Kait Stephens

Talk to your customers. The more customers you can speak with, the better you'll be able to identify trends in your customer base, which will be a flywheel for your product. When speaking to customers, click deeper into the feedback you are hearing. Ask why they feel that way or why they give you that feedback to help uncover additional learnings from this feedback. Remember, feedback is a gift! Even if it hurts to hear.

One thing I’ve found helpful is using your calendar to set boundaries and provide transparency. As a leader, my calendar is public so anyone on the team can see what I am doing and when, and that includes personal time. I also block my time for personal things - from bedtime to doctor’s appointments. I communicate clearly to my team about these being protected times and have discussed the different forms of communication to use for different reasons. Slack for normal business items and text or call if something is a true emergency. Otherwise during blocked times, my team knows they won’t hear from me.

I'm a big fan of setting an agenda ahead of time. We now have a dedicated slack channel for each of our big meetings where team members can drop in topics throughout the week. We even have a bot that reminds us to add to that agenda. The expectation is that people are reading the agenda ahead of the meeting. Anything that requires deep reading or consumption should be sent ahead of the meeting so the meeting can focus on collaboration and execution. This makes us so much more efficient and collaborative in our meetings.

Events provide an unparalleled opportunity for you to get in front of senior leadership at key firms across the industry as well as stay up on the latest discussions & innovations in the industry. Here are my tips: - Post on LinkedIn ahead of the conference. Use the event's hashtag and communicate that you're opening to meeting up - Send messages ahead of the event via email and LinkedIn to those who you'd be interested in setting up meetings with. - Don't be afraid to approach people and introduce yourself - Finally, take notes on what you're learning about trends. Share them back with your team and on LinkedIn so multiple people can benefit. - Don't forget to follow up!

It's critical to be surveying and speaking to your customers -- through a variety of channels, including social media, SMS and email. Your customer success team will also help you spot trends and opportunities. Bringing together this feedback from your customers will allow you to identify problems and opportunities for your business. While it is important to not build for too much of an edge case, multiple requests for a similar product, flavor or idea can help motivate where you should be spending time on new products and innovation.

Marketing should be thought of as a series of small tests - many of which will fail and some of which will perform well. However, to understand success vs failure, you need to appropriately define success metrics prior to these tests. These can be both qualitative and quantitative measures that allow you to assess the success of a test. Failure should be repositioned as a learning, because each failed test should be an opportunity to rethink the next test, learn and iterate.