5-Bit Friday’s (#17): Snackable insights, frameworks, and ideas from the best in tech
On: "Quiet Firing", Questions to never ask in a survey, 3 marketplace supply strategies, Marketing advantages to accelerate your growth, and How to run meetings that don't suck
Hi, I’m Jaryd. 👋I write in-depth analyses on the growth of popular companies, including their early strategies, current tactics, and actionable business-building lessons we can learn from them.
Plus, every Friday I bring you summarized insights, frameworks, and ideas from best-in-class experts to help us become better builders.
Happy Friday, friends 🍻
If you missed this weeks company analysis, we went very deep on How Atlassian Grows:Lessons on kickstarting and scaling a B2B/enterprise business from one of the greatest go-to-market machines of all time.
Not to be biased, but I definitely suggest checking it out. Their story is fascinating, with tons of concrete lessons for builders and operators. If you’re pinched for time though, just go straight to the recap.
Otherwise, not much housekeeping today, so let’s just get straight to it
Here’s what we’ve got this week:
How to know if you’re being “quiet fired”: 19 signs, and what you can do about it
Don’t ask these questions when surveying customers - but make sure you do this
Marketplace supply strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated
Leverage these 9 marketing advantages to accelerate your growth
How to run meetings that don't suck
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How to know if you’re being “quiet fired”: 19 signs, and what you can do about it
Exactly a year ago, in a market where employees seemed to have had the upper hand, this video made the rounds on TikTok. With it, the term “quiet quitting” was coined. Simply, it refers to doing the absolute bare minimum to keep your job.
Well….this is March 2023, and the tables have turned in the job market.
This has given rise to the term quiet firing. AKA — when companies try to push out employees so they quit, saving having to fire them. Explained perfectly by Bonnie Dilber (Recruiting Lead at Zapier):
The "Quiet Quitting" thing is funny to me. I think the real conversation should be around "Quiet Firing" as it's rampant.
You don't receive feedback or praise.
You get raises of 3% or less while others are getting much more.
Your 1:1s are frequently cancelled or shuffled around.
You don't get invited to work on cool projects or stretch opportunities.
You're not kept up-to-date on information that is relevant or critical to your work.
Your manager never talks to you about your career trajectory.
This happens ALL THE TIME.
It works great for companies...eventually you'll either feel so incompetent, isolated, and unappreciated that you'll go find a new job, and they never have to deal with a development plan or offer severance. Or your performance will slip enough due to the lack of support that they'll be able to let you go.
Instead of worrying about "quiet quitting", I'd encourage companies to look at their management practices and identify places where people are being "quiet fired" by poor managers who don't want to do the work to support, train, and coach their teams.
And we’re seeing this with companies like Meta and Tesla.
So, I looked into which signals to look out for. Turns out, the Harvard Business Review has compiled a very comprehensive list: 👇
Quiet firing warning signs
Changes related to work responsibilities:
Reassigning important job responsibilities to other employees
Demoting an employee, or changing their job description
Not assigning promising new opportunities
Setting up unreasonable performance targets
Giving an employee responsibilities that are undesirable or misaligned with their role
Preventing an employee from receiving a well-deserved promotion
Changes related to compensation:
Pay cuts
Preventing an employee from earning more by taking on extra work or overtime
Not providing expected yearly bonuses or raises
Changes related to working conditions:
Changing work hours or regular shifts
Increasing workloads to unreasonable or unmanageable levels
Forcing an employee to relocate
Taking away “perks” such as an office or parking spot
Changes related to supervisor communication:
Not discussing career trajectory or providing performance feedback
Evaluating an employee unfairly, providing excessively harsh feedback, or constantly criticizing their work
“Ghosting,” or repeatedly cancelling meetings
Not providing critical information related to an employee’s work and responsibilities
Not giving an employee credit for their work, or even worse, giving the credit to others
Beyond that list, another thing to watch out for is being asked to write down what you do — never a good sign. If you know of any others, drop them in the comments.
Okay, knowing it’s happening is just the first part. What do you do next?
Steps to take if you’re being quiet fired
Rationally diagnose the situation. If you think you’re on the receiving end of a "quiet firing," it's important to first take a step back. Evaluate the situation and figure out if there are objective reasons for the changes you're seeing and if they're affecting everyone equally. It's easy to misinterpret actions in a sensitive and uncomfortable situation. If the workplace is unbearable and affecting your mental health, it may be time to quit, but make sure you have an accurate understanding of the situation before reacting.
Do your homework. Familiarize yourself with the protocols for promotions and raises by reading the employee handbook. I.e, what conditions are and aren’t acceptable.
