Just because you are a startup doesn’t mean things need to be haphazard. Approaching decision-making and tracking progress can help your team stay focused on the right tasks and your company on the right track toward positive growth, and there is a common way to do just that:

The Edison Research report as of April 2020 shows that there are 850,000 active podcasts, with over 30 million episodes. And it’s up to us more than ever, to weed out the noise and spend time on credible podcasts that offer some tangible takeaway. Ditch every podcast that doesn’t seem to be respectful of your time. If you are in the marketing domain, then it’s no secret that there is a lot of fluff around. Too many people in this domain tend to play the game of “fake it till you make it”. But, it’s easy to figure out fluff. Some of the tell-tale symptoms are: The podcaster will try to make every other sentence sound like a punchline. There’s too much focus on dramatizing the whole episode with sound effects, buildups and too much post-production than focusing on offering quality content. Episode topics are click-baity in nature, but the episode content doesn’t live up to it. Random content – i.e., the conversation goes in all directions and doesn’t communicate a clear takeaway. Biased/agenda driven- a good podcast is one that offers a balanced view on the subject. For instance, if it’s about ‘gating content’ – you will see that podcasts from companies offering chatbots will be against gating content, giving you the modern marketing story. But, you as a listener are here to take away an unbiased outcome, i.e., what’s the point of gating, when to gate and when not to, and definitely not to hear propaganda. To sum up, I’ve tried to put together some real indicators you can look for when you select a podcast to listen to.

An introduction to product strategy with examples of north star metrics across industries The product north star is easily the most powerful and misunderstood product strategy framework in use today. More product teams are dealing with the consequences of not defining it at all or defining it the wrong way and leading their team down an unintended path. This article is our first deep dive in a series on the north star metric. We hope it serves as a guide to product leaders and managers around the world on why this metric matters, how to define it and how to use it to drive your long-term product strategy and growth.