You walk into your growth interview after hours of preparation. You’ve perfected your 2 minute pitch, polished your work stories, and maybe even done some case prep. You’re ready to showcase your achievements and you have an answer ready for any question they throw at you.

But there’s one big problem you’ve overlooked — the interview isn’t actually about you.

Most candidates approach the interview process as a way to showcase themselves and their accomplishments. But, the best growth candidates orient the process around the company and its strategy.

After years of interviewing hundreds of people applying for various growth roles, I’ve seen candidates make the same 6 mistakes over and over again. They all tie back to this one core error — thinking the interview is about you.

In this post, I’ll outline the six most common ways those mistakes play out — and look at the mental models that can help you avoid falling into the most common trap that trips up even the strongest growth candidates.

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1. You forget to identify what growth means to the company.

Growth means something different at every company. At one company, it may be another name for marketing. At another company, it may be a hybrid of marketing and product, while at another company it may mean expansion into new markets.

Whatever the case, it’s your job to find out what it means at the company where you’re interviewing, and frame your answers through that lens. The key here is to do the research beforehand, and then ask the right questions early in the screening process, prior to the main interview.

Below are a few select things you can research and questions you can ask to give you insight into what growth means at a specific company.

Research the following topics:

1. Search LinkedIn to identify the leaders on the team you would be joining and look at their backgrounds:

• What functions were they in previously?
• What types of companies did they work at previously?
• How long have they been in a leadership role at this company?

2. Google those growth leaders to see if you can find any blogs, podcasts or other content that gives you insight into their approach to growth.

3. Google the company to see if you can find any press that outlines how it’s grown.

Ask the following questions:

1. What part of the organization is the growth team part of? Is it its own team or part of marketing or product?
2. What metrics does the growth team own?
3. What are a few examples of growth focused experiments or campaigns your team has run previously?
4. How has the company grown thus far? What are your key channels?

The risk if you don’t ask these questions early and frame your answers accordingly is that the interviewers may misunderstand what you bring to the table.

For instance, if you’re interviewing at a company that views growth simply as marketing, and you start talking about a bunch of product initiatives, it won’t resonate. To get the job offer, you need to adapt your ideas, language, and answers to how the company views growth.

You can also use this information to evaluate whether the company is the fit you’re looking for.

Get the interactive Growth Interview Prep Template that goes with this post.

2. You overlook the cultural principles of the growth team.

Every team operates by certain set of principles that shapes the culture and drives how it makes decisions. Testing for culture fit is integrated into almost every growth interview, and lack of fit is often used by interviewers as a “veto card.”

Occasionally, those cultural principles are explicitly stated, but more often they are implicitly understood by the team. If you scroll to the bottom of my Work with Me page, you can see that I outline the principles that govern my team at Reforge.

Many candidates don’t realize how important it is to tease out the cultural principles unique to the target company and frame their answers in terms of those principles. Demonstrating that you embody the cultural principles during the interviews lets the interviewers feel confident that you share their values and will fit culturally.

The risk of failing to identify the key principles early, is that even if you embody them, it may not come through in an obvious way during the interviews. In this case, the interviewers may wrongly assume you don’t fit with the team.

Below are a few select things you can research and questions you can ask to suss out these principles.

Research the following topics:

1. Check out the company’s career page on their site — does it outline details on cultural principles?
2. Read the job description carefully. Are the team’s principles baked into the description of the company, team, and role?

Ask the following questions:

1. What are the key characteristics of the strongest members on the team?
2. What’s the difference between a good candidate and a great candidate for this role?
3. What are the core operating principles of the growth team? How are they used in the decision making process? Can you give any examples?

3. You misunderstand the purpose of “Walk me through your resume.”

I’ve had many candidates walk me through their resumes word-for-word, listing off their previous companies and roles, without providing deeper insight than what I read on their resume. When interviewers say, “Walk me through your background,” they’re not actually looking for a verbal recap of your resume. They’re trying to get at two things:

1. What specifically did you contribute at previous companies?

2. Why did you make the decisions you made?

What specifically did you contribute at previous companies?

Rather than saying “I was on the retention team,” tell me what you did and how you drove results that led to growth. Ideally, you summarize this information on your resume, and then use this prompt to further shape the narrative around how you made an impact. Interviewers are more interested in your contributions than your role.

