Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Two simple processes that you could put into place today is, one, set up a forum called Marketing Review. This can be a live meeting that you host for an hour a week or it can be a Slack channel where people are posting things async, or even an email alias where things get sent to. Have that be transparent to the rest of the organization so anyone in the marketing team, anyone in the product organization can join that forum. What that does is it creates a fishbowl where you see sort of, what are the themes that come out when somebody reviews a piece of content? Are they looking at the strategy? Are they looking at the audience? Are they looking at the words? Are they looking at the sort of design approach? So you learn through osmosis of looking at some of these discussions. And then I would say don't overdo it. I would say there are probably two checkpoints in a program that are really important to get aligned at. One is the 20% review. A 20% review is a strategy review. What are we trying to accomplish? Who are we trying to do it for, and what is the rough approach that we're going to take? If everyone feels comfortable with that, you come back at the 80% mark where you've done a lot of the work on the artifacts, the different types of teams that have to be involved and how do you take something to market it in the first place. And the reason that I say 80% is sort of critical because if you come in at the 99% mark and you're just looking for a rubber stamp of approval, and you don't really have the slack in the system to be able to make any changes, then that review was worthless. So come in at the 80% mark where you can still make some substantive changes before it goes out the door. And that serves the purpose of consistency so that your brand is showing up in a consistent way to the audience. And two, it helps the rest of the organization learn from each other. There's almost this unspoken element of what you're describing that I want to dig into a little bit, which is the need and value of having consistent and high quality marketing, communication. Why is that important? There's always this talk of just move fast break things. "We're going to be scrappy. We're not going to be obsessed with perfect quality of our, I don't know, websites and emails. " Just, why is that important? Why do you value that? Why should companies maybe value that more? It's funny because with the companies who value velocity actually do value their brand just as much, but oftentimes they think of these as two siloed separate initiatives that they have to put their headspace and calories towards. And I actually think they are not mutually exclusive. They are actually very interconnected. And so when you understand the consistency of your brand, it actually empowers the organization to move faster because you kind of understand how you want the brand to show up in the world. What is that experience that you want your customers to come away with when they interact with your brand? And the brand is not just marketing artifacts, it is your product experience. It is how your customer support team talks to them, how they resolve tickets. Are you getting passed between a bunch of different teams or is someone just resolving your ticket right away? It's the experience that they have for candidates when they come to recruit your company. So all of these variety of touch points that touch so many different organizations and teams within your organization, they are the amalgamation that makes up your brand. And so if you think of these two things as separate silos, you are optimizing for entirely the wrong thing.…

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