Tag: Philosophy

You can’t change the wind, but you can beat it!

From the archive:

Anything worth doing comes riddled with challenges. Whether leading a team in business or running a marathon, you will encounter obstacles, some bigger than others. How you evaluate these challenges and react to the obstacles will determine your short term project success and long term career happiness.

When running a marathon and the wind gets really bad, it’s hard not to expend unnecessary energy, take bigger strides or fold forward at the waist to challenge the wind. An uncontrollable force slowing progress is incredibly frustrating and can put you in a negative headspace perpetuating bad decisions. It is important not to overcorrect to the wind, instead keeping your form no matter how annoying the element becomes. With this said, wind and other weather conditions offer varying degrees of danger. 10–25 MPH wind may slow you down but rarely causes bodily harm. 50 MPH+ wind, hurricanes or tornadoes have the capacity to destroy everything in their path. When determining how you approach the conditions, consider the strength of the opposing force and power to influence your path independent of your actions…

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A Higher Purpose for Business Organizations

From the archive:

Common corporate nomenclature often assigns the Business team with the shortened “B-Team” or “B-Side”. The label might serve as a convenient abbreviation simplifying meeting/calendar subject lines, but more interestingly, “B-Team” can be indicative of the way a product-oriented founder views the business. For many leaders, business actually is an afterthought to the A-Team – Product/Engineering. Moreover, the Sales organization is seen as a coin operated function with the single purpose of driving revenue regardless of product-market fit or market demand.

A properly hired and trained sales organization should do much more than sell features dreamt up by the Product org. The Sales team is on the front line of untapped markets while Operations (Client Services) is normally the first to learn the needs of existing business. Taken together, insights from both teams can be invaluable in shaping product development and prioritizing feature launches based on market requirements.

There are countless tactics that can empower the B-Side to help your Product team build the best products for the market, but we will focus on a handful here.

Read full article on Linked In Here.