The Exchanges

Q Do I give them the data? If so, what data? So we want to give them an assignment, a practical. What do I give them, Darius?

A Yes. Yes. You would want to give them data. You also want to give them your strategy. Like where is the business going? Where has it come so far? A little bit of the product history. And I think for this first engagement, just kind of testing it out, giving them high level data, the kind of things you give to your investors or advisors. So things you put in a board deck, maybe like plus all the appendix slides. So these are things like where the revenue's gone, how the user growth has been at those high level things. Ideally, if you have them, some of the conversion rates of like the onboarding flow, monetization, retention rates, cohort graphs, like If you have some of that kind of industry standard growth model stuff, that's really great to give them too. But at some level, kind of give them all the somewhat clearly put together reports you have, and then see what they do with them.

AI assessment note: “Yes. Yes. You would want to give them data. You also want to give”

Q What questions do you ask for customer discovery? I find a lot of questions can be quite kind of leading the witness. I find a lot of people listen too much. It's like listen to problems, not solutions, I always think. What questions do you ask? What does great customer discovery look like for you?

A Yeah, it's true. You don't want to lead the witness too much. Like if you say, are you excited about this particular value prop? Oftentimes people are trying to look good and trying to say the right thing, partly because you're probably paying them. You're probably giving them a 50, a hundred dollar gift certificate to like participate. So they want to kind of try to make you happy. It's also just a social thing. So what you have to do is kind of show them that you're happy already. And this is great. Thank you for being here. Additionally, give them open-ended questions. One of my favorite questions is if you saw this page, what would you think? That doesn't preface them with anything. It gets them ready to, like, just give you their raw, unfiltered perspective. And then, what would you think about this? How would you interact with this? What needs would you have to be satisfied by this? Could you see yourself using this? Relatively high-level questions and slowly getting deeper into their perspective and digging into things when they bring them up. So they say, yeah, I think this would be good, but, like, maybe for my friend, not me. It's like, okay, well, why would your friend use it? What value would they get? And then why wouldn't you use it? Digging in there, and then maybe more towards the end of the conversation, I find, Getting into very specific things, double check t…

AI assessment note: “One of my favorite questions is if you saw this page, what would you think?”

Q Are there any companies where specifically you find amazing growth people coming out of? I was shouting to Grant, the founder of WhatNot, the other day, and he was saying how the people from Pinterest in particular are the best growth leaders.

A I think Pinterest has one of the best, like, systems of growth. A list of all the current growth experiments, you automatically run reports on it, etc. I think the only other company that really has that system is Facebook, and Pinterest maybe, just being like a newer company, maybe has like a refresh on that that's maybe a little, like, simpler. Facebook's System is incredibly detailed and incredibly powerful, but it's also built for, like, incredibly high volume, very, very metrics-based environment. In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies maybe, like, really do know growth. They know how to run these successive experiments. So all those companies, I think, have, like, really great growth culture where people have metrics, come with experiments, execute, and kind of everyone on the team knows how to do it. I think those are all great places to dig for people.

AI assessment note: “In general, I think people at Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, a few other companies”

Q I love your analogies, Darius. These are fantastic. Final one before we discuss a little bit more personal, but in terms of postmortems, do you do postmortems? How do you structure them? How do you think about effective postmortems for growth teams?

A Maybe I call them like learnings more than postmortems. One of my refrains is that in life, you can only do one of two things. You can succeed or you can learn. You never quote unquote fail. One thing that I started up at Dropbox that was kind of a Is every two or three weeks, we'd get together, and there were multiple growth teams at Dropbox, because it was so big, we'd share all of our learnings. Bi-weekly learnings lunch on Fridays. What your ask was is to show up with what you plan to do, ideally some screenshots and some, like, product experience to make it, like, more concrete. And then, oftentimes, we'd ask people, what do you think won? A, B, or C? And people are like, hmm, B. And then we'd do the reveal and say, actually, C won. Oftentimes, we don't know exactly why. Sometimes we'll run user research and try to figure out, like, from users' mouths why it won, but even then, that might not be perfect. It was always a really great way for people to understand what other teams are doing. See the kind of exploratory experimental kind of mindset, especially for teams outside growth is a great way to learn growth and then also learn from each other and say like, oh, someone used that message on this page. It worked really well. I wonder if I could use that same messaging on my experiences because effectively it's all the same product. It's all Dropbox. So that was a really g…

AI assessment note: “Bi-weekly learnings lunch on Fridays. What your ask was is to show up with”

Q But I want to start with a little bit on you, because we look at the profile, and we've got Dropbox, Facebook, Airtable, and some of the most powerful growth orgs. How did you make your way into the world of growth originally, and what did that entry point look like?

