Britt Gage

There’s lots of well-intentioned advice out there about the risks if a business takes off and there isn’t a solid foundation to stand on. But at the same time, it's no surprise that startup leaders see words like "optimizing headcount through capacity planning models" and file it away as unnecessary bureaucracy that’s more befitting of the “BigCo” ... See more

Set aside time for experiments . Straightforward calculus suggests that doing what you’re already good at has the best payoff. But you won’t encounter nearly as many opportunities if you never learn anything new. Setting aside time for hobbies you’re bad at, books you know nothing about or skills you’ve never practiced may seem wasteful, but it’s

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We make purchases with emotion, but justify them with logic.

And that logic gets pieced together over time in what Eugene Schwartz called the Stages of Awareness.

He covered this in his classic book Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966.

He broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:

The Most Aware: They’re motivated to solve the problem p... See more

How can we go from accumulating insights to embodying and integrating learnings?

Who owns research?

That depends on the type of research. Marketing often owns marketing or market research. Makes sense, right? This might be qual or quant research that helps Marketers do their jobs well.

Who owns CX, UX, user, customer, or “design” research? I would have to say that your CX or UX Researchers own it. Perhaps your Service Designers,... See more

So what is systems thinking? In his book The Fifth Discipline , Peter Senge gives a systems thinking definition as “A discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static ‘snapshots.’ And systems thinking is a sensibility—for the subtle interconnectedness ... See more

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important t... See more

-1 to 0 is when you figure out what you want to work on. It’s when you decide where to allocate the next 5-10 years of your life.

This may sound simple, but it can be overwhelming and isolating in practice. That period before SPC was not my first -1 to 0 experience. I spent the year after leaving Facebook to start Cove feeling like I was banging my... See more

I’d spent much of the last decade trying as hard as I could to make a positive impact, from teaching English in South America to working in microfinance in Colombia to volunteering in the Peace Corps in Ukraine to starting an education business on the Internet. This endless striving came from an insatiable need to make a difference, to feel like my... See more