20 Growth: The 3 Levers to Successful Growth Models, The 3 Types of Growth Hires Startups Need To Know, The 3 Stages All Successful Growth Teams Need To Go Through with Elena Verna, Advisor @ MongoDB and HP

Elena Verna is a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth organizations. Previously, Elena spent over 7 years as SVP Growth @ SurveyMonkey where she ran product, growth marketing, and data teams. Post SurveyMonkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro both as Interim CMO and as an advisor. Elena has also advised some of the best growth orgs with advisor roles at HP, MongoDB, Netlify, Maze, and many more awesome companies. In Today’s Episode with Elena Verna You Will Learn: 1.) How Elena made her way into the world of tech and growth from a Craiglist job listing? What was her big break in the world of growth with her first Head of Growth role? 2.) How does Elena define "growth" and "Head of Growth"? When should startups not have a growth team? What are the 3 main levers to the growth model today? How does Elena advise between hiring a CMO vs Head of Growth? Where do many founders make mistakes with this decision in mind? 3.) Who are the wrong people to hire for your growth team? What characteristics and traits do these people have that make them bad for growth? What questions does Elena ask in interviews to determine if they have these traits? How does Elena advise founders structure the process of hiring their "Head of Growth"? Should it be internal promotion or external hire? 4.) Where do most founders go wrong in the onboarding phase of their growth team? What do you have to have in place before the growth team starts? What are the biggest red flags for founders when reviewing their growth teams in the first 3 months? Why does Elena not like post-mortems? What is the optimal relationship between CEO and Head of Growth? 5.) How can growth teams work most effectively with both product and engineering teams? How do they need to communicate to ensure a healthy relationship? Where do growth teams most often make mistakes here? What have been some of Elena's lessons on how growth can experiment without angering engineering teams?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth, the new segment of the expanding 20 media platform. And if you did not hear our first with Casey Winters at Eventbrite last month, then check that out. But 20 Growth is a series that interviews 10 of the best growth minds, uncovering their tips, tactics, strategies and lessons on what it takes to start, scale and maintain growth teams today. Providing you with a benchmark for how the very best growth leaders think and act. And to our guest today, and I'm so thrilled to welcome Elena Werner, a master when it comes to all things starting and scaling growth orgs. Previously, Elena spent over seven years as SVP of Growth at Survey Monkey, where she ran product, growth, marketing and data teams. And post Survey Monkey, Elena worked with the rocket ship that is Miro, both as interim CMO and as an advisor.

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  Elena has also advised some of the best growth orgs with advisor roles at HP, MongoDB, Netlify, Maze and many more amazing companies. I'd also want to say a huge thank you to Casey Winters at Eventbrite for the intro to Elena today. Really do so appreciate that. But before we move into the episode today, if you're a founder or running a startup, I want to tell you about Brex. Brex combines high limit credit cards, expensive software and payments into one platform to help you scale smarter and faster. Go to brex.com/growthpodcast to get a corporate card with 10 to 20 times higher limits, great rewards and expense tracking. Plus a business account with no transaction fees and there's no personal guarantee or credit check.

• 1:24Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Stripe.com to get started. And while we're talking about the best decisions you can make for your stack, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Pendo Free, which aside from having a wonderfully cheeky meta value prop, it's software that makes your software better, is a must have though for growth minded founders and PMs such as you lovely listeners. With powerful no code product analytics and in app guides, Pendo Free is a complete platform that will help you deliver better digital experiences for happier and more productive users. Plus it's free forever for up to a thousand monthly active users and takes literally minutes to install. Get started today at bit.ly/pendofree. Again, that's bit.ly/pendofree. But it's now time for the show and I'm so excited to welcome the one and only Elena Werner.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 3:00Harry Stebbings?

  Elena, this is such a joy to do. I've had so many good things from many different people. So thank you so much for joining me today.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me here. I'm excited to be here.

• 3:08Harry Stebbings?

  That is so kind of you, but I do always love to start with some context. So I want to start with like, how did you make your way into the world of startups and come to lead some of the most powerful growth walks of today? And what was that entry to growth for you like?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Well, let me just say is that I've never imagined to be where I am right now. I've never dreamed of being head of growth or doing growth advising that I am doing right now. So all of it was just a stroke of luck and opportunities uncovering very randomly throughout my career. I started my career as an analyst, so I didn't start in tech. I actually started working for a marketing team of a very large grocery chain. But very quickly I started feeling suffocated in that environment, just because it wasn't moving quick enough for me. I found my first tech job on Craigslist listing, for those of you listening in US, is just like listing for random jobs. I wasn't head hunted, I wasn't approached. I applied for SurveyMonkey position of Craigslist and they didn't want to hire me.

