Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)

My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of, like, really smart people that had never done sales and have them do sales. There are a lot of disadvantages to that, but I do think it led to a ton of innovation. That's how we got our very innovative go-to-market motions, 'cause a lot of those people then moved into different functions at the company. They had all this context on who the user was. They had talked to so many different users at that point. If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can, like, innovate, because they're also... I think they come in with, "I don't know anything. Let me just, like, figure this out."

(instrumental music) Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Melissa Tan. Melissa was the longtime head of growth for Dropbox's B2B business. She was also their first growth product manager, then she went on to do full-time advising for companies like Canva, Grammarly, Miro, and Row, helping them with their growth strategy and helping them build their growth teams. For the past two and a half years, she's been leading growth at Webflow. But hot off the presses, as Melissa shares at the top of this podcast, she's going back to full-time advising life. So, if you're looking for help with go-to-market plans, growth strategy, building your growth team, aligning your sales, marketing, and growth efforts, she's about to become available, so definitely reach out. In our conversation, we get deep into what it takes to build a high performing team, and also how to build a high performing growth team specifically. Melissa shares advice for becoming a leader that people will follow from company to company, how to best develop your people to become the best versions of themselves. She talks about the most common ingredients of a high performing team, and what she's learned from working with companies like Canva, Grammarly, Miro, Row, Webflow, and Dropbox. We also get into how to interview product managers, and she shares her actual interview process, plus who your first growth hire should probably be, the most common mistakes people make when they first start to invest in growth, and a real talk story of what Dropbox did right and what they did wrong in their shift to B2B. There are so many golden nuggets of lessons in this episode, and I'm excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Melissa Tan after a short word from our sponsors. Today's episode is brought to you by AssemblyAI. If you're looking to build AI-powered features in your audio and video products, then you need to know about AssemblyAI, which makes it easy to transcribe and understand speech at scale. What I love about AssemblyAI is you can use their simple API to access the latest AI breakthroughs from top tier research labs. Product teams at startups and enterprises are using AssemblyAI to automatically transcribe and summarize phone calls and virtual meetings, detect topics in podcasts, pinpoint when sensitive content is spoken, and lots more. All of AssemblyAI's models which are accessed through their API are production ready. So many PMs I know are considering or already building with AI, and AssemblyAI is the fastest way to build with AI for audio use cases. Now is the time to check out AssemblyAI, which makes it easy to bring the highest accuracy transcription, plus valuable insights to your customers, just like Spotify, CallRail, and Rytr do for theirs. Visit assemblyai.com/lenny to try their API for free and start testing their models with their no-code playground. That's assemblyai.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Mixpanel. Get deep insights into what your users are doing at every stage of the funnel at a fair price that scales as you grow. Mixpanel gives you quick answers about your users from awareness, to acquisition, through retention. And by capturing website activity, ad data, and multi-touch attribution right in Mixpanel, you can improve every aspect of the full user funnel. Powered by first party behavioral data instead of third party cookies, Mixpanel's built to be more powerful and easier to use than Google Analytics. Explore plans for teams of every size and see what Mixpanel can do for you at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. And while you're at it, they're also hiring, so check it out at mixpanel.com/friends/lenny. Melissa, welcome to the podcast.