Get prepared and start documenting your wins. Write down all the great things you’ve done at the company. Note the projects you’ve worked on, lessons, and the impact with specific metrics. This can help demonstrate the value you’ve added to the company — but it also serves as a record for you to use in interviews later.
Update your resume. With your wins noted, make sure your resume and LinkedIn is polished up, and ready for action.
Quietly quit. Not as a tit-for-tat play, but disengaging from your work and only doing the bare minimum can be an effective option to alleviate some of the stress associated with being quietly fired. This could free up more time to…
Actively look for other jobs. If you know you’re on the way out and/or you’re not happy — start applying for other roles while you still have one. It’s an advantage to look and apply without the pressure of being unemployed. Plus, you look more desirable to companies having a role while applying.
To cap off the advice here for you, this is what Lenny said about being better prepared for layoffs (based on answers from a bunch of people who recently were):
Not being in this situation myself but with the benefit of a large audience of insightful readers, I went to Twitter and LinkedIn to ask people who’d recently been laid off what they wish they had done to have been better prepared. Here’s the most common advice I heard:
Document your accomplishments
Build (and freshen up) your network
Update your resume
Add some cushion to your savings account
Explore additional sources of income (e.g. a side hustle)
Don’t ask these questions when surveying customers - but make sure you do this
This is a short, sweet, and very important one for product managers and marketers.
If you’re ever involved in surveying your existing users, take note…I’ve certainly been guilty of this…
Product Management Daily Tip, Day 61: In surveys, don't ask questions to which you (should) know the answer.
e.g. "How long have you used our product?" (Check your CRM!) or "Do you use our product on mobile or computer?" (Check your analytics!)
Re-asking questions sends a message to respondents (read: customers) that you don't really understand them. You're pushing work to them that YOU should be doing, and their self-reported responses are much less likely to be accurate vs. finding the "true" answer in the data.
— Jeff Lash, VP Global Product Management at Forrester via LI
So, DON’T ask questions for answers you know/can easily pull yourself. But, to leave you with some DOs on customer surveying:
Figure out the feedback and insights you want, and include only questions designed to get that information. Have a survey planning doc where you note your research questions, and what you want to get out of the survey. Make sure it’s clear why you’re running it, and what you plan to do with it.
Get feedback from the right stakeholders. Circulate your planning doc with a few people to see if there’s anything you’re missing.
Test them before sending with others. Of course you should QA them, but getting another set of eyes to check your logic and make sure your questions are asking what you intend them to is very helpful.
Send it to the right people. If you’re looking at your data (answering your own questions) you shouldn’t need to use qualifying questions — just send your survey to the right people, period. As a simple example, if you need feedback on a specific product, don’t send it to people who’ve never used it.
Automate them if you need to. If you want to capture specific feedback about something, setting up surveys to go out automatically based on some condition can work really well.
Use the right surveying stack. Make sure you’re using a tool that meets your needs. Right now, I use Typeform (because I want the customer to have great experience) and integrate it with Notion so I can segment responses nicely and make reports. Other tools don’t have the same CX, but have much better native reporting tools.
Include some open-ended questions. Freeform answers can be a goldmine of insight if you prompt people with the right question.
Minimize the use of binary questions.Yes and No answers can be useful (i.e 70% of people said they had no idea we could do X ⇒ i.e highlights an awareness problem), but usually other questions give you more detailed feedback you can use.
Ask “Why?” as a follow-up to dig further. It’s usually the reason behind a response that’s the interesting part — so have open-ended questions nudging people to elaborate.
Keep them short. Unless you’re offering something for their time, people don’t have 20 minutes to spare on a long survey. You want complete answers without drop offs, so prioritize that.
Randomize the order of answer options. When using multiple choice questions, randomize the options you present to avoid any bias.
Watch out for survey fatigue. You don’t want to be sending the same customers surveys too regularly, so look into using suppression lists etc to ensure Nick who just got a survey doesn’t get another in 3 weeks time.
Offer some value back (if you can). Whether it’s a small gift card, an internal offer for their time, or an entry into a draw for something, having a carrot at the end incentives people to open the survey.
Ask if people would be open to a follow up interview. I always close out by asking if people would be open to a 30-minute product interview. If there’s a response you want to dig more into, this gives you an opportunity to reach out.
Segment responses. Once you’ve got your answers, it can be super helpful to segment responses by different personas to categorize feedback and problem areas.
Use your insights and take action. Lastly…don’t just run a survey and do nothing. Note important insights, takeaways, and potential action items from it, and share what you found with others.
Thank you for reading How They Grow. This post is public so feel free to share it.
