Lauryn Isford: Product Growth Secrets from Facebook, Airtable, BlueBottle, Dropbox & Notion | E1037

1. 0:00 – 0:25

   Intro

   1. LILauryn Isford0:00

      It's helpful to do an exercise in correlation, and ideally causation, to understand if some early things that users do in the product ultimately correlate with retention, as I mentioned before. But that exercise is not one I would spend too much time on, because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric. And you'll probably want to change it and

2. 0:25 – 2:26

   How do you define growth?

   1. LILauryn Isford0:25

      revise it to something that reflects actually what your users are doing today with the features that you've launched, um, rather than the ones that were focused yesterday. So, um, I wouldn't spend too much time really trying to find the perfect metric, recognizing that it will evolve.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings0:39

      Lauren, this is such a joy to do. I've heard so many good things from many prior guests on the show, so thank you so much for joining me today.

   3. LILauryn Isford0:46

      Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings0:49

      Now, I would love to start, I'd love some context, and I also want to start with a definition, because I get confused by growth. It's thrown around as a word so much. So, how do you define growth and how did you make your way into the world of growth for you?

   5. LILauryn Isford1:03

      Great opening question. I would define growth as the practice of kickstarting, fueling, and scaling business outcomes. So, ideally, once you have a product with market fit, you focus on growing and scaling that product by building the mechanisms that fuel and accelerate its growth, that could be bringing more customers to the product, helping those customers get more value, helping them progress to different outcomes. Generally, all of this would be in service of maximizing the number of users or total amount of revenue that a business or a product generates.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings1:44

      So, how, what would you, what would you say then was your first role in growth if you were to diagnose that entry point?

   7. LILauryn Isford1:51

      It actually was quite a coincidence. I joined Dropbox as part of a program that they called the Dropbox Rotation Program, where when you graduated from school, they placed you on a variety of teams, and the very first team that I worked on after I graduated was Dropbox's growth team. Uh, I worked for someone named Giancarlo, who now is the CRO at Zapier, who built an incredible growth engine for Dropbox's self-serve business, and that was really my first exposure to the world of growth, which at the time

3. 2:26 – 11:02

   Lauryn’s Track Record (Dropbox, BlueBottle, Facebook, AirTable)

   1. LILauryn Isford2:26

      didn't even really have a formal name, but now has become really a staple part of a number of consumer and SaaS software businesses.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings2:35

      So, when I was looking at your history, Lauren, I looked at the incredible companies, and I thought, "We normally do a quick fire round at the end, but there's, like, several amazing companies here that I want to understand what you took from them in a relatively condensed timeframe." And so we're gonna do a quick fire on a lesson from each company and how it impacted your mindset. (laughs) And so I'm gonna start in chronological order. Dropbox, what was the biggest lesson and how did it impact your mindset?

   3. LILauryn Isford3:06

      Hmm. My biggest lesson from Dropbox was probably that growing a business is a game of inches. We worked on trial conversion, helping folks convert to premium plans after trying Dropbox with their team for the first time, and I understood just how much impact could compound from ensuring that different markets, different payment methods, different customer profiles could all experience Dropbox and get value out of that experience, and going really, really deep in the data to figure out where different pockets of customers weren't converting as well as they could be. Uh, I don't think I really understood how much return you can get simply from being precise and rigorous and detail-oriented in ensuring every customer is getting maximum value, and I really learned that there.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings4:01

      That is hilarious. I did hear from many of your colleagues about your data centricity, so we're gonna get to that later. Um, but sticking on the theme of the quick fire, Blue Bottle, I mean this is a cool addition to the roster. What was the biggest lesson from Blue Bottle and how did it impact your mindset?

   5. LILauryn Isford4:18

      So, at Blue Bottle, I focused on our e-commerce business, and the primary product we offered was a subscription where we mailed fresh, whole coffee beans to your home, recurring, so that you could make Blue Bottle Coffee at home instead of traditionally going to the café. And what I learned with my team in endeavoring on this journey, was actually the importance of knowing your customer. We felt, at first, that the customers most likely to want Blue Bottle Coffee at home would be the same customers who go to our cafés. And what we found in actually visiting many of our online customers is that they were completely different, and that someone who's making coffee at home every morning isn't going to the café that day. They actually have a fully different routine, they tend to be more of a hobbyist, uh, enjoy the craft of the morning ritual of brewing coffee at home. And that unlock really helped us focus our marketing, our product offerings, what we were building for those of, those people who were interested in the e-commerce business rather than retail. Um, it's actually something that I've carried with me, that, in general, you should always have evidence and insights to inform what you work on and what you prioritize on a growth team or any team. And in talking to customers, we understood the why behind some of the trends we were seeing.

   6. HSHarry Stebbings5:47

      I'm seeing a recurring theme here. Uh (laughs) ... But, uh, I want to move to Facebook. You spent an incredible, uh, several years at Facebook, three or four years I think it was at Facebook. What was the biggest lesson from Facebook and how did that impact your mindset?

   7. LILauryn Isford6:01

      So, at Facebook, I was lucky to work on several of the initiatives that were related to the launch of the Jio Phone in India and generally, growth in international markets and developing markets. One area was internet.org, another was the launch of the Facebook app that was retrofitted to the Jio Phone when it launched in India and overall, I think my biggest learning from that was that other markets around the world are very different from the US. And I know that sounds obvious on its face, but I find that, especially in technology, many businesses build with a Western bias and it's important to really understand if you're serving all customer needs, especially when you have a big international customer base. Um, in working on those projects, I came to learn a lot about the nuances across markets that I didn't understand, and I think we built much better products by being global in our thinking rather than building what we thought would be the best product for the market.

