Georgiana Laudi: Welcome to the Forget the Funnel podcast, where we help SaaS and recurring revenue businesses stop guessing and start making more customer-led and data-backed decisions about how to grow. We're a product marketing and growth consultancy that helps te ams learn from their best customers and map and measure their experiences.
To unlock your most effective levers for Growth. If you're ready to evolve past best practices and other people's playbooks because you know that what got you here won't get you there, then this show is for you. With that, let's dive into the episode. Hey everyone. So today, we're gonna be talking about first principles.
And first principles are not a new topic. It is wildly important right now, though. I am feeling much the same as I'm sure many of you working in tech are right now. My head is spinning. There is so much going on. There is so much changing. The pace at which things are happening right now is just, I almost can't, I mean, I definitely can't quantify it.
I talk to a lot of teams right now, some at AI companies, some not AI companies, and all tech, and there's just a feeling of either moving too quickly or moving too slowly. Most of the time, even the teams move too quickly. They feel like they're moving too slowly, and I thought it was a really important time to go back to first principles and revisit.
Even for me, these core principles, at the end of the day, help us anchor the decisions that we're making and help us make sense of what it is that we do every day. And I know it is a really helpful exercise for me. And I do this regularly, except that it's just so much more important right now.
So I'm going to assume that you all might feel something like I am, uh, which is that things are moving at just a head-spinning pace. If we can anchor ourselves in first principles like these, not only will we be able to make better decisions, but we'll be able to enable our teams to make better decisions, too.
So, let's get into this. A couple of situations that brought this, uh, topic to the forefront for me. Suppose your team is moving fast. But nothing feels like it's quite landing, and you're wasting time shipping features that aren't sticking. And this isn't a new problem. Um, this is certainly something that I've heard from teams for a very long time, but I will say I.
The velocity at which teams are doing product development is exacerbated. Yes, it's easy to correct, but there are so many downstream implications. Moving so fast that you are, I don't wanna say breaking things, but like moving fast to the point where you're developing features and products, you're wasting time, and you're confusing things for your customers, your team, and yourself.
So, a few hours spent on aligning around first principles can save weeks of wasted work. And I wanna say it could even save you years. I know I've worked with teams over the years where they were solving for one customer for years, and it wasn't until they slowed down and took a step back that they realized that they'd been focused on the wrong customers all along.
This has happened several times. I've told these stories before, so this is certainly not new, but my concern is that this will continue to happen. No, it might not take you years to realize, but at the pace at which a lot of these product teams have to operate right now, two weeks is an eternity.
The next thing that comes to mind is those teams stuck in analysis, paralysis, and potentially drowning in data. These are teams typically that have been around for a little bit longer, and they're trying to wade their way through a lot of what's going on right now. They're trying to make good decisions about how to prosper in this environment, and first principles help those; if this sounds like you, it helps you cut through the noise and make better decisions.
But cutting through the noise is the piece that I wanna sort of lean into there. We did a previous episode of around teams that are like. Data are rich and insights poor. Um, if that sounds like that might be you, I would encourage you to check out that episode teams that have been around for a couple of years that aren't AI-first companies; they've got this very different thing that they're contending with right now.
If this feels like you if you feel like maybe you're not drowning in data. 'cause I know no team. Well, that's not true. I was gonna say that no team has ever come to us and said they're drowning in data. We have had teams come to us and say that we have way too much data, and it's clouding our judgment.
But even if you're not in a situation where you feel like you're drowning in data, you might be looking to your data for answers when you need to take a step back and remind yourself what the f it is you're doing and help your team make more decisive and confident decisions.
Another thing that might be going on right now is that you think you need to reposition or new messaging, which might be true. Uh, the mistake that I just don't want you to make is assuming that positioning and messaging are a marketing exercise because if you are. Product team. If your sales team, your customer success team, you know, if your go-to-market and product team are not aligned on who your product is for and why it matters, you're gonna end up with a very broken and sort of Frankenstein customer experience.
And that can happen whether or not your SaaS has been around for years. And that can happen if you are building at this velocity, which I know is a lot of AI TE teams are right now. If your teams are confused, your customers are certainly going to be confused, and you're gonna start to lose revenue, maybe even more than you currently are.
So again, if you're thinking about updating your positioning and changing your positioning and messaging, just I'm gonna talk a little bit about, basically, you're gonna see why positioning and messaging isn't a marketing exercise. I don't want you to make that mistake. So, in this episode, I will speak mostly to AI and SaaS product founders.