Marketplace supply strategy: Comprehensive, Exclusive, or Curated
Marketplaces are tricky beasts to get started and scale. There’s no single player mode — meaning without two sides (supply and demand) of sufficient size and who are engaging with each other — there’s no value.
In other words…networks are hard to establish, and hard to keep balanced. But, once they are, there’s a ton of value and defensibility that comes from the marketplace model.
So, with two sides to constantly be thinking about (i.e hungry people at home (D), and restaurants & drivers (S)) — where’s the best place to focus?
For marketplaces, “owning demand” is the surest path to sustainable growth. In practice, that means users come directly to you, rather than going through intermediaries like Google or Facebook, and that they exclusively (or almost exclusively) rely on your marketplace instead of comparison shopping with competitors.
It’s one of the key challenges of any marketplace. “Demand efforts” like SEO, SEM, CRO, and amazing UX are necessary, but not sufficient; ultimately, the key to owning demand is through supply strategy.
The right supply strategy varies based on the product being offered and those customers’ needs. If users value consistency and predictability—like, say, UberX—the path to long-term success generally lies in being both better and cheaper than the competition.
However, in most marketplaces, users value having a high variety of supply. For these marketplaces, there are three main strategies for supply differentiation: comprehensiveness, exclusivity, and curation.
Let’s unpack each of those three supply strategies, as per Casey and Anne.
#1 Comprehensiveness: have more supply than anyone else
This is all about how many options buyers have. Here, the focus is on building an extensive and diverse supply base, and giving customers a lot of choices.
Amazon is a great example. Search for anything, you’ll find anything, and there will be so much variety to choose from.
For many winning marketplaces, comprehensiveness is the core value proposition that allows them to own demand and provide a sticky product.
But, comprehensive to me could be very different from comprehensive for you…so where do marketplaces going after this strategy draw the line for comprehensive enough?
With the exception of marketplaces where supply is concentrated among a few players, most marketplaces will never be able to achieve 100 percent comprehensive supply. Instead, they face the Comprehensiveness Asymptote: as supply coverage increases, each additional unit of supply requires more effort to add. Furthermore, external factors can constantly cause supply coverage to shift, such as new restaurants opening and closing or new home-sharing hosts going on and offline.
Ultimately, achieving 100 percent comprehensiveness is impossible, except for a few verticals where supply is extremely concentrated (which then results in compressed margins). Instead of requiring 100 percent comprehensiveness, marketplaces that successfully execute this strategy pursue “comprehensive enough” supply.
Successful marketplaces determine what is comprehensive enough by understanding of what level of supply fits their particular users’ jobs-to-be-done. In other words, it’s comprehensive enough from the user’s perspective, not the company’s perspective. Marketplaces typically achieve this “comprehensive enough” level of supply by either 1) verticalizing—focusing the marketplace on an increasingly specific product category, such as GOAT and Stock X for sneakers or Reverb for music equipment; or 2) optimizing supply acquisition loops.
#2 Exclusivity: have supply nobody else has
This is harder to pull off, because getting the things that people want that they can’t get anywhere else is, well…hard!
A great example of this is with streaming:
Netflix locked up streaming rights for popular content, taking advantage of the fact that most studios were still thinking in terms of traditional cable distribution arrangements. Netflix purchased, and then created original shows, understanding that by building its own distribution platforms, it would own its audience. Netflix’s Chief Content Officer and co-CEO Ted Sarandos once famously said, “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”
There is some hidden truth in Ted’s statement. While the exclusivity approach has helped Netflix build a sustainable business, it has also driven multi-tenanting by the demand side of the marketplace. Multi-tenanting means that users participate in multiple marketplaces to accomplish the same (or very similar) job-to-be-done. By using exclusivity arrangements to make sure supply isn’t multi-tenanting, Netflix has almost guaranteed that there will be multi-tenanting on the demand side. Because a marketplace can’t own all supply, users will go elsewhere to seek out exclusive content, if the content is strong enough. That is why Netflix, Disney+, and HBO can all be successful over time.
Two takeaways from that:
You need to weigh exclusivity against comprehensiveness. And you can do that by asking yourself, “does exclusivity meaningfully drive demand?”. In entertainment, absolutely. People raced to Disney+ to get access to the Mandalorian, same with Stranger Things and Netflix.
Companies that start out with exclusive inventory sometimes move to a comprehensive strategy over time.
And the last strategy:
#3 Curation: have hand-picked supply
This strategy is all about achieving differentiation by vetting and being very selective about the supply on the platform. The benefit of this is that it allows the marketplace to appeal to a niche audience.
