How the military prepared me for a career in Growth

Around this time last year, I was sprinting off a C-130 into the sandy landscape of Northern Iraq. I was moving in complete darkness. My vision completely reliant on night vision goggles and my hearing drowned out by the roaring engines of the plane.

Oh, how much can change in a year.

I resist the notion that the military shaped who I am as a human being. One thing I don’t deny, I was building skills that have translated to my new career in Growth for startup tech companies.

My life had come to a crossroads. I had grown tired of a career mostly centered around outdated regulations and counterproductive traditions. I wanted a role where I could be creative in my solutions, a role completely untainted by strict military rules and regulations.

So, I retired the combat boots for some comfy Allbirds and headed to the land of innovation, Silicon Valley.

With the move, I thought I was starting from scratch. How could I possibly connect my days in the military to the world of growth? Bridging my experience seemed impossible until I hit the ground running working for my first few clients. Here are just a few connections that really stood out.

Every startup has an eye on how to grow. The hard part is growth occurs differently for every company and every product. A traction channel that worked last year might be saturated. Your target market might be more accessible to another channel.

My time in the Air Force provided me with a similar mindset. No mission was ever the same, and complacency was a true killer. This is how it translated into my new career:

Mission Planning -> Growth Frameworks

When I entered the field of growth, the first thing I had to do was dive deep into various growth frameworks. I wanted to learn how to create a growth machine that was actionable, repeatable, and scalable.

The further I fell into the growth rabbit hole, the more I recognized the concepts from my previous career. I was back to planning out missions based on the intelligence I was provided and the goal presented.

I found that there was a framework that applied to my past and my present.

Framing a Goal — Military missions and growth campaigns start with a similar process. Before doing anything else, you have to frame your goal. This step is essential because the goal affects the rest of the campaign.

If we entered a foreign village with a goal to build a rapport with the local community, the nature of that goal changed how we operated. We shifted from acting as an authority to conducting ourselves as guests of someone’s home.

With growth campaigns, choosing the right goal and not being influenced by the wrong metrics is critical. If you’re having trouble retaining users and your goal is to boost the LTV of your customers, basing your plan off unique visitors will not solve your problem. Tracking returning users and doing cohort analysis to analyze churn rates should be more aligned with your goal.

Plan — The devil is in the details. For a mission, you want to know what ground you will be covering, the exact time you will spend there, and your exit strategy. If I’m running a test on paid ads, I want to know how long I’ll be running these tests, on what platform, with what targeted segments in mind, etc. Sound familiar?

Test — So you have this great hypothesis of how things will go. You should just go for it, right? Wrong! In the Air Force, we practiced every part of our plans routinely. And almost every time we discovered something we could change.

In growth, you have a plethora of tools to take this approach. A/B testing, smokescreens, etc. There’s no reason you should live off assumptions. Test your hypothesis and let data confirm your path.

Not testing can carry similar high risks. Startups operate on a limited runway of funds. Wasting these funds can be the difference between the life and death of a company. In my previous career, it was the difference between life and death period.

Analyze — Every test, successful or not, provides great insight on what to do next. In the military, analyzing detail and making adjustments before the next mission would confirm or reject the tactics we used. For growth, we use data analysis to confirm or reject a hypothesis.

One habit I developed was creating a playbook with a collection of successful strategies that help me build upon previous ones and gives me a reference when a new goal needs to be met.

A company should know exactly what job their product does for the consumer. This won’t be the same for every consumer but there’s a good chance that you’ll find trends among them. A good way to gain insight into this is by conducting jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) interviews.

I started conducting JTBD interviews from the beginning of my new career. It was surprising how second nature the process was. I found my prior skills more than prepared me for these consumer interviews. Here’s how:

Field Interviews -> JTBD Interviews

During the Vietnam war, the interrogators used against the American prisoners were so effective that when the war ended, many captured soldiers decided to stay instead of returning to the United States.

The most effective strategy they used wasn’t torture or intimidation. It was strategic rapport building and providing small comforts.

While in the Air Force, I was responsible for protecting the communities that lived on base. A large part of the daily work routine happened to involve conducting interviews. These interviews weren’t about a product, but for witnesses, victims, and suspects of a crime. By the time I left, I had done hundreds of these.

I had come from a career conducting interviews during highly emotional moments in these people’s lives. Sometimes, it was provoking the confidence required for a victim to take action against a wrong-doer. At other times, it was combing through the tiniest of details for another lead in an investigation.

I discovered that one of the keys to interviewing is letting the interviewee provide open-ended information. This was integral while I was interviewing, no matter what circumstances surrounded the process.

