411 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

After OKRs are set, there’s no ritual for reviewing them, so they quickly get out of date. Then employees start resenting them because the effort to actually create the goals was a waste of time — and OKRs slowly die because no one looks at them anymore. Expectations aren’t enough. It’s the ritual that keeps the priorities top of mind and folks focused on what’s … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Kevin Fishner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

What I’ve found is that it’s not necessarily the way you ask for feedback that matters. It’s how you show up when you receive that feedback that increases your chances of getting high-quality insights.

Content: Quotation | Author: Nate Stewart | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

For interpersonal [feedback], I’m a big fan of a simple formula: “When you A, I feel B, because C, and what I’d really like is D.” Specific behavior, specific emotion, specific cognition, specific alternative behavior.  And I think a variant can be used for delivering performance feedback as well: “When you A, it causes B, because C. One thing to try could be D.” Specific … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Wallaert | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior

If we only focus on the monetary barriers to adopting a product, we miss out on a lot. There are also time, effort and energy costs — ones that we are often unaware of. Consider when the real cost of change occurs in a transaction, and solve for that uncertainty.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Innovation, Marketing / Sales

Show people what they are losing by not doing something, and help them realize that even if the moment-to-moment costs are harder to create change, even over a short period of time, the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Change Management, Management, Organizational Behavior

A startup’s biggest competition isn’t an established player, it’s inertia.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

[A cold outbound strategy] gives you a very good sense of how something resonates. On the other hand, if you get a warm intro, people will take the call and maybe ask for a demo. It’s very non-committal and vague, and I actually think that’s harmful to startups because it can make them think they have product-market fit when they don’t.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Hsu | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

If you want to launch a startup, you need to have differentiated beliefs about the world. If your beliefs are the same ones that everyone else has, there’s no reason why you’re going to find success when others didn’t.

Content: Quotation | Author: David Hsu | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

At large corporations, making decisions is often not a matter of getting somebody to say yes, it’s getting nobody to say no.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sara Clemens | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

The key thing that leads people to feel like companies are slowing down is when decisions don’t get made, when there is an opportunity or an issue and it just drifts on. Not knowing who can make a decision is the curse of large organizations.

Content: Quotation | Author: Sara Clemens | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Organizational Behavior

Ask the question: Which quarterly goal does that workstream support? If you keep finding that the work that you’re doing isn’t reflected in the quarterly goals, it’s time to rethink how you’re approaching those OKRs, or get them right the next time.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russ Laraway | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Management, Personal Development

There’s no problem with tackling low-hanging fruit. Eventually, you have to. But you better make sure that you solve for the bottleneck first — because every bit of low-hanging fruit you tackle creates an illusion of progress and sunk cost problems.

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Project Management

When moving from a BigCo to a startup, about half of what you know will be innovative and incredibly useful to your new company and the other half will only work at the later stage. Your job is to figure out as quickly as possible which half is which.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jeanne DeWitt Grosser | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Entrepreneurship, Personal Development, Work

Product-market fit is one of the most important, yet elusive, concepts in company building. It’s not a clear metric you can measure or a milestone you can easily check off your to-do list. I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from “pushing” your product on people to them “pulling” it out of your hands. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Todd Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

I firmly believe that the majority of my time and coaching energy should actually go into people who are high-performing. They are the rocket ships that could end up running parts of the company someday. To me, as a manager you’re looking to bring out the maximal optimized version of each person. So when you have someone who’s doing really well, the question should be, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Molly Graham | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

My approach to management is about fighting cognitive biases. Humans have a recency bias, meaning we tend to overweight recent experiences. In management that means I’m mostly paying attention to whoever I talked to last — as the saying goes, “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” So I try to be on alert for the people who I haven’t heard from. It’s often because they … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Wallaert | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

It’s easy to assume that listening is merely about showing up and paying attention to the other person, but it’s also deeply tied to paying attention to ourselves. Being an effective listener is about building self-awareness around how you naturally show up in conversation.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ximena Vengoechea | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Personal Development

We often think of miscommunication as an issue with our own content or delivery — that if we could tweak the what or the how, our message would be more effective. But that perpetuates a dynamic where we view our counterparts as an audience, not as collaborators.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ximena Vengoechea | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Communication, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Your job in 1:1s is to make each person feel heard.

Content: Quotation | Author: Liz Fosslien | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

As part of the strategic planning process, you’re making choices. It’s important to document those concrete choices — not just that we’ve chosen to do A, but also to explicitly reinforce that we’re not going to do B.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ravi Mehta | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Strategy