Why did you make the decisions you made?

Interviewers also want insight into why you made the decisions you did. We want to know how and why you chose those projects, joined that company, and took on that role. Many candidates realize it’s critical to share what they did and the impact of those efforts, but fail to understand that “the why” is what leaves a lasting impression.

“The why” offers insight into what it would be like to work with you. It reveals your personal motivations, which are usually found in why you chose to work on certain projects, and how you allocate your time.

For example, if you’re an engineer and explain that you were excited to work on a certain experiment because you thought it would deliver meaningful conversion improvements, the interviewer may infer you are motivated by growing the business. In contrast, if you instead explained that you were excited to work on the experiment because it was a big challenge, the interviewer may assume that you value solving hard engineering problems above all else, and would be dissatisfied in a growth engineer role.

When I ask candidates why they chose to work on specific projects, a common but terrible response is, “It was decided by management.” This kind of answer not only makes the candidate appear to be an order taker, it also misses the opportunity to showcase the candidate as a strategic thinker.

Instead, flip this response on its head, transform it into an opportunity to demonstrate critical thinking, and show that you had ideas about how to improve the strategy.

Say, “My manager told me to do [explain the project]. This is why I think it was chosen [explain the reasoning]. If the decision had been in my hands, I may have chosen [insert other initiative] and here’s why [explain your reasoning and why you think this other project should have been higher priority and would have had a higher impact].”

Below are examples of the types of questions you want to answer in your “walk me through your resume”discussion.

1. What results did you drive in each role?
2. How and why did you choose each company?
3. What factors helped you determine that a company was a good fit?
4. How and why did you choose each role?
5. How did each role progress your career towards your longer term goals?

4. You fail to think about the target audience.

Considering the qualitative and quantitative perspectives together drive insights for growth. When you’re interviewing for a growth role, approach questions from both a qualitative and quantitative perspective to demonstrate that you know how to use both to make strategic and tactical decisions.

One of the biggest mistakes I see growth candidates make is coming into the interview without a solid hypothesis of who the target customer is. I want to see that a candidate roots their ideas in critical thought about who the product serves, rather than blindly coming up with initiatives.

Prior to your first interview, research the company and develop a point of view on who the target audience is, what their needs are, and why they use the product.

Test your customer hypotheses and showcase your critical thinking during the interview process by saying something like, “Before I answer that question, I’d like to make sure I understand the target audience. Here is my current hypothesis given the preliminary research I’ve done, but I’m wondering if you can tell me more?”

After the interviewer shares their point of view, weave their insights into your answers to show that you listened and adapted your hypothesis to reflect new input. Doing this will demonstrate that you take the user’s perspective into account when framing growth problems, opportunities, and hypotheses. It will also have three other positive benefits — it shows:

1. You “do your homework” and take initiative
2. You’re not afraid to develop a point of view
3. You’re adaptable and you listen to feedback — you ask questions and refine your POV based on new input

Below are things to research and questions to ask to understand the qualitative aspects of the target audience.

Research the following topics:

1. Analyze the company’s website (especially the home page and pricing page) and/or presence in the App Store — what can you learn about how they define the target audience from the messaging, imagery, and pricing?

2. Read reviews on Yelp, in the app store and any other review site. Who are those people? Why do they love or hate the product? What motivates them to feel the way they feel?

3. Scan their social media presence — what are people saying about them on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.? Who are those people? Why do they love or hate the product? What motivates them to feel the way they feel?

Ask the following questions:

1. How does your customer describe the pain point or problem that your product solves?
2. What are the top 3 reasons your customers use your product?
3. Can you walk me through the persona for your target customer? What are their demographics, psychographics, and needs, and what channels do they spend the most time in?

5. You don’t focus on the data.

On the flip side, I’ve interviewed many candidates who make the mistake of relying purely on “gut feel,” rather than consulting behavioral user data to guide their decision making process. As I interview, I look for candidates who use data to pressure test and validate their growth ideas that may have originated from instinct.

There are a few ways that you can demonstrate data-orientation during the hiring process:

1. Include quantitative outcomes in your resume. For instance, if a bullet point on your resume highlights a project you worked on related to retention, make sure to include something like, “Launched [insert initiative], increasing retention by x%.”