They're practitioners who, you know, are the practitioners on those teams, and product and growth roles go to market roles. Then, teams also struggled with the speed of execution. So, product teams and founders tend to live in the future as they should. Right now, that future is changing daily, which has implications and can be stressful.
The leadership team and, certainly, the founder, but the practitioners as well. Heads of product, heads of Growth, heads of marketing, heads of sales, and customer success. Those teams, as well, can struggle. To execute when things are changing as quickly as they are. So this is who I'm talking to today, and I wanna make sure that that is clear.
So, for those of you who are like first principles, I know I don't have time for first principles. Our hair is on fire here, and I don't have time for this. What? I have a couple of things that I wanna say to you before I get into the meat of the episode. And so what I wanna say is that I want you.
To stop wasting time on things that don't move the needle. That is my goal for you in this episode. I would also like you to be able to quickly assess whether or not your messaging, your roadmap, or your customer experience is aligned with actual demand in the market. I like it, but I cannot emphasize this one enough.
Why most teams are optimizing in silos and ending up with a broken customer experience and how to fix it, I want you to be able to walk away with clarity. Around that. And then also, I want you to walk away with a framework or at least clarity on how to choose a framework to make better decisions no matter how quickly things are changing.
This episode is not about AI today. I'm not gonna give you the date, uh, because I want this to sort of be like the antidote to how quickly things are moving. This is the reminder that I think. These are the reminders that I think teams need right now. So even though you might be a skeptic and might be like, I know first principles, I got it.
I don't; I don't need to rehash the old. All I can focus on and all I have time for right now is what's happening and what's new. I want to make this sort of promise to you that this is my goal, this is what I'm focused on, and if this sounds like something that you need and that would be valuable for you, then that's why I'm doing this other reason that I'm doing this.
There are two companies that I'm working with right now that have prompted me to want to record this episode, and they are in. Two very different situations. And so I'm gonna tell you about that, and hopefully, that helps create a little bit of a context, and maybe you're gonna see yourself in these two stories.
Okay. So I'm working with an AI company that, as far as AI companies go, is relatively mature, has been around for a couple of years, and has tens of thousands of customers. Growth has started to slow slightly, but momentum is high, like really, really high. This company is on fire like they are building. Quickly, the product team is off to the races.
They are super excited and gung-ho, and things are changing so fast. I was gonna say for a second, weekly, a new way of building product, like comes across product teams desks. But actually, it's more like daily right now. And because of that, more and more like the velocity is just. A lot higher, but also more and more team members have ideas and things they want to try, and it's amazing, and it's so exciting, and it's like the lid has been blown off of what is possible.
What that means for this product team is that they need to be focused on obviously building the right things so that they're not wasting time because they have no time to waste, but also, their go-to-market has to keep up with this, and that is. A challenging thing to manage, right?
When your product changes, like your value proposition, changes from one week to the next or potentially changes from one week to the next. That has massive implications for your go-to-market but also for your team and the people who are responsible. For going to market with this product.
Now there's this other situation, this other story that I have of a company that I'm working with that has been around for a long time. They've been around for over a decade, shifting target markets and doing the right thing. It's the right time to shift into this new market.
But this team, because the team members, many of them have such. Like long histories with this company, they have a ton of historical context. They've got a ton of data that they've relied on over the years to make decisions, and this is new territory for them. And it is feeling a little bit like there's a little bit of analysis paralysis in terms of a lot of different directions that can go in, and the team is.
Starved for, like, what is the next big thing we should do when there's a lot of short-term opportunity for them on the table, but there are just so many directions they could go in. So, the first principle I want to discuss is that marketing does not create demand, and marketing does not create.
Demand is wildly important right now because of the massive appetite to deliver products. Right now, just a glut of products is coming onto the market. The thing that I wanna remind those teams and those founders of is that your product exists, but that does not mean that there is a demand. And on top of that, you cannot just like.
Add marketing on top of that to create demand. Marketing does not create demand. The demand exists where there is a struggle, and many of us know this, of course, if we have any man amount of years of experience working in in tech and in product and in marketing, we all inherently know that demand exists where there is a struggle, but it is easy to forget this when you are like.
Stoked about the thing that you're about to bring to market. And this is where I get a little bit nervous for teams when they're kind of like we're, we are going back a little bit to like building for the sake of building. And I think this first principle is the anchor many teams need to remember.
You are not in the category creation space. You might be in the category creation space but not the problem creation space, right? There is a problem, and it is our job to find and direct it, like finding that demand and directing it appropriately. And there's no amount of marketing that is going to create a need or demand for your product.
