Intrapreneurship

Feedback is Data

Customer discovery paves the path to profitability.

This really is the work for entrepreneurs starting a new business. Customer discovery requires trust in your early moves, obsessive curiosity, patience, thick skin, humility, an interest in being wrong, discernment, and a willingness to adapt. No problem, right?

For many entrepreneurs, impartial feedback can be scary. Customer discovery puts ideas on the hook, and colliding new conversations may contradict past assumptions. That’s the point! Interacting with the market you seek to serve allows us to learn from no in a way that gets us to yes.

As you collaborate with those who criticize what you’re building, learn why naysayers debate your hypotheses. Be humble. Either attack the massive lift to change the product and even the target customer or make your concept more compelling to win over those who care.

The more you learn from others, the more you’ll recognize supply and be able to meet true demand. Collecting real-world data is human and intellectual capital that attracts more network and financial capital. 

Beyond the psychology of it all, customer discovery can feel like a drag because it is often a protracted process. The time commitment is real. This market exploration can be slow at first and may seem less necessary as signals of traction emerge. The potential need to rethink ideas makes feedback scary too. As always, if the entrepreneurial lifestyle was easy, career nirvana would not be so fleeting. Knowing this, we can seek honest feedback that strengthens our value proposition to eventually go further in the right direction.

When learning from the perspective of others, it’s imperative to remember that feedback is data.

Collect, organize, and examine data from feedback like a scientist. Inference is more informed with data. Decisions that are made become more in tune with reality as you continue to collect and learn with data.

As you translate decisions into action, you must also find your own way. Even with good intent, people who provide you with feedback are doing so based on their experience. The experience of others is based on their own past, and no feedback is likely to fully harmonize with your vision. There are many ways to navigate the idea maze. Gather feedback like power-ups in a video game and use diversified data to guide your quest toward product-market fit.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Echoes

The echo of an idea is always fading.

How can we extend ideation long enough to activate early moves, blow through barriers, and maintain lasting enrollment? This is clearly a loaded question. Much goes into enabling ideas into reality and the rate of an idea’s degradation depends on a million factors, but let’s sip on the artistry of pushing without being pushy.

As seen in the Ideation and Research chapters of YDNTB, personal reflection is the easiest way to think through the various angles that might make an idea interesting. This private contemplation doesn’t require much skill and we don’t get stuck trying to earn the attention of others. Unfortunately, the ease of your own activity is matched by the hardships that await those who don’t let ideas breathe. This is why stealth mode is precarious and ongoing customer discovery is key.

Extra Shot

Will you spend time or money?

When we share a new idea with someone else, the situation becomes complex. This is the moment we put our idea on a hook. It’s when we push past fear and invite doubt. Connecting dots within such complexity is difficult, takes time, and is never straightforward. Research helps to build confidence and adds clarity to how opportunities are articulated. While this preparation helps guide others through layers of understanding faster, a blend between patience and urgency is required to align interest.

This makes blunt repetition tempting, but ineffective. Whether it’s potential co-founders, mentors, early adopters, or investors, more of the same (without execution) can chase away interest. To avoid potential fading too fast, find different ways to motivate movement.

For a fun visualization, let’s imagine a small pond. If one pebble drops in, the lonely ripple would be obvious, but also fades fast. While it made a splash, it’s soon forgotten. Now, imagine many pebbles being thrown in different ways, all around the pond, and over time. The pond is now alive! The echo of each pebble is magnified and the abundance of rippled collisions leave a more lasting impact.

Like this pond full of pebbles, we can nudge progress long enough to activate action by adding variety into how we introduce and continue to explore an idea. Conversation in different environments, creative analogies, inquisitive questioning, active listening, talking about anything else, releasing reluctance, or getting more people involved are all ways you can keep building without seeming frantic, repetitive, or desperate. This intentional diversity allows different echos of one idea to each feel different, and yet, all bounce in the same direction.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Real Skills

Talent is natural.
Skills are learned.

Instead of abstracting, even nerfing the value of what makes us indispensable by using terms like soft skills or power skills, “real skills” invite the new reality. Knowledge, action, and persistence are still required, but real skills help us connect, communicate, and collaborate as we pursue peculiar work fueled by significance in our connected era.

As Seth Godin writes about, real skills help students, founders, intrapreneurs, and people-centric organizations activate humans working toward shared understandings. This updated term removes the optional vibes out of subtle superpowers that help us go beyond the status quo. To close his 2023 manifesto for teams, The Song of Significance, Godin shares this working encyclopedia of categorized real skills.