2. As you’re walking through experiences in your work history with interviewers, speak to the quantitative impact your work had for each project you worked on.

3. When answering case exercises, explain how you would use the given data and ask for any data that seems important but hasn’t been shared. Even if the interviewer doesn’t give you the data, asking for specific baseline metrics not only demonstrates data orientation, but also shows you know which metrics are important.

4. Ask questions about the company’s metrics throughout the interview process. For instance, if you’re interviewing at a startup and you want to assess its level of Product-Market fit, you could ask what the retention curves looks like. Again, asking this question, and other data-related questions, will show that you know which metrics matter.

Intuition is important, but ultimately growth leaders are looking to hire practitioners who balance qualitative and quantitative inputs to keep themselves honest, on track, and working on the highest impact initiatives.

To get insight into the quantitative user data, here are a few examples of questions you can ask throughout the interview process.

Ask the following questions:

1. What does retention for the product look like?
2. What is the CAC and LTV?
3. What do the top of funnel and conversion metrics look like for the product?

When candidates don’t factor in both the qualitative and quantitative data, they end up becoming reactionary, which leads us to the next mistake…

6. You jump to an answer too quickly in case exercises.

It’s becoming more popular for companies to ask case questions during growth interviews. These types of on-the-spot exercises can be nerve wracking for even the most experienced candidates.

The biggest mistake I’ve watched candidates make over and over, is jumping to an answer immediately upon being presented with an exercise-based question. For instance, when given a question asking where they would focus in a specific channel or on a certain initiative, many candidates jump right into ideas they have to optimize x or y.

But that’s the wrong approach. Candidates often miss the point of these types of exercises, randomly grab for immediate answers, and then dig into those answers when questioned. These exercises are less about giving the right answer, and more about demonstrating how you approach problems, evaluate and prioritize options, and make decisions. Think back to 6th grade math — it’s the demonstration of your work that matters most, not your answer to the question.

In case questions like this, you want to make sure you take a step back first and start by focusing on higher level strategy, not tactics. Start by asking the interviewer questions to understand the goals, audience, metrics and any other information that would help you identify the strategy.

Once you have that baseline information, breakdown the desired goal or output into its inputs, and walk through how you would identify and prioritize different initiatives in which you could invest. Questions like this are great opportunities to get on the whiteboard and map out your strategy, goals, inputs and approach to show your process, rather than just tell.

By walking the interviewer through your approach, rather than immediately jumping to an answer, you demonstrate that you have a repeatable process for approaching growth problems. More importantly, you demonstrate that if you had the role full time, and access to all information, that you’d have a high likelihood of identifying winning strategies and tactics.

Here are a few types of questions you can ask during a case exercise to help you focus at the strategic level first. Since case questions vary quite a bit, tailor the questions you ask to the information that is explicitly given in the case.

Possible Questions:

1. What is the goal or desired outcome of the initiative, experiment, or campaign?
2. Who is the target customer or audience?
3. What is the baseline for [insert key metric]? And where do we want to take it?
4. What resources do we have at our disposal?

Research + Hypotheses + Smart Questions + Critical Thinking = A Winning Interview Strategy

Ultimately, whenever you’re interviewing for a growth role, you’re being tested for skills, experience and fit, but most importantly, the interviewers are assessing your critical thinking.

One of the best ways to demonstrate your critical thinking about the company and its market in the interview, is to do as much of it as you can beforehand. Do your research, ask the key questions early in the process, come up with your hypotheses, and then translate your answers and stories into the language spoken by the company and its people.

Subscribe to get access to the interactive Growth Interview Prep Worksheet.

Originally published at brianbalfour.com on September 26, 2017.

6 Mistakes Growth Candidates Make in the Interview Process was originally published in Reforge on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This is the Data Wheel of Death:

If the above looks familiar, you’re not alone. I estimate that greater than ⅔ of data efforts at companies fail.

This is trouble because data plays a key horizontal role in the growth process and mindset. Without good data, it’s not possible to run a legitimate experimentation cycle.

Today, I’ll take a look at 4 reasons why well-meaning data efforts fail so often, and what you can do about it.