A Well, I've always loved to use technology to build delight for users, even in college. I got a CS degree, but I was always more focused on the product side. Like, how can we use this technology to build something interesting and even kind of fun and delightful? And I ended up as a programmer at Tickle.com, which is one of the early growth viral houses back in the day. We build, like, viral tests about, like, yourself, and you send them to your friends, and you find out, like, what's your IQ, what kind of dog you are, and, like, more fun things, but we learned a lot about virality. And even at Tickle, we built social network, and we built a matchmaking site, and all these things with these intrinsic, like, viral knowledge. And that really got me hooked on it. Growth, I find, Is an interesting combination of, like, human psychology, technology, and then meeting, like, business goals. And so that, really, I found appealed to my brain, and I ended up kind of having the thread of that through my career.

AI assessment note: “I ended up as a programmer at Tickle.com, which is one of the early growth viral houses”

Q meshed with us. They align with how we want to approach growth. We need to onboard them. I think this is where everyone fucks it up. I mean, they fuck up the prior process too, but what does the optimal onboarding process look like? And what can I as the founder and leader do to make these growth hires as successful as possible in the first 30, 60, 90 days?

A Yeah, when I think about that kind of early, like that first quarter, the ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building. So for context, they really need to know the history of the product, all the things you've learned, Especially things you've tried in the past, because that shows, like, maybe obvious directions to go that perhaps you've tried out already, especially in areas now owned by growth. Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketing. Really making clear what growth owns and should be not only evolving, but also responsible for the product surface area in general for is really key. More context is all the current data and dashboards internally and third-party systems. Then the other part is relationships I think are really key for a growth team, really just such a collaborative entity. Great connections to the heads of marketing, sales, product, data, also the growth competent advisors and VC firms that the company might have.

AI assessment note: “the ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building.”

Q Final one for you. What one company growth strategy have you most recently been super impressed by?

A Pretty recently, I've talked to some interesting companies that actually use the calendar as a growth vector. It's obvious when you reflect about it, but a lot of these B to B SaaS companies that grow through a PLG, like product-led growth motion, At the end of the day, one person has to use it, they share it with another person who then uses it, who shares it with another person, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's examples like Dropbox and Slack and others who do it. And then one of the key examples is, you know, Zoom. You and I first were introduced to Zoom almost certainly through someone sending us a Zoom link that we kind of hesitantly clicked on, and then we had to install some software, which was weird, and then we fell in love with Zoom, and we shared it with our friends in the same way. And that's really kind of a calendar, a meeting level of virality that's also shared by On a lower level, like a company like Warmly, like automatically updates your calendar to have like links to people's LinkedIn's and just some interesting info so you can get to know them a little bit before without doing manual searches. And it really is like a fundamental viral mechanism of like meeting people through calendar entries and one-to-one meetings, especially in this remote work world. So I think it's kind of under reflected on viral opportunity that's still really prescient today.

AI assessment note: “companies that actually use the calendar as a growth vector”

Q On the personal elements, there's two questions to me here, which is like, can you take me to a moment where you made a growth decision without data? Darius, this was institution-led. How did it go?

A Yeah, the one that kind of comes up for me when you ask that, at Dropbox, we are optimizing the onboarding and the initial install of the Dropbox client. We are also optimizing monetization, kind of the whole funnel. One thing we realized is that once someone would go over quota, they used up their whole two gigabytes of free storage to Dropbox, That would be a time where they're much more likely to convert to paid. Cause we tell them, look, you're out of storage. You need to pay in order to keep growing your files. And people would say, okay, it makes sense. Here's my 10 bucks a month. So I thought to myself a little bit, what if they immediately got to that point? This is also based on the, the user research I'd done, even just around the company where people said, I said, when did you fall in love with Dropbox? And they said, when I moved all my files in, then I paid for it. And I was realized that they're safe now. Like I could throw my computer out the window and all my files were in the cloud. That's kind of an amazing aha moment, which is hard to access for most people. Most people are not going to drag their whole lives into the Dropbox folder. So my kind of realization with that from a growth perspective, but leading to a long-term strategy change at Dropbox was that what if when you install the Dropbox client, we instantly offered to sync your documents folder and you…