   8. HSHarry Stebbings7:04

      Having invested in emerging markets, I completely agree with you on that statement (laughs) . So I feel, I feel the pain there. Final one, and then we're going to dig into some more of the nitty-gritty, but Airtable most recently, how did that impact your mindset and what are the one or two biggest lessons?

   9. LILauryn Isford7:22

      Yes. So Airtable is an area where I started to really focus on product-led growth for SaaS. I had seen a bit of it at Dropbox much earlier, but this was more of a recent chapter and PLG, product-led growth, has really taken off in the past few years. Something that I think we did really well at Airtable is thinking of PLG or that product-led motion, and the sales-led motion or sales assisted motion as being part of one engine for the business. I find that commonly businesses will say, "Well, I need to pick one. Either I'm a product-led business or a sales-led business," and we were actually able to work the two in concert and make sure that when folks gave Airtable a try, we were actually thinking through the full journey of that customer over time and when it would actually be the right moment for them to graduate from a free plan or small team use into something more sophisticated or a more complex deployment. This is something that, to me, feels under-understood, if you will, um, that we did pretty well at Airtable.

   10. HSHarry Stebbings8:30

       Sod the schedule. You've just blown it up. I'm too interested with this. I, I have a lot of companies that are like, "Oh, we're doing PLG, but we're going to layer on the enterprise, the sales-heavy motion," and the common advice is actually, "It's too early. Do one well. Understand the customer type. The product type is very different." How do you do both early from the very earliest days?

   11. LILauryn Isford8:55

       Well, it does depend on the stage of company. So I will say that for an early stage business, just finding its footing, developing product market fit, monetizing customers for the first time or in those early chapters of monetization, picking one motion makes sense. There should be, of course, a learning period to think through what is the right go-to market for you. So, maybe you collect a wait list of signups on your website, you experiment with some product-led motions, which could be community-led growth, it could be content marketing, it could be SEO, could be something else, and then you might bring in a sales hire to help figure out outbound sales versus inbound. You know, qualifying the folks who have signed up, who are using your product in a limited capacity and make a call from there on if your product is most amenable to a product-led motion or a sales-led motion. If you decide that something like a product-led motion makes sense and that users should be able to experience your product and learn its value by being inside the product and becoming a user, then developing a sales team later on takes on a very different flavor because your reps will be working with existing customers, who might even be paying customers, and selling additional value on top of what they've already experienced, which, of course, is very different than emailing outbound and trying to find people who haven't been exposed to your product yet and teaching them that. Um, both, of course, should be done together if you ultimately want to build that upmarket motion, but the composition of your sales team will actually look and feel very different because of the nature of how you find and qualify and convert leads. And then additionally, there should ideally be some efficiencies for you in having that product-led motion at the beginning, because there is a larger pond of great customers who already know and understand the value of your product. So, that sales conversation is really more

4. 11:02 – 14:16

   Defining Great Onboarding

   1. LILauryn Isford11:02

      how to get the most out of using the product rather than, uh, experiencing it for the first time.

   2. HSHarry Stebbings11:07

      So I have to ask you, you mentioned that kind of, uh, those early steps, and especially in terms of kind of that user experience. Uh, I know that this is kind of one area where you're world-class, to be precise, from, uh, one of your colleagues, I can't remember who was telling me, "Yes, uh, truly world-class at great user onboarding." Um, wonderful references by the way. Um, my question to you is, what makes truly great user onboarding and how do you think about that today?

   3. LILauryn Isford11:34

      User onboarding is my specialty. I'm glad you asked. Um, onboarding is a term that's used very broadly and there are many tools that you can buy to help you or that claim they can help you with onboarding, where you help orient a user to your product with the hopes that they are more likely to be more successful. The metric that many companies use to represent this is activation rate. So the percentage of folks who sign up for your product who then ultimately are expected to retain long term.And usually, there's two dimensions on which activation is defined. The first is either engagement or retention. So, did Harry sign up today and keep coming back tomorrow, next week, and next month? But then also sophistication or early habit building. So, did Harry also take an action that was high value? Did he create a documented Notion that was meaningful? Did he build something in Airtable that was useful? And those together indicate that someone has found value, they keep coming back because they see something that they want to come back for, and also that they're doing the right things to experience that recurring value over time, and uncover and unlock the magic of what your product offering is. So, to me, onboarding is one of the most important things you can invest in. Interestingly, it can be very hard to move that activation rate metric. So, unlike a lot of growth experiments where, you know, maybe the classic is that you add a big button, or you make a button bigger and you see more people click on it, uh, onboarding is more complicated, because ultimately, you're in the business of helping people learn more effectively and trying to simplify and make digestible all of the functionality that your product offers. Today, many of the design patterns that are used in products or tool tips, uh, y- you know, you sign up for something and you see 8 or 10 or maybe even 20 different pop-ups that define terms for you and ask you to learn a bunch of things, and the reality is that nobody's actually learning that many things that quickly. So, the, the real impact, in my opinion, comes from being patient and breaking down what actually the user needs to know right now to be able to find value that's relevant to them. This is something that we spent a lot of time on at Airtable. If you are a longtime user, you may have noticed that the onboarding experience has changed quite a bit over the past few years, and it's something that I'm hoping to tackle at Notion as well.

   4. HSHarry Stebbings14:12

      I have so many questions for you. This is fantastic, by the way. This is exactly what I wanted.

5. 14:16 – 19:25

   How to Onboard Horizontally

   1. HSHarry Stebbings14:16

      But in terms of, like, finding value for you, the challenges with Notion, with Airtable, these are horizontal tools that are incredibly powerful, but to many different users with many different needs. The way that I as a podcaster turned investor is very different in, even in my job, compared to how someone else uses it in their job. How do you have a horizontal user onboarding when the needs and value derived is very different?

