Mission → Vision → Strategy → Goals → Roadmap → Task

As taught to us by Oceans 11 👇

If you want to get better at writing, do yourself a favor and subscribe to this free email series by @david_perell. I read every issue and take something away each time. Often, something game-changing. And it’s

How do you prioritize a roadmap?

First, take a step back and remember that a business is just a group of people solving problems for other people in exchange for money. Your job is to (1) figure out the problems, and (2) solve them in the most efficient way possible. Thread 👇

1/ Step 1: Figure out the problems -- get the ground truth:
* Talk to customers
* Talk to employees who talk to customers (CX, sales)
* Observe your customer's behavior, through data and user research
* Use the product yourself
* Look into what caused users to churn

2/ Step 2: Solve problems in the most efficient way possible -- least work for most impact:
* Develop hypotheses around what you believe will solve the problems
* Ideate solutions to these hypotheses (see link)
* Put these ideas into a spreadsheet

3/ Rate each idea from 1-5 across two attributes: (1) Impact: How impactful it'll be in solving the problem, and (2) Effort: How much work it'll take to execute. Guesstimate -- what matters most is relative differences.
* Sort the spreadsheet by ratio of Impact / Effort, discuss

4/ How do you estimate Impact?
Every decision is somewhere along this spectrum:
Gut <--------------------> Complete data
Knowing this, use all of the data at your disposal (quant, qual), plus your team's experience, to inform the estimate. You are smart people, trust yourselves.

I'm excited to share a new growth framework that @danhockenmaier and I have been developing (with help from the amazing @reforge crew)

I've been finding myself coming back to this framework often when talking to founders about growth.

Thread

1/ As a startup, it's essential that you, and your team, have a clear understanding of how your business is likely to grow. We call this building a Growth Model. With this, you'll know which growth investments to make right away, which to avoid, and which to double-down on.

2/ Our advice is to think about your business like a high-performance race car. The same four components that help a car drive faster also help your business grow:

1. ⚙️ The (Growth) Engine: Self-sustaining growth loops that drive most of your growth (e.g. virality, perf marketing, content, sales)

2. 💥 Turbo boosts: One-off events that accelerate growth temporarily but don’t last (e.g. PR, events, Super Bowl ads)

3. 💧 Lubricants: Optimizations that make the growth engine run more efficiently (e.g. improved conversion, a stronger brand, higher customer retention).

4. ⛽ Fuel: The input that your engine requires to run (e.g. capital, content, users).