AI assessment note: “what if when you install the Dropbox client, we instantly offered to sync your documents”

Q data gets you up it. I do want to ask, we kind of jumped a step there. We mentioned before the show about, kind of, how many people, kind of, are in growth. And growth is so, kind of, commonly used now. I find this kind It kind of lost its meaning in some ways. When you hear the words growth and head of growth, how do you define them?

A I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric, and really from a customer lens, it's bringing the value of the product to more people. It's kind of like expanding the people using and or paying for the product. It's usually incremental, but it can be transformative. It often involves A-B testing, as long as you have enough traffic. In some cases, it doesn't. Sometimes I find growth is applied to Pretty much anything that makes the metrics go up independent of testing or kind of optimization work. So I've had companies say that, like, oh, we have an iPhone app, and the Android app is just to, like, get more people, so that's a growth project. It could be kind of a lower G growth product. Like, yes, it grows the company, but I don't think of it as kind of an uppercase G growth product. Like, you don't need a growth expert to go build an Android app. That's effectively, like, new product work that's relatively clear and doesn't use the growth techniques that we're talking about. Growth often overlaps with product and marketing. Growth can encapsulate Paid marketing, SEO, virality, and other, like, product-led growth changes to the product, which ends up overlapping those two categories. So you'll often see growth product or growth marketing as, like, titles or department labels. And then happy to go on the head of gross job, but I'll pause there…

AI assessment note: “I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric”

Q Darius, in this process, what should we, if we hear, run away from? What are the things where you're like, oh my god, no, I'm out. What are the red flags?

A Yeah, fair. So red flags would be, if you're not able to really kind of collaborate with this growth leader, if you're not able to kind of get on the same page, one failure mode here is sometimes that people just want to apply Their previous playbook. So like if they came from Facebook, they're like, oh yeah, we're just going to run a million experiments and throw stuff on the wall and see what sticks. And you might be like, wait, that doesn't sound like what my business needs. Like maybe we don't have the traffic to run that many experiments. We mean a more nuanced approach. So first off, I just make sure that like their approach to growth maybe isn't fully what you would do because you're bringing on a new leader with new opinions, but it feels like it meshes with like your business and how you're approaching it. So I think if they don't mesh with you and your approach, that's a red flag. I think they need to be able to competently tell you about how they go deep and get insights, and they can go deep with users and understand their perspective, go deep with the data, go deep with, like, the existing company to, like, learn from the company, and they can also have some good intuition. Some people have a really refined idea of, like, what this product needs, even just looking at it. Ideally, they have all those things, but some idea of how they kind of go deep on some aspect o…

AI assessment note: “if they don't mesh with you and your approach, that's a red flag.”

Q Should I proactively encourage this cross-functional communication as the leader, or should I expect the head of growth to really make those connections themselves?

A It's a really great question. I think it is incumbent on the leader of the organization in order to set up growth and frankly, all the departments for success to not only have like clear expectation of the org and like the leader of the org, but also clear kind of cross expectations of what support and collaboration is expected from the CEO by those orgs, either to accomplish the goals of the org or the goals of the company. So for instance, I think one way to set a growth team up for success is to say, Hey, the whole company for this coming year wants to move this metric by 40%. Users could be activated, could be revenue, what have you. As part of that 40% goal, we might even, like, assign a percent of that to marketing, a percent to a growth team, and a percent to a core product team, and then also say that, look, each one of you need to collaborate with the other maybe 20% of your time in order to, like, help unblock each other to achieve these metrics. Because obviously a marketing team needs someone in product ends to collaborate with, such that they can get the sign-up flow right, and maybe the in-product connections to the marketing landing pages. And then the growth team needs connection to the core product so that the logged in homepage, et cetera, reflects like the need of the growth team. Like for instance, Linking to a new product feature in order for it to grow. So…

AI assessment note: “it is incumbent on the leader of the organization”

Q What have you found as the most challenging elements of onboarding for yourself as a growth leader and growth professional in some of the incredible walks you've been? What's been the shit challenging moments?