An example here is Caviar with on-demand food. In the early days, they only onboarded high-quality restaurants, aiming to be the place for the best quality service and food. This appealed to people that are willing to pay more for the best quality.
Quality and reliability of supply are essential for marketplaces, and I think especially so in the beginning. So I love this approach when thinking about marketplace GTM’s.
But on the other side of that coin, the drawback is it’s not a very defensible supply strategy long-term:
Curation can help provide differentiation in the early stages of a marketplace, but it is difficult to defend against well-resourced competitors. What curation promises can normally be better solved via algorithmic recommendations, but those recommendations require tremendous amounts of training data in the form of ratings, reviews, and many other supply attributes.
In many marketplaces, there aren’t objectively better suppliers than others, just trade-offs of price vs. quality vs. speed that different buyers have different preferences for. So while curation can solve for helping buyers find quality supply, as supply accumulates trust signals that can be leveraged for recommendations, and demand showcases preferences that can be leveraged for personalization, curation loses its strategic appeal.
For more details on these three supply strategies, and knowing which one is best for you, checkout the full piece here.
Leverage these 9 marketing advantages to accelerate your growth
According to Emily Kramer from MKT1, to succeed at startup marketing, a company needs 3 things: 👇
Founders who approach marketing as a strategic lever, not as a service organization to sales. Founders need to value and enable marketing as they do other teams in the organization.
A team with go-to-market skillsets & storytelling ability. Early on, founders need to be able to effectively hire go-to-market talent, including the right first marketer. As the company scales, it is critical that all leaders see marketing on equal footing with other teams.
Built-in marketing advantages. Marketing advantages are dynamics in a company’s business, product, or market that inherently drive growth.
These marketing advantages are, as she says, “highly critical to a startup’s overall success,” and most startups that reach meaningful scale typically have more than one of these advantages they’re leveraging. Once you find what yours are, you should lean in hard to accelerate them. And if you don’t have any of them, well…Emily notes you may need to adjust your product, business strategy, or go-to-market approach.🤔
So, what are they?
I’ll let Emily explain:
Product-led growth marketing advantages
⚡NETWORK EFFECTS OR PRODUCT VIRALITY
Virality: When users share your product—internally or externally.
Network effects: When a product gains more value when more people use it–which tends to be a stronger advantage than virality alone.
🤑 FREE PLAN OR TRIAL
When your product has a free version that helps users unlock value faster before purchasing, it typically makes your product easier to market and sell. This is especially true when you have the right "trigger" to convert a company to paid (whether that's time, user count, or feature based). If you have a self-serve motion for new customers or self-serve upgrade process, even without a free product, this can also be an advantage—but usually to a lesser extent.
🧀 WEDGE INTO A LARGER MARKET
When your product and GTM efforts initially target a small segment with a goal of ultimately winning a larger market, you have a wedge in. A wedge in can mean expanding from one audience to additional audiences with the same or slightly different product, or building a specific product for an audience and expanding to become a full-platform or suite of products for that audience.
This is only a marketing advantage if you use your first wedge, both on the product side and the marketing side, to get to the next. Otherwise, you’ll be starting from scratch each time you launch to a new wedge, and you’ll never scale fast enough (this advantage then goes from being an advantage to a disadvantage).
Market / Ecosystem marketing advantages
⚙️ INTEGRATIONS / CO-MARKETING
When your product or business has obvious partners, you have potential for co-marketing opportunities. If you work with partners to leverage each others’ distribution channels or piggyback on their brand awareness, you can grow faster than by building your own audience. You can even piggyback on a “partner’s” audience by writing content about them or segmenting marketing to their user base, without working with the partner directly.
🧑🤝🧑 CHANNEL PARTNERSHIPS & SALES
When you make it easy for other players in your ecosystem to promote or sell your product for a share of revenue, a referral bonus, or a discount for the buyer, you unlock growth. It’s essential to enable your channel partners by properly incentivizing them and helping them market your product. Channel partners can even be influencers or service providers in your ecosystem.
🗓️ FORCING FUNCTION: TRENDS OR REGULATIONS
Forcing functions create urgency to buy. When there is a current trend in the market (like the downturn) you can piggyback on, your messaging will better resonate. Even better than being relevant to a trend, new or changing regulations are incredibly strong forcing functions.
Brand & story marketing advantages
💡 AUDIENCE SEEKS COMMUNITY OR EDUCATIONAL CONTENT
When your audience is underserved by educational content or opportunities to connect with each other, you have an opportunity to fill this gap. When you treat your community and content like a “product” to drive top-of-funnel growth this advantage becomes stronger.
