Lenny's Podcast

How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)

Carilu Dietrich is a former CMO, most notably the Head of Marketing who took Atlassian public. These days she’s an advisor to CEOs and CMOs of hypergrowth B2B companies and has worked with companies like Miro, Segment, Bill.com, 1Password, Productboard, Sprout Social, Weights & Biases, and more. In today’s episode, we discuss: • Patterns across the most successful hypergrowth companies • How to advance in your career, and how to someday become an executive • How to decide which company to work at • Advice for navigating the job market during tough times • How to find and execute new growth opportunities • Why most CMOs and CPOs get fired, and what we can learn from this — Brought to you by Rows—The spreadsheet where data comes to life | Braintrust—For when you needed talent, yesterday | Coda—Meet the evolution of docs Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-achieve-hypergrowth-in-your Where to find Carilu Dietrich: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hypergrowth-advisor/ • Newsletter: www.carilu.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/clu007 Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Carilu’s background (04:28) Habits and behaviors that will help you reach an executive role (07:15) Why there is no substitute for working hard (08:15) 5 things you need to do to get to the C-suite (10:39) Choosing the right company for accelerated career growth (12:42) Criteria for assessing a phenomenal company (14:41) Asking better questions and making decisions with energy (16:05) Advice for finding a job during a recession (19:25) The importance of quality products and sustained brand advertising (24:06) Lessons from successful hypergrowth companies (28:14) Is word of mouth a necessary growth lever? (31:31) How to accelerate word-of-mouth marketing (35:28) Atlassian’s product-led growth strategy and delayed sales team hiring (39:54) When to hire your first salesperson (43:04) Common growth levers and roadblocks (47:01) How to build trust between CEOs and CMOs (49:00) Challenges of C-suite roles in startups (52:55) Bundling strategies (57:17) Lightning round Referenced: • Tomasz Tunguz: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomasztunguz/ • Denise Persson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisepersson/ • Oracle: https://www.oracle.com/ • Atlassian: https://www.atlassian.com/ • Classy: https://www.classy.org/ • Snowflake: https://www.snowflake.com/en/ • Salesforce: https://www.salesforce.com/ • Okta’s “Businesses at Work” 2023: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/ • Y U No Use Hipchat billboard: https://techcrunch.com/2011/04/22/y-u-no-have-lame-billboard-hipchat/ • Productboard: https://www.productboard.com/ • Miro: https://miro.com/ • Scott Farquhar: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottfarquhar/ • Elena Verna on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/the-ultimate-guide-to-product-led-sales-elena-verna/ • Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell translation: https://www.amazon.com/Tao-Te-Ching-Laozi/dp/0060812451/ref=asc_df_0060812451/ • How to Win Friends and Influence People: https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/8183227899/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0 • Never Split the Difference: https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-audiobook/dp/B01COR1GM2/ref=sr_1_1 • Everything Everywhere All At Once on Hulu: https://www.hulu.com/movie/everything-everywhere-all-at-once-fa320000-8cf3-46fc-8c45-df5ec67b71f2 • Tara Brach guided meditations: https://www.tarabrach.com/guided-meditations/ Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

Carilu DietrichguestLenny Rachitskyhost

Apr 29, 20231h 7mWatch on YouTube ↗

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Hypergrowth Playbook: Product, Career, and Marketing Lessons From Atlassian CMO

Former Atlassian marketing leader Carilu Dietrich breaks down what drives hypergrowth in both companies and careers, emphasizing exceptional products, organic word of mouth, and leaders who can keep up with rapidly scaling organizations.
She shares concrete frameworks for choosing high-upside companies, navigating tough job markets, and accelerating your path to the C‑suite through hard work, cross-functional learning, and tight alignment with revenue and strategy.
On the company side, she contrasts product-led and sales-led growth, explains when and how to add sales, how to use bundling effectively, and how to lean into virality via content, communities, and thought leadership.
Throughout, she highlights why CMOs and CPOs so often get fired, what it takes to earn CEO trust, and how to make big strategic changes across functions rather than treating growth as a marketing-only problem.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Hypergrowth requires a product people genuinely love plus built-in virality.

You cannot buy your way to sustainable hypergrowth with paid channels alone; products like ChatGPT, Miro, and 1Password grow fast because users are excited to use them and naturally bring in others.

Treat your career like a long-term compounding asset—work harder and learn broadly early.

Dietrich attributes her rise to the CMO role to consistently working extra hours when she was young, taking on “tour of duty” roles in other functions, and proactively stepping into white-space responsibilities.

Choosing the right company can accelerate your career more than anything else.

She advises early-career people to join high-momentum, high-quality companies, and evaluates them via investor quality, Rule of 40, NDR, growth, burn, NPS, category leadership, and Glassdoor sentiment.

Product-led growth should delay and tightly target sales, not eliminate it entirely.

Atlassian’s success came from massively over-investing in R&D versus sales, using PLG to land users, and only adding sales later to assist existing accounts, renewals, and large enterprise deals.

Major growth shifts (e.g., moving upmarket, adding products, new channels) are company strategy problems, not just marketing problems.

To make big changes stick, the whole C-suite must align—product, marketing, sales, CS, and support all need coordinated roadmaps, staffing, and OKRs aimed at the same growth bets.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

In order to get hypergrowth, you have to have organic inbound and viral word of mouth. You can't pay enough to grow at those rates and have a viable company.

— Carilu Dietrich

There's no shortcuts to knowing a lot.

— Carilu Dietrich

If you wanna be in the C-suite, it's a job about how the system works.

— Carilu Dietrich

The big growth levers are strategy problems, not individual departmental problems.

— Carilu Dietrich

You should always test it. Data-led insights are better than anything any pundit would say on a podcast.

— Carilu Dietrich

What hypergrowth companies have in common (product, virality, ‘riding the lightning’)Career strategy for reaching the C-suite and thriving in downturnsHow to pick high-momentum, career-making companies to work forProduct-led growth vs. sales-led growth and when to add a sales teamBrand and awareness marketing: when expensive advertising works (and when it doesn’t)Using bundling, new segments, and new channels as major growth leversWhy CMOs/CPOs get fired and how executives build trust with CEOs and boards

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