462 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

Make your remote team members first-class citizens. If a benefit, perk or experience is created for your in-office team members, find a way to create parity for those who aren’t in person. That means mailing items given to your in-office team to remote workers — or if you cover lunch for your in-office team, send your remote team a gift card or stipend for food … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

There’s a difference between delegating and absolving yourself of responsibility.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Resilient founders don’t ask “Which competitor are we scared of?” Instead, it’s “What fully-formed company would be an existential threat to us, whether it exists or not? And if it doesn’t exist, why aren’t we building it?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

I don’t worry about competition, I worry about my own vision being wrong, which creates an opportunity for competition to succeed. If anything, I think we spent too much energy thinking about the noise everyone else was making and not enough thinking about our own place in the real market.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Competitive Intelligence, Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

Product/market fit isn’t a diploma you hang on your company’s wall. It’s a moving target that you constantly have to monitor. Take it from me — you can find it, only to watch it slip through your fingers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Bob Moore | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Marketing / Sales

Unstructured meetings are a waste of time. Remember, time is your most precious resource as a manager — and wasted time harms yourself and your team.

Content: Quotation | Author: Karen Rhorer | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips

One of the most common startup failure modes is investing in too many channels at once, and as a result not investing in any one channel enough. As an example, betting big on both SEO and virality feels like a really good idea (“We’ll grow twice as fast!”), but in practice it rarely works. And it’s often not clear that either of these routes are … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Dan Hockenmaier, Lenny Rachitsky | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

When your direct report asks for advice, turn it around and ask “Before I answer, what do you think?”

Content: Quotation | Author: Lenny Rachitsky | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Keep track of instances where your report did well, didn’t do well, or generally did something noteworthy. Share these things with your report in weekly 1:1s and save them in a running file so you can refer to them come performance season.

Content: Quotation | Author: Lenny Rachitsky | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

[Ask your direct reports, “What’s harder than it should be?”] It helps you identify patterns when you talk to various people. It helps you smell smoke early. That question could apply to many situations, jobs and companies. And it isn’t judgmental.

Content: Quotation | Author: Maggie Leung | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Your job as a manager isn’t to dole out advice or ‘save the day’ — it’s to empower your report to find the answer herself. She has more context than you on the problems she’s dealing with, so she’s in the best position to uncover the solution.

Content: Quotation | Author: Julie Zhuo | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Starting to address diversity by focusing on recruiting is like fixing the quality of the product by improving your testing process. Testing won’t fix a broken product, just as recruiting won’t fix a broken environment.

Content: Quotation | Author: Nikhyl Singhal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Diversity, Human Resources

Here’s my simple definition of product/market fit: The value of each user is greater than the cost of bringing them into the product. It means there are enough customers out there and you can efficiently bring them in. […] There are a lot of product/market fit definitions out there that focus on how many users love you. But that misses a key ingredient: the profitability … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Nikhyl Singhal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Marketing / Sales, Project Management

It’s important to set aside the time for critical reflection. That work hinges on a resolve to deeply introspect about where you’ve been, where you’re headed and how you can seek self-improvement, even in the midst of stormy weather.

But it’s hard to know exactly how to approach this vital work. Often, personal development and self-improvement gets lumped together under the umbrella of “self-care.” But we … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Personal Development

I don’t really understand how you have an organization where managers review all their reports, but reports don’t review their manager. Frankly, if I had to have one, I would rather have all reports reviewing their manager than the other way around.

Content: Quotation | Author: Max Ventilla | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Management, Organizational Behavior

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Massella Dukuly, Tania Luna, Dr. Vaneeta Sandhu and Vanessa Tanicien of LifeLabs Learning stopped by First Round recently for a tactical discussion on why and how leaders can become more deliberately inclusive. Given the much-needed push for change that has been taking place in the tech industry, we thought we’d share our notes from this internal conversation with a wider audience here on the Review. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Massella Dukuly, Tania Luna, Vaneeta Sandhu, Vanessa Tanicien | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

There’s a big difference between modes of support that a mentor offer, whether it’s championing, mirroring, coaching, or advising. It’s easy to jump straight into giving advice based on our own experience, but often that’s not what your mentee needs. Maybe she just needs someone to say ‘Keep going, you’ve totally got this!’”

Content: Quotation | Author: Sally Carson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

I think people need two different categories of mentors: One that’s three to five years ahead of you who’s doing the job that you want to have next and a mentor who’s much older and has already achieved the level of success you’re after. Mentors who are only three to five years ahead can sink into the nitty-gritty tactics and help you tackle the problems … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Chris Hicken | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Personal Development

What most crisis communication systems neglect is closing the loop with colleagues in the same careful manner as they do with their customers.

Content: Quotation | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Risk Management