#1: Project Mindset vs Process Mindset

Most companies that want to get more serious about data approach it as a project. Something with a definitive start and a definitive end.

When you think about data as a project, you get the Data Wheel of Death.

The project wraps up, but at some point someone finds a piece of data that doesn’t look quite right. As a result, they don’t trust it and then they stop using the data. Because no one is using the data, the data isn’t maintained — which leads to more distrust.

In the above scenario, treating data like a project is at fault. In reality, data is an ongoing, never-ending project, similar to building a product.

Your data needs to be refined and updated via an ongoing process for a few reasons:

1.Your product will change. Features will change on an ongoing basis. As your product evolves feature by feature, your data also needs to keep pace or it will become irrelevant / flawed, people will lose trust, and the Data Wheel of Death will continue.

2.Your understanding of the business will change. Data should lead you to insight that might lead you to prioritize some things and de-prioritize others.

Andrew Chen likes to say, “Your data and KPI’s should be a reflection of your strategy.” Your strategy will change over time and what you track and analyze needs to evolve along with what it.

3. New answers expose new questions. As you gain fresh insight from your data, it opens the door to new questions. As you have new questions, you need to update your instrumentation and analysis. Saying the process is “done” is saying you understand every thing there is to know about your users, product, and channels.

4. Shit breaks. It’s that simple.

5. Data is never done. People spend more time on analyzing what tool to use than they do instrumenting and updating their data. The project mindset is what’s behind this, and is tied to a mindset of “I have to get this right the first time.” The problem — there is no perfect tool and you end up in analysis paralysis.

If you view data as an ongoing process — there’s no defined finish — it’s easier to jump in knowing that you’re bound to iterate as new needs emerge.

What to do instead

Instead of a one-and-done, project-based approach to data, you should assign dedicated resources for both data collection and analysis.

In the earliest stages, this might be part of a couple of engineers’ or PMs’ time, but no matter how many or how few the number of hours it is, it needs to be seen as critical part of their role.

In later stages as the company grows, you will most likely need a dedicated team to maintain the data process — both building and maintaining the data infrastructure, and promoting data usage.

It’s important to keep in mind that getting a data process off the ground isn’t just about instrumentation. Your other job is to build trust with the consumers of your data within the organization.

You must spend time verifying data in at least some of the reports and working with the greater team around you to make sure they both understand and trust what they’re seeing. If they don’t trust it, they won’t use it.

Issue #2: Misalignment of Incentives

Even if you treat data as a process vs a project, that doesn’t necessarily translate into success. There are companies that spend endless time on the infrastructure, tooling, and instrumentation but then miss something extremely important.

Getting an organization to use data requires behavior change among the individuals.

Changing behavior is extremely difficult. There is typically one culprit behind the lack of change: a misalignment of incentives and rewards.

Teams and individuals will ultimately do what they are rewarded for. So if you want to change behavior, you have to make sure that the behavior is part of what they are rewarded for. There are multiple types of rewards:

• Financial Rewards (bonuses/raises/equity)
• Progression Rewards (promotions)
• Authoritative Recognition (good job from boss/superior, etc)
• Peer Recognition (“good job” from peers, etc)

When you look around your team, how often are you delivering one of those rewards related to the use of data?

Here’s the problem

If the use of data is not rewarded, then the work that it takes to instrument and analyze data will be seen as friction to doing what is rewarded, or what’s perceived as a “good job” within the company.

If the use of data is rewarded, then the work it takes to incorporate data will be seen as an ally to doing a good job.

Then ask yourself a second question: How big / often is that reward in relation to other things you reward for?

How big/often the use of data is rewarded compared to other rewards signal importance/priority. Managers need to be careful how they weight different factors as part of rewards.

What to do instead

1. Every team needs a KPI. Every team needs a KPI as part of their measure of success. Having a KPI for each team aligns the use of data to their work vs positioning data as a friction point. Just setting the KPI isn’t enough, though. These 3 things need to happen:

• The team needs have a sense of ownership over the KPI.
• If they don’t feel like they own it, they will view it as someone else’s problem.
• Every single person on the team needs to understand the KPI and have easy access to viewing it.

Often times only the PM or a couple people on the team will truly understand it.

The KPI needs to be part of the four types of rewards, but not the only thing the team is rewarded for.