• 4:03Speaker 02

  I pursued them for eight months, trying to get them to make a decision on me, after which I finally convinced them to take a chance on me and give me a job. That translated over seven and a half years in me at SurveyMonkey where I did start as a data analyst. I progressed through a data org, getting to a director level. Then I went really briefly to product marketing, which I realized really terrible at after I hired somebody that was so much better than me. And after that, I went into growth, just because the company was starting growth team and they gave me an opportunity to figure it out. And that was the best chance that the company has ever taken in me that really shaped the rest of my career. But it was completely random sequence of events that I've never planned for, nor have I really worked for specifically.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Before we dive in, I just have to ask, what do you think it was that convinced them after eight months to give you the chance?

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Well, I'm pretty sure that half of the team was willing to give me a shot and half of the team thought the other candidate was better. They were more senior than me, that I was only about a year and a half out of school. I think some of it alongside of persistence of me following up with them every week to two weeks. Did you make a decision? What else can I do for you to make a decision? So I don't know, some of it is just gonna be left in the history of me never knowing, but I was very persistent. Once I've met the team, I knew I wanted to work with them and I knew how much I'll be able to learn from them. And even though I never realized what they will actually do to my career of taking this position. It was one of the best choices that I've made in my life.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Listen, I think persistence is everything, and so I think that I had a big role to play. I do wanna start it, because we throw the term growth around and the head of growth around. And I think there's a lack of clarity around it. So when we think about definitions, what does growth and the head of growth mean to you?

• 5:47Speaker 02

  So let's start by breaking down what is product versus what is growth. Every product needs to have a product market fit. There is a problem in the market that you're solving with your product. That's important. On top of it, you need to have a distribution system for that product. Therefore, there is a growth model. It's a completely separate set of activities outside of your product market fit. And after you have your product market fit, you need a growth model to achieve maximum distribution for your product. Those are two separate concepts. Do not convolute them and do not combine them together. Because I think that's where most of the confusion actually lies. Now, what is growth model? Growth model, there's three main levers that fall into growth model, which is how do you acquire customers? How do you monetize your customers and how do you? You retain those customers.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Those three levers uniformly apply across any given product to achieve maximum distribution. And by the way, there is incredible products that have never seen the light of day and died of slow death because they never had a growth model. And there's also a lot of really terrible products that have incredible growth models and the multi-billion dollar businesses right now. I'm sure you can think of some products that you hate to use, but you have to use. But they have such a good growth model that you force to use them and they completely dominate the market. I'm not going to name any though. But let's talk about back to the growth model. How do you solve for your acquisition, retention and monetization? Those are the things that constitute your growth model. On top of it, there is different motions that you can apply of those levers. You can be marketing led in acquisition.

• 7:14Speaker 02

  You can be sales led in monetization and you can be product led in retention. Or you can be product led across all three levers. You need to figure out what that actually is and how you're going to grow. Is it via marketing, via sales, via product combination of thereof, which will make up your growth model? So when we talk about head of growth, we're not talking about head of marketing, but we'll talk about that later too, of how confusion on that really is rampant across the field. We're not talking necessarily about product. We're talking about your growth model, which is authentic growth model to your business is which why you're successful and creates predictable, sustainable and competitively defensible growth for your business.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  I love that breakdown in terms of those three. I think you mentioned that the marketing, you mentioned the sales, you mentioned the product. Just so I can build a picture, when we think about when is the right time to build that growth team to work on the growth model? Let's take the contrarian stance, which we're going to do throughout today, which I love as a suggestion. When should you not have a growth team, Elena?

