The 6 Elements of Direction: Finding your North Star

Practices we discuss include:

• Purpose beyond profit

  Why does your company make the planet a better place?

• Company values

  What are your guiding principles for aligning your team?

• Business ambition

  What business outcomes do you aspire to in the long run?

• North Star metric

  What is the ONE metric that really matters?

• Company value proposition

  What unmet customer needs do you solve uniquely well?

• OKRs

  How can you make your direction operational for your teams?

ESG: Environmental, social and governance as a driver of business success

(with Johannes Lenhard and Hannah Leach)

Practices we discuss include:

• Are you setting up an environmentally sustainable enterprise?

• Are you living up to high diversity, equality and inclusion practices?

• Are you investing in governance standards?

People (HR) Excellence: Attracting, developing and retaining the best crew

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right people OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your people function have all the roles and responsibilities in place?
  Are you scaling the right people roles at the right time?

• Recruiting & candidate experience

  Are you recruiting the best possible scale-up technology and product talent?
  Have you built up an internal executive recruiting agency?
  Are you attracting the right talent with a shining employer brand?

• Organizational development

  Is your job leveling, promotion and compensation fair and transparent?
  Are you deploying the best training and coaching programs possible?
  Are you measuring employee attrition and engagement in the right way?
  Have you put the right people support tools and operations in place?

Scale-up Mindset: Cross-functional principles which make the difference

Practices we discuss include:

• Growth hacking mindset

  Have you established cross-functional growth hacking teams for activation, retention and monetization?

• Customer centricity mindset

  Is every team member obsessed with the customer experience?

• Autonomy mindset

  Are you empowering your teams enough to make decisions rapidly & independently?

• Learn-it-all mindset

  Are you prioritizing learn-it-all over know-it-all?

Product Management Excellence: Launching products that create value for customers
(with Johnny Quach and Sven Grajetzki)

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right product OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your product function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Product vision and direction

  Are you developing a clear product vision and deriving your roadmap from it?
  Is your product organization focused on outcomes, not just designing a "feature factory"?
  Are you investing in your core product while pushing adjacent opportunities and venture bets?

• Product development process

  Are you creating a crystal-clear picture of your target customers?
  Is your product value proposition aligned with the underserved needs of your customers?
  Is your roadmap a crystal-clear communication tool developed with the right prioritization logic?

• Product management basics

  Are you getting the brand and product design right early on?
  Are you building a thriving user research engine quickly?
  Do you have best-in-class product management tools in place?

Technology Excellence: Creating scalable and secure tech platforms for future growth

(with Christopher Richter)

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right technology OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your technology function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Your way of agile

  Are you creating your own version of agile development?

• Development operations

  Are you establishing lean software development principles?
  Are you establishing technical DevOps practices for continuous delivery?
  Are you enabling a team of doers through the right DevOps culture?

• Scalable architecture

  Are you creating a “good enough” software architecture that can evolve over time?
  Are you building resilient and scalable cloud architectures?

• Information security

  Are you keeping the top 10 web application security risks on your radar and mitigating them?
  Are you integrating the key information security practices into design, development and deployment early on?

• Data management

  Are you establishing a scalable data architecture?

B2C Marketing Excellence: Scaling up with minimal expense and maximum customer retention

(with Kelly Ford)

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right marketing OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your marketing function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Marketing basics

  Are you establishing a single source of truth for your key marketing and growth KPIs?
  Are you bridging the gap between marketing quants and creative brains?
  Are you equipping your teams with the right marketing and growth tools?
  Are you finding your product-channel fit quickly and maintaining it?

• Organic and viral marketing

  Are you leveraging the power of organic conversions to drive down customer acquisition costs?
  Are you getting your PR machine up and running at full speed?

• Paid online marketing

  Are you harnessing the six key hacks for buying online ads efficiently?

• Offline marketing

  Are you leveraging the power of offline marketing in the digital age?

• Monetization

  Are you nailling your monetization strategy to drive revenue?

B2B Sales Excellence: Creating brand advocates & pipelines full of sales opportunities

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right sales OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your sales function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Sales playing field

  Are you exploiting the right niches?

• Sales basics

  Are you creating a commission plan that fits your growth stage?
  Are you enabling your sales teams with the right sales tech stack?
  Are you attracting and hiring a world-class sales team?
  Are you training and coaching a “challenger” sales team?
  Are you getting your basic sales pitch in place?

• Qualifying and closing leads

  Are you rigorous with your lead qualification criteria and process?
  Are you enabling your sales teams to close leads?

• Retaining and "farming" customers

  Are you measuring customer health to predict and prevent customer churn?

Service Operations Excellence: Resolving customer inquiries while delivering the wow factor
(with Dr. Niko Glusac)

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the service operations OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responisbilities

  Does your service operations function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Prevent contracts

  Are you ensuring "best service is no service"?

• Deflect contracts

  Are you deflecting unnecessary transactional contacts to automated self-help enough?

• Resolve contracts

  Do you have the right service specialist available at all times?
  Are you resolving customer inquiries with autonomous teams and close-knit performance management?
  Are you investing in Lean Six Sigma processes while giving teams enough room to create moments of service delight?
  Are you investing sufficiently in a loosely coupled, yet highly integrated suite of service tools?
  Are you making your external partners boost your business goals?
  Are you boosting back-office throughput with performance management, automation and centers of excellence?
  Are you investing enough in resilience to recover from demand and supply shocks quickly?

Supply Chain Excellence: Shipping customer happiness consistently
(with Matthias Wilrich)

Practices we discuss include:

• OKRs

  Do you have the right supply chain OKRs in mind?

• Organizational charts, roles & responsibilities

  Does your supply chain function have all key roles and responsibilities in place?

• Supply chain practices

  Are you recovering from demand and supply shocks quickly enough?
  Are you hiring supply chain specialists early enough?
  Are you boosting your order economics with performance-based contract clauses and price benchmarking?
  Are you getting your order economic analytics to a best-in-class level?
  Are you becoming proficient in supply chain operational excellence?

Finding Growth Capital: The 6 questions every growth stage investor asks

(with Vanessa Pinter)

Practices we discuss include:

• Fund fit

  Does your company fit the investor’s fund in terms of industry, size and funding needs?

• Timing

  Why now?

• Market potential

  Is your serviceable available market worth more than USD 1 billion?

• Category leadership

  Have you created a defensible solution which is 10x better than any other in that market?

• Business model

  Does your company’s performance to date show a path toward becoming profitable in the long term?

• Team

  Have you assembled a great executive team that can scale?

Negotiating Growth Term Sheets: 15 terms sheet issues to keep on the radar

(with Vanessa Pinter)

Practices we discuss include:

• Negotiation guidelines

  Are you following the major guidelines for term sheet negotiations?

• Key term sheet issues

  Do you have the 15 most important term sheet issues to be negotiated during a growth round on the radar?