Patrick Campbell: belief

Transcript context

…All right, back on track. Topic number five, shipping. What have you learned about shipping? What are mistakes people make when trying to ship faster, ship more efficiently? Yeah. The bratty thing here is that real professional ship. At the end of the day, real... I don't care what if you're a marketer or product person, engineer, ops person, people ops, real professional ship, and they ship it a pretty high frequency for whatever they're doing. And so the thing that we thought a lot about is, in my opinion, your tempo framework, and I'll explain a little bit more of what that means in a second, is more important than your org design. And so if you've ever had a team that seems really, really smart, but they're always planning or they don't really ship a lot, or you've had trouble where everyone gets it at the leadership level, but then the team below them and below them seems to be kind of going in a different direction, you probably don't have enough alignment and you don't have enough alignment on what good looks like in terms of tempo. And so the way we looked at this was we have to establish mission metric and guiding principles at the top so, what do we do? How are we measuring it? And how we're going to get there? So for us was we automate subscription growth. Our mission metric was the amount of revenue that was on ProfitWell because that was good from acquisition, but it also meant we were doing our jobs. Then how we're going to get there. We want to be the most helpful brand in SaaS. And then we also we're going to do it for you, this whole thing that I just talked about. Then what we did is we established that at the leadership level, every org leader, so marketing, sales, et cetera, they need a framework that fits into that overall. So marketing at ProfitWell was this whole inbound media, so lots of podcast, video series, et cetera. And the most important part of that was they needed to determine what good looked like in terms of shipping. So if we're like, "Hey, we're doing sales," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, or marketing in this case, "this many episodes per month, it's this many product launches per month, this many big product launches per quarter," whatever it is. And then your leadership is basically a conversation of, "Great, that's what good looks like, we agree. How do we close that gap?" And then all of those conversations are like, "Okay, you only shipped one thing per quarter, we want to do one per month. Why?" "Well, I don't have enough resources." We solve that problem or we figure out how to get the more resources, then they're not doing it again. "Okay, why?" "Well, there's this problem." And then all of a sudden you start to create this very high output team across the board, and you also have this alignment so you don't wake up nine months into someone being at your company and being like, "Well, I think Tim sucks." And it's like, "Well, why did you just all of a sudden wake up and think Tim sucks." "Well, he's not shipping blah, blah, blah, blah." "Well, it's probably an org problem rather than a Tim problem," because again, you vetted Tim. you just all of a sudden wake up and think Tim sucks." "Well, he's not shipping blah, blah, blah, blah." "Well, it's probably an org problem rather than a Tim problem," because again, you vetted Tim. Tim was at this other company and apparently was a really great rockstar. So what's the difference here? You screwed up the hiring? Well, maybe because that is really, really hard, but most of the time you just haven't set an expectation of what good looks like in terms of tempo, and then you haven't had that constant conversation to make sure that Tim has what he needs in order to ship.…

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