A It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric. When you back out a little bit, it seems obvious, like you want more users to use your product, and you'd like them to monetize at some level. But when you zoom in more, each metric can kind of be this, like, genie wish problem. Yes, we want that metric, but not at the expense of this other metric. Based on that, let's not say that we really want that metric. So one classic one is, yes, we do want to either monetize or move people towards these deeper experiences, but we also don't want to Push them so hard that we lose, like, low-intent users. And so that can be, like, a real trade-off of, like, hey, are you willing to push people to give up this lighter way of operating for the deeper way of operating? That's when I've hit at a few companies.

AI assessment note: “It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric.”

Q data gets you up it. I do want to ask, we kind of jumped a step there. We mentioned before the show about, kind of, how many people, kind of, are in growth. And growth is so, kind of, commonly used now. I find this kind It kind of lost its meaning in some ways. When you hear the words growth and head of growth, how do you define them?

A I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric, and really from a customer lens, it's bringing the value of the product to more people. It's kind of like expanding the people using and or paying for the product. It's usually incremental, but it can be transformative. It often involves A-B testing, as long as you have enough traffic. In some cases, it doesn't. Sometimes I find growth is applied to Pretty much anything that makes the metrics go up independent of testing or kind of optimization work. So I've had companies say that, like, oh, we have an iPhone app, and the Android app is just to, like, get more people, so that's a growth project. It could be kind of a lower G growth product. Like, yes, it grows the company, but I don't think of it as kind of an uppercase G growth product. Like, you don't need a growth expert to go build an Android app. That's effectively, like, new product work that's relatively clear and doesn't use the growth techniques that we're talking about. Growth often overlaps with product and marketing. Growth can encapsulate Paid marketing, SEO, virality, and other, like, product-led growth changes to the product, which ends up overlapping those two categories. So you'll often see growth product or growth marketing as, like, titles or department labels. And then happy to go on the head of gross job, but I'll pause there…

AI assessment note: “I really think of growth work as optimization with the goal of improving a metric”

Q Okay, so we've chosen a company that's aligned. It may be a couple of stages ahead of us, and we can get someone who can see the potential that we have, and we reach out to them and And we get the intro, and we've got three of these candidates. What does the interview process look like?

A So, I'm gonna walk you through my, like, five-point system for identifying, like, top people. Oh, amazing! And it speaks to the art and science that we talked about earlier. It's really a bit of a combination. So first, I'd have specific interviews to gauge their understanding of your business. B to B SaaS guy. Something like Airtable is a good fit for me, and other companies, you know, might be different. First, figure out like, okay, does this person understand how people show up on board, the value they're getting, all that kind of stuff. You want to have some resonance there that this person gets my business, and even maybe understand some of the non-obvious nuance, even before I tell them. They don't need to be as expert as you, but having that quick ability to figure out your business is key. I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B to B SaaS business, because it's just such a different world. Then they need to be expert in one or more key methods of growth. As I was talking about, if your business is viral, ideally this person has optimized viral flows, maybe has worked at some point in their career in like consumer because like a lot of good viral flows there. Then they need to be great at turning data into insights because data is really the, like the lifeblood of a growth organization. I like to think of data for a growth team as like water for a sports tea…

AI assessment note: “I'm gonna walk you through my, like, five-point system for identifying, like, top people.”

Q meshed with us. They align with how we want to approach growth. We need to onboard them. I think this is where everyone fucks it up. I mean, they fuck up the prior process too, but what does the optimal onboarding process look like? And what can I as the founder and leader do to make these growth hires as successful as possible in the first 30, 60, 90 days?

A Yeah, when I think about that kind of early, like that first quarter, the ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building. So for context, they really need to know the history of the product, all the things you've learned, Especially things you've tried in the past, because that shows, like, maybe obvious directions to go that perhaps you've tried out already, especially in areas now owned by growth. Ideally, growth owns the product areas, and it's not just kind of a layer on top of core products. So usually growth would have ownership over the core onboarding flow and the monetization flow and maybe the logged out pages, or those might be owned by marketing. Really making clear what growth owns and should be not only evolving, but also responsible for the product surface area in general for is really key. More context is all the current data and dashboards internally and third-party systems. Then the other part is relationships I think are really key for a growth team, really just such a collaborative entity. Great connections to the heads of marketing, sales, product, data, also the growth competent advisors and VC firms that the company might have.

