Podcast Summary
The Benefits of Experimenting Without Personalization: Taking risks and following your instincts in experimentation can lead to unexpected positive outcomes. Developing a growth strategy that specifically fits your product is key.
Laura Schaffer, the head of growth for Amplitude, shares an experience where her team took a risk in running an experiment without personalization and solely using questions to gather data.Despite expecting a decline in conversion rates, Schaffer was surprised to find an improvement in signups by 5%.This goes to show that running experiments and following gut instincts can lead to unexpected positive outcomes.Schaffer also discusses the importance of carving your own path and developing a growth strategy that works specifically for your product.
Seizing Opportunities for Career Growth: Take control of your career growth by finding and proposing new opportunities that benefit both customers and the company, instead of relying solely on traditional methods of impressing managers.
Laura Schaffer, the head of growth at Amplitude, shares her framework for career growth that takes back the power from managers and company trajectories.Traditional methods of working hard within a job and impressing managers can be limiting.Instead, Laura suggests finding and seizing opportunities within the company that benefit customers and the company's growth.She learned this lesson early on in her career when she realized she was repeating the same thing over and over again in her sales position at a small company.By suggesting a solution to her manager, she was able to create new opportunities for herself and the company.
Staying Close to Customers: Key to Career Growth: Building a deep understanding of customers and their needs can help individuals create new opportunities for career growth and advancement. Proposing new ideas and presenting valuable customer insights can lead to executive recognition and personal brand development.
It is important to stay close to customers and bringing valuable insights to the executive team.As companies grow, executives can often become disconnected from the customer base, making customer insights extremely valuable.By developing a deep understanding of the customers and their needs, individuals can build their personal brand within the company and create new opportunities for themselves.While it's important to recognize that not all ideas will be immediately embraced by the executive team, proposing new ideas and presenting valuable customer insights can lead to career growth and advancement.
The Importance of Listening to Customers for Business Success: Listening to customer feedback is crucial for business growth. Identifying pain points and implementing changes can lead to customer satisfaction, trust building, and ultimately drive growth for the company.
Getting to know customers is crucial for any business.Even if a company's product seems easy to use, it's important to listen to customers and identify pain points they experience when using it, especially as a company grows and innovative new products are added.Lending a voice of the customer report can highlight concerns and lead to opportunities for changes and improvements.By sharing insights and building trust, one can create a growth team within a company and implement changes that can help the business succeed.Taking initiative and providing value can create opportunities for oneself and drive growth for the company.
The Value of Customer Conversations, Sharing Knowledge, and Successful Experimentation for Career Growth: Engaging with customers, sharing expertise with colleagues, and leveraging experimentation and data can help build a strong personal brand and accelerate career growth, while enhancing problem-solving skills and innovative thinking.
Talking to customers every day is extremely valuable as it provides insights into their problems and pain points, making you a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in your company.Sharing your knowledge and skills with others in your company, such as through tips and best practices, can help build your brand as someone who is supportive, skilled, and creative.Being an SME can also open doors for you in other areas of the company and be an accelerator for your career growth, without necessarily going against your manager's support.Experimentation and data are also important in growth, and a surprising result can shift your perspective on what works and what doesn't.
How Asking Questions During Sign Up Can Improve User Conversion: By asking questions during sign up that align with users' organic thoughts, businesses can provide comfort and challenge the notion that the product will be difficult, ultimately improving conversion rates. Understanding the psyche of users is just as important as understanding product and market.
The speaker realized that they didn't know anything about their users because they didn't ask any questions during sign up.They decided to run a test where they added a few questions in the sign-up flow to learn more about their users.Surprisingly, this actually improved conversion by 5%.By asking questions that aligned with what their users were organically thinking about, they were providing comfort and challenging the notion that the product was going to be difficult.This experiment taught the speaker that understanding the psyche of users in the user flow is just as important as understanding the product and market.
Understanding Good and Bad Friction in User Onboarding: Good friction, such as helpful and relevant questions during signup, can increase user confidence and provide valuable data for segmentation. Considering the user's mentality during the onboarding process is crucial for a seamless experience and higher success rate.
Bad friction is bad, and good friction is good. Adding helpful and relevant questions during the signup process can be considered good friction as it eliminates doubts and increases the user's confidence in their ability to navigate the platform.This not only helps with onboarding but also provides valuable information for the company to better organize and segment their users.It's essential to consider the user's psyche and their mentality to succeed with the product to provide a seamless experience, and incorporating it during the early stages of onboarding can greatly affect the user's success rate.