SELF-CONTROL

Adaptability to changing requirements
Agility in the face of unexpected obstacles
Alacrity and the ability to start and stop quickly
Authenticity and consistent behavior
Bouncing back from failure
Coach-ability and the desire to coach others
Collaborative mindset
Compassion for those in need
Competitiveness
Conscientiousness in keeping promises
Customer service passion
Eagerness to learn from criticism
Emotional intelligence
Endurance for the long haul
Enthusiasm for the work
Ethics even when not under scrutiny
Etiquette
Flexibility
Friendliness
Honesty
Living in balance
Managing difficult conversations
Motivated to take on new challenges
Passionate
Posture for forward motion
Purpose
Quick-wittedness
Resilience
Risk-taking
Self-awareness
Self-confidence
Sense of humor
Strategic thinking taking priority over short-term gamesmanship
Stress management
Tolerance of change & uncertainty

PRODUCTIVITY

Attention to detail
Crisis management skills
Decision-making with effectiveness
Delegation for productivity
Diligence and attention to detail
Entrepreneurial thinking and guts
Facilitation of discussion
Goal-setting skills
Innovative problem-solving techniques
Lateral thinking
Lean techniques
Listening skills
Managing up
Meeting hygiene
Planning for projects
Problem-solving
Research skills
Technology savvy
Time management
Troubleshooting

WISDOM

Artistic sense and good taste
Conflict resolution instincts
Creativity in the face of challenges
Critical thinking instead of mere compliance
Dealing with difficult people
Diplomacy in difficult situations
Empathy for customers, co-workers, and vendors
Intercultural competence
Mentoring
Social skills
Supervising with confidence

PERCEPTION

Design thinking
Fashion instinct
Judging people and situations
Mapmaking
Strategic thinking

INFLUENCE

Ability to deliver clear, useful criticism
Assertiveness on behalf of ideas that matter
Body language (reading and delivering)
Charisma and skills to influence others
Clarity in language and vision
Dispute-resolution skills
Giving feedback without ego
Influence
Inspiring to others
Interpersonal skills
Leadership
Negotiation skills
Networking
Persuasive
Presentation skills
Public speaking
Reframing
Selling skills
Storytelling
Talent management
Team building
Writing for impact

What a provoking collection of conversation starters! This encyclopedia is a guiding light for when we are being honest with our own abilities, filling gaps on the team, considering session topics for an event, or working to reform educational curriculum. Special thanks to Seth Godin for granting permission to share these real skills as they were written. Real skills are regularly updated to meet emerging demands as well.

Let’s add inclusivity, curiosity, showing up, content creation, systems thinking, accelerating others through the art of connection, identifying founder-market fit, thinking big, mindfulness, following up, pure wonder, and having fun.

What will you brew into the mix?

By Ben McDougal, ago

Significance

Most of us seek peace, love, and significance.
All can be achieved by offering each to others.

Visions, missions, and titles may help guide teams in a shared direction, but linchpins want work that matters and culture outshines even the most thoughtful strategy.

The race to revenue makes it easy to see why we’ve been seduced by surveillance, predictable profit margins, and forced productivity. Too often, the easy metrics borrowed from such compliance are the ones that get measured. This leads to endless meetings geared toward delivering information, avoiding blame, and asserting authority for those in charge. The illusion is that control will lead to predictable results thanks to a maximization of resources. The problem is: humans are not a resource.

Leaders who make a difference welcome tension brewed by those who make a ruckus. We nurture initiative, even when results aren’t perfect, which creates enrollment where enthusiasm is met with consistent action. We keep promises and our sense of abundance fuels intentional permeability that invites people to leave. We create a culture where everyone can be proud of the impact they make. Contributions are appreciated, knowing they would be missed if they were gone and the work is worth doing because it invites each human to sing their own song of significance.

Extra Shot

Are your meetings led by a few people talking and most pretending to pay attention? Perhaps it’s time to get real by inviting the team to lead together.

By Ben McDougal, ago

Permeability

We don’t have many 40 year careers anymore.

With talent in high demand, but often on the move, abundance can be overshadowed by scarcity when it comes to talent retention. We survey meaningless metrics, count the keystrokes, and try to pay people just enough not to leave. What if instead of trapping talent, we create purposeful jobs in an inclusive environment that gives agency to team members eager to keep a promise?

In his new book, The Song of Significance, Seth Godin argues (among other things) how enrollment can last when we invite people to leave. Instead of fighting to keep people in place, what if we optimize onboarding and welcome turnover, while creating conditions to make this the best job someone has ever had? When people are invited to be a linchpin, they feel significant and the team will be led by those who aren’t just collecting rent for their time.

As Seth talks about in this conversation with Tim Ferris, when we create a gratifying, but more porous environment, listen to stay in-tune with gyration. When departures occur, don’t blame the individual. Consider the conditions that contributed to such a decision and work harder to nurture a performance-based culture that’s made to stay.

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When you dance on the edge of infinity, there’s always enough… because you aren’t taking opportunity from anyone else, you’re creating it. -Seth Godin

By Ben McDougal, ago