And so you better get damn good. Damn clear on what that struggle is that creates that demand for your product. For principle number, number two, people buy progress, not products. Now again, I. This is not novel. I mean, no first principle is novel, I suppose. I was listening to a podcast episode recently with Bob Maa where he was talking about the previous first principle around creating demand.
Marketing does not create demand. And, of course, if we look at this too right, people buy progress, not products. Our customers hire our product. To do a job for them. And we talk a lot about jobs to be done here. We love it as a framework. Bob Moesta is one of the original co-archers of the Jobs to Be Done framework and approach.
He wrote the Forward for our book, Forget the Funnel, um because of our customer-led Growth. The framework builds upon the jobs-to-be-done framework. We believe so heavily in this approach, and I know a lot of product teams do as well, and that is why this is one of the first principles today. We cannot forget this, right?
It is not about our shiny features. Um, we can have the full debate about benefits versus features. We have a previous episode where we recorded, uh, about benefits versus features. That's not actually what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about here that, like right now, there's just a massive tendency to roll out features.
Feature sake, and we cannot forget to focus on the transformation that those features allow, not the features themselves. Again, this is just like a big reminder: Take each one. I'm slapping you in the face whenever you say something against these first principles. I like it, but I cannot stress enough about this.
The best kind of marketing, the best kind of messaging, the best kind of, you know, product experience and customer experience is the one that leads people to say, that is me. They see and understand me, and I feel seen and understood; this represents where I wanna go. That is the only thing that matters.
And so, as amazing as the new features you might be building, the only thing your customers care about is the progress they are trying to make. That's it. I'm not saying the brand is not important, it is important, but as far as building a messaging strategy and a product experience for them and the product that you develop, it has to be about the progress that your customers are trying to make in an organized way, which brings me to first principle number three.
Context is everything. I talk a lot about context, and context is everything. I mean, it's a silly name for the first principle, I suppose. But let me get into what I mean by this. So there are many ways I could talk about context, but the way that I wanna sort of lean into here is that. The other thing to remember, other than the fact that, like, you are not going to create demand, the struggles and, and problems and the, the, the market creates the demand and that your customers, you know, people are not trying to buy a product.
They wanna make progress. They don't care about your product. Next, you must remember that customers need different things at different times. I'll say like in their lives because they're human beings and their relationship with you. And, when I say their relationship with you, I mean from being in the world, not even experiencing it.
The problem that you solve, and this is where it becomes important for us, right? To the context, you know, the life they are experiencing as they're experiencing the problem for the first time, right? Like, when are they like, oh, this sucks, and what are they doing in that moment?
What was their experience at that moment? Is it with a tool? Is it in a conversation? Is it in their job? Is it, uh, you know, is it a life decision? Like what. It is going on in that specific context where they first experience the problem that you are ultimately gonna help them solve.
That is one very specific context and only one of, like, potentially dozens that your customer will be in, in their relationship with you. Imagine all the others that come, right? What matters when they're in the problem space and potentially even in solution-seeking mode is very different from what matters to them when they land on your website and discover that you exist when they decide to try your product for the first time and get into that onboarding experience from when they.
You know, become a customer and reach value realization from when they evolve past the problem that you help them solve and need something else now. Or it's, you know, a renewal time, um, or, you know, you introduce something else to them to expand their product usage. Every single one of those points is completely different from the other.
And I see way too many teams confuse and conflate all those different contexts. This is why it is so important to deconstruct your customer's experience and identify those key milestones. You know, we talk about these like success. Milestones are these moments of value that your customer experiences along with their relationship with you.
Again, from being out in the world, experiencing the problem that you are gonna help them solve, to evaluating your solution, to talking to their colleagues, to getting into the product and trying for the first time to inviting their team members to asking their boss to expand it like. In all of those situations, it is our job to deconstruct their customer experience in a way that allows us to understand and go deep on each of them so that we can understand what they are thinking, what they're feeling, and what they're doing so that we can create an amazing experience for them.
All along the way, it is our job to adapt to them, not their job to adapt to us. And that is something that if you were honest. And you honestly did, if you did the secret shopper thing in your customer experience across your marketing and your website, and you went into your product, if you pretended to be for your customer for a second, I wager you are going to see discrepancies in the experience that you're providing.
First principle number four, focus on actionable metrics, actionable and meaningful. I don't wanna harp on this too much um, but I will say that this is not a marketing thing. It's not unique to marketing. I know that vanity metrics are often referred to as a marketing thing, but that's.