There are other important factors for product teams like shipping velocity, product quality, etc. Like most things, it is a balance.

2.Design systems for each type of reward. Go through each of the four reward types and design systems to reward for the use of data. What do I mean by systems?

Here’s a quick example around a system for Authoritative Recognition Reward: the best managers I know have checklists they use to prep for every 1:1. An item on the checklist might be “Did this person display the use of data in their work?”

If yes, make sure to give recognition for it. It is too easy to forget these types of things unless you have specific prompts.

3.Communicate the rewards clearly. Don’t assume that team members know how they get promotions, bonuses, praise. You need to put it in writing, make it explicit, and reinforce. You have to over communicate in order for it to get through.

When you promote someone, don’t just announce “Congrats to Jane Smith on her promotion to Sr. Product Manager.” Back the announcement up with examples of the type of work and behavior that the person has displayed which led to the promotion.

Issue #3: Data Team Becomes the Bottleneck

If you solve process vs project and incentives and data starts to become valuable in the company it creates a couple of new problems.

The first is that the data team can end up becoming a bottleneck. This stems from a the data team taking an “ownership” mindset to the data, i.e. “We own the data.”

But ownership thinking leaves out one important point: Every team has a “customer.”

The data team’s customers are the other people using the data internally: data analysts, product managers, engineers, marketers, etc.

In service to these internal customers, the data team needs to act like any other product team:

• They need to define their customer segments
• They need to understand customer needs
• They need to deliver the most compelling solution
• And they have to iterate!

In other words, their output must be able to enable other teams’ output, rather than them being the exclusive owners.

Issue #4: Brilliant Answers, Useless Questions

There’s a second issue that arises once data has become valuable and recognized, and that’s when people start noodling on data for data’s sake. Whether it’s because they find the data process intellectually fascinating, or just to seem smart, productive, etc. in the end, it’s data masturbation :)

Data for data’s sake is an alluring trap, but only creates “brilliant answers to useless questions,” as Ken Rudin, Head of User Growth & Analytics at Google and former Head of Analytics at Facebook, says.

Rudin reminds us that even though it’s alluring to increase knowledge, insight alone isn’t enough — results and impact are the true goal of analytics. To that end, data teams should make sure they’re asking the right questions, not just coming up with more and more answers.

Rudin has two suggestions for how to create a data process that actually serves business needs:

1.Hire analysts that are business savvy, not only academic about data or its tools. When you interview candidates, don’t focus on just “How do we calculate this metric?” Ask them “In this business scenario, what metrics do you think would be important?”

2.Make data everyone’s thing. Rudin’s team at Facebook ran a two week “Data Camp” for not just the data team but for everyone at the company. It gives the wider organization a common language to frame questions that data can answer. (Some great additional talks by Ken on data and impact here and here.)

A solid data process will be informed by asking good questions that result in a real business impact. Rudin also makes a great point that data teams must be accountable for not just “actionable insights” but the fact that those necessary actions get taken.

As data provides answers and actions, it helps shape better and better questions.

As data’s answers translate to impact, people will be incentivized to maintain and even improve data systems, leading to more data capacity, and stronger answers to better questions.

Learned something? Say “thanks” by clicking the 💚.

This article was originally published at www.coelevate.com on April 4, 2017.

Keep reading about this topic…

The Startup Founder’s Guide to Analytics

How You Battle the “Data Wheel of Death” in Growth was originally published in ThinkGrowth.org on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In marketing/growth there is a big industry problem. An addiction to Hacktics - the tips, tricks, hacks, tools, and secrets that promise to solve all growth problems.

As a result, marketers now get the majority of their “learning” through this prescription based hack-tic content which isn’t helping create the next crop of great marketers. As a result, I recently wrote about what growth professionals should focus on instead. In the process, I realized that these principles apply to many professionals.

Most real world work involves a problem that doesn’t have an answer yet, and the biggest growth opportunities are in uncharted territories. More specifically, you don’t figure out the answer by just plugging in the answers that have worked for others in the past. Instead, the biggest upside lies in solving problems that likely didn’t exist before.

As we emphasize continuously in Reforge, becoming an elite professional has nothing to do with the specific hammer in your toolkit and everything to do with mastering the emerging skills, frameworks, and thought processes that enable you to solve new problems, repeatedly.

