Find the biggest risk and go straight at it

Andres Glusman on the ProductLed Podcast, on the mentors, the mistakes and the Meetup years that turned into DoWhatWorks.

Show
ProductLed Podcast, episode 81
Host
Andrew Capland
Guest
Andres Glusman, DoWhatWorks
Runtime
42:00

Chapters

Opens at that point
02:05 Where DoWhatWorks came from The frustration that produced the company, and why the answer was to go and look at what other teams had already tested. 05:50 Building the growth skillset How the discipline got learned, mostly by running things and watching which ones worked. 14:00 Risk first, not roadmap first Identify the key risk, go after it as fast as you can, and validate the assumption before you build around it. 16:58 The Meetup years What the work actually looked like inside Meetup, and the shape of its growth journey. 25:15 Winning, momentum, and moving into leadership What changes when the job stops being running the tests and starts being running the people who run them. 33:00 The mistakes The failures Andres learned the most from, and the advice he gives anybody building a growth skillset now.

Andrew Capland runs a #HowIGotHere series on the ProductLed Podcast, where the subject is the route somebody took rather than the job title they ended up with.

Andres walks through the years at Meetup that built the growth skillset, the failures that taught more than the wins, and the frustration behind starting DoWhatWorks.

Name the assumption that would kill the thing, then find the cheapest way to test it this week.

What to take from it

  • Find the assumption that would sink the whole thing and test that one first. Everything else can wait.
  • A growth skillset is built by shipping and measuring, not by reading about it.
  • The mistakes teach more than the wins, but only if you write down what you expected before you ran the thing.