Ángela Castillo-Gill

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

First week back at work after taking 👑 @wes_kao's Executive Comms course. I'm entering meetings much more intentionally and knowing how exactly to sell my ideas with her (R)TLC framework. Comms are key so very pleased w/ this investment 🔑💖https://t.co/Rd2yun2BG3

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@lennysan Hi Lenny - I’m a newsletter subscriber but haven’t been able to access the Slack (filled out form twice), where should I write to to sort this out please? Thanks!

[Brian Balfour @bbalfour]

I wish I had this when I was at HubSpot. @fishmanaf puts on a masterclass on how to set an ambitious team vision and build support for a big investment ask. Here’s how ⤵️

In 2019 Adam was VP Product and Growth at Patreon. They were heading into H2 planning. He saw a large opportunity for the growth team, but it required a much larger investment.

This artifact (linked in the thread) is the presentation he used to:

🚀 Define the mission of the growth team.

🔭 Provide a simple view of the strategy.

🤩 Get the team excited about the vision.

💰 Justify the investment ask through an ROI analysis.

Artifacts is a new free product from Reforge. You can view, save, download, and remix the real work from others so you never have to start from scratch.

There is a lot in the presentation. But my favorite piece is the ROI analysis that supports the vision (pictured in the image). How to justify investments asks is a common question we get in Reforge courses. There are a few takeaways from this simple image:

🌳 Root The Analysis In A Metric The Exec Team Cares About 🌳

The CEO and exec team are often not looking at input metrics layers three levels down. So even though your initiative might improve a metric like activation rate, you need to translate it into the top-level metric the exec team is looking at and thinking about weekly.

In Adam’s case, that was TMV (which was a tailored GMV metric for Patreon’s marketplace). But in B2B SaaS it can often be MRR or ARR. If you don’t do this you are forcing others to do the translation of how it might impact the metric they care about. Often times they won’t do the translation, or not get it right. Do the work for them!

📆 View It Over A Longer Time Horizon 📆

Many growth improvements can compound over longer periods of time. So if you view the ROI for one or two quarters, the investment often doesn’t make sense.

What Adam does here is he takes 3-year view of the return. He shows that it might not make a big difference in the short term, but it will have huge returns over the longer time horizon.

A lot of folks have trouble thinking about the impact of compounding returns over long periods of time. So once again, do the work for them!

🥅 Provide A Short Term Scorecard 🥅

Often times it can take a while for improvements to bubble up to the top-level metrics. So while the ROI analysis is rooted in the top-level metric, you also need to provide a way for the team to be measured in the short term.

Adam does this in the lower right-hand corner providing “Metrics this team will move” like pledge conversion rate and the average pledge value.

🙋‍♂️ Expect Your Assumptions To Be Questioned 🙋‍♂️

No matter what, your assumptions will be questioned. You can proactively prepare for this by working with finance. Adam says:

“One of my biggest recommendations is to work with a partner in Finance to help come up with these numbers. You need to expect that your assumptions are going to be questioned, so it is good to have finance already on board with the assumptions that you are making.”

Lots of gold in a simple slide/image. The full presentation is in the artifact link in the 🧵

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

Apple Pie Position:
A statement that instantly elevates the person who is saying it and is simultaneously hard for anyone else to push back on, and so everyone avoids the personal risk and just nods “yes”, even though its actual value in this specific situation might be relatively low, zero, or even negative.

Because everyone in the workplace wants to come across as smart & competent, especially during meetings, Apple Pie Positions end up being frequently employed by your colleagues.

Examples of Apple Pie Positions
(trigger warning: might feel too painful at times)

1) “We need to define the success metrics for <whatever is being discussed>”

Also seen in the wild as:
“How will you measure success here?”

2) “Do you have any data to back that up?”

(narrator: it is either impossible to get useful data in this situation or the effort to get useful data would be greater than just doing it)

3) “We need more scalable team processes”

4) “We have too many meetings”

5) “We need to sync more often”

6) “This is a two-way door, so let’s just decide quickly”

(narrator: it was actually a one-way door. or, it was a two-way door with a hungry lion on the other side of the door, so we kinda died)

7) “We need more metrics before making a decision here”

8) “We need a better go-to-market motion to improve product adoption”

(narrator: the problem is you’ve built the wrong product, no amount of GTM sorcery is going to fix that)

9) “We need to clarify our expectations from people in this role so we can set them up for success”

(narrator: the problem is that you’ve hired too many people whose work overlaps with other functions)

10) “We need better internal documentation!”

