In 7 Principles to Mastering Growth, one of the principles was about choosing what to work on. What you work on impacts what you learn and the perceived impact of your work inside your org. So what you work on is an important choice. In that post I argue a great place is to work on High Impact, Low Popularity projects:
A typical mistake is to optimize for the popularity of a project over its impact. Working on high impact, low popularity projects does a few things:
You learn a lot simply because the more challenging a project is the more you tend to learn.
Messy projects require a deeper level of understanding to untangle whatever the mess is. You instantly become an expert on something that is high impact in the org.
You put yourself at the center in focus. These types of projects tend to have high visibility in an organization. You are seen as a leader/savior because you are tackling something no one else wanted to touch. Everyone wants these types of people on their team."
So what are common areas in the company that fit this criteria? Elena Verna (EIR @ Reforge, Advisor @ Miro, MongoDB, others) argues in Making Monetization Your Superpower, that monetization is one of those areas in almost every company. I agree, I saw the same thing at HubSpot.
Elena points out that nobody wants to work on monetization typically for three reasons:
Fear or Customer Revolt - Everyone has fear changes they make around pricing and monetization will be met with a customer revolt.
Complicated Set of Stakeholders - Monetization changes requires you to manage a large set of stakeholders (product, sales, marketing, customer service, etc).
High Visibility Impact - The impact you make (good and bad) is highly visible across the org and to executives.
In other words, it's high impact, low popularity. Where others moan and groan, is your opportunity to embrace it.
Related: Monetization and Pricing Deep Dive, Free Trial vs Freemium, Monetization vs Growth? It's A False Choice
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