   2. LILauryn Isford14:46

      Yes. Very, very good question, and hard to do right. Something that we do at Notion that I think generally, uh, is tried and true, is to ask someone what they're here for. Many businesses will actually cast, or, or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account, and one might assume that they're there for a personal use case. But it's possible that they used their Gmail, but are actually evaluating your tool or your product to, um, deploy at their business. And just starting with that simple question of, "Are you here to do work with your team? Are you here as a student? Are you here for personal projects?" can really help you as the builder of the product understand the value the customer is seeking and reflect it back to them. And then, demonstrating value is more of an exchange. So, when you ask a customer to tell you something about them, you can meaningfully change the product experience and reflect that back, and help them see that this product can be relevant and specific to their use case, and that, in fact, the product will help them get there. So, there might be templates or examples or, um, different customizations that the product can make for them to help them get there along the way. As, um, as one example, if I signed up for Notion today and said that I was a student, it wouldn't really make sense for me to see tasks and sprints right away. And the inverse would also be true, that there are some things well-suited to students that might not be best for professional use. So, that's the balance that we try to strike, making sure that if we do ask customers for something, we return it back.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings16:33

      How important is time to value or time to wow? You know, with Uber or with any, uh, DoorDash, it's like click and it's like, "Ooh," it, it's quite a quick and compressed time to value. How important is that in that early onboarding phase?

   4. LILauryn Isford16:49

      Time to value is critical. The large majority of users who sign up in a product-led motion for a consumer product or a SaaS tool will not come back. So, the reality is that that first impression means everything, and it's not realistic to teach everything about most products in that first session and in that first impression. With that in mind, it's important to ask smart questions and also to be realistic about what the right cross-section is of features you offer that are both useful and relevant and also magical, and demonstrate some sort of wow factor or inspiration that will make the user feel like this is something differentiated that they should keep using.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings17:37

      Is simple always better in user onboarding?

   6. LILauryn Isford17:41

      I think simple is always better.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings17:44

      Okay. Is there ever the concern, and sorry, I'm really going granular, but I'm enjoying this so much. You know, there's like the loading screens, and sometimes there was like the rumors that they have them just 'cause they want you to feel like they're doing work in the background, like it's, it's more difficult than it is. Is there ever a case where for enterprises, for heavy enterprise use cases, actually it's better to have more thought or simple isn't better? Is that ever the case?

   8. LILauryn Isford18:14

      You make a good point, though I would say that that loading screen instance, or even in an enterprise deployment, really what you're getting at is demonstrating power, or demonstrating the high ceiling that a product can offer, inspiring and creating that feeling that something magical's happening under th- happening under the hood. But you're not asking the user to do that hard work. You're doing it for them. So in that case, actually, the set-up process happening under the hood ideally should make that end user experience feel more simple. Um, now, in the case of significant enterprise deployments, often there will be a human assist, uh, in getting something set up. So activation and onboarding may be less incremental to the business, but they still can help a customer move forward and make time spent with customer-facing teams more efficient, so that that time can really be used on more complex questions, more advanced feature setup rather than just getting the basics in motion.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings19:19

      You said time spent there, and I, I, as an investor, say, Lauren, a lot of my time spent is

6. 19:25 – 24:00

   Activation and Retention Metrics

   1. HSHarry Stebbings19:25

      with founders who are focused on the wrong metric in the first place, misunderstanding an activation metric, which doesn't accurately define value in a lot of cases. How do you advise founders on choosing the right activation metric, right metric to focus on, in this early stage of onboarding?

   2. LILauryn Isford19:45

      In general, I have some controversial opinions here, which I will share, but caveat-

   3. HSHarry Stebbings19:50

      Great.

   4. LILauryn Isford19:50

      ... that they're not shared universally. An activation metric should correlate with long-term retention. So if you activate this week, you should be more likely to be active in six months. It should also demonstrate both retention and also sophistication, some sort of use that indicates that a habit or value has been found, that a certain feature that's important has been used. And probably around 20% of your customers should be able to reach that metric. Now, the last piece is controversial. Many activation metrics that I've seen in working with companies can be more narrow. So, you know, you have to do this set of five or seven things in order to be activated, and only a small percentage of customers get there. The reason why I don't like very, very narrow activation metrics is they tend to over-focus, to me, on what the company projects as being value for the user, rather than measuring if the user has found value themselves, which is often best measured by them coming back and continuing to visit and build a habit over time. So I would prefer to go with something a little bit more broad. The other thing I'll say is it's helpful to do an exercise in correlation and ideally causation to understand if some early things that users do in the product ultimately correlate with retention, as I mentioned before. But that exercise is not one I would spend too much time on, because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric. And you'll probably wanna change it and revise it to something that reflects actually what your users are doing today with the features that you've launched, um, rather than the ones that were en focused yesterday. So, um, I wouldn't spend too much time really trying to find the perfect metric, recognizing that it will evolve.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings21:43

      What would an example of that be when you said about the correlation and causation? Just so I understand what that actually means in real life.

   6. LILauryn Isford21:51

      I think a great example to call on Airtable would be if a creator of a new base, which is the spreadsheet interface that's central to the Airtable product, were to build something of substance, so there's some number of entries in that spreadsheet, and bring a collaborator into that base to work with them. That, to me, would be a signal, and I've done the math, so I can tell you that's correct, (laughs) um, that they're much more likely to keep using Airtable six months from now, because they've done substantial work, they've brought in a collaborator in a product that's designed for teams, and together, those two people are working on something that they can ultimately grow into a more sophisticated deployment of the product over time.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings22:39

      Love that. Thank you for that. Can I ask you a really unfair question? You- you're, like, the master of like B2B, kind of PLG, uh, mastery. Let's leave it there. Um, what is good retention for a-

   8. LILauryn Isford22:53

      Mm...