• 8:12Speaker 02

  So I believe that starting growth team too early is a problem. If you don't have a product market fit, what are you growing? So with people that are wanting to have a head of growth as one of their first hires or one of the leadership first hires, let's just say the company under thirty people. And you want to have a head of growth, my question to you, what are you growing? If you don't actually have even necessarily product market fit and ability to show that you have traction. In the market and that you have really satisfied customers that are retained with you. I think it's money wasted and it's an effort and resources wasted. On the other side, I also think that not putting any pressure of growth on your original founding team of those first thirty fifty people is a mistake.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  If you immediately hire head of growth or growth team and say, hey, none of my PMs, none of my marketers are responsible for growth at all, because I'm immediately outsourcing it to another team where I'm putting all of the growth pressure on, is an absolute mistake. Because then you're gonna have teams that are just releasing stuff as a most making impact to your business. And then you have the team that carries the entire weight of the revenue goals for your company. And it's not shared and it's not being a collaborative effort. So I think hiring pre-product market fit, big, big mistake. Hiring right after product market fit without actually figuring out how to create some of the traction is a big mistake as well. I also think that the company has to be ready internally to create a growth team.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  You need to be able to be at the place where people understand there is a value of the growth team to be created, where there is lack of understanding of how to create that growth mindset, of how to be data accountable, of how to implement scientific method. And really not investing in the homegrown talent. I think the biggest mistake that I see in the company's hiring is they chase after that head of growth position from the beginning without understanding who internally can create that growth evolution as opposed to creating growth revolution with an external talent. They can potentially just be rejected out of the ecosystem right away. So doing it too early and only looking externally, I think the two biggest mistakes that people make.

• 10:22Speaker 03

  And just two questions I have to ask is, one, whose responsibility is the education? You know, is it the internal existing team who need to appreciate the value of a growth team? Or is it the growth team who needs to come in and clearly communicate why they're there, what they're doing and the value that they provide? Whose responsibility?

• 10:40Speaker 02

  CEO or the leadership team do not understand the value that growth team is meant to provide and what their success looks like and what their goals are. They get rejected by the system. There has to be buy-in top-down if you're creating growth team, otherwise everything falls apart.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  And then the other one that you mentioned was like having an internal versus external. How do you think about detecting growth talent internally and signals of great growth talent from your existing ranks rather than taking a head of growth?

• 11:10Speaker 02

  It's a tough question to answer. Let me give you a couple of examples of where things go wrong here. Which is you believe that you need your head of growth to have at least two plus success points in the past in order for them to be successful as a head of growth. Let me give you a spoiler alert. Nobody after successfully running growth teams for two successful companies ever wants to do a third time. It's the same thing and it becomes boring and repetitive. It's just like people that are being CPOs successfully in two companies. It's really hard to convince them to do it third and fourth or fifth time. At the end of the day, I think that chasing after the head of growth can take you a year, two years to find the right person.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Not recognizing that you can potentially nurture talent internally is just missed opportunity throughout that entire time. And then convincing head of growth, they're so expensive. And I know by myself in terms of the rates that demand of the head of growth, you'll be paying an arm and a leg for a person that potentially is not going to implement the right growth system in your product versus investing in somebody internally and attaching, let's say, advisor to them so they can help and grow the product in the right way that is authentic to your business as opposed to just slapping and copying and paste of something that they've learned in the past. I think it's the best way to do it, but it's a local decision. I can't say that there is just one way or the other. Sometimes hiring external head of growth is absolutely the right next step

• 12:38Speaker 02

  for iteration in your growth model and your growth efforts. But I really, really think twice about if that's going to create a revolution in your company, don't do it. It has to be an evolution and if you do create a growth team, it has to be a mix of internal existing people that are working on it and potentially external additional hires. But don't just create. Create an external growth team only from external hires. I think that's just gonna lead to a rejection from the system.

• 13:06Speaker 03

  You mentioned there kind of two plus existing stints as the head of growth at incredible successful companies with growth stories. If we think about like other things that maybe are wrong or would make a mistake in terms of the characteristics that one might hire into a growth team. When thinking through the people side, who are the wrong people to hire, do you think, other than the two plus stints?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  I'll give you two angles. There is one angle of the actual people's mindset that is wrong to hire for growth. And then the other one of their superpowers that is wrong to hire for growth or maybe different stages of growth. You should think about different people's superpowers. So let's talk about tactical stuff first. So what is important for growth team? Number one, they have to be data driven. You can't have a growth team without data. The whole growth model is depending on how do people process through acquisition, monetization and retention. It's all about user journey and how where the friction points are and where you're going to focus your efforts on unblocking those friction points to unleash the system and to really accelerate your growth efforts.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So if you people are not data driven and they're all intuition driven, where they love to ideate hypotheticals, but they never ask for data points. Then what value is that gonna add to create predictable and sustainable competitively defensible system? So one to me is data driven. They have to understand data. Number two is they are like stability. Part of being growth is understanding where business friction points are, which can change on daily basis or monthly basis, maybe weekly basis. And be able to adjust to it. So if you see somebody that has ownership desires, that they want stability. They want ability to finish something from very start to the very end, probably not gonna be great on your growth team. Your growth team has to be flexible.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  So my question there, unpacking those, when you're interviewing these candidates, how do you determine first whether someone's data driven? Has data at the core of their thinking? What teases out whether they are data centric?