AI assessment note: “the ones that come to mind as most important are context and relationship building.”

Q What have you found as the most challenging elements of onboarding for yourself as a growth leader and growth professional in some of the incredible walks you've been? What's been the shit challenging moments?

A It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric. When you back out a little bit, it seems obvious, like you want more users to use your product, and you'd like them to monetize at some level. But when you zoom in more, each metric can kind of be this, like, genie wish problem. Yes, we want that metric, but not at the expense of this other metric. Based on that, let's not say that we really want that metric. So one classic one is, yes, we do want to either monetize or move people towards these deeper experiences, but we also don't want to Push them so hard that we lose, like, low-intent users. And so that can be, like, a real trade-off of, like, hey, are you willing to push people to give up this lighter way of operating for the deeper way of operating? That's when I've hit at a few companies.

AI assessment note: “It's surprisingly hard sometimes to pick that core metric.”

Q Is growth like investing in the way that we always underestimate the size of the market when investing? Carter, Cap table management. That's not a big market. Airtable. Spreadsheets. Okay, but it's just spreadsheets. Is it the same in the way that you always underestimate the size in growth?

A It can be. I mean, growth experiments can sometimes be a little bit more capped, and they're against a backdrop. The way in which it's similar, I'll say, there's an amazing way that growth experiments can multiply each other. You might have a growth experiment that just gets you like a one percent win, and you're kind of like, who cares? And then you have another experiment that gets you a one percent win, and it's a who cares? But if you know anything about compound interest, As you add up those percentages, and they multiply each other, being on different parts of the flow, or somehow additive, or multiplicative, really, it can add up very quickly. 10 plus 10 plus 10 plus 10 isn't just, like, the sum of it, it's the multiply of, like, 1.1 times that number of things. Really, it can get to double classer than you think.

AI assessment note: “The way in which it's similar, I'll say, there's an amazing way”

Q But I want to start with a little bit on you, because we look at the profile, and we've got Dropbox, Facebook, Airtable, and some of the most powerful growth orgs. How did you make your way into the world of growth originally, and what did that entry point look like?

A Well, I've always loved to use technology to build delight for users, even in college. I got a CS degree, but I was always more focused on the product side. Like, how can we use this technology to build something interesting and even kind of fun and delightful? And I ended up as a programmer at Tickle.com, which is one of the early growth viral houses back in the day. We build, like, viral tests about, like, yourself, and you send them to your friends, and you find out, like, what's your IQ, what kind of dog you are, and, like, more fun things, but we learned a lot about virality. And even at Tickle, we built social network, and we built a matchmaking site, and all these things with these intrinsic, like, viral knowledge. And that really got me hooked on it. Growth, I find, Is an interesting combination of, like, human psychology, technology, and then meeting, like, business goals. And so that, really, I found appealed to my brain, and I ended up kind of having the thread of that through my career.

AI assessment note: “I ended up as a programmer at Tickle.com, which is one of the early growth”

Q Can I just dive in? Do I, as the founder, need to have the data infrastructure set up before my growth hires come in, or can they implement it because it's a hodgepodge and I haven't got the data infrastructure set up seamlessly?

A That's a great question, and even, like, having a CEO like yourself ask that question in a real way is, like, already a win, so let me just say that you're already ahead of most CEOs. I'd say if you don't feel like you have it already set up in a great way, then what you need to do is make the space and the people To set it up. So a great growth person can at least knows what good looks like, even if they aren't necessarily fully capable of all the mumbo jumbo of data under the hood. I mean, they're not necessarily data engineers. What I would do in that case is pair a great growth person with a great head of data and make sure they have staffing to build that out. Just a deep dive on that for a second. One of my favorite like missing pieces, like the Gatorade in the water, if you will, is really good dimension tables, which are like pre-aggregates of your audit tables and like your Just all your tracking and they're aggregated tables that then you can easily query. So for instance, if you, Harry said, Hey, I want to know all the forever revenue of each of my customers. Usually that would be a really complex query because you have to query both the people who paid you and the people who refunded and all the other stuff and aggregated up. And it's like a huge, just knowing like how much money people paid you total is actually a pretty tough query. Ideally you want to give a data…

AI assessment note: “pair a great growth person with a great head of data and make sure they have staffing”

Q How do you think about this, like, hype growth? And then another example would be, like, sustainable growth, which would be maybe more tempered and slower, but maybe more sustainable. How do you think about hype growth versus sustainable growth?

