Learn and repeat

In last week’s The One Thing, our VP of Product, Craig Daniels, talked about repeatability — and about building engines that are designed to be repeatable.

I loved this because I think that organizations need to get better at learning from the past and repeating what they have found to work.

At Drift, for example, we’ve outlined the 5 steps for effective creative internal and external presentations — steps that we’ve spent years refining and testing. We also spent a lot of time learning from the greats.

There are a lot of things we have done here that this rings true for — like our Friday Show-n-Tell meeting and our daily shipping approach. They’re recipes — so we shouldn’t improvise. I often encourage our employees to fight their ego’s desire to go it alone and stick to what works.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t ever be creative and iterate, but when it comes to things that you know work — like we now do with building presentations, or building products based on our customers vs our personal preference — you should think hard before improvising.

So as you look to 2020, think about the things that are working — and commit to making them repeatable.