   9. HSHarry Stebbings22:53

      ... B2B PLG motion? Just, and it's, we're not gonna hold you to it, but just, like, what's baseline good? And what also, what, what number is it? D30, D180, D360? Like, wha- what- what are we looking at here?

   10. LILauryn Isford23:08

       I thi- it really depends on the metric. Some loose rules of thumb, I would say you want the large majority of sign-ups to come back to your product again in the first seven days. Ideally, roughly 15 to 20% of teams using your product continue to collaborate after a month. And over the long term, somewhere in the order of 10 to 20% of teams continue to find value. Maybe even that number increases as folks discover new use cases and new value in your product over time.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings23:44

       I love that. Thank you for answering what was a very basic and really, uh, terrible question. Um, what are some other very common mistakes you see startups make when it comes to user onboarding? I'm sure you go through onboarding flows and you're like, "Oh, no." What are some that

7. 24:00 – 27:00

   Startups most common mistakes in user onboardin

   1. HSHarry Stebbings24:00

      you see very often?

   2. LILauryn Isford24:02

      There are a couple that come to mind. I mentioned briefly that I generally don't like tooltips, because they're basically a quick wall of text usually defining a bunch of terms that the user doesn't understand and will continue to not understand. The other...... pattern that I don't love is a checklist or a more passive opt-in. So you could imagine you sign up for a product tomorrow and something pops up that says, "Do these 10 things and if you choose to do them, you know, you will be all set up to use this product." Um, the reality is that something passive like that where you can choose to engage with educational material is probably only going to have about a 10% opt-in rate, so 90% of your customers will never actually learn any of those things. And this means that actually if you want effective onboarding, you have to be more assertive, more opinionated, and actually ensure that 90% of your customers are completing that educational material. Now, there's a balance there, because you have to pick the right material that's relevant to most people. But in general, a checklist is just not going to get you the breadth of engagement that is needed to really move the needle on activation.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings25:18

      I'm sorry. How do you do assertive education? 'Cause I'm with you in terms of the pop-ups, this button does this, this does that, but, like what do you do? Is it like a hard pay wall of education where you can't get through the flow without it? How do you assertively present education?

   4. LILauryn Isford25:37

      There are a few patterns in the market that I like. Um, I am biased. I think Airtable's onboarding is very good. I also think Linear's onboarding is very good. Um, in general, something more visual, more progressive, and more experiential is generally better. And so what I mean by that is asking a user to do something, in the case of Linear entering a command, uh, showing somebody the visualization of what will manifest in the product for them rather than just telling them, "Here are the terms you need to know." Um, and then progressive, I actually would love to see a product do this really well, I'm- I'm looking, so let me know, uh, i- if you, if you find one, but, um, progressively disclosing different pieces of the product. So instead of giving a customer everything all at once, teaching them pieces of it over time and graduating them into the full experience so that they can focus on understanding the most important pieces.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings26:41

      I- I love that. I actually th- thought of games actually when you were talking about that. Often games, the early levels are so easy that they are essentially onboarding in the most base functionality, um, so I totally agree with you there. My question that I have to ask now is, you've mentioned data fairly often in this conversation,

8. 27:00 – 32:20

   Data analysis vs Gut feelings

   1. HSHarry Stebbings27:00

      um, uh, my- how do you think about data centricity versus gut, uh, intuition when making decisions today?

   2. LILauryn Isford27:10

      So I've had the luxury of working mostly at scaled businesses that have lots of data to look at. Most of the startups I work with as an advisor or an angel investor are much, much earlier, sometimes pre-launch, and that data and that logging just doesn't exist. So in that case, you can still be data-driven, it just looks and feels a little different. What I mean by this is that there are great people out there who've worked on these things before, often at products that look and feel a little bit like yours, and can give you comparison points. So one of the things that I do the most when I don't feel like I have good data to ground myself in is just learning from others. "Hey, you know, you tried these different onboardings. What worked? What didn't work?" Um, "We're thinking about experimenting with a more visual approach and we saw that Linear did this really well and we'd love to learn from them." Um, getting those percentages, understanding what activation rate a product like yours has used, um, learning from comps in the market can be really useful here. Uh, in- in general, there are a couple different patterns and frameworks for doing some of these onboarding tactics or generally growth tactics more broadly, and learning from other people can give you that grounding on if your intuition is right before you invest.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings28:27

      In terms of learning from other people, for a lot of founders listening, they're thinking, "Great, I'd also have to run, you know, a sales team, a CS team, a product team, and actually this is a growth function in a way, um, I probably need to hire for growth." When's the right time to hire for growth, do you think?

   4. LILauryn Isford28:46

      It does depend on your go-to-market. So if a business decides that a product like go-to-market is the right approach in the early days, I would have somebody, usually an engineer, though it could be a technical PM, focused on growth earlier than in other businesses, and the reason for this is that you can actually deliver more scaled impact early as you're developing that initial motion. Um, if, y- you know, I- I guess if PLG is not necessarily the crux of go-to-market or you're still figuring it out, um, the rule of thumb is to introduce someone working on growth after there's product market fit and to invest more if you see good return on that initial investment of bringing someone in to work on growth, but it does depend, and I've seen some companies bring in one person, usually an engineer who's passionate about the area, pretty early to set up the scaffolding, make sure experimentation is possible, do some of the initial data logging, try out initial onboarding, and that has good return.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings29:55

      We're getting granular here, but people love it when you go granular, so I'm just going ro- I'm like diving straight into the deep end on this one. Data logging and data acquisition in the early days, what does good look like for you in terms of the infrastructure that I can give you when you come into my company? As a growth leader, growth advisor, what would you like to see?