Product has just as many vanity metrics as marketing teams do. So I mean, I'll give you an example. On the product side, you might have a habit of tracking weekly active users or monthly active users. I. Or credit card entered, there is a chance, potentially even a high likelihood that those metrics, uh, just as examples might have, might be vanity metrics.
They might have nothing to do with your customer reaching or experiencing value. We did a two-part podcast on developing and thinking about these KPIs, like leading indicators of success, and how to identify them, define them, and tie them back to product usage. And so I won't go on too much, but if you're interested in that, I would check out those two episodes because we go pretty deep on like.
Why, what is this thing? But I want you to remember here that I'm seeing just a lot of teams relying on metrics that don't matter. And especially now, right? Again, the lid has been blown off of everything we could do, and I think that is.
Amazing. I think that's so, so, so exciting. Marketing teams are experimenting with new things. Product teams are experimenting with new things, and I think that that's incredible. But the North Star, so to speak, needs to be rooted in all the things they're trying, like our customers getting to a moment of value.
And that's exciting, right? That puts teams in a position of doing incredible things when they don't need to just be laser-focused on weekly active users or visitors to the blog or, you know, engagement on social posts. But I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that a lot of teams are just too low of a level.
They're considering what they prioritize at the micro level instead of the macro level. And so when we do customer experience mapping for teams, what we're doing is we're under, we're identifying those milestones in the customer experience where customers take these like leaps of faith.
And for each of those milestones, we are identifying one. Quote unquote, like North Star, is a sort of KPI for each of those milestones because context is everything, and I call it a North Star. I call them North Star metrics, which I recognize as an oxymoron because there should only be one by virtue of the name.
But I genuinely believe there is a North Star metric for each milestone. Does your company have a North Star overall? Should you, I'm sorry, have a North Star metric for your product? A hundred per cent. I'm not anti-North Star metrics at all. At all. I would refer to that as value realization like your customer has reached value realization.
That should be your North Star. The tippy, tippy top. But then there are the other leading indicators of success that should roll into that. And they're sort of the, the tie that binds between your, maybe your North star metric or MRR growth, these like lagging indicators of success versus the tactical metrics that your team is likely swimming in right now as they are experimenting with new things.
And at the end of the day. If you are not moving the needle on, you know, your customer's ability to understand if the value that you provide, you know, matches the hellscape that they're in on your website, for example. Then, like, what are you doing? You know, if your product experience isn't helping your customer get to a really meaningful moment, a first value in your product that convinces them to keep going on their way to reaching full value realization, and you're focused on them entering a credit card.
No, that, that might have nothing. I'm almost positive it has nothing to do with them experiencing value, so I'm just seeing a lot of teams getting bogged down. Again, it kind of goes back to that, like data-rich insights, poor problem, where a lot of teams are missing the forest for the trees.
And I, by the way, empathize because there is so much going on, and there is so much experimentation happening inside of teams right now that this is, and it's easy to happen. And I'm not saying that these smaller measures of success are not important but at the end of the day.
Nothing is more important than those high-level KPIs that tell us that we have done our job, helping our customers get from one milestone to the next. Everything else is noise unless it is driving towards that, unless those underlying metrics are driving towards those higher LED KPIs, it's noise.
Okay, that's my fourth first principle. So again, as a reminder, right, when your head is spinning, either because you're moving too quickly or you're moving too slowly, or things are feeling chaotic, right? The first one, marketing does not create demand. It's up to us to identify that struggling moment and meet it, meet that moment, harness that demand, and meet them where they are.
People also do not buy products they buy. Progress. It is not about your features. Nobody cares about your product. They care about the progress that you are gonna help them make. That is critically important to remember. Context is also everything. So you can have all the amazing ideas in the book, I'm seeing a lot of teams throw the kitchen sink.
At their customers across the customer experience, they are sending way too many messages simultaneously when people are in and are not ready for it, right? This is not unique right now. Um, this is something that we've helped teams with for years and years. Throwing the kitchen sink at their customers.
You know what? Onboarding as, as a good example, has been a problem for a very long time, but that is. One of the, the first principles that we all need to remember when we are building campaigns, when we're building programs, when we're building programmatic comms, or even ai, you know, uh, personalized experiences, context is everything and the team needs to.
Operationalize or deconstruct the customer's experience in a way that makes decision-making much easier and also ideation so much more exciting, honestly, and a lot more focused, which is first principle number four, focusing on. Meaningful, actionable metrics are so, so important right now. It is so easy to get lost in the data right now.