📣 FOUNDER STORY OR FOUNDER/MARKET FIT
If your founder already has relationships or a personal brand built up with your target audience, it’s easier to gain credibility with prospects and customers. In addition to helping build credibility, you can use founders with existing followings as distribution channels. To make this a true marketing advantage though, you need a founder who can and wants to effectively tell this story.
🏆 ABILITY TO CREATE OR OWN A CATEGORY
When your product is an entirely new space and doesn't replace an existing product, you have an opportunity to brand a whole new way of doing something. If your brand becomes synonymous with the category, you have a huge leg up on the competition. Similarly, you can redefine an existing category with new criteria or try to be crowned the winner in an emerging category created by another brand or by analysts.
Not every business should create a new category, it can be extremely time consuming. Creating a category is only an advantage when you are truly doing something new, and aren’t just building 5x-10x better version of an existing product.
And the actionable advice she suggests is perfectly captured in this awesome chart she put together:
And to close us out today and kick us into the weekend…🥾
How to run meetings that don't suck
Meetings…often dreaded, wasted time, and spent with people asking themselves “why am I here” while multi-tasking away at something else. 🫠
But as PMs, they’re a big and important part of what we do — so, how can we make sure we’re running meetings that get shit done and don’t suck for us, and everybody else?
Why? Most updates are relevant to just one or two people in the call, while everyone else painfully waits for their turn. Replace the weekly status or “check-in” meeting with async communication, smaller team standup meetings, or calls focused on ironing out open problems.
As a manager, hold 1:1 meetings sacred.
Why? These are the most important meetings on your calendar when you appreciate one detail: They’re not for you, they’re for your report. You’re there to make decisions, clear roadblocks and help them feel happy and valued. Sticking with a schedule and being engaged shows your reports that they’re important and respected.
Every meeting must have a single owner.
Why? No one should have to ask, “Whose meeting is this?”. Without a responsible owner, the agenda gets lost and there’s nobody to keep things moving and on track towards the purpose of the call. Having an owner steers the ship, identifies decision-makers, and manages follow-up and sending notes.
Share the purpose of the meeting and agenda ahead of time
Why? There’s nothing worse than getting into a call and wondering why you’re there and what this is all about. People want to be prepared and know what’s expected of them rather than getting blindsided.
Calendars shouldn’t postpone decisions
Why? If a decision is urgent, don’t wait to find time to meet. Bring the decision-makers together and make a call ASAP. This creates a culture of urgency where decisions are made quickly and aren’t allowed to be punted because someone’s calendar is unavailable for the next 2 weeks.
Why? Bringing together 6 engineers for 2 hours is a costly call. It’s useful to frame meetings through an opportunity-cost lens to yourself when scheduling, as it can eliminate unnecessary attendees, or even sub a meeting for a Slack thread.
Treat other people’s calendars as a scare resource.
Why? Especially in a remote-first world, it’s important to respect people’s time and calendar. If you have something to talk about, does it needed a 30-minute block? Minimize taking engineers/designers away from deep work for small things, and be mindful of not running over time when you do.
If the meeting is over, end the meeting.
Why? If you’ve achieved the goal of the meeting, wrap up and give people the time back. Overall I agree with this suggestion, but I think there’s some value in shooting the shit for a few minutes with your team when we’re all remote. That’s relationship building…which is not inefficient at all.
Speaking of meetings, Peter Yang wrote a similar piece where he zoomed into specific types of meetings. One I want to call out from it is 1:1s.
The goal of the 1-on-1 is to let two people build trust and empower each other.
The #1 mistake that people make is to use the 1-on-1 for status updates.
Instead, you should:
Talk about the awkward issues. Discuss topics that you would hesitate to bring up in a team setting. Examples include:
Expressing concerns about your project
Sharing constructive feedback
Talking about your career goals
Try not to cancel or move 1-on-1s. If you’re a manager, it’s easy to move or cancel your 1-on-1s for other “important” meetings. This is disrespectful to your direct reports. Even if you see them everyday, nothing beats a private half-hour conversation where they can be open about real issues.
Schedule 1-on-1s with the right people. Aim for weekly 1-on-1s with your manager and direct reports and monthly 1-on-1s with your extended team and other important stakeholders in the company.
1-on-1s have massive leverage - you can improve someone’s work for months with a single heart to heart conversation. Don’t skip them.
And of course, there’s what to do after the meeting. Mainly, sending notes about decisions made and the next steps. Luckily, there’s lots of tools (many now AI powered) that make this much easier. Just take a look at this incredible demo of Coda AI — this is insane.
And that’s everything for this week! 🎬
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