A Yeah, I think Andrew Chen has this interesting blog post or reflection that hype growth, the weird thing about it is you really can't control it. If you're in a hot air balloon, like, everything's rising right now, and it's not something you did or can't control, it's just things are going up. And so it's really this kind of updraft that, like, helps your company and What is to be celebrated, but because it's not controllable, you're not able to always direct it, not able to reproduce it when you want. So in many ways, I see that as just kind of a tailwind that's moving your business forward, but you really need to make sure that you optimize your experience within it. And the other tough thing about hype is it's often short lived as quick as a week these days, or as long as like six months, but it's almost certainly not going to be multiple years. And so there's a way in which as a growth leader, you want to capture as much of that hype driven growth in some kind of Basically sustainable engine. So get a basic retention system going, and make sure as many people get into that as possible, rather than refining, like, the whole funnel perfectly. Because you already have the inbound. You just need to make sure that those people stay, and then maybe even later, make sure that those people invite other people, etc. But just kind of capturing that magic, or if you're in that kind of…

AI assessment note: “capture as much of that hype driven growth in some kind of Basically sustainable engine”

Q And then, sorry, I interrupted you. On the second one, how do you know whether it should sit within existing teams or standalone growth team?

A I think there's been this kind of excitement about a classic model, but then there's a more standardized model I'll get into. The model that people think about is like Facebook and Uber, where you have this supposedly single brilliant person who leads the company to 10 X or hundred X. That person is brilliant most of the time, but it is an unusual model in today's world, partly because if you put growth outside a product, You kind of set up a potential conflict between the two. Really at the end of the day, growth is often effectively a product team. They have product people, engineers, data scientists. They work more with like the code that builds the stuff that users see than they do with other topics like marketing. And so what I've seen more recently is having something like a VP growth within the product org, like under the CPO, and ideally with a close connection to both the CEO and the heads of other departments. Like Very often marketing, but even sometimes like financial or strategy as the growth team contemplates either pricing changes or more strategic shifts for the business. So that's, I think, a good place for it to sit. That's where I sat at Airtable, and I think it speaks to the basic nature of it, which is usually a more product-focused team.

AI assessment note: “having something like a VP growth within the product org, like under the CPO”

Q of the timing there being six months, and so with the review process, in terms of the actual timing of your first growth hires, when do you advise founders that it is the right time to either hire a head of growth or hire Your first growth hires and adjacent question, sorry. How do you advise them on whether to hire a head of growth or more junior growth people?

A Yeah, for sure. I'll hit both of those. So when a company's first starting out, you want to do something where you look for the kind of white hot center of the market. This is my friend James Currier's approach. Any given market has like a certain group of people who really, really desperately need your product. Going to give you great feedback and really kind of be with you during those early stages where you're figuring out like what this product even is. And what the important parts of it. So you want to start there and you really, as a founder, as an early team, you want to talk to those customers and really get on board with them with the hope that this will lead to like a broader market over time. So what happens is that the first kind of growth effort is really just those first customers that you get relatively manually. You like reach out through your network or maybe some very simple marketing ploys, but you reach, get to a few people, make a product that works for them and expand that with time. As you do that, you'll eventually find that You're kind of doing the same things repeatedly, like, oh, this is another customer in this space, and I'm just doing another onboarding, and it's working, and you're like, okay, great. Now I've got this kind of engine that works a bit. Maybe now I can get some help with it. There's going to be parts of the engine that are, like, mor…

AI assessment note: “Now I've got this kind of engine that works a bit. Maybe now I can”

Q of the timing there being six months, and so with the review process, in terms of the actual timing of your first growth hires, when do you advise founders that it is the right time to either hire a head of growth or hire Your first growth hires and adjacent question, sorry. How do you advise them on whether to hire a head of growth or more junior growth people?