Simplifying Onboarding: The Importance of Understanding Users: Understanding the psychological state of users is crucial for effective onboarding. If something logically makes sense but isn't converting, consider where the user is psychologically and adjust accordingly.
The Twilio team conducted an experiment in their onboarding process to simplify it, but it did not work well for their users.They found that the telecom part, specifically getting a phone number, was putting off developers who were not familiar with it.To address this, they embedded the phone number step in their documentation, within the language and code samples that developers were comfortable with, rather than making it the first step in the onboarding process.This approach improved the conversion rate for onboarding.Understanding the psyche of users is critical, and if something logical isn't converting well, it may mean that you need to take a step back and consider where the user is psychologically in your space.
The Importance of Iteration in Experimentation: Don't be afraid to fail in your experiments. Iterating and experimenting allows for catching errors early on and leads to improved products or services. Embrace failure and use it as a tool for success.
When running experiments, it's better to be iterative instead of redesigning the whole thing at once.Around 80% of the time, ideas and hypotheses are wrong, as proven by companies like Netflix and Microsoft.The more you iterate and experiment, the more likely you are to catch those errors sooner and avoid spending time and money on the wrong things.Failure can be a compass that leads you in the right direction, and it's better to catch it early rather than shipping something that is 80% wrong.Embrace failure and use it to improve your product or service.
Efficiently Validating Ideas for Successful Experimentation: Quickly and effectively validating experiment ideas can increase their chances of success. While A/B testing can be costly and time-consuming, using tools like painted doors or mocks can quickly invalidate hypotheses. Use qualitative responses to supplement quantitative data, and don't rely solely on confidence rates when making decisions.
The process of experimenting to find successful ideas is challenging and unpredictable.While it's difficult to increase the chance of success, there are ways to validate ideas quickly and effectively.A/B testing is an expensive and time-consuming way to validate an experiment, so using tools like painted doors or mocks can help reduce the failure rate by quickly invalidating hypotheses.It's important to fail fast and efficiently, rather than trying to solve all the complex challenges that come with experimentation.Being data-driven is crucial, but using qualitative responses can supplement quantitative data to make better decisions.Confidence rate is also important, but it shouldn't be the only factor in decision-making.
Importance of accurate data validation in high-risk industries: Inaccurate data can have severe consequences in industries like pharmaceuticals, but in other fields, accepting some false positives may be acceptable. Regardless, it's crucial to have a game plan and validate hypotheses through qualitative feedback and corroborating data to avoid unnecessary risks.
The speaker emphasizes that sending inaccurate data can be dangerous, especially in the pharmaceutical industry where false positives or negatives can have severe consequences.However, for those working in converting users or upselling, there is less burden and they can take advantage of using lower confidence intervals, even if it means accepting a small amount of false success.It is crucial to have a game plan in advance and to think deliberately about how to validate hypotheses.Accepting more risk requires hardening validation through qualitative feedback and other corroborating data.It is a huge risk to not run enough experiments and shipping more can lead to positive results.
The Importance of Avoiding Predetermined Concepts in Experimentation: Growth teams should prioritize understanding opportunities and report over longer periods of time to reduce reliance on vanity metrics. Embracing failure and learning from experiences can ultimately lead to better results.
In running experiments, it's important to avoid making the data fit a predetermined concept.Growth teams should focus on validating and understanding the biggest opportunities and not be pressured to show progress on short timelines.It's important to educate others, especially those outside of the growth team, that success may not happen immediately and that it's okay to fail as long as they learn from it.Reporting over longer periods of time can lead to more real success and less reliance on vanity metrics.Embracing the reality of failure and learning from others' experiences can lead to better results in the long run.
Committing to Achievable Goals for Growth Teams: Growth teams should set achievable goals for a year, considering low, medium, and high objectives. Identifying user needs can lead to big changes, like generating millions of dollars in the pipeline, as Laura Schaffer experienced at Twilio.
Laura Schaffer suggests that growth teams should commit to something that they can achieve over the course of a year, thinking across low, medium, and high.It helps people understand the space better and what to expect.Laura shares her experience at Twilio, where she identified a growing number of people in the ecosystem who identified themselves as not developers but wanted to build with Twilio.By identifying what they needed to succeed, Laura's team ultimately found that they couldn't write code from scratch, which led to a big change that generated tens of millions of dollars in the pipeline.
