In today’s digital age, data and the digital footprint it leaves are everywhere. The ability to use it effectively for evidence-backed decisions can truly set you apart.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Identify relevant data to solve problems, extract and analyze datasets, and generate actionable insights
- Effectively communicate insights through clear visualizations and a compelling narrative
- Align business decisions, experiments, or hypotheses with data-driven insights for impactful outcomes.
One of Amazon’s key leadership principles is deeply understanding your customer—their pain points, motivations, and alternatives—as the foundation for building effective solutions.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Define and communicate clear customer personas for a product or service
- Conduct thorough user research, interpret insights, and understand customer messaging
- Use frameworks like JTBD (Job-To-Be-Done), User Stories, and User Quotes to define user requirements
Effective communication with team members, senior leadership, and external stakeholders is the most important predictor of career growth—especially as automation increases. This skill will serve you for life.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Confidently represent yourself and your ideas with clear and concise articulation
- Write compelling, brief and purpose driven documents
- Influence without authority at the workplace
As Elon Musk says, this is “the only thing worth mastering.” Understanding problems at their core, identifying key components, and building solutions is vital in startups’ ambiguous environments.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Deeply understand and communicate core problems
- Break down problems using frameworks like MECE and 80/20
- Identify key problem-solving levers and prioritize efforts on identified issues
“What will it really take for this business to be successful?” is a nuanced question, the answer to which lies at the intersection of core business domains like marketing, finance, operations, accounting and strategy. The ability to answer this single question goes a long way.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Grasp and apply essential business frameworks and concepts
- Understand core business models, metrics, and flywheels
- Analyze revenue, cost, LTV, CAC and other levers that move the needle
To succeed in high-growth startups, the key is to launch fast, fail fast; listen to customers, and continuously iterate on your product. This agile approach contrasts with traditional methods but is fundamental to the success of every major tech startup.
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Define hypotheses, launch experiments, and build solutions based on customer needs
- Develop a Minimum Viable Product and craft a GTM strategy to secure your first 100 customers.
- Create clear success metrics, track them and iterate solutions based on feedback
At Mesa, by the end of the program, you will:
- Understand the process of selling in both B2C & B2B contexts
- Work backwards from an audience and product to create an efficient sales funnel
- Create a sales strategy for acquiring the first 100 customers for any product/service
The ability to plan, execute and monitor a process is often overlooked. It is a key muscle to build if you want to be indispensable at the workplace. Startups look for doers, folks who can own something end to end and deliver end outcomes without requiring hand holding.
At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:
- Understand what goes behind setting up business processes from scratch
- Deconstruct a customer journey funnel, conversion metrics and interventions required at every stage
- Build comprehensive trackers, define micro success metrics and create task distributions
Understanding how a sector works, business models within it, needle movers for increasing revenues and decreasing costs are vital when wanting to enter the startup ecosystem as a founder or as a startup leader.
At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:
- Understand key business drivers and levers in a sector
- Understand a few dominant business models existing in a sector
- Deconstruct what it will take for a startup to be successful in a particular sector
Artificial Intelligence and its applications are completely disrupting the way we work and solve problems. It’s absolutely essential that you stay on top of emerging technologies and understand the core concepts that run them.
At Mesa, our goal is that by the end of the program every student will be able to:
- Understand core building blocks of the technology
- Deconstruct examples of use cases where the technology has been deployed
- Build and launch prototypes of micro-SaaS products