   6. LILauryn Isford30:18

      In general, the ability to experiment is nice. Uh, not necessary, but nice. Uh, there are some tools out there that can make this easier.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings30:26

      So what should I have, 'cause like I'm just thinking Google Analytics. You're gonna be upset with me for that. So like what should I have in place where you're like, "Good. We've got the f- we've got the foundations. I can do my job now."

   8. LILauryn Isford30:39

      Well, it depends a little what you're trying to do. If the goal of bringing someone in to work on growth is really to help with acquisition at the top of the funnel, that's more growth marketing, uh, then maybe Google Analytics is enough to get started to work on SEO and SEM. Um, if more, it- it- it, you know, if more is needed or- or if you're interested in doing more, including stuff in the product, maybe, uh, experimenting with your pricing model, onboarding, uh, in general, some degree of data engineering is necessary. So actually having somebody in seat who can help set up the initial data pipelines and logging for you to be able to understand if changes made to the product are good for users and good for the business is necessary. Um, some sort of, uh, analyst facing tool, could be Amplitude, could be Mode, could be Hex, um, i- is, you know, necessary to make sure that what you are learning can also be digested by and acted on by whoever's working on growth. Um, and then ideally, an experimentation tool like Eppo, uh, to round that out, uh, and make sure that, you know, you're able to actually try stuff and learn from it.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings31:52

      Can I ask you, when we're hiring for these people in the early days, it could be that first technical PM who's gonna be on growth, or it could be actually growth people who work with the PM. I need to know h- what to hire, and in my head I've got a data-centric experimentation, brilliant, but then I've also got someone who needs to be creative and needs to understand that we don't have all of the data. We don't have a rigid structure to our growth.

9. 32:20 – 38:03

   How to Hire Your First Growth Hire

   1. HSHarry Stebbings32:20

      What are we hiring for, and what is the right process to hire those first growth hires?

   2. LILauryn Isford32:27

      So the first question I would ask is if the goal of this growth hire is to bring more signups and customers in, so acquisition, or to improve return on total users, customers or revenue once those customers sign up for your product in the first place.

   3. HSHarry Stebbings32:48

      How does that change the person that you have?

   4. LILauryn Isford32:51

      So in the first camp where you're really focused on acquisition, the right archetype of a hire is growth marketing. This is someone who's worked in data-driven marketing, who understands the dynamics of key data-driven campaigns. In some cases, maybe has experience with community-led growth or content marketing, depending on exactly, you know, what you think might work well given what you know or what you don't. Um, in the second case, you're looking for someone who is more comfortable interfacing with, or is an engineer. And the reason for that is that actually meaningfully changing the code base of the core product is necessary to imp- to have the change that you're seeking. Um, in general, it's hard in growth because LinkedIn might just say growth, and it's not clear if that candidate is someone who's got more of a marketing background or more of a product and engineering background, but the work they're experienced in will vary.

   5. HSHarry Stebbings33:50

      Can you have someone who does both, or is this a my- mythical unicorn?

   6. LILauryn Isford33:55

      I think it's a bit of a mythical unicorn. There are some folks out there who've dabbled in both. For example, in some of my earlier work I was more focused on growth marketing, and now in my later work I'm more focused on the product side. But in general, especially if you're only hiring one person, if your team is small, if you're focused on making sure that you get good return and you just wanna try with one person, it's going to be very hard to find someone who can do both.

   7. HSHarry Stebbings34:19

      Can I ask you, when we go down to the hiring process then, what questions should we ask to understand the quality of candidate? And let's take, let's actually be specific. Let's focus on the, kind of, uh, maximization of value, post-product, the engineering-led candidate. What questions would we ask there? What case studies would we do to understand the quality of candidate? I've never done this before. You're, you're educating me.

   8. LILauryn Isford34:45

      I think interviewing for growth is really fun, especially if you're looking for someone experienced, because the prompt can actually be pretty straightforward. What I would do is give that candidate our website and have them sign up for the product. Maybe ensure they can have access to, you know, more than just what they would normally have if they signed up today, uh, you know, on, on the website, and ask them to spend some time and come back with their ideas for what we could be doing better to grow the business more effectively and to have more impact, more users, more revenue. Um, the reason why I think such an open-ended question is effective is a great growth practitioner should be very creative and deliver probably, you know, at least a few, three or four net new ideas in that interview process that you even thought about before to be an additive hire to your team. And a good growth practitioner should understand comps in the market, to my earlier point, very well, and be able to say, "Hey, looking at your onboarding, looking at your pricing, I see some gaps here. I think you could be more effective if you followed this tactic. What I understand from my community is that these other mechanisms might be more impactful," and give you some recommendations even without seeing the data or understanding, you know, the details of how things are working today.

   9. HSHarry Stebbings36:09

      Do you give them time? Is this a take-home task or do they do it in the office with you?

   10. LILauryn Isford36:14

       This is a take-home.

   11. HSHarry Stebbings36:15

       This is a take-home task. Okay. And so that's what good looks like. What would some red flags be? We- we can have that as green flags. Are there anything where you'd be like, "Eesh, didn't like that"?

   12. LILauryn Isford36:27

       The biggest red flag to me is when I hear a heavy bias towards experimentation. So, maybe requiring every change made in the product to be an experiment, or over-focusing on optimizing...... adding friction, removing friction, uh, raising prices, reducing prices, um, versus making substantial changes to the core product experience itself. And the reason why this is a red flag to me, is it suggests an over-focus on needing experiments to validate judgment. Where in early companies, actually having the right judgment before you make an investment is important, so that you get return on how you spend your time. And also, it would suggest to me an over-focus on optimization rather than an ability to think more critically about how the product serves the user and how value is derived from that. So ideally, things like new features might even be something that a growth leader could suggest or contribute because they have a thesis on how that feature will help the business, rather than just saying, you know, "Let's add a couple tool tips here or, um, a couple buttons over there."

