1. What is our company’s story? What is our pitch?
2. Which market segment should we pursue?
3. How do we differentiate our product from competition?
4. What is the best way to assure a successful new product launch?
5. How should we respond when customers ask for discounts?
6. How much customization do we offer?
7. How can we reduce or maintain cost of customer acquisition?
8. How can we retain our customers for longer?
9. Which of our

… [ Read more ]

Author: Tomasz Tunguz
Source: The 13 Critical Questions to Answer about Your Startup’s Product Marketing
Subjects: Entrepreneurship Questions, Marketing Questions

To nail the delicate chemistry required for a successful mentoring match, eight questions have proven to be particularly telling, says Narcisse — four that mentors should ask, and four that mentees should ask:

For mentors

1. Can I clearly be helpful to this potential mentee? Have they reached out with clear reasons or intentions for why they’d like my help? Are there specific needs they have

… [ Read more ]

Author: Whitnie Low Narcisse
Source: We Studied 100 Mentor-Mentee Matches — Here’s What Makes Mentorship Work
Subject: Human Resources Questions

Follow up with candidates — both those who got offers and those who didn’t — to get their feedback. You want all candidates who didn’t get the job to still have an incredibly positive impression of your company and your process. The world is small. Reputations are long. You want them to have wished they would have gotten the job — so much so that … [ Read more ]

Author: Dan Pupius
Source: Develop Your Hiring System Like a Product to Eliminate Bias and Boost Retention
Subject: Human Resources Questions

The best approach to measuring leadership is to evaluate a leader’s performance in the three areas in which all great leaders must excel: clarity of thought / communication, judgment about people, and personal integrity / commitment. Measuring leadership in this way requires gathering data from employees, but most startups have never done this in a systematic way.

Eventually, all companies need to develop methods to gather … [ Read more ]

Author: Ali Rowghani
Source: How Do You Measure Leadership?
Subject: Leadership Questions

Joseph L. Badaracco’s book, Managing in the Gray: Five Timeless Questions for Resolving Your Toughest Problems at Work, suggests asking five basic questions to help make hard decisions when the analysis, facts and data fail to provide a clear answer.

1. What are the net consequences? That is, if you have to make a decision that has a lot of uncertainty and significant human stakes,

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Joseph L. Badaracco, Tom Fox
Source: A Harvard professor on the five questions to ask when facing tough decisions
Subject: Decision Making Questions

1. Direction. Do leaders communicate a clear and compelling vision of where the organization is headed, how to get there, and what it means for people?
2. Accountability. Do leaders in the organization ensure individuals understand what is expected of them, have sufficient authority and feel accountable for delivering results?
3. Coordination & Control. Do leaders consistently measure and manage business and risk, and act to address problems when

… [ Read more ]

Source: Organizational Health Index
Subject: Organization Questions

To understand where to focus on your sales operations transformation journey, start by asking yourself and your organization a few simple questions:

• How much of your sales resources are in sales-support roles versus front-line sellers and sales managers?
• To what degree is your sales-operations function centralized or dispersed by customer segment, business unit, or region?
• What are the metrics and reports you use for sales-performance management activities?

… [ Read more ]

Authors: Bertil Chappuis, Brian Selby
Source: Looking Beyond Technology to Drive Sales Operations
Subject: Sales Questions

A lot of companies don’t decide how they want to grow until they’re well into their growth phase. For a long time, your actions pull your company along, and then all of a sudden it switches — your existing business starts pushing your behavior. External forces like feature requests, the need for more customer support, the need to create a team to do X when … [ Read more ]

Author: Claire Hughes Johnson
Source: To Grow Faster, Hit Pause — and Ask These Questions from Stripe’s COO
Subject: Management Questions

Great strategies answer five critical questions (“the strategic five”) in ways that are unique to your company:

1. What business or businesses should your company be in?
2. How should you add value to your businesses?
3. Who should be the target customers for your businesses?
4. What should be your value propositions to those target customers?
5. What capabilities should differentiate your ability to add value to your businesses and deliver their

… [ Read more ]

Author: Ken Favaro
Source: Why Popular Strategies Always Fade
Subject: Strategy Questions

Since innovation is a complex, company-wide endeavor, it requires a set of crosscutting practices and processes to structure, organize, and encourage it. Taken together, the following eight essentials constitute just such an operating system. These often overlapping, iterative, and nonsequential practices resist systematic categorization but can nonetheless be thought of in two groups. The first four, which are strategic and creative in nature, help set … [ Read more ]

Authors: Erik Roth, Marc de Jong, Nathan Marston
Source: The Eight Essentials of Innovation
Subject: Innovation Questions