Twilio's Quick Deploy Platform: Creating Demo Experiences for Non-Developers: Quick Deploy allows anyone to create and deploy an app without writing code, providing a confidence boost for non-developer buyers and helping drive sales growth. Focusing on both product growth and sales can lead to optimal audience conversion.
Twilio created a platform called Quick Deploy on Code Exchange.It allows anyone to deploy an app without writing code and give them an 'aha' moment with Twilio.This platform is a create-your-own-demo experience that addresses the psyche of non-developer buyers who may not be comfortable using telco platforms.This platform gives the momentum and confidence to the users and helps in the sales growth of the company.Companies should employ both product growth and sales motions to optimally convert their audience as both are thematically the same stuff.To shift from sales to product-led growth, companies need to recognise that it's sales via the product and a good sales rep understands the problem of the person they're engaging with.
Focusing on the Unique Needs of PLG Startups in a Self-Serve Experience: To create a successful self-serve experience for PLG startups, companies must identify and address their unique pain points. Solutions like Amplitude can offer the necessary tools and expertise to help users navigate complex metrics and reporting.
When creating a self-serve experience, it's important to focus on the unique problems and challenges of your target market.For PLG companies, this may mean tapping into the needs of startups and giving them a space to grow.One common issue for startups is the lack of analysts, leading to CEOs and product managers taking on those roles.To address these challenges, a focus on the customer and their pain points is crucial.Companies like Amplitude can leverage their knowledge and momentum in the industry to help users feel reassured about getting to the bottom of the right metrics and creating reports that show things the right way.
Unique Characteristics of Selling to Developers: Developers have a unique mindset when it comes to purchasing new products. They prioritize testing and evaluating, and have an aversion to traditional marketing tactics such as speaking with sales representatives.
When building a startup that sells to developers, it's important to understand that developers are a unique audience that doesn't follow traditional marketing strategies.They often skip the marketing website and go straight to the signup flow, and they have an aversion to talking to sales.This is because developers are responsible for the products they build and use, and any failures can have serious consequences for their career and reputation.As a result, they can't afford to take anyone's word for it and need to thoroughly test and evaluate any new product before adopting it.
The Importance of a Self-Serve Function for Developers: Companies can effectively convert their developer audience by investing in a self-serve experience that allows developers to build and prove concepts before committing. It's important to always consider the psyche of the user.
For companies that require developers to build, investing in a self-serve experience is key to effectively converting your audience.Developers need to prove it themselves, which means they need to build something or a proof of concept before they're ready to commit.Therefore, companies should consider creating a self-serve function, similar to Salesforce, to cater to the needs of their developers.It's important to remember that developers will not accept sales coming in and trying to convert them at that stage.The psyche of the user should always be taken into account, especially when it comes to developers.
Five SaaS products recommended by Laura for everyday work: Use qualitative feedback tools like Hotjar and Builder along with quantitative data analysis for powerful insights. Embrace the idea of the first iteration being embarrassing to celebrate progress and speed up shipping.
Laura Schaffer recommends five SaaS products that she has personally used and found helpful in her day-to-day work.These include Hotjar, Slack, Builder, Chat GPT, and her current employer, Amplitude.She highlights the importance of qualitative feedback in addition to quantitative data and recommends tools like Hotjar and Builder for this purpose.She also suggests that integrating Amplitude with other tools like Hotjar and Segment can provide powerful insights and help form concrete hypotheses.Finally, she emphasizes the value of embracing the concept of being embarrassed by the first iteration, which speeds up the shipping process and helps celebrate progress.
Amplifying Technology for Increased Data Gathering and Networking Opportunities: Technology can provide valuable insights without needing to engage customers, and can be amplified to increase data gathering. Utilize networking opportunities such as LinkedIn to connect with experts like Laura Schaffer for job searching assistance.
Talking to customers is an effective way to gather information, but connecting and threading technologies together can also provide valuable insights without having to engage customers.Laura Schaffer, a growth expert, suggests amplifying the use of technology to gain an amplitude in gathering data.She also encourages those who are job searching to connect with her on LinkedIn and reach out for potential job opportunities in the industry.In these trying times, Laura wants to help as many people as she can by offering feedback, suggestions, and job connections.
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