50% not. And so you have to, you have to, like, define, you have to draw in the lines around it, right? And so there's a 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 and, um, 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 it Marketing Mary, a VP of marketing who was, like, looking for a solution and, like, an all-in-one marketing solution because she didn't want to aggregate a bunch of point solutions. They had, then had this, like, enterprise, I think it was, like, called Enterprise Eddy or something like that, enterprise who was looking for a more, like, compliant marketing solutions, s- secure, like, a- all of these types of things. Still solving marketing, still trying to solve inbound marketing. So on the surface seemed the same, but when you, when you got down into it was kind of different. They 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, their needs and, well, 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, all that kind of stuff.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:06:06

       Mm-hmm.

    3. BBBrian Balfour1:06:06

       So they ended up focusing on that mid-marketing Marketing Mary persona and use case around the 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, they aligned, this was before my time, they aligned all the sales comp behind it. They aligned a- 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 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, you know, to these values?" Because those are the things that actually help us understand more of, like, 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, and all these other places. The last piece is, I've noticed this actually extends to almost all life (laughs) as well. I'll give a really strange example. This is something that I've brought up before but not a lot of people know about me, is that before my life in tech, I was actually a wedding planner for a few summers-

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:08:20

       I didn't, didn't know this.

    5. BBBrian Balfour1:08:20

       ... in, in, in LA. My uncle is a wedding planner down in LA, and, um, I went and worked with him for ev- a few summers, and, uh, 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, like, I learned in that, reflecting on that experience, is that the most miserable couples in the wedding planning process were the ones that were trying to solve for everybody. Their 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, and the people who tried to accommodate all of those things are prob- the ones that didn't have, you know, th- their, like, best experience for that what's supposed to be an amazing and magical day. And instead, I think in that process, right, like, my uncle would try to get them to essentially say, like, "Who is the most important group here? Is, is it your family? Is it your parents? Is that who you're try... That's okay if it is, like, there's nothing with that, but, like, let's focus on that. Or is it your friends, or is it, or is this like really an experience for you two?" And because what you design and build around the experience that you build around for a wedding really, really determines. And then, and then when all of these, like, edge things kind of came up, you could ask the question, "Well, like, is, is this really for you or is this for this s- group of people or set of people that you've distinctly said, like, 'You know what? We know they're gonna have a say, but we're, 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 is... I don't know, that's where a lot of my stress and, you know, anxiety has, has probably come from.

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:30

       This one really hits home. My wife often tells me that I am trying to make too many people happy at once.

    7. BBBrian Balfour1:10:36

       (laughs)

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:36

       And I have this people-pleasing tendency. And she's like, "You're not gonna make everyone happy, and just don't, don't sow, don't cause all these problems by making sure everyone's doing great." So...

    9. BBBrian Balfour1:10:45

       Well, what have you done with that? Have you, have you gotten better at identifying-

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:49

        Yeah.

    11. BBBrian Balfour1:10:49

        ... the, the groups to be like, "Mm, you know what, I'm, I'm making this trade-off, and that's okay?"

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:55

        Mostly I'm like, "No, I'm not. Leave me alone."

    13. BBBrian Balfour1:10:58

        (laughs)

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:10:58

        It's all... (laughs) I don't have this problem. But, uh, no, there is, uh, 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 gonna be okay."

    15. BBBrian Balfour1:11:08

        That's right. That's, that's 100%... That, that, that random Uncle Eddie, he will be okay if you don't give him what he wants.

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:13

        Okay. (laughs)

    17. BBBrian Balfour1:11:13

        So it's

20. 1:11:14 – 1:16:52

    There are many ways to do product

    1. BBBrian Balfour1:11:14

       okay.

    2. LRLenny Rachitsky1:11:15

       On the values piece, I thought I just wanted to double-click on that, 'cause I think it's really important. And this is something that I learned also from this guy Douglas Adkin, 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, like, 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, 'cause everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, every place has that."

    3. BBBrian Balfour1:11:46

       Yeah. I think this als- also comes down to I think a common topic that you probably get asked about too, i- well, like, even in all your series about how we do product, right? Like, you just did one on Linear, and there was actually quite a bit of Twitter response to it, right? (laughs)

    4. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:00

       Yeah.

    5. BBBrian Balfour1:12:00

       Which was like, "This only works, you know, in, you know, this methodology." But-

    6. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:05

       Yeah.

    7. BBBrian Balfour1:12:05

       But there's actually multiple ways to do product, product management. At Airbnb it was m- you know, it was much more designer, uh, from what I understand, much more designer-forward. And in some organizations, it's actually much more engineering-led and engineering-forward. And then other cases, it's much more product manager-forward. And there's different types of people, different shapes of people that help you create that environment and are successful and happy in that, in that environment. But it's, 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. A ton, creates just a ton of friction internally. And tho- those are just frustrating conversations.

    8. LRLenny Rachitsky1:12:55

       Yeah. That is absolutely true. I think with the Linear post, which we'll link to just so folks who 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 gonna hire product managers for as long as we can. It's gonna be designers and engineers running the show." And there's basically every other company where they men, often did hire product managers really early and it worked out great. So I think it really, but there are many ways to do it. I think a lot of it depends on who your founders are and what they value and the people you hire and how much do they want to do product management?

    9. BBBrian Balfour1:13:31

       100% based on founders. I think the second thing is who your customer and who you're building f-

    10. LRLenny Rachitsky1:13:35

        Mm-hmm.

    11. BBBrian Balfour1:13:35

        ... for, right? Like that, the thing in Linear's case is that they are building a product for themselves essentially, right? Right now, right? And that product is designed for modern software development teams, you know, who are most used by like engineers and designers. So, it makes sense that they have an intuitive sense of what the customer wants. Whereas if they're building a, 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.

    12. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:09

        No.

    13. BBBrian Balfour1:14:09

        And as a result, you need a specific type of way of developing product for that specif- that serves that specific customer. But I agree with you, it, a lot of it stems from founder, but I think also a lot of it stems from who and what you're building.

    14. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:23

        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 gonna be a fun job. Like, if you're a designer that's spending time talking to salespeople all day and writing research briefs and, you know-

    15. BBBrian Balfour1:14:37

        I think it's just-

    16. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:37

        ... PRDs-

    17. BBBrian Balfour1:14:38

        Yeah. I think it's time too, right?

    18. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:40

        Yeah.

    19. BBBrian Balfour1:14:40

        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 scents much more quickly, right?

    20. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:49

        Yeah.

    21. BBBrian Balfour1:14:49

        But I think it would, it could, would consume way more time, um, if they're building for a totally different audience, right?

    22. LRLenny Rachitsky1:14:56

        Right.

    23. BBBrian Balfour1:14:56

        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, like it's not just them being unhappy, but they're, 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, to the ultimate goal, which is building a successful product.

    24. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:15

        Absolutely. The other thing that I think of 'cause we're going down this thread of Linear 'cause 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, whereas designer led building for themselves. So it's, it's more of a question of just like when does it make sense? There's, I just hate that there's this like anti-product management sentiment just like-

    25. BBBrian Balfour1:15:48

        It is, that has come up.

    26. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:49

        "Oh, no product managers."

    27. BBBrian Balfour1:15:50

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. (laughs)

    28. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:52

        "Yes."

    29. BBBrian Balfour1:15:52

        Yeah. 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-

    30. LRLenny Rachitsky1:15:58

        Yeah.

Episode duration: 1:41:59