It's so easy to get lost in the weeds of execution and lose sight of what matters to your customers, as well as measure our ability to help them reach those moments of success. Okay. Now, to apply these first principles, I cannot go on and on about these first principles and not talk about them, like the reminder here, like audit where your team is stuck.
Now, this might. Be easy, or this might be hard. It could be easy if you're like, okay, I'm gonna k put these first principles in the, in my mind's eye, and I'm gonna think these things through, like after you've listened to me like rattle off about these things, you might be like, I know where our biggest deficit is.
I know where. The team is stuck. It might be one or two key areas that the team is stuck on. Parts of the customer experience might be off, or that decision-making is poor. Um, inside of, you know, some of the teams potentially, or you might not know. You might have gone through all of this and still feel unsure.
What is the problem? If that is you, the problem is your customers, and I don't mean that your customers are the problem. I mean your understanding and clarity around your customers and team. Clarity around your customers and in delivering the experience your customers need when they need it.
It is a problem like you don't have a revenue problem; you have a customer problem. Right? That's, that's the, I don't wanna say like, it's an old adage, but that is so true. Maybe that should have been a first principle. You have to understand your customers and if you sort of take a, uh, the macro look at what's going on inside your team right now, and you are not sure what the problem is, you need a realignment around who your customers are.
I cannot tell you how many teams that we have worked with over the years that have operated for. Years without really truly understanding who they serve. And they spread themselves too thin, and they survived despite it. And my worry now is that those teams won't survive anymore. Your days are numbered if you don't deeply understand who you serve.
Your team doesn't have absolute clarity, and that information is not democratized across your team. I always talk about democratizing that information and removing all ambiguity around what matters, too. Your best customers should be your center of gravity, and if you are not sure what is wrong or you're experiencing slowed or inconsistent Growth, that's your problem.
The next thing that I will say is to identify if speed or indecision is the problem. Again, this is a situation where, like, this might be easier, or it might be difficult for you to figure this out because if you are not like on the ground with your team in the execution and not like a witness to the execution, it might be indecision, right?
Like if you're not seeing a lot of. Execution, it's probably gonna be indecision, but you might also see it's spaghetti at the wall. And, um, both situations are terrible, and understanding that is important. But they're both a problem in either case.
Entering around the context in which, you know, they're executing their ideas or the customer context that they need could speed up the teams that are locked in in the decision and could also help. Reorient the teams that might be moving too quickly, like wasting time, throwing spa at the wall, aligning products, and implementing a go-to-market strategy in real demand.
This one is very, very pertinent right now. Again, going back to just the velocity at which I'm like teams are executing right now, anchoring your team. Back around. The actual demand that exists for your thing is important. And I, I I say like anchoring, aligning, repeating, you cannot, like, there's no world where your team feels like they know too much about your customer or they know they have too much context about your customer for what it is that they're designing or building or solving.
And so reorienting around like actual real demand and we're, we're not. There's no chasing ghosts here, like real demand in the market has to exist, and it probably does exist. You just need to find it and reorient your team around it over and over and over and over again. This is an ongoing process. You always need to tie back to the actual demand.
Okay. And now how product marketing can help. And I'm putting an asterisk on product marketing because, at the end of the day, product marketing does many things. I'm gonna talk about some aspects of what product marketing is responsible for. That can help. Here, we developed a customer-led Growth framework designed to solve much of this.
Not all of it, but a lot of this stuff. But mostly, what I wanna focus on here is. Suppose you have a product marketing team or a product marketer, or at the very least. In that case, hopefully, you have some sort of product marketing function inside of your team, this is how I firmly believe that product marketing is the function that will really, that is just gonna be more and more and more important as all of these markets become more and more and more commoditized.
Not only does the product development cycle stay at this pace, but the marketing being produced and thrown into the market also continues to do so. Product marketing needs to start becoming the center of gravity for many teams if you let it serve as the alignment piece right because product marketing can act as a shared resource for alignment for the team.
I'm not saying customer success teams should know much about your customers. Of course, they should, but product marketing by design should be the one. That is responsible for learning as much as possible about what is going on inside your customer's heads. What is going on in the market, what's going on in the competitive space, and how do your solution, your product, and your customer experience tie back to it?
And so, product marketing can serve as one of the most incredible alignment tools at your disposal. I'm gonna wager if you have a product marketing team. You're underutilizing them in this way. And I say that because I don't know if I've ever seen a product marketing team genuinely utilized in all the ways it should be.
