Brian Balfour: recommendation

Transcript context

…Wow. I love that. Do you work that way? Do you try to work that way? We started working this way about, I'd say four or five months ago. We went through a few crazy years at Reforge where everything we were shipping was working and we were just trying to keep up with all of the growth. And then of course when all the macro stuff hit a year or so ago, we were kind of in the bullseye of it, being in the L&D space, a lot of our customers in tech, 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, to be frank. They were all disasters. And we had so many smart people around the table who had gone through these processes before, but I think when you're in that incredibly fast-growing stage, or you're in the earliest stage where you're landing a bunch of new bets that are a bit ambiguous and it's more like product 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 80 to 90% of the assets produced are actual visuals of the experience. It doesn't have to be product visuals either. I've started forcing marketing teams to show me what the potential marketing assets might be rather than giving me a Notion doc. Or we do a bunch of stuff on the supply side of our network and I'm like, "Well, what is a customer facing asset? How might they experience this?" Because we're going to have a way more productive conversation over that type of asset than a bunch of words on a Notion doc. And so we have started working like this in the past six months. We found it way more effective. Now how long that can last and how long that can scale: huge question mark, right? All of these processes, OKRs, all these kinds of things, they've been created for a reason in scale. But I think where we're at as a company, 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. And it doesn't matter if it can't scale because you're going to change it anyway. Right? The way I thought about planning always, it's just the best idea you have at the time, "Let's just do it this way."…

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