Visionary leaders aren’t meant to spend their days responding to DMs.
And yet, here you are.
Spending the most productive and creative hours of your day responding to questions you thought you answered a thousand times over.
Listening to your team spin their wheels, brainstorm ideas, and add more ideas to an ever-growing backlog - and wondering why it’s taking so long to ship work that increases your acquisition, activation, and retention numbers.
Suffering the cognitive load of context switching throughout the day while you straddle your dual roles as CPO and CEO (or Team Lead and Lead IC) without having enough time to think and plan for how you’ll navigate your transition from startup to scaleup.
An uncomfortable truth about why it's hard to get off the hamster wheel:
Your team doesn’t see what you see. Your team doesn’t know what you know. And no matter how many times you explain your vision, they'll rarely embrace it like you do.
Why?
1. You’ve spent years understanding the problems you’re solving, understanding the market you're serving, imagining the future you're building - and adapting and evolving that vision as you build.How many hours, days, weeks, months would anyone in your position need to transmute the wholeness of your wisdom into the brain of another person with conversation alone?
2. Sharing too much of your vision at the wrong time or in the wrong way can make it harder for your team to know what’s important right now.Even if you could share the entirety of what you’re asking people to see, your team doesn’t need to know all of your vision. They need to know what’s important now, this month, this quarter, this year.
Especially as your company enters the "We have so many opportunities it's hard to choose" stage.
3. We humans are prone to a variety of biases that make it difficult to trust the word of someone else over what we ourselves experience.Think of a time when someone told you how hot it was outside with sweat dripping down their forehead, what did you think? “Wow must be hot.” When you went outside, what did you feel? “OMG they were right I’m in hell I need lemonade in my veins.”
The same phenomenon is true for visionary founders. As believers in visionaries, it’s one thing to hear the vision filtered through the experience of the visionary. It’s an entirely different thing to discover the same forces, problems, and opportunity. To really embrace and understand how to act on a vision, team members “have to see it to believe it.”
4. Understanding and operational readiness are not equivalent.You having a vision, your team believing in that vision, and your team knowing what matters now, and being excited to execute on that vision does not equate to your team being operationally ready to execute on that vision.
How can you overcome these truths to start shipping faster, growing your metrics, and step into your role as a visonary leader?
I help visionary founders get back to the business of leading and thinking about the next five years by mobilizing your vision, getting buy-in from your team, and establishing operational readiness for them to ship high impact work
You can bring onto your team to help in two ways
Option 1: Get Your Team to See Your Visions and Make Decisions as if They Were You
This fixed scope quarter-long project is about finding what’s most likely to grow your business now, getting your team to see and believe that vision, and giving them the building blocks to start shipping 2-3X faster at one bajillionX the quality.
In this project we’ll:
- Find out what matters most now: Agree on who your best customers are, surface the jobs they desperately want to hire your project for, and find out when they are most likely to be shopping for your solution with a Roadmapping Session and Jobs To Be Done research study.
- Mobilize your vision: Get your team to see your vision through eyes so they trust and believe in the vision you see with yours by turning the raw voice-of-customer data we uncover into a custom, repeatable training for your team.
- Establish operational readiness: Give your team of product managers, UX designers, copywriters, and marketers the building blocks that allow them to prioritize and ship high quality work 2-3X faster than they do now.
Option 2: Fractional Head of Product, Growth, Strategy, and/or Change Management
AKA, an advisor who does stuff.
The title is only as important inasmuch as it helps the rest of your team understand how I can help them do their best work.
This option is available as follow-on work to a project with me or with another JTBD consultant. After we've established operational readiness, I work with teams in 1 of 3 capacities:
- Advisor: As a thought partner with you, we’ll unpack and solve the gnarliest problems at your business in regular conversation.
- Coach & Consultant: As an embedded member of your leadership team, I’ll do the above plus find and fix the challenges and blockers that are stopping your team from making autonomous, evidence-backed, outcome-generating decisions that scale your business.
- Hybrid Leader - IC: As a Swiss-Army Knife IC, I’ll do the above and/or take hands-on approach to ship work that increases your metrics, especially activation. In addition to product management I’ll bring my background of UX, Research, Conversion Copy to ship new onboarding UX, conversion-optimized onboarding emails, and updated copy.
This work is an ongoing engagement available in various units of Alli depending on your team’s needs.
Put a permanent stop to work that keeps your focus in constant motion but keeps your business stagnant
Here’s what I want for you:
- Get your team to see what you see: Go from repeating yourself about what’s important 15 times a day without seeing anyone do anything about it to fielding inbound requests from your team saying, “I found this number that’s smaller than it should be, I have a hypothesis about how to improve it, here’s what I propose.”
- Get more activated users:Stop watching customers dropoff and never return after that first time they log in with new and improved onboarding UX and conversion-optimized onboarding emails.
- Ship outcome-generating work so fast you kind of want people to slow down and explain things to you: Go from wondering what’s taking everyone so long to having the champagne problem of seeing outcome-generating updates and improvements ship faster than you can keep up with them.
- Spend less time answering DMs: Go from swatting away one million DMs a week to so much confidence across your team that you only hear from them when it’s time to rubber stamp their spot-on work or collaborate on truly gnarly problems
- Get back to business: Reclaim your focus time from leadership of your product to leadership of your business.
- Stop wondering if you’re missing something: Let go of that nagging feeling of wondering whether you’re making the right choice about what market to focus on first, which low hanging fruit is the juiciest, and whether you’re making the right choice for the kind of business you want to lead.
"If you want to create an environment where you can trust your employees to make decisions that support the long term objective and deliver the most value you possibly can for your customers, you work with Alli.
"So if you want to figure out how to speak to your employees better, if you want to understand what your employees are going through, if you feel like you're having a hard time understanding, if you feel like you keep saying the same thing over and over and over again, and not being heard, and if you don't want to be completely stressed going through through this phase of growth...
"...You work with Alli."
-Jordan, VP Product EngineeringGet a cross-functional right-hand who has gotten reps inacross almost every part of SaaS business
These are some of my greatest hits:
- Helped a company launch a new product for a new market and coached the team to grow it 0-1, from development to launch to established and integral asset
- Led change management initiative to coach a team of 10 to transition from working as a marketing team to establish operational readiness as a product team
- Designed in-app and email onboarding experiences that increased new customer activation by 144%-300%
- Introduced leadership, decision-making, and operational readiness coaching and frameworks to sustain growth in the wake of change
- Trained team members on conversion copywriting, JTBD research, UX design, product strategy, and leadership to increase product release cycle output for team
- Identified core JTBD to inform product, marketing, and overall company strategy
- Worked with over 50 teams to launched Voice of Customer programs to unite strategy and decision-making across sales, product, and marketing initiatives and prepare teams for 10X growth
I'm a SaaS Polymath with expertise in:
- New user onboarding
- Leadership
- Operations
- Qualitative and user research
- UX design
- Product
- Marketing
- Conversion copywriting
- Segment event protocols
- Positioning
- Public relations
- Enough React, CSS, and SQL to talk with your engineers
I'm a speaker or mentor with:
- MicroConf
- TinySeed Accelerator
- LTVConf
- UIBreakfast
- Startups for the Rest of Us
Reach out today and in 6 months you could be done with too-many DMs, slow shipping, and sad metrics
Set up a discovery call with me here. If the times on my calendar don’t work for you, email me at [email protected] and we’ll make it happen.