This 1-pager was developed for a check-in with the executive team and cross-functional leads (Partners team and Marketing team). The goal of the discussion was two-fold: 

Get approval from executive team to move forward 2. Get buy-in and resources allocated from cross-functional teams for pre-green light work to be done.

Get buy-in and resources allocated from cross-functional teams for pre-green light work to be done.

The user problem + target audience [demand] were typically scoped in parallel. We would look for problems which were high frequency, and high severity for an audience segment that was large, and addressable (i.e. we could reach them through our marketing channels).

Clarity on what kind of work the target audience does was really important. In the case of growth leadership - if company hasn’t proven out growth as a concept, then the challenges are more about getting buy-in, proving the value of growth work etc. It was also less in control of the individual growth leader. We chose not to tackle that problem, and instead focus on the big problem areas that growth leaders faced in companies where there was already buy-in for growth work.

We evaluated each topic brief with a lot of rigor - it was typically a multi-stage process. This stage was the first stage - where we got strong validation on strategic fit and demand, and initial signal on supply and insight quality. We would then do a second round of scoping and validation before green lighting the course and moving forward to development.

Because the primary target audience for this course were growth leaders who were already in our existing audience, we focused demand validation on our existing customer base. If we were evaluating a topic for a target audience we didn’t already serve, we would evaluate demand among non-customers.

We would typically do an initial survey of our network of experts to see what kind of supply we could attract. This would help us know whether we were ready to move forward with further validation of supply and insights, or if we needed to source new supply into our expert network. This takes a long time, and can impact the overall project timeline.

Evaluating insight quality is often the hardest part of the course green lighting process. Insights take time to develop, they tend to be subjective, and they are.

Based on pattern matching across 15+ courses, we noticed 3 things were different about courses that had the highest NPS / Satisfaction scores - they solved burning problems, there were few good alternative approaches to solve those problems, and the solutions themselves were actionable - they were specific enough that people could apply them to their work.

So at this stage of evaluation, we would try to get a read on whether the course has potential to get high quality insights, and then we work would with shortlisted experts to build out 1-2 topics to see if we got there.

These were the next steps we wanted exec buy-in and cross-functional partnership on.

Akshita Ganesh

I developed this 1-pager to get approval from executive team to move forward, and get buy-in and resources allocated from cross-functional teams.

 A summary of the user problem, target demand and target supply.

. Evaluation of topic brief against prioritization parameters of strategic fit, demand, supply and insight quality.

. Additional actions to be taken before the course is ready for a green light review.

🧠 User Problem This Course Will Solve

Growth strategy without a strong organization, processes, and goal structure often falls on it’s face. However, growth is often the mandate of the product or marketing leader, or in early stage companies, owned by the CEO. These leaders have not established or led growth teams before which leads to a few common mistakes:

Copying other companies’ org. structures and working models.

 (e.g., spinning out dedicated growth team because competitors have done so, or organizing growth teams as cross-functional experimentation pods because thats how Meta does it).

Force-fitting their functional mental models into growth work

 (E.g., using agile squads for cross-functional growth work; expecting growth teams to operate at the same velocity as feature dev. teams; hiring from established companies because of their reputation and experience even if skills are a mismatch)

Assuming growth = experimentation/hacking

. This common misconception that growth is all about experimentation leads to many growth leaders over-indexing on short-term gains over long-term value.

Underestimating the cross-functional dependencies and impact of growth work

 (e.g., Product oriented growth leaders might miss that a key success driver is aligning finance and marketing on the growth model)

These mistakes lead to slow or unsustainable company growth, lack of alignment between the work that growth teams are doing with product/marketing/finance, loss of trust in growth as a function and ultimately, a breakdown or sunsetting of growth in the organization.

👩🏽‍🦰 Target Audience For This Course [Demand]

 Growth leaders who have teams of 3+ growth practitioners in their org. Their titles could be Head of Growth, VP of Growth, Chief Growth Officer, CMO, CPO, President, GM etc.

: Working in post PMF companies where growth as a concept has been proven out or has some buy-in. Less relevant for enterprise-sales led models, or contexts where there is no org. buy-in for growth as a concept.

👩🏽‍🔬 Target Partners For This Course [Supply]

Growth leaders who have built and scaled up growth teams in post-PMF companies; Ideally they have built it from a small team of 1-2 people to a much broader team.

A combination of product and growth orientation across a diversity of growth models (B2B PLG vs. B2C transactional etc) between the experts will be an added bonus.

Ideally good combination of product-oriented and marketing oriented leaders

✅ Strategic Fit with Opportunity to Drive Retention

Core business value metric: Retention of existing audience

The product and growth program portfolios helps acquire early and mid-career growth practitioners. However, there is no growth program that serves mid-career practitioners graduating into leaders, which is a missed opportunity for multi-year retention of our growth audience. This program will fill that gap.

Growth leadership was the highest demand topic across audiences in Spring 2022 end-of-program demand survey; 30% of all respondents said they would be interested in this program.

Every cohort, we get a ton of questions about growth org. design, hiring, competency modeling etc. Most popular questions include: 

How do I evaluate growth team members? Is there a “growth competency” framework similar to the product competency framework?

How do I hire for and establish the first growth team in my organization?

How do I split my growth team between acquisition, eng. and retention?

Strong Early Pipeline of Potential Partners [Supply]

Over [X%] of Reforge’s expert network comprises growth leaders who meet the supply criteria.

Through initial interest survey, we have identified X leaders who fit the ideal partner profile (relevant roles and diversity of experiences), are interested in building a course and available to build during the next 8 months.

While we can’t yet validate insight quality without bringing experts on board, we have reason to believe this topic has the makings of high insight quality for a few reasons:

It addresses a high-intensity, high-severity user problem.

 Poor org. structures, goal setting and processes can erode trust between growth leaders and their executives and teams, which hurts both the individual’s career and the organization’s growth outcomes.

 . Because growth is a relatively “new” domain, there is very little high quality, specific and actionable content out there on this topic. Most of the advice is pretty generic or slight modifications on product /marketing leadership content.

Past success with actionable solutions on leadership topics.

 Reforge’s product leadership and engineering management programs were both successful in addressing some of the problem areas mentioned above around - org. design, operating model, forecasting impact and allocating resources to short-term vs. long term work.

 Initiate formal vetting process for partners. This will involve 2-3 conversations and reference checks to get to a shortlist.

 For shortlisted program partners, validate insight quality through topical blog posts.

Work with marketing team to get growth leadership topics on content calendar.

 Scope and prioritize list of topics through member survey and qualitative interviews. Explore open questions: 

How much should this course touch on strategy topics covered in other growth programs?

Should this course help growth leaders manage their own careers, in addition to building their organization?

Should this course also target aspirational growth leaders? Or should we focus onfolks who are already in the role of growth leader?

New Course 1-Pager: Reforge Growth Leadership

New Course 1-Pager: Growth Leadership

Topic Brief

🧠 User Problem This Course Will Solve

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