So, uh, product marketing can also create frameworks to keep teams. Rooted in these first principles and other first principles, but you know, for the sake of argument, again, serving as that like anchor for good decision making for that source of truth on like decision making. Um, I am not trying to take away from marketing leadership, product leadership, customer success leadership, or sales leadership.
I'm, I, I'm. Not de from them at all. Those leaders need help. They have so much to do, so much more to do than they can, that product marketing should be at the service of them. Product marketing should be at the center of the Venn diagram, and I don't think that there's much that's more important than that right now.
Again, with everything that's going on in the market, use product marketing to your advantage. The other thing is that product marketing can ensure that execution stays focused on real customer needs, right? We're not chasing ghosts here. We cannot, you know, hypothesize about what our customers might care about or what they must care about.
We can't assume. Anything. Things change so quickly. By the time we have an idea about one thing that might resonate with our customers, it's probably changed. And so we have to stop guessing, stop assuming that we know better than our customers, and, again, take the time to take one step back in order to take two forward.
I wanna say more than two because rooting execution back in actual customer understanding is kind of the only thing that matters right now. Product marketing is the best at enabling and educating the team and keeping the team and the rest of the org in the loop on what is happening that matters.
And, um, how to tie it back and just how to make everything sort of work. Again, I'm not saying that your head of product can't do this. I'm not saying that your head of marketing or other teams can't do this. What I'm saying is that those people have to manage the. Teams have to make sure that their teams are, you know, actually doing this work and doing their best work and making amazing decisions, enabling them to make amazing decisions and try new things and all that stuff.
Product marketing has the unfair advantage of being at the center of that Venn diagram and serves as the education to the rest of the company. And I just see way, way, way too many teams just underutilize product marketing in this way. Okay. Lastly, I want you to remember that if your team is struggling, go back to first principles.
They are your anchor. When in doubt, go back to those first principles. When in doubt, go back to what matters to the customers who love you, have made trade-offs to put you in their lives, and would never let you go. That is your centre of gravity, and use first principles. As a reminder to get back to that, anytime you have an opportunity to make better decisions, particularly as a team, you must understand the context of demand and progress, not chase tactics.
I'm not sure much else needs to be said about this. I feel like, as soon as you look at these first principles, I think you're gonna pull your head out of the clouds a little bit, pick your head up, get outta the weeds, and. Reorient your teams around actual demand, customer context, and progress they want to make.
You know, execution is everything. I'm not saying tactics aren't wonderful. They are tactics. For example, I love to work at the tactical level, but right now, we have to zoom out before we can zoom in. Speed without clarity is total chaos, and clear priorities are the only things that will drive real progress.
You can get part of the way there by throwing spaghetti at the wall. You certainly can, but you will waste a lot of time and might burn out. Your team, we saw this happen in the big wave of SaaS in the early 2010s, right? A lot of people were burning out, particularly in customer-facing roles, for a different set of reasons than today.
But by staying anchored around these first principles, we'll keep your team focused, anchored, and motivated. Also, with just like not needing to operate in like chickens with their heads cut off kind of scenarios, which happens so much and is happening a lot right now. Hopefully, this episode was helpful in reminding us, you know, why we are here and what we are doing.
And how do we make better decisions and enable our team to make better decisions and be excited? It's a really exciting time to be working in tech right now. And you know, there are two outcomes out of this, and one of them is that your team is excited and clear and can help you make progress.
And the other one is that your team is throwing spaghetti at the wall, feeling stressed out, and not knowing how to. Keep their jobs when layoffs are still happening, and people are getting really nervous about what is happening in the world, let alone in tech. So, first principles are my favourite thing.
I haven't always called them first principles 'cause I'm like, this is just the way things should be done. And I don't pretend for a second that you all don't know. These first principles exist and that they're important. I know you know they are, but maybe you can stick 'em on a sticky on the side of your monitor and just remind yourself on a daily basis.
These things matter, and your team depends on you to remember these things as well. That goes for leaders managing their founders and CEOs as much as it is for the founders and CEOs managing their leaders and the members within those teams that are on the ground. Doing a lot of this work and getting just as many inputs, um, as to what's possible today and the latest, you know, prompt and product that is available.
So, hopefully, this helps. And with that, I will see you in the next episode. Take care. And that's it for this episode of the Forget the Funnel podcast. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions about the topic we covered, don't hesitate to reach out on LinkedIn or visit our website@forgetthefunnel.com.
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