Four Questions That Drive Me

Every quarter, the same four questions drive me: 1. What’s the low-hanging fruit that we should be pursuing as a marketing organization? 2. What are we testing and are we doing enough of it? 3. Are we showing enough urgency and is it impacting our productivity? 4. Will this work have a lasting impact on our customers and the growth of our company? 

Here’s how I look at each one and use them to make myself a more focused leader. 

What's the low-hanging fruit? 

While every organization should be focused on building for the long term and taking big swings, leaders shouldn’t forget that we also need to balance this constantly by being scrappy. When we see low-hanging fruit opportunities, we must encourage our teams to jump on them. This is the best way to learn, continuously iterate, and get better faster.

What are we testing? 

Every team member should be focused on gaining institutional knowledge and intuition. To get there, CMOs must build experimentation into the DNA of the department (and really, the entire organization). By following an experimentation mindset - with each phase of experiments building on each other, it allows the company to grow quickly, adjust course as needed, and uncover new data about your customers and products than you ever anticipated. This is the fastest and most sustaining path to success. It is also the most fun. 

Are we showing enough urgency?  

The mark of a high-performing team is when it finds the right mix of productive urgency. Too much urgency causes fire drills. Too much planning causes inertia. We need to find that happy middle where everyone is moving deliberately with urgency and strong action bias. 

What will have a lasting impact? 

Measuring your department’s impact not just on the organization but also for your customers should truly be the driving force for your team. Making the lives of our customers better is the easiest and most important way to measure impact. It should drive everything we do. As teams scale, we must encourage our people to move from the “forming” and “norming” phase into “performing” and “outperforming.” With endless opportunities out there to drive change -- identifying which ones will help us outperform the competition and our own expectations are the big ideas that should be relentlessly pursued.  

What are your four big questions? How do you keep yourself and your team disciplined?

I want to know below.