A Yeah, for sure. I'll hit both of those. So when a company's first starting out, you want to do something where you look for the kind of white hot center of the market. This is my friend James Currier's approach. Any given market has like a certain group of people who really, really desperately need your product. Going to give you great feedback and really kind of be with you during those early stages where you're figuring out like what this product even is. And what the important parts of it. So you want to start there and you really, as a founder, as an early team, you want to talk to those customers and really get on board with them with the hope that this will lead to like a broader market over time. So what happens is that the first kind of growth effort is really just those first customers that you get relatively manually. You like reach out through your network or maybe some very simple marketing ploys, but you reach, get to a few people, make a product that works for them and expand that with time. As you do that, you'll eventually find that You're kind of doing the same things repeatedly, like, oh, this is another customer in this space, and I'm just doing another onboarding, and it's working, and you're like, okay, great. Now I've got this kind of engine that works a bit. Maybe now I can get some help with it. There's going to be parts of the engine that are, like, mor…

AI assessment note: “doing the same things repeatedly... Now I've got this kind of engine... get some help”

Q I'm literally here to ask the dumb questions. I do such a good job at it. I'm a good actor. When you say business changes, Business-driven. What does that actually mean, and is there an example of this, and how do you test for business-driven people?

A Business-driven people are, like, worried about, to some degree, the existential factors of the business. Like, when it comes down to it, a business needs to make more money than it spends, and it only does that if people show up and spend money or get ad revenue or what have you. Certainly when you talk to CEOs, especially ones at different stages of the company, they might say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but what about that core metric we need? That core metric is often the thing they need to raise the next round of funding. So for an early stage company, it might just be some like successful pilots. If you're a B to B SaaS company, like you might not even need that much revenue, but you do need a few people to say, yes, this is a great product. And like, we do want to pay for it someday. That's enough to raise the next round for a later stage company. It might just be either raw revenue or even some submetrics for revenue, like the gross margin or other aspects of the business that they need for the public markets, whatever that metric is that really makes the business successful, like helps it grow to the next level. That's the metric that I think of as that business goal.

AI assessment note: “Business-driven people are, like, worried about, to some degree, the existential factors”

Q not create conflict when it comes to product marketing and messaging? Growth teams then get a lot of this data from the customer discovery, and then they have their own idea of how it should be messaged and marketed, and the words that should be used. And how does that integrate with the marketing team, who also have their own way of doing it? Do you see what I mean?

A Well, maybe I'll just continue on to number five. Strategic communication is a key trait. So one of the things they need to do is, when you're interviewing people, now I'm talking about They need to show that they can communicate the goals of the growth team and the operational procedures of the growth team. Like what is this growth team doing and why? Very much because they have overlap with marketing and like how it's messaged, how you get to customers, that first experience with customers that marketing often feels ownership over, as well as the product flow, like how you onboard, how you monetize all that stuff, which oftentimes the product team feels ownership of. And so really they need to be great communicators so that they can kind of bridge these gaps. In some ways there's kind of a Venn diagram of marketing and product. Growth is like another circle in the center, not just the overlap, but like a circle that's like overlapping all three of the Venn diagram like spaces. And so one question is, can they fit their goals into the goals of local partner team? Can they build bridges? And I think of it as like judiciously use their trust in organization to create measurable impact saying that, Hey, marketing, you did this research. We did this research. Let's combine the research and like go achieve a goal together. That's hopefully achieving both of our team's metrics, whic…

AI assessment note: “they need to be great communicators so that they can kind of bridge these gaps”

Q Okay, so we've chosen a company that's aligned. It may be a couple of stages ahead of us, and we can get someone who can see the potential that we have, and we reach out to them and And we get the intro, and we've got three of these candidates. What does the interview process look like?

A So, I'm gonna walk you through my, like, five-point system for identifying, like, top people. Oh, amazing! And it speaks to the art and science that we talked about earlier. It's really a bit of a combination. So first, I'd have specific interviews to gauge their understanding of your business. B to B SaaS guy. Something like Airtable is a good fit for me, and other companies, you know, might be different. First, figure out like, okay, does this person understand how people show up on board, the value they're getting, all that kind of stuff. You want to have some resonance there that this person gets my business, and even maybe understand some of the non-obvious nuance, even before I tell them. They don't need to be as expert as you, but having that quick ability to figure out your business is key. I wouldn't hire like a consumer expert for like a B to B SaaS business, because it's just such a different world. Then they need to be expert in one or more key methods of growth. As I was talking about, if your business is viral, ideally this person has optimized viral flows, maybe has worked at some point in their career in like consumer because like a lot of good viral flows there. Then they need to be great at turning data into insights because data is really the, like the lifeblood of a growth organization. I like to think of data for a growth team as like water for a sports tea…

AI assessment note: “first, I'd have specific interviews to gauge their understanding of your business”

Q Is it difficult managing morale when you don't have a hit for a while, when there's not that massive trajectory moving project, and it's a little bit flat? How do you think about managing morale in those times?

