Culture Index promises to make executives more effective by helping them understand their own traits, build a team that complements them, and foster greater empathy for their teammates by knowing each other’s traits. Here, we dig in to see if a personality test can really make someone a better manager.

Working as a fractional CMO, I have to bring the fire every day, because every month, revenue’s gotta go up. And when you’re trying to bring the fire for three companies at once, context-switching is incredibly taxing. You can’t rely on your memory to remember everything, and you can’t count on making time to do everything.

That’s why I’ve developed an operating system for scaling myself. I developed my system by studying other growth marketing consultants that I've hired, as well as by studying other fractional CMOs. There’s no silver-bullet for scaling oneself. But there are specific strategies and tools that I’ve learned to help me be effective. Here’s what I’ve learned.

I was recently searching for “good take-home projects for content marketers.”Instead found a slew of irate 😡 articles from candidates who were, asked to do work for free, had companies steal their ideas, or expected to invest hours before even meeting the hiring manager. No bueno.
💪 Hiring Managers: we can do better.
That’s why I created a list of 9 things you can do today to make your interview projects less cumbersome for candidates and more powerful at spotlighting the best candidates. 🎁 Bonus: I’ve also included details on the take-home projects I’m currently using to screen performance marketers and content marketers.

Marketers need to grow faster and more cost-effectively than ever before, but growth is a cross-disciplinary sport, and setting your growth team up for success is a complex problem to tackle. In this post I’ll cover six rules, and as a corollary, six mistakes I’ve personally made and how to avoid them. We’ll cover:

• How to build your startup’s model and why it should matter to everyone not just your VP of Finance

• How to set the right north star metric with an example of what I chose, why, and what others I considered

• How to increase team velocity and reduce team thrash - this is a big one that I’ve spent years struggling with so you don’t have to

• How to prioritize growth projects - with my very special Growth Playbook framework that I’ve used at 6 startups

• How often should teams reevaluate goals (i.e. OKR planning) - hint: it’s less often than you think

Uber’s 2016 rebrand was one of the most controversial in recent history. Here’s what made this rebrand so unique:

• Uber wanted to recast itself as more than an on-demand taxi company. It had grand ambitions, some of which are now realities (UberEats) and others that never materialized (autonomous trucks)

• Rather than hiring an experienced branding agency, Uber did it in-house with heavy involvement from Travis Kalanick

• Rather than a single global look & feel (which is considered a best practice), the new strategy involved localizing certain colors and patterns to each region

• Uber launched the rebrand in 2016, gradually backed-away from parts of it in 2017, and rebranded again in 2018 (Airbnb, for comparison, also had a controversial rebrand but has stuck with it)

I reviewed dozens of stories about the journey and reviews of the output to synthesize what we can learn from Uber’s journey. Below is what I learned.

Over the past decade How Brands Grow has been very influential in consumer marketing. Author Byron Sharp does something most marketing books don’t: he backs his framework with swaths of data from a dozen global brands like Coca Cola. Despite its influence, his anti-segmentation mass-marketing framework is rarely discussed in startup marketing. In this post I summarize Sharp’s insights and explore what Sharp’s framework might mean for startup growth.

It’s no secret that branding processes are fraught with challenges. They often take longer than expected and rarely do they meet with positive reviews. Most importantly, they can take time from other initiatives, both urgent and important. So here is a guide to running a startup branding process that gets the job done well, quickly.  There’s an infamous flak jacket that White House press secretaries for years have been handing-down from one to the next, filled with notes and advice. Consider this the flak jacket I bequeath to you. Go forth and conquer.

Over the course of three years building out the marketing, sales, BI, and customer success tech stacks at Bloc, we learned a great deal about the trade-offs between building vs. buying. Oftentimes when executives have a technical background and engineering resources they tend to favor building tools themselves. And certainly if something is going to be one of the businesses core competencies, there’s a fair argument that perhaps we should build it ourselves. But early-on in a startup’s journey you may not know exactly what you need to build, and buying off the shelf solutions can help you leapfrog. So which path should you choose and under what circumstances is it the right choice?

Coding bootcamps have been held up as an egalitarian alternative to elitist university computer science programs. Bootcamp boosters claim bootcamps can be a new source of diverse technical talent. But does the admissions and financial aid process preclude this diversity from materializing? Are coding bootcamps only for the rich?

According to bootcamp industry-watcher Course Report, 79 percent of bootcamp students have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher before enrolling. Furthermore, Course Report found the average pre-bootcamp salary to be $46,600. As bootcamp applicants tend to be younger than America’s median age, this puts would-be students already near the top of America’s middle class.

I owned Microsoft’s “back to school” campaigns on university campuses for 2007 through 2009. At that time Microsoft was quickly losing ground to Apple amongst students, and so we launched a campaign aimed at competing. We focused on the same lifestyle themes that Apple was using to gain share: pictures, music, and movies in your pocket.

Unsurprisingly, this campaign failed. And so for the 2008 back to school season, we tried a different strategy, one that I called “workstyle” instead.