459 Posts found for Source: First Round Review

The one thing every single one of us has in common at work is that we want to be successful. So whether or not a manager has charisma is irrelevant in that context. It’s the person who does the grinding work each day or week to make their team members successful. That’s who people ultimately want to work for.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russ Laraway | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Nobody ever applies for a job called ‘leader.’ The job is usually called ‘manager.’ We have to restore dignity to the office of the manager. I’ve found that folks are too focused on finding really complicated, cool leadership-y things for their unique environment, instead of just focusing on the stuff that works pretty much everywhere.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russ Laraway | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Leadership, Management

There’s one common ingredient across every type of manager: You’re leading people. So the core of what makes for good management can’t be all that different, whether you’re leading a team of baristas or engineers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Russ Laraway | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Build a team in the same way you would build a product. Just as you would think about your users and their pain points, you should think about your team and the problems you’re facing so that you have clarity on what you’re solving for.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Good strategy is good storytelling. People tend to overcomplicate it, but it’s actually quite simple. Strategy is outlining the things you are going to do to get where you need to go. I stress a lot around telling human stories. A good strategist should be able to say in 30 seconds what we’re doing for our users.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Strategy

An important skillset of being a good manager is what I call being an “emotional dampener” for the team. An emotional dampener finds themselves in situations where they know their team is upset, they know people are frustrated about a certain problem but choose to coach them and help them by dampening their emotions as opposed to riling them up. If that’s not an easy … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jiaona Zhang | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell.

Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell. On a smaller scale, you might think of a particularly sticky … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

Here on The Review, we’ve committed ourselves to an annual ritual each January. This year marks one decade of using the first week of a shiny new year as a chance to revisit every article and podcast episode we published in the 365 days prior.

2022 certainly brought plenty to reflect on. Assembling this year’s list was a reminder of just how quickly things can change. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Management

Choosing your next role is one of the most important investments you can make — but, unfortunately, no one hands you a ready-made toolbox for navigating big career decisions. And evaluating opportunities in the startup world — without much publicly-available information and data to grasp onto — can be an even trickier black box.

Even in a compressed job hunt, taking a few minutes to flip … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Career, Start-Up Resources – General

Product creators like to think of what’s possible: They dream about how introducing their product into the market might change the world. This is an appropriate framing — as long as it comes with a bit of humble pie. New products don’t succeed because of the wide breadth of features they provide. Facebook isn’t successful because it allows people to build groups, host events or … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Gagan Biyani | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Marketing / Sales

When you’re adding new features, the question shouldn’t be, “Is this potentially useful to someone?” Instead ask, “How does this contribute to our users achieving their goals?” It’s very easy to “value add” your way straight out of product/market fit.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Understanding how a person wants to view themselves is actually incredibly valuable. It tells you a lot about how you can mirror that feeling back to them with your product while still satisfying their actual preferences.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research, Market/Investment

Understand the why and the how behind user behaviors, identifying which ones actually demonstrate value and which ones are potential leading indicators of a broken experience.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jane Davis | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Market Research

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Price resets can create significant wins. But if minor changes in price cause massive fluctuations in output-KPIs, there’s a deeper problem: Your product is not working. 

The solution is to build a more diversified, customized product and pricing model — moving away from one-size-fits-all and towards granularity. By doing this, you won’t only improve your unit economics, but your product itself will become … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dee Sahni | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Marketing / Sales, Pricing

There’s typically about eight different steps in the customer jobs flow of someone starting and completing an action. You can really apply that framework to any product that you’re working on and look at the steps that you’re solving today. Look at the steps that you’re currently not solving and think about how you can solve other jobs that are ancillary to your core product. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation

One of the tricks that I learned is that at the beginning of every meeting you have with a potential buyer or someone who might use your product, always let them know the decision they need to make at the end of the meeting. It’s called submarining — you’re breaking up this long, really big decision of whether to potentially make this annual or multi-year … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Marketing / Sales

Founders should recognize the difference between validating product/market fit and discovering product/market fit. If you can deeply understand what your customers are looking for, you can discover product/market fit without actually having to build a product.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

You can’t rely on your customers to figure out what to build. They can really only tell you what outcomes they’re looking to achieve.

Content: Quotation | Author: Ryan Glasgow | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Innovation, Market Research

Widespread “good enough” hiring processes aren’t always mindful of the candidate experience — and most importantly, may not lead you to extend an offer to the best person for the role. The advice that follows from Peoplism is to intentionally examine the pieces of your hiring cycle that are already in place (and perhaps even be able to trim down some steps in your current … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Amber Madison, Liz Kofman-Burns | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Hiring, Human Resources | Company: Peoplism