Lexy Franklin on Unlocking Your Career Superpower, how Facebook led to Sidebar, and the Future of Work

Product State Q&A

Lexy Franklin is the CEO & Founder at Sidebar. Previously, he’s been an Entrepreneur in Residence at Foundation Capital, a Product Management Lead at Facebook, and the VP of Product at Striiv.
Website / LinkedIn

EC: How did your PM role at Facebook lead to starting Sidebar?

LF: When I was a PM at Facebook, there was no forum for connecting with other product leaders. I realized that if this wasn’t an option there, it was probably a problem everywhere. And this was before COVID and remote work. Since then, everything has become orders of magnitude harder.

On the Facebook growth team, I learned the power of excellent execution. Once we’d made a plan and achieved buy-in on it, we never missed a date. The social accountability was so powerful. I brought that same feeling to Sidebar where you set goals and have people counting on you to see those goals to completion. 

These two things coupled together made me think that there was a huge opportunity to connect peers to learn from one another as they operated at a level of excellence — and that led to the creation of Sidebar.

Sidebar is a leadership program that accelerates your career. It’s where people at the top of their field grow through a small peer group, virtual platform, and facilitated curriculum matched to them.

The defining factor for Sidebar is small peer groups with expert facilitators focused on outcomes over networking. In our view, networks have benefits, but programs have outcomes. Our focus is on outcomes — tactical, practical feedback you can apply to your career today. Social accountability, expert guidance, and results make all the difference.

EC: How do you measure the success of the product at Sidebar?

LF: Sidebar’s success is measured by our members’ successes and our members’ satisfaction. After every session, we ask members to rate their experience and to give us feedback while it’s still fresh in their minds. 93% of members say that Sidebar has made a significant difference in their career trajectory. We’re constantly obsessing over member input and striving to get even better. 

When it comes to the power of peers, nothing will get you further in your career than learning from your peers. Peers encourage. Peers challenge. Peers hold us accountable. Our view is that you could spend 10 years trying to find your people if you left things to chance and happenstance. Too often, the story of the help people get is filled with coincidence. What if you could take the randomness out of this crucial kind of support, feedback and encouragement? What if it could be intentional and made to work faster and more directly on exactly what you need? That’s our goal at Sidebar. 

Research tells us small coaching groups create safe spaces where peers can grow, have accountability, and take risks. Small group coaching uniquely unlocks career growth – it's a competitive advantage that's untapped for many. Imagine how much more successful people would be if they all had 10 people behind them supporting and guiding them.

EC: What do you think the future of work looks like? 

LF: We spend 90,000 hours on average of our lives working. It’s the vast majority of how we spend our time awake on the planet.

COVID completely turned the way we work on its head. Instead of everyone being together in an office, we’re now spread out across hybrid, remote, and in-office arrangements. 40% of workers in the U.S. are either fully remote or hybrid, and this number is expected to double in the next year. Now that we work everywhere, the concept of the office hasn’t caught up. 

In addition to this physical separation, leadership can be lonely. When you’ve reached a certain level of seniority, you look up and look around, and realize there’s no safety net of other decision makers — and there’s no one to bounce ideas off of. The antidote to this distance and leadership divide is peers. 

The future of work is unlocking this superpower of peers, tapping into the collective intelligence of other exceptional professionals who are at the top of their fields and experienced in the unique challenges you might also find yourself in. With Sidebar, we put those peers together into small groups, creating personal boards of directors, and then we give them access to tech that empowers them.

We’ve built a platform that matches people to the right group for them and offers goal tracking, social accountability, messaging, and sessions customized to each member. We’ve reimagined what video chat and messaging could look like, with collaboration in mind, like with our video chat platform, where there’s agenda tracking and messages are persistent. This is what makes Sidebar the tech-powered program for career success.

“When it comes to the power of peers, nothing will get you further in your career than learning from your peers. Peers encourage. Peers challenge. Peers hold us accountable.”
- Lexy Franklin, Sidebar CEO & Founder