   13. HSHarry Stebbings37:39

       You need an opinion. This is what I love about you, Lauren, which is you have strong opinions, and I, I agree with strong opinions, uh, and experimentation just 'cause you like all opinions. You're useless people. Um, but my question to you is, you mentioned kind of changes to core products. That's great, but it's also hard because you have product teams who are like, "Well, please don't ruin it. Please don't break it." So the first question there is should growth teams sit

10. 38:03 – 56:04

    How Product and Growth Teams Should Work Together

    1. HSHarry Stebbings38:03

       within product teams to ease that dislocation potential?

    2. LILauryn Isford38:08

       I think so, especially in early to mid-stage businesses, because the reality is that there is one engineering team that is delivering all changes to the product, and it's important that the quality bar is as high for growth as it is anywhere else in the org. So, I do think co-location helps. I, I also think for recruiting purposes, um, it can be favorable to make sure that everybody in growth and everybody in core product is together, learning from each other, um, versus having sort of an island where growth does its own thing, and hopefully everybody has fun.

    3. HSHarry Stebbings38:45

       I think you learn a lot from mistakes, either the ones you've made or that you've seen around you. When you think about hiring for growth teams, whether it's your previous hires or founders that you've worked with from 25 portfolio companies or advisory roles, um, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see founders make in those hires in the early days for growth teams?

    4. LILauryn Isford39:06

       One mistake I've seen is assuming that best growth practices and experience in consumer will translate to SaaS, and the other way around. That risk was taken on me. When I started at Airtable, I actually came from Meta, and so I was jumping from consumer to SaaS, and I experienced the steep learning curve firsthand. I, I learned that they aren't exactly apples to apples. Um, but in general, if you are hiring for someone to do growth in SaaS, I would try to find someone who's done it in SaaS before, and the inverse is also true. If you're hiring in consumer, find someone who has done growth in consumer before.

    5. HSHarry Stebbings39:43

       What are the biggest differences? 'Cause in my mind I would be like, "Oh, great. They bring a consumer lens. They bring the creativity and virality of consumer growth to B2B, which is more stodgy and sticky." Why- wha- talk to me about the differences and why that may be not the case.

    6. LILauryn Isford40:01

       So, if you think about Facebook or Instagram, a growth tactic that may be effective in either of those apps would be making a critical action more prominent. Making a button bigger, making stories appear at the top of your Instagram feed instead of in the middle, which they used to, if you may remember. Um, reducing friction. Maybe there's only two steps to complete sign-up instead of three. And generally, those optimizations will yield relatively meaningful changes in behavior for a consumer user base for whom there's more of a choice to be using that product today or tomorrow, and little differences in effort required might actually make the difference on if they take an action. In SaaS, often a tool is used at work. So, if my boss asks me to send them a Notion doc to use Notion to deliver something, I will do it. And that means that a slightly bigger button or a slightly shorter sign-up flow is actually not going to move the needle on if I use a tool. Um, there's of course some incredible delight and value that comes from consumer-grade product experiences in SaaS, but I find that in consumer growth, there tends to be an over-focus on very small detail changes, whereas in SaaS it's more important to make bigger or bolder changes that really react to the user's intent so that their behavior will change.

    7. HSHarry Stebbings41:31

       What's the biggest and boldest change you've made, do you think?

    8. LILauryn Isford41:35

       Well, just last week, my growth team at Notion launched a template gallery, relaunched our template gallery, and released more than 4,500 new templates for what you can do on Notion. This is a pretty big change for us. We had only about 500 before the launch. And in addition to that, we also feature the creators who are making them. So, in the case where Notion has not made the template, anybody else can, and you can actually present it and share it right from Notion's website, which is a celebration for us of our creators, and also a bet on leaning into the horizontal nature of the product and celebrating student use, personal use, hobbyist use, and also professional use. So, a- as one example, we have more than 100 habit trackers in our template gallery now, which is pretty cool that, you know, i- if you want to track your habits in Notion, you can actually shop through many different ways to do that and decide which one you like best.

    9. HSHarry Stebbings42:34

       Two questions there. Sorry, I have to ask.

    10. LILauryn Isford42:36

        Yeah.

    11. HSHarry Stebbings42:37

        One, how do you think about effective product discovery when there's now 100 habit trackers? People need curation and people need direction. How do you do that with the depth of content you now have?

    12. LILauryn Isford42:52

        So, the thesis that we have here, which is inspired by some of the work that we've seen Canva do as well, um, is that people love to shop. So, if you say, "I would love a red shirt," you might get a red shirt given to you by, you know, someone at a store. But if you can browse a whole bunch of different red shirts and decide this is the one that's- that's right for me that I'm really excited about, then that actually gives you a much more personal experience, and you probably walk away much happier with the red shirt. So, we'll see how it plays out, but we're really excited to, uh, bring this thesis to life.

    13. HSHarry Stebbings43:30

        Do you think that it will be a 95/5 situation, which is kind of common in a lot of cases in life, where 95% of the downloads really are driven towards 5%, or do you think it'll be quite an even dispersion across the gallery?

    14. LILauryn Isford43:47

        I think it depends on the product. So, in this case actually, I don't think it will be 95/5. I think there is diversity of interest and preference and passion that we will celebrate. I would assume a product like Canva might have a similar effect, where, you know, it wouldn't be that most people choose the same RSVP invitation pattern, but that there are many, and that there's room for all of those. Uh, in different businesses, maybe where there's a more narrow set of options, that could be true, but there are so many things you can build on Notion and so many different things you can make that I suspect that that diversity will be.

