“Semper Gumby” is the unofficial motto of the Marines. It is a play on the phrase “Semper Fi”, which means always faithful. Semper Gumby is a reminder to embrace change and to embrace the best (and sometimes hardest) parts of the agile product management methodology.
Tag: Growth
What is your North Star Growth Metric?
My contrarian viewpoint is, if you’re a startup, you shouldn’t have a growth team. Startups should not have growth teams. The whole company should be the growth team. The CEO should be the head of growth. You need someone to set a North star for you about where the company wants to go, and that person needs to be the person leading the company, from my opinion, that’s what I’ve seen. Mark is a fantastic example of that. Back when Facebook started, a lot of people were putting out their registered user numbers. Right? You’d see you registered user numbers for MySpace, you’d see a registered user numbers for ___11:38, you’d see registered user numbers. Mark put out monthly active users, as the number both internally he held everyone to, and said we need everyone on Facebook, but that means everyone active on Facebook, not everyone signed up on Facebook, so monthly active people was the number internally, and it was also the number he published externally. It was the number he made the whole world hold Facebook to, as a number that we cared about. If you look at what Jan has done with WhatsApp I think that’s another great example. He always published sends numbers.
In order for you to reach your dream world vision for your product, you have to develop a North Star growth metric to give you a target to shoot for. Read more here.
PolyMth - Product Leadership 