So that begs the question, how do you do this?

1. Generalist or Specialist?

I’ve commonly been asked the question, “Should I be a generalist or a specialist?”

It is such a popular question that it was asked on Inbound. I hate to say it, but 100% of people who took the poll got it wrong. Partly because the question presents two false choices.

Some of the commenters started to get it right by saying that you should “Shape yourself like a T.” But what does that actually mean?

1. Master The Fundamentals
2. Go Deep

Lets dive into each of those individually…

Mastering The Fundamentals

In his book The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking, author Edward Burger tells a story about internationally acclaimed composer and trumpet player Tony Plog teaching a group of students:

“During the class, each student played a portion of his or her selected virtuosic piece. They played wonderfully. Tony then gave very easy warm-up exercise that any beginning trumpet player might be given. They played the handful of simple notes, which sounded childish compared to the dramatically fast, high notes from the earlier, more sophisticated pieces.

After they played the simple phrase, Tony, for the first time during the lesson, picked up the trumpet. He played that same phrase, but when he played it, it was not childish. It was exquisite. Each note was a rich, delightful sound. The students’ attempts did not come close — the contrast was astounding.”

The point of the story is that the difference between the master and student happened at the level of fundamentals.

The fundamentals are the foundation that everything else builds upon. Another analogy would be in sports. What separates someone like Lebron James from average professional basketball player (physical advantages aside) are not his abilities to dunk or complete alley oops. Lebron simply knows how to dribble, pass, and shoot a jump shot, better. The fundamentals.

The fundamentals help you solve the variety of growth problems you will face in your specific situation. The better you are that fundamentals, the harder the problems you will be able to solve. The fundamentals for growth are not Search, Facebook Ads, Content, etc. It also has nothing to do with a set of tools.

The fundamentals for growth are:

1. Data Analysis — Understanding the meaning of data to identify, understand, and pinpoint solutions.
2. Quantitative Modeling — Translating your historical data into a forward looking model to simulate the future which helps you understand better what you should be doing today.
3. User Psychology — The data doesn’t matter unless you know how to influence the numbers in an authentic way. That comes down to understanding the psychology of your audience, problem, and solution to figure out what your users respond to.
4. Storytelling — You can be the best at quant modeling, analyzing data, and understanding the psychology, but to be a great growth professional you need to know how to bring those things to life in a way that is compelling and interesting to your target audience. This is storytelling.

Everything else like Copywriting, CRO, Facebook Ads, etc build off the foundation of these four things.

Don’t underestimate how much time you need to be spending on the fundamentals. Reading Cialdini’s “Influence” doesn’t mean you know User Psychology. Your learning on the fundamentals never ends. It is continual process of mastery.

Go Deep

Every time I’ve hired for a role I inevitably get a swarm of applications with a couple years of experience that say they “know” CRO, Facebook Ads, Content Marketing some other combination of 5 + things. The applicants claim they are generalists, and they’re proud of it. Sounds great on paper, but as soon as I dig in I typically find they are ok at a lot of things, but amazing at nothing.

Being “ok” at a variety of things, is far less valuable then been amazing at one.

Why is that?

Anyone can learn the surface layer of a subject. But going deep requires you to solve problems where the answer isn’t in some hacktics blog post. You never experience this as a generalist. The best way to get better at solving problems, is by solving more problems so in the process you actually build the skills that will enable you to go deep on something else.

When I hire, I will take someone who has become amazing at one thing over a generalist any day of the week because if they got great at one thing, the probability of them becoming great at another are a lot better.

When I’ve given the “go deep” advice to those early in their careers I’ve found that it feels daunting to them. Common responses I get are:

“What if I don’t like it?”
“I might not want to pin my career on that one area.”
“I don’t want to be stuck there.”
“I better be really sure.”

Two responses to this…

One, the only way to find out the answers to those questions is through action. You aren’t going to think your way to those answers. You need to dive in and spend enough time on it to give yourself an opportunity to fight through a hard problem.

Two, this isn’t a 10 year commitment. If you really focus you can go deep on something in a year or two. If you end up not liking that area, it’s not a waste.