    15. HSHarry Stebbings44:26

        You- you mentioned this quite big change, really, to how Notion really organizes content and delivers it and what the content is that it provides. Postmortems are fascinating to me. Fascinating. How do you do postmortems? Who's invited? Who sets the agenda? How often are they? Can you just take me into the world of postmortems and how you do them?

    16. LILauryn Isford44:48

        Yes. We- we do them all the time. We call them retros. Postmortems is also great. And, uh, they're recursive, so it could be that a small team, maybe even a pair, a PM and an engineer who worked on something, will retro together. It could be a team, it could be an org, it could be at the company level. Uh, but generally, for something substantial, like a new launch, I would allow for time to see results and then hold a f- meeting where everybody can share their rose, bud, thorn equivalent. You know, what went well, what we could do better, what didn't go well. And also, assess and understand the performance of that launch and feel ... and follow through on accountability for if the original hypothesis in launching that feature delivered, and also what surprised us about the behavior we saw from customers and the business impact that we saw on the other side. This is something that can be pretty second nature in growth, because we are so close to the data, but I find that that focus on metrics, on results, on impact, can sometimes be less central in the rest of product orgs, in p- in places that are further away. Um, and it's a shame, because there's so much you can learn from saying, "Hey, we launched this feature. What did we expect to see in terms of usage, in terms of engagement, in terms of conversion, behavior changes?"

    17. HSHarry Stebbings46:10

        Do you ever not hit metrics and leave the meeting happy?

    18. LILauryn Isford46:14

        Absolutely.

    19. HSHarry Stebbings46:15

        Talk to me about that. Does that not mean you don't hit your goals, but you're still happy?

    20. LILauryn Isford46:20

        There's a difference between missing a goal because your hypothesis was disproven and missing a goal because you didn't execute well. So, in the first case, you've actually learned something really valuable, that a h- hypothesis that you held in building a product for your customers was incorrect, and ideally, you understand the why behind that and you fix forward and- and build differently and better for them. In the case of missing a goal because execution didn't go well, that is where really getting into the details in a postmortem or a retro and saying, "What didn't we do well and what can we do differently next time to make sure we do give it our best shot on goal?" is really important. But in the first case, you've actually been blessed with learnings that you didn't have before, so I- I think that's actually a- a great outcome.

    21. HSHarry Stebbings47:14

        I love that kind of separation of the two. How often is it the first? How often is it the second?

    22. LILauryn Isford47:20

        I would say, rule of thumb is, for growth teams, maybe a 20% batting average. So, you'll see metric wins or hit that goal 20% of the time. Um, now, that's a little different than, uh, how to set a goal that's sufficiently ambitious. So, uh, when my teams set goals, we usually aim for a 70% hit rate, meaning that if there were 10 teams in the growth org, seven of them probabilistically would hit the goal that they set. Um, and you know, the other 30% wouldn't. And that's by design, to make sure that goals are both ambitious and pragmatic, and it also means that then the team needs to have so many ideas that even if only 20% of them contribute to that goal, that will be enough to get to that metric.

    23. HSHarry Stebbings48:09

        I'm always stuck on growth in the way that I'm never sure, Lauren, whether it should be like, "Oh, we increase activation..." You said a brilliant quote earlier on. I can't quite remember it, but it was like, learning by inches and kind of incrementality actually leads to great progression. But then I have other growth leaders on who are like, "We need to, like, expand, like, bl- blow shit up, and if it works, it's like a 10X on the company." And I'm never sure which camp growth should really fall into which is like the binary one in 50 work, but when it works it's a halo, or the 70% work, and actually we build yard by yard.

    24. LILauryn Isford48:49

        I think it depends on where the product is at, and- and also the st- the stage of companies. So-... if, if a business is maybe ha- has product market fit, but is not seeing even close to the top of funnel signups or new users that it needs to achieve its ambitions, then maybe more of that Hail Mary approach is warranted to say, "Let's come up with some big, bold ideas that could completely change everything for us. Because that's the only thing we care about, and incremental gains will not be enough to help us achieve what we want to achieve." Um, similarly, there could be a point where the funnel, so, y- you know, from signup, to activation, to conversion maybe looks really good for a great product with market fit. And so actually, the best use of a growth team is to aim higher and say, "Instead of optimizing this, this thing, which we think is doing pretty well, let's consider new bets or take new risks." Um, and then the flip side would be if there is a business that's had a lot of success, but there's so much low-hanging fruit to just optimize little things; introduce the right payment methods, provide the right onboarding, make sure landing pages on that website convert well, then that more incremental approach of optimizations can actually compound and yield so much impact. Um, something that I think about when I'm looking at different components of what drives revenue for a business is, sometimes you look at something like a churn rate, and even a very small percentage reduction in that churn rate compounding over many years will be really meaningful for the business. So, um, it, it does actually start with understanding who, you know, who you're, what you're building for, and also how the product is doing.

    25. HSHarry Stebbings50:41

        You said consider new things there. I'm always stuck honestly, when I'm thinking about, how long do I give an experiment? Like, is it a week? Is it a month? How do you think about enough time to know whether something works versus, "Ugh, this isn't working, and we need to make a change."

    26. LILauryn Isford51:00

        It does depend on how many users you put an experiment in front of, and also if you're looking for statistical significance. In some cases, if you're making a change that's focused on a pretty narrow set of customers, you may never actually (laughs) get to that significance. It might take months, right, or, or even a year. Um, so in general, I worry less about how long to run an experiment and think more about, what are the key signals that will help us determine if the behavior we seek from our customers is happening or not happening? Uh, and then what are the guardrails that we want to look at? So, even if you run an experiment for a week or two, you might see that more people are paying for your product or fewer people are paying for your product. And without significance, it could give you enough signal to say, "Let's keep moving, and let's get this out the door and ship it to everyone."

