Lenny's PodcastCareer frameworks, A/B testing, onboarding tips, selling to engineers | Laura Schaffer (Amplitude)
At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
From Twilio to Amplitude: Growth, experiments, and selling developers
- Lenny interviews Laura Schaffer, newly appointed Head of Growth at Amplitude and former growth/product leader at Twilio and Rapid, about career growth, experimentation, and developer-focused products.
- Laura shares her career framework centered on proactively surfacing customer insights, building an internal brand, and effectively carving your own path instead of waiting for managers or ladders to define it.
- She dives deep into experimentation strategy—why most ideas fail, how to validate cheaply, when to accept lower statistical confidence, and the importance of understanding user psychology at each step of the journey.
- They also explore how to build product-led growth motions (especially in traditionally sales-led companies) and what makes developers such a distinct, demanding audience to build and sell for.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasOwn your career by surfacing customer insights, not just doing your job well.
Laura argues that simply excelling in your role ties your trajectory to your manager and org structure. By deeply understanding customers and regularly sharing structured 'voice of the customer' insights across the company, you build a broader reputation, unlock cross-functional opportunities, and can even create new roles/teams for yourself—as she did with growth at Twilio.
Get known internally as “the person who knows the customer.”
Creating recurring artifacts (e.g., a digest, a quarterly voice-of-customer session) makes you visible to senior leaders and peers. This helped Laura quickly gain influence at Twilio and secure support when she later pitched forming a growth team.
Not all friction is bad; use “good friction” to reassure and orient users.
A Twilio experiment adding four questions (language, role, product, use case) to signup unexpectedly increased conversion by ~5%. The extra steps calmed users’ fears (“Am I in the right place? Will this work for me?”), showing that psychologically aligned friction can actually boost conversion.
Design experiments around user psyche, not just UX logic.
In onboarding, forcing developers to deal with telecom concepts (phone numbers) as step one suppressed conversion, because it triggered anxiety and unfamiliarity. Moving that step later and 'hiding the scary part in the hot dog' (embedding it within a more familiar code-first flow) significantly improved outcomes.
Most ideas fail; success comes from failing cheaply and often, not from perfect bets.
Citing data from companies like Microsoft and Netflix, Laura notes 80–90% of hypotheses are wrong. She pushes teams to validate ideas via cheap methods (mocks, qualitative tests, painted doors) and reserve fully built A/B tests for concepts that have already survived earlier filters.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesBad friction is bad, and good friction is good. There’s no rule that all friction is bad.
— Laura Schaffer
Your executive team is smart, but they’re often the farthest from the customer. That’s your superpower.
— Laura Schaffer
If it’s not embarrassing, you’ve gone too far with the first iteration.
— Laura Schaffer
Failure doesn’t have to be a wall; it can be a compass.
— Laura Schaffer
Developers can’t afford to take someone’s word for it. They have to prove it to themselves, because if your service fails, it’s on them.
— Laura Schaffer
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