The process of going deep on one thing is itself a skill that makes it easier to go deep on another.

2. Choosing What You Work On

A large input into how you learn are the projects you work on in your organization. That means you should choose projects wisely. How do you make decisions of what projects to work on in the organization?

Some people choose projects based on if they were the easiest, the most fun, the most creative, the most technically difficult, etc.

If you want to optimize for learning and career trajectory, you’ll need to take a different approach.

While most people will position themselves in one of the three blue quadrants, you want to position yourself in the green quadrant — getting into the projects that have high organizational impact and are unpopular to everyone else. Why?

Having high org impact should be self-explanatory. Projects are unpopular because they are typically hard and messy. But, by taking those projects on you do a few things:

1. You learn a lot simply because the more challenging a project is the more you tend to learn.
2. Messy projects require a deeper level of understanding to untangle whatever the mess is. You instantly become an expert on something that is high impact in the org.
3. You put yourself at the center in focus. These types of projects tend to have high visibility in an organization. You are seen as a leader/savior because you are tackling something no one else wanted to touch. Everyone wants these types of people on their team.

The combination of those two things leads to faster trajectory. If you successfully solve one hard problem, people will come to you with more. Opportunities will start flowing to you rather than you having to seek them out.

3. Keep One Foot in the Known

My first job out of college was as a Product Manager at ZoomInfo. By all measures I was a terrible employee when I started.

I entered into a situation where 90%+ of what I was suppose to work on were things I knew nothing about and as a result I struggled to make progress on anything. My manager at the time quickly recognized this, and we had a long honest conversation about what I was comfortable with and what I wasn’t. From there, he helped reshape the project so that a larger percent was based on things I knew and was comfortable with while make sure a chunk was still new to me. That was a turning point for me. After that, I not only learned much faster but delivered much better results.

If you want to maximize learning you need a foot in the known and a foot in the unknown. Whatever you are working on, a certain percentage of the work are things you already know, and a certain percentage are things you don’t know and have never worked on.

You don’t want to be too far in the known. When everything is known you aren’t continually learning and over a long period of time you become obsolete as the industry moves around you. The challenge is that it’s easy to fall too far into the known because it feels easy, comfortable, and efficient or you start to get bored which leads to unhappiness.

Being too far in the unknown also has its problems. It is easy to get overwhelmed and not know where to start, making it impossible to make progress.

I often hear that you should jump into something with both feet if you want to learn. But studies have shown that the most effective learners learn by relating the new with the known.

In reality there is no perfect 50/50. What you want to shoot for is the range in the middle. Sometimes you might be 70% in the known, and 30% in the unknown. Sometimes the reverse. Your goal is to recognize the signs when you are one of the ends of the spectrum and figure out a way to work yourself back to the middle.

4. Accomplishments Over Credentials

I went to the University of Michigan for my undergraduate degree. While I enjoyed my college days I look back now and realize that it was an extremely unfulfilling experience.

Part of why it was so unfulfilling was that I made sure half of my classes were easy to make sure my GPA was high. I thought the GPA and degree credential were super important. I realize now how stupid that was, yet the dominant thinking today hasn’t changed: the Credential is what matters.

Our education system burns a hole in our head from childhood until we graduate college that it is all about the credentials (the grade, the degree, etc). Pre-internet the credential was one of the more efficient ways to signal that you know something about a certain topic. This thinking is out of date for two big reasons:

1. As Google itself has discovered, credentials have little to no correlation to being successful in a role and a highly productive professional. The company that was famous for hiring exclusively from the “Ivy Plus” has now removed it from their screening criteria.
2. The internet makes our actual work more transparent, easier for us to display, and easier for others to check out. There’s Github for developers, Medium, Slideshare (and other sites) for business people, Dribbble for designers, and so on.

It is no longer about credentials. It is about creating good work and then finding a way to show it off (see Build A Platform section). Yet, instead of showing off work on LinkedIn I see professionals adding lists of certificates and credentials.

However, as an employer, I could care less that you took a course and passed some test. I want to see if you can actually apply it. Focus on accomplishments, not credentials.

5. Build a Platform

Each year for the past 7 years I’ve taken a couple days in December to reflect on the past year. One of the questions I ask myself is “What are the 20% of activities that led to 80% of value creation?” There is only one thing that has been on that list all 7 years. Writing on my blog.

