The Product Show

Growth design is a central part of the way we think about design at Pony and it was an absolute pleasure to discuss the topic with one of the senior design leaders at Dropbox, Phil Vander Broek. He comes with a wealth of experience in growth design and is super excited about the future of this field and how they approach results-driven design at Dropbox.

In this episode we discussed: 

• Dropbox’s journey to their organisational model and where Growth sits within their company structure 
• How does Growth exist in companies - is there a one-size-fit-all model 
• How do we create alignment about the overall goals the teams are working on, delivering cohesive user experience and business results
• Building "awareness - discovery - evaluate - commit” for the user
• The growth design playbook - an example from the Dropbox kitchen to get you thinking about your approach to growth
• How to prove the value of design for the overall business
• Why all designers should do their duty in growth design 
• How to create a win-win situation where great user experience drive strong business results 
• The most important qualities for a designer in 2021 and beyond
• Is design becoming a commodity? 
• Why designers must always be impact-oriented 

Patrick Campbell is the founder and CEO of ProfitWell, a software that helps subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies. He strongly believes that people should get more comfortable with working on their pricing strategy and should avoid “the path of least resistance”. It’s not easy, but it’s not more difficult than many other aspects of building a successful product and it’s surely one of the most important ones. 

In this episode we discussed:

• when is the right time to start thinking about monetization
• why Brand and Design influence our willingness to pay by up to 25%
• how to decide what to bundle with your main pricing plan and what to leave as an add-on
• why you should always lead with Freemium and the data that backs it
• strategies how to switch to an annual plan
• why discounts should be offered in “physical” amounts rather than percentages  
• most common mistakes to avoid when it comes to your monetization strategy
• how often should you review your pricing strategy (it’s more often than you think).

“Humble Decisiveness”  is the Most Important Quality of a Product Manager - Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar

We spoke with Megan Murphy, VP of Product at Hotjar, to find out how they’re growing one of the most successful user research products in the world and how their fully remote team is serving over 700,000 businesses. Megan comes with a wealth of experience in product management, having worked at companies like Skyscanner and N26, so her deep product thinking is nothing short of inspiring. 

In this episode:

• How is the product team at Hotjar structured and how they operate
• How to build a remote corporate culture beyond the posters on the wall (it starts with hiring!)
• How they use user personas and Jobs to be Done at Hotjar
• How to balance optimisation and experimentation to make sure you’re delivering towards the business objectives
• What are the red flags that a product is heading for trouble? 
• Some interesting findings from experiments Megan ran at Hotjar and Skyscanner
• What are the most important qualities of a good product manager?

Eric Peters, product manager at HubSpot Academy, shares how offering online education and certification can empower product growth. HubSpot Academy is the worldwide leader in free online training for marketing, sales, and customer service professionals. With over 200,000 customers, it has become the hub for their prospect and existing customers and it’s a product on its own. We discussed:

- How they approach the needs of all the different users - existing customers, prospects (unseasoned and seasoned professionals) and content creators
- How they identify the Academy users that could turn into Hubspot customers 
- Retention tactics
- How to exceed expectations and create delightful moments 
- Managing intermediary stakeholders and external contributors that impact your users 
- Why the “hybrid” model is the future of education

For the video version and more conversations on product-led growth, product design and product strategy, visit  https://pony.studio/design-for-growth/the-product-show

How do you build the safest and smartest marketplace in the world? - You add friction. But how do you grow and scale it - you get rid of friction. This is one of the biggest challenges you’d face if you’re building a marketplace in the childcare industry. 

We spoke with Ari Last, founder of Bubble, to find out the ups and downs of building a marketplace in one of the most sensitive industries. And no, Bubble is not “the Uber for babysitting”. 

In this episode:

• Ari’s personal journey to building a platform of 130,000 members 
• How do you drive demand without being too salesy (your child is not a pizza, right?)
• How is the product addressing the leakage issues? 
• What’s the impact of lower pricing on activation? 
• Why the first-time user experience is everything for consumer products that deal with such a sensitive area
• What’s the biggest challenge for the childcare industry
• And of course, the elephant in the room, Covid, and how they’re fighting back 

What's the role of Product Marketing in the product management puzzle? 

Tessa Pettman leads the Product Marketing team at TransferWise, one of the most impressive fintech startups in the world! They were founded in 2011 and were recently valued at $5 billion, with over 8M active users around the world. 

In this interview, Tessa shares:

- what are the differences between product marketing and traditional marketing
- how they approach product growth at TransferWise
- what she believes is the future of the fintech market in the UK 
- what qualities she's looking for when hiring product marketing managers 
- the findings from some interesting experiments they've been running internally
- what she believes sets TransferWise apart and how they have become one of the world leaders in fintech

Emeric Ernoult is the co-founder and CEO of Agorapulse, a social media management tool aiming to be in the Top 3 social media SaaS products in the world for SMBs.

He's been through 12 years of failure, according to his words until he and his co-founder Ben finally founded Agorapusle in 2012. As he says, he's "a dinosaur of SaaS". Emeric likes to talk straight, he's French after all, he doesn't believe in quick wins and he has learned how to manage a company.

In this interview, you'll learn:

- Why, in SaaS, you have to be aiming to be the tool that someone needs on a daily basis to do their job;
- What's the basis of a strong experimentation culture  
- What they learned from A/B testing Facebook ads
- Where and how he would spend $1,000 on social media advertising 
- Why having a simple pricing page would convert much better than "trying to reinvent the wheel" with fancy UX tweaks
- Why he didn't inject money in the product, after raising a healthy VC funding round in 2019

Former financial analyst Dhruv Ghulati and his team are working on an AI startup with a mission to restore trust in news media.
 
In this episode you will learn:

- What should be your strategy if you want to raise funding from world-class investors like Mark Cuban, Biz Stone, and Craig Newmark;
- When you should listen to your customers and when you have to lead the market and innovate;
- Why you and I are the future of journalism and why we need a product like Factmata to make this happen.

Callum McKeefery is the co-founder and CEO of Rreviews.io, a company offering reviews collection and management solutions. He shared with us how he started the company 10 years ago from his kitchen table with his wife and co-founder Nikki and how they grew to 10M in revenue with no investors funding.

In this episode you'll learn:

- How rain impacts your conversion rate
- What’s the hottest method for customer reviews collection in 2020?
-  How you can bootstrap a company from 0 to 10M