(narrator: yes we do. we also need 50 other things so let’s just finally admit that this ain’t happening. besides OpenAI will solve this for us in 2024, right?)

11) “Let us not forget [quote one of the company’s core values].”

(narrator: sometimes used as a weapon to justify one’s position, especially when faced with objective & rational counter-arguments for an issue)

12) “We need to replace our team meeting with written updates”

Fast forward a few weeks/months:

“People are missing live interactions with team members, they don't know what's going on across the team, nobody's reading the written updates. We need a meeting”

13) “Our current org structure doesn’t set us up for optimal execution of our strategic goals. That's why we are announcing a re-org”

14) “We must not slow down our shipping velocity”

(narrator: usually applied to push back against a fairly rational measure that will cause a minor delay in shipping the product but will prevent bigger problems for the customers or the company further down the road)

15) “We need to post-mortem this”

(narrator: you should have pre-mortem'ed this, so you wouldn't have had to deal with an ugly post-mortem. and the systemic changes rarely happen and somehow we are doing another ugly post-mortem 3 months from now. repeat)

16) “After 13 amazing months as CxO, Bob has decided to leave for other personal pursuits. The company wouldn’t be the same without his contributions”

(narrator: this is not how it actually went down)

17) “We need an offsite so we can align the teams better with our strategic priorities”

(narrator: we said the same thing for the previous 6 offsites. it almost seems like we are doing offsites more than we are being onsites)

18) “Remember, we are a mission-driven company”

(narrator: particularly effective when justifying below-market salary / stock for current and prospective employees)

19) “We need to go on a customer listening tour to understand our customers better”

(narrator: no, you need to pay more attention to the customer research that’s already happened over the past 18 months that we haven’t done anything about. you then need to translate that into differentiated features, instead of just building me-too tablestakes)

20) “We need more apple pie”

(narrator: 🥧yum. yes we do)

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@claireinez Were they used?

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

1/ People who take notorious notes

Notes notes. Even your notes should have notes

Notes are the closest thing that humans have to time travel

You'll miss a finite detail and the notes will help you remember instantly

If you want to be more focused, focus on note taking

[Dr. Cat Hicks | grimalkina.bsky.social @grimalkina]

If you have a robust skincare routine you have demonstrated aptitude in many core skills of data science. I will not be taking criticism of this idea. Girls who have developed personalized skincare routines know more about multivariate causal inference than many engineers.

[lynn park @ggallynn]

how do i explain tech debt to my therapist

[Nick Kapur @nick_kapur]

Watch how the ultra-wealthy in America gradually raised the taxes of the poor and eventually bent the curve downward until they paid the lowest tax rate of all

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@K4KYA I love your shelves! So organised!

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

Wow! Proud videographer of this today ♥️

[Tim Castillo-Gill @TimCastilloGill]

Intimate concert with a Fox this afternoon who came to listen #SelfIsolation #COVID19 #coronavirus

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@keepcalmcarrie1 Join us! Join us @keepcalmcarrie1 ! 👩‍💻

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

Wow! @KKulma has created this delightfully detailed tutorial on how to scrape data that you MUST have but that lives in tangled HTML. https://t.co/8h088U3QFB

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@arnvald @krissygoround @claireinez I wonder why

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@aliciaverbs YAAAAAAAAS congratulations! You are amazing, this is well-deserved and I can't wait to see you do a tremendous job!

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@krissygoround @mepartoconmigo @TheLeadDev Well done Krissy! Hope you get accepted!

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@sallygoble a-ma-zing

[Ángela Castillo-Gill @acg_me]

@gvwilson Sorry for your loss Greg! We're here for you :)

[Caitlin Hudon @beeonaposy]

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[Kyle McDonald @kcimc]

realtime processing across 24x 2080Tis. you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.