    27. HSHarry Stebbings51:47

        I can literally talk to you all day. I, I do have one more thing to ask. Uh, uh, Sa- Sam, uh, clearly has, has so much ... I mean, if, if I was an interviewer, this'd be great. Um, but, uh, what I was gonna say was, um, you've invested in many great companies. You also advise many great companies. How has investing changed how you think about growth, PLG, onboarding? 'Cause i- it is a different hat and window into the world of startups.

    28. LILauryn Isford52:13

        I actually think it's one of the areas where I learn the most, and the reason for this is, to be a great growth practitioner, you can't have tunnel vision just on your own product. It's important to understand the ecosystem, to study different puzzles, rather than just working on one. So, when I work with startups, it actually helps me take a step back and think differently and learn about different growth tactics and flywheels that work well for products that are not the one that I spend all of my time on, and I think it makes me better at what I do.

    29. HSHarry Stebbings52:47

        Have there been any really tangible takeaways, either from companies that've really worked, that really haven't worked, where you're like, "Ooh, that was an interesting insight from that exp- like, from that moment or ... Not experiment, but that journey that I didn't think about before"?

    30. LILauryn Isford53:02

        One of the things that I think I've become much crisper on is, if you're focused on top of funnel, so if you're focused on bringing more people into your product, being thoughtful about which strategies will yield the right customers that fit the profile of your ICP, or your ideal customer profile, and, uh, an example of this would be, if you have an amazing YouTube strategy or community strategy, that will bring in lots of passionate folks who want to give your product a try, but it may not actually be the way to get a large enterprise to discover who you are or to learn what you offer. So, being smart and thoughtful about that, where actually your first touch in getting to know a customer will, you know, bring in a certain profile of customer that ideally you should then be able to serve all the way down funnel, and your go-to-market should match. Um, tha- that's something that I feel I've gotten a lot sharper on in working with companies that are earlier and are trying many different things to, to see what works.
11. 56:04 – 59:58

    Quick-Fire Round

    1. LILauryn Isford56:04

       time.

    2. HSHarry Stebbings56:04

       What tactics have totally died a death? No more? À la poubelle.

    3. LILauryn Isford56:10

       Referral programs. They still exist, but you probably haven't seen one in a while. Or if you have, you probably haven't referred someone in a while. They ... The $10 credit for referring a friend seems to be a little outdated.

    4. HSHarry Stebbings56:22

       What one piece of advice would you give to a growth leader starting a new role today? You're calling them up the night before their first job.

    5. LILauryn Isford56:29

       I would give three months to just learn. Study the business, understand what data you have, talk to customers, attend a sales conversation. Learn from folks at the company around what they've tried and what's worked and what hasn't worked, because every customer base is different, and it's easy to have bias from the customers that you've worked with in your previous job.

    6. HSHarry Stebbings56:50

       What is the biggest challenge about layering on a sales assisted motion to an existing PLG motion?

    7. LILauryn Isford56:59

       At some point, the two motions will compete. So, a dollar earned through a freemium or self-serve motion from PLG may be a trade-off against 2 or $5 earned through closing a contract in a sales assisted motion, and it's very important to be explicit about those two motions working in concert and to make the right trade for the business overall.

    8. HSHarry Stebbings57:22

       Is it fair that sales reps get comped with sales commissions and PLG don't?

    9. LILauryn Isford57:30

       It's a good question. I think it can be harder to predictably deliver numbers while yielding ... W- while, uh, excuse me, while managing product changes rather than working a book as a sales rep, but the question comes up a lot, and I would be curious actually to learn if there's anyone out there who's done more of a variable comp structure for growth that I could learn about.

    10. HSHarry Stebbings57:56

        Yeah. Uh, if you could be in any other growth team in the world, hypothetically, for a day, just out of curiosity, like fly on the wall, where would you be?

    11. LILauryn Isford58:05

        You know, I always have admired the Pinterest growth organization from its earlier days through, and I actually don't know a whole lot about the specific stuff they've built on the inside.

    12. HSHarry Stebbings58:15

        Well, no, I totally agree. They've actually got an amazing, like, growth alumni that have come out of it. By the way, the Dropbox alumni is the best I've ever seen. When you look at ... Also, they've turned into investors as well. Most investors actually worked at Dropbox, which is terrifying. Um, but, uh, I want to ask one, which is, you've seen incredible trends in the productivity space. What are the biggest trends in the productivity space having seen two of the best internally?

    13. LILauryn Isford58:41

        In general, I feel like over the past five to seven years, this idea of collaboration by default, or a more multiplayer use of a tool, has become much more commonplace. So, if you think about some of the productivity tools that were more for individual note-taking or private note-taking that were more popular five, seven years ago, something like Bear, uh, that's a lot less common now. Um, I think that trend is going to stay, that our tools will become even more multiplayer, and, uh, that actually building a product experience that helps you maintain a private space and also engage with others will be really important.

    14. HSHarry Stebbings59:17

        Final one. Which ONE company growth strategy recently have you been really impressed by, where you're like, "Ooh, that's smart. I like that"?

    15. LILauryn Isford59:27

        I think Figma did a really great job with the launch of FigJam. It was smart feature development to bring in a different section of the market with a product that plays very nicely with their core offering.

    16. HSHarry Stebbings59:41

        No, I totally agree with you. I think they nailed it. Uh, listen, Lauren, I love this. Thank you so much for putting up with the discussion. Uh, I hope you didn't spend too much time with the schedule that I sent you last night. (laughs) Otherwise, it was a surprise. Um, but I love this, so thank you.

    17. LILauryn Isford59:57

        Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Episode duration: 59:58