Prioritizing important over urgent

In the two and a half years between 2003 and 2006, Russia’s mobile telephone penetration went from one in five Russians owning a mobile phone to four in five owning one. Alexander Izosimov coined the term hyper growth in his 2008 HBR article - managing hyper growth.

He also observed that Mobile telephony markets consistently grow from 20% penetration to 80% in less than three years. That’s the first lesson to learn about hypergrowth: It’s over almost before you know it.

The second lesson is that it’s an experience that either kills your company or makes it much stronger.

Izosimov came up with five rules to manage hyper growth:

1. Sell first and ask questions later

2. Don’t try too hard to innovate

3. Organize like McDonald’s

4. Push decisions out to the front lines

5. Foster a can do culture

He offered the analogy that managing a company in hypergrowth is very much like Formula One racing, speed skiing or surfing. When you’re learning to drive a race car or surf a wave, you’re taught not to fight the momentum but to ride with it. Mentally that means being both focused and relaxed—focused to the extent that you’re paying attention only to the driving, but relaxed about how the ride is going.

But how do you prepare to deal with hyper speed.It is not exactly something you can learn from a book, or from an MBA program. I can attest to that. I used to design airplanes as an aerospace engineer, but creating a brand new aircraft takes more than a decade. I conducted some micro-experiments in the tech sector - the speed thrilled me and I decided to leave my childhood dream career. I decided to learn about building businesses properly by moving to the financial capital of the world - New York city.

But after I finished an MBA from Columbia Business School, I still didn’t know how I might build the next tech unicorn. So, I moved to San Francisco to join Twilio, a tech company that grew from 1100 people to 8500 people in the past 3 years serving loved brands like Uber, Shopify and Nike. Revenue has 8x’d to $4Billion. While hiring PMs, analysts and engineers for my rapidly growing team, I noticed that many people haven’t learned about what makes B2B products delightful, and how things scale to handle hyper growth.

I asked my peers at companies like AWS, Google Ads, Salesforce, etc. and found that they faced the same problem while hiring. What does one do in such a situation? If the market doesn’t expose people to hyper growth - there needs to be a course that can teach them.

So, I’ve designed a Cohort Based Course ~ for busy people like you - who still make time to level up.

By the end of 4 weeks, you’ll have:

✨ unpacked the secrets of B2B product management

⚡an approach to prioritizing, driving growth, and achieving hyper growth

👩‍🦳a wider network of ambitious Product managers, entrepreneurs, and builders from AWS, Google Ads, Twilio, etc.

If you want to learn more, the course details are here if you want to learn more and sign up: 

In case you’re eager to join the community but have some questions first, feel free to write back, but be quick, we expect the remaining 12 seats to fill up this week.

Regards,

Prateek Jain (PJ)

Product leader, Twilio

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