Career frameworks, A/B testing, onboarding tips, selling to engineers | Laura Schaffer (Amplitude)

... like the, you know, dead of the night, and by that I mean, like, you know, 7:00 p.m. or something on, I think it was a ... Pretty sure it was a Friday. We just asked for forgiveness and kind of sh- put these questions into the sign-up form and ran as an A/B test with a small group. And, you know, I'm fully expecting, okay, this is gonna like hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad, you know. And I'm gonna be prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting. And I was totally ... and I'm thinking of it like written story to write like a, like the framework for how I wanted to, to surface this. And we start to get the data for this thing. I'm not getting an improved conversion. Like we ... There's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions. It improved conversion by like 5%. Like, just improved sign-ups. And it's one of those, like, what? Like, okay, this, like ... What is going on here?

(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 Laura Schaffner. The week we recorded this chat turned out to be Laura's first week in a new gig as head of growth for Amplitude, taking over for a previous legendary guest, Elena Verna. Prior to Amplitude, Laura was VP of product and growth at a company called Rapid. Before that, she spent over seven years at Twilio as head of growth and PM lead of the growth platform and the experimentation platform at Twilio. In our conversation, we dig into Laura's career growth framework and the importance of carving your own path versus waiting for one to be carved for you. We also get into a bunch of tactical and surprising advice around running experiments, making decisions on gut versus data, developing your growth strategy. And how to sell your product to developers. Laura has a wealth of wisdom and I learned a lot from our conversation. With that, I bring you Laura Schaffner after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. This episode is brought to you by public.com who want to tell you about their new treasury accounts which earn a 4.8% yield on your cash. That is higher than a high-yield savings account while still being backed by the full faith and credit of the U.S. government. Treasury yields are at a 15-year high, but buying U.S. treasuries is super complicated. You have to go to a bank or navigate an ancient government website, or at least that was the case. Now you can move your cash into U.S. treasuries with the flexibility of a bank account. You can access your cash whenever you want, even before your treasury bills hit maturity. There are no hold periods, no settlement days, just a safe place to park your cash and earn a reliable yield. Public will automatically reinvest your treasury bills at maturity, so you don't have to do anything to continue growing your yield. And you can manage your treasuries alongside stocks, ETFs, crypto and any alternative assets. Do all your investing in one place and earn 4.8%, a higher yield than a high-yield savings account. Only with a treasury account at public.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next generation AB testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern grow team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, e-mail marketing and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at GetEppo.com. GetE-P-P-O.com. And 10X your experiment velocity. Laura, welcome to the podcast.