One way I achieved this was establishing rapport from the very beginning. Interviews can easily feel formal, but the most effective interview feels like a conversation between friends. You wouldn’t guess how many times I’ve had a suspect admit to a crime because they felt more at ease.

You also wouldn’t guess how many user interviews surprise you with what your product does for them. The best information you can pull from a user interview is what you weren’t expecting to hear.

The other key to interviewing is to ask new questions. If I can, I always take notes so I can always come back to those thought-provoking details once they finish. This process leaves no stone unturned and dictates a comfortable interview pace.

An understandable struggle in the tech world is the ability to give up a certain level of control to others. This industry is full of immensely talented people that it may not be second nature to hand over the reins.

Coming from a world where someone literally had to watch my back. I’ve found a natural tendency to let people pull their weight of a project.

Relying on others — Cross-functional projects

As you become invested in a project it can be easy to trust yourself over others outside of your team. For example, a Growth Manager may be hesitant to hand over some control to a Product Designer for the visual aspect of ads, or the user flow on their site.

In my past, I had to learn to rely on others. I had to keep aircraft and their crew safe while landing in dangerous areas. I would search for threats on the horizon and respond when necessary. While we were in the air, the pilot had entire control over our safety by not only flying the plane but avoiding threats shooting up from the ground. We understood each others’ role and put our faith into one another.

As a Growth Marketer, I came in trusting other teams and understanding that project overlaps don’t have to become a point of tension. I see handing some control over a project to other teams, like the visual aspect of ads to designers, not as a risk, but a chance to optimize our ability to meet a common goal.

On a higher level of working well with others, teamwork has been a concept preached since the beginning of time. Despite this, it’s a rare circumstance to see a group of people truly operate smoothly in a team-oriented process.

We have all seen the evidence of the power that true teamwork possesses. Whether it be the group of guys who started Paypal or the 2015 Golden Warriors who surprised everybody with their first championship run. Here’s how teamwork was ingrained into how I operate:

Teamwork -> Teamwork

I learned a long time ago, that when you work for the people around you, you create a process that works. The old saying, “you’re only as strong as your weakest link” was embedded in my mind.

At one point, I found myself in a combat training program in Texas. Every morning, before the sun came up, we all would wake up to go running.

If a few of us fell behind, our entire group would have to circle back around and run behind them. The idea was no one finished until everyone finished. At first, this was incredibly frustrating. We had a destination in mind and circling back wasn’t getting us any closer.

As the program came to an end, those same morning runs were a hell of a lot easier. The same people who had previously fallen behind were in the front pushing the pace.

I had learned a valuable lesson in having to circle back for the rest of a team. The practice gave those who were falling behind the comfort of knowing the team wasn’t going anywhere without them. For myself, I felt the importance of backing every member of my team.

This mentality has served me well since my career transition. With so many intelligent people in the startup community, it can be easy to create a team of individuals surviving off their own wits.

It’s when these people look to each other with a helping and receptive hand, that this individualism becomes the fuel for an engine of a larger process.

I know that I’ll give everything I have. Not just for my next company, but for the people who are spending every day trying to make it great.

In tech, we adapt to an ever-changing professional scene. New job titles pop up every year, new programs are available to learn, and new companies are ready to take their shot at success. The military more than prepared me for this uncertainty. Here’s how:

Always on the move -> Being adaptable

The military is unpredictable. The average person uproots their life every 2–3 years. In my short span, I worked in Texas, Guam, DC, Qatar, Kuwait, and Iraq. With each of these moves, our roles changed. We had to adjust our skillset to the scope of work provided.

If you haven’t noticed, the average time someone spends in one role in Silicon Valley is significantly shorter than a more traditional career. People are transient for a number of reasons. Their startup failed, they gained traction and their role changed, or maybe they were lured by another exciting opportunity.

This level of uncertainty and need for adaptability is not for everyone. Being adaptable is just what I know. For that reason, I’m not scared of change and I embrace exploring unfamiliar things like using new traction channels, reaching new customers, etc. I come in ready to give every opportunity my best shot.

It took me an adjustment period to realize I wasn’t starting from scratch. I had to realize these connections as they came up in the new work I was doing.

If you’re already in tech, don’t discount the parallels someone’s background may provide. If you’re looking to transition into tech, don’t discount your own experience. You’ll be surprised what will serve you in this new career.

Have you made a career switch? Are you looking to make one now? Have you ever hired someone who was making one? Reach out and let’s talk about your experience.

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