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

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 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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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

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 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.

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?