Funny thing is that I don’t even write that often, yet it is still on the list every year. Every professional opportunity that I’ve had has come from my blog. I got my first job at ZoomInfo because my hiring manager read my blog. I got my first round of VC funding for Viximo because the VC’s knew me through my blog. I met the VC’s of Boundless through my blog. A huge reason I got hired at HubSpot was because of my blog. The only reason I’m in a position to start Reforge is once again because of my blog.

I’m not saying you must write a blog, but you should invest in building a platform for yourself that you own.

The platform could be a blog, speaking gigs, videos, images etc. Your platform gives you an opportunity to show off your hard work, creations, and thoughts (which is very different from showing off credentials).

By doing this, a few things happen:

1. Opportunities Flow To You. When you distribute your hard work, people take notice and the opportunities flow to you.
2. You Create Leverage. Because opportunities flow to you, you end up gaining leverage. It is a much stronger position to be in the seat of being sold to versus being the one that is selling.
3. You Build a Personal Brand. It is no secret that companies with strong brands hold a number of powerful advantages in their market. The same holds true when thinking about your personal brand.

Everyone isn’t a great writer, but that doesn’t mean you can’t build a platform. The medium that fits you could be video, podcasts, visual portfolio site, presentations, speaking, or something else. The tools are out there to make any of these mediums easy (and it is getting easier) so you don’t really have any excuses.

6. Get A Coach

You’ve probably heard the a advice to get a coach 100 times, yet, so few do it.

The truth is, finding a great coach is incredibly difficult. It is something that you have to search for and work at for a long time. But when you find the right person, the relationship can last for years.

More important you need to understand what the value of a coach is. The biggest misconception is that you need a coach in order to do good work.

It’s actually the opposite — you do good work first, which gives you the opportunity to find a good coach.

I use the term coach vs mentor (or something else) on purpose. Any professional sports player’s coach can’t dribble the ball for them and make in game decisions. That is up to the player.

Similarly, a business or career coach doesn’t make decisions for you or provide the answers. Instead you want to find a coach that helps facilitate a better answer than one you would get to on your own.

That guidance takes two forms:

1. Unbiased Opinion. Everyone around you (family, friends, employees, co-founders, investors) have their own personal biases pulling you in different directions because they all have a personal stake in the outcome in some way shape or form. The value of a coach is someone who can offer an unbiased perspective because they don’t have a stake in the outcome.
2. The Right Questions. Great questions lead to great answers. A great coach will ask you questions that you wouldn’t ask yourself. In the process helping you look at a problem in a different way or reveal some information you wouldn’t have otherwise.

7. Proactive vs Reactive

If you do the above things, you will likely have a lot of opportunities that flow your way. This creates a new issue:
Reacting to things that come your way rather than being proactive about what you want.

Being reactive almost always creates sub-optimal outcomes. It is hard to say no or evaluate opportunities in an unbiased way if you don’t have some pre-set criteria or filter.

Being proactive rather than reactive is my usual advice, but as I’ve watched others try to put this into action I’ve noticed a couple of common issues. The proactive mindset forces you to ask yourself about what you really want. Understanding the answer to that question seems easy on the surface, but for many is actually pretty difficult.

The answer is simpler than we think. Like the other important problems / questions, “What do I really want?” is something you can’t think or theorize your way out of. You need to act.

So here’s my revised advice:

Rather than feeling like you need to think your way to a confident answer, treat it like experiments.

It breaks down into these steps:

1. Think your way to a set of prioritized hypotheses of what you want
2. Design the experiment
3. Run the experiment
4. Analyze its results

If the results are positive, keep going. If the results are bad, then stop and feed those learnings back into your next set of hypotheses in a series of iterations.

As we emphasize in Reforge and on our own growth teams and players, learning growth marketing is also learning problem solving. The best “rules” aren’t shortcuts but a long term investment in integrating the principles of mastery into your career.

If you are interested in more content like this, check out my personal blog Coelevate.com.

P.S. This is actually my first Medium post! I could use some ❤’s!

Originally published at www.coelevate.com on October 12, 2016.

7 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started My Career was originally published in Buffer Stories on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.