A It's one of those things where you have to look at the bigger picture. I mean, growth teams do need to deliver win on some cadence and you can use it to say like, look, we need some more wins in the future and let's keep motoring on this. It's also the case that oftentimes the first six months of a growth team will really be setting up infrastructure and starting to get initial learnings. Those learnings will tell you all the wrong directions such that you can find the right directions. Kind of like Edison says after his thousands light bulb attempt, like I found a thousand ways that it won't work. And that in some ways shrinks search space for finding the ways that will work. A little bit, you need to come with some kind of, like, hope of previous stories or previous experiences where you found a bunch of failure ways that got you to the right way, and really what it is, is the team is learning how users think about the product and what works for this particular product, and each time you fail, you effectively get, like, a reverse vector. If you're failing because you went more technical, maybe the next experiment can be less technical, and that actually gives you, like, reverse vectors that you can then test Cause you've effectively found a way to move the needle. You just moved it the wrong way. And so that's the way I kind of think about it for teams. You also do need to ma…

AI assessment note: “It's one of those things where you have to look at the bigger picture.”

Q of designers, and it's kind of the next phase post-founder-led growth, number one, do they sit in a separate team as a growth team, or are they integrated? And two, how do you determine which of the people within your current bench Have what it takes to do growth when they've traditionally been in product, or in design, or in marketing. How do you select them from the existing bench?

A Okay, getting me all these compound questions. The second part first of identifying growth people. This has always been a fun one for me, like, especially interviewing engineers. They'll either be like hard growth, hard anti-growth, or be what I call like, convincible. So really, to get excited about growth, you have to have a business mindset. You have to think to yourself, okay, how is this moving the metrics for the business? And like, how is this going to help the business succeed? And the business's success and metrics success is like my success. There are some people who like, this is all they care about. And they have a hard time building beautiful things that don't have a very clear business plan attached. They kind of feel maybe insecure that like, what am I even doing? Like, does this matter? You also have the reverse of people who want to build beautiful things and they feel a little bit uncomfortable when it's too business driven. So you really want to kind of suss that out in the interview or as you're working with them is even easier. And the people who are like more business driven or can be convincible into it, you say, Hey, This is going to like help us raise our series B. And they're like, that sounds amazing. Like, how can I be part of an effort like that? Those people are going to be excited to look at the numbers, like run SQL queries, figure out how someth…

AI assessment note: “The second part first of identifying growth people.”

Q not create conflict when it comes to product marketing and messaging? Growth teams then get a lot of this data from the customer discovery, and then they have their own idea of how it should be messaged and marketed, and the words that should be used. And how does that integrate with the marketing team, who also have their own way of doing it? Do you see what I mean?

A Well, maybe I'll just continue on to number five. Strategic communication is a key trait. So one of the things they need to do is, when you're interviewing people, now I'm talking about They need to show that they can communicate the goals of the growth team and the operational procedures of the growth team. Like what is this growth team doing and why? Very much because they have overlap with marketing and like how it's messaged, how you get to customers, that first experience with customers that marketing often feels ownership over, as well as the product flow, like how you onboard, how you monetize all that stuff, which oftentimes the product team feels ownership of. And so really they need to be great communicators so that they can kind of bridge these gaps. In some ways there's kind of a Venn diagram of marketing and product. Growth is like another circle in the center, not just the overlap, but like a circle that's like overlapping all three of the Venn diagram like spaces. And so one question is, can they fit their goals into the goals of local partner team? Can they build bridges? And I think of it as like judiciously use their trust in organization to create measurable impact saying that, Hey, marketing, you did this research. We did this research. Let's combine the research and like go achieve a goal together. That's hopefully achieving both of our team's metrics, whic…

AI assessment note: “the whole company should be sharing this user research, whether it's led by growth”