• 15:00Speaker 02

  I start from the bottoms up of giving them a data question that I want them to understand how to actually ask the right questions to unpack that data trend. Then how would they think about creating a strategy or tactics to reverse that data trend? And my question is super simple. You have weekly active users. The trend is going up, up, up for the last five years. It's doing nice and healthy. And all of a sudden, in the last three months, it's not only plateauing, but it's starting to go down. It's weekly active users, so it's a pretty loaded number in terms of what actually falls into it. What do you do next? As a head of growth, that is going to be one of your main metrics that you're going to be tracking. And if it's going down, you not only need to be able to unpack it from the data side

• 15:43Speaker 02

  and work with analytics team to figure out where the waves and the trends are happening. Do you need to focus on acquisition? Do you need to focus on retention? If it's retention, where is it that you need to look at? And then number two is what are your next go-to move? Because you can't just spend three months unpacking that number. You need to help business ASAP to reverse it. So what is your really quick decision based on some of the fake data or just some hypothetical data that you feed them on the answers that they have of the data?

• 16:12Speaker 03

  I mean, I love that in terms of, we're going to go deeper into that. The second part, though, that you did mention was like stability, ownership. Again, how do you prize out whether someone is inherently stable-minded and ownership-centric versus plastic, flexible, willing to move with the times?

• 16:27Speaker 02

  You can ask definitely some qualitative questions. I think it's asking what gives them energy, what gives them happiness? Give them examples of the projects that they felt very accomplished with. And anybody in the growth field will say, okay, we're identified a data trend and we will be able to fix it, or we were able to really reverse team direction and go and attack an area of friction for the business. Whereas if you hear somebody that they want to build, that they want to see things through, that they want to own, and if that gives them energy, listen, this doesn't mean that they're raw or bad employee. This just means that they're not going to be potentially great profile for your growth team. But let me unpack it a little bit more of what I mean by that. I believe that there are three different types of profiles

• 17:09Speaker 02

  that exist at scaled growth teams, which is innovator, settler, and optimizer. So innovator constantly thinks about the next horizon.

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Next growth loop, next channel, next tactic, next user flow that they can unlock. Settler takes existing growth ecosystem that already created hypothesis on. And they build processes around it and they exploit it to its maximum potential. So they don't come up with anything new, they just build of what's already been hypothesized on. And they really test the hypothesis and come up with whether it's working or not. Then there's optimizers. Optimizers are amazing people to squeeze that last five percent out of any given channel, out of any given page, out of any given user flow. Now, in any given trajectory of your journey, you need to have good mix of those people or you need to hire the right profile of people.

• 18:00Speaker 02

  I believe, for example, that it's founder's responsibility to come up with original hypothesis for growth model. And then everybody immediately goes into, I need to hire head of growth. Wrong, because you need to hire a settler. You need to hire a settler that's gonna go and prove out whether your hypothesis is correct or not by actually implementing that growth model and exploiting it. After that, you can think about whether you need to get an optimizer, if this growth hypothesis was correct, or you need to get an innovator, which is gonna be head of growth to iterate on our hypotheses. But going immediately after innovator before you settle your existing growth hypothesis or hiring optimizers before you actually figure it out whether your growth hypothesis is even working or not will create wrong incentives.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Now, the reason I'm bringing it up is because people that like change versus people that like stability, some of those mixes of profiles will go in it. Like optimizers have very deep knowledge of their specialty area. They don't really switch back and forth, they're not generalizers. The good examples of it is SEO, SEO specialists. They know SEO through and through. They're not gonna be able to necessarily help you optimize your landing page or figure out your activation flow. But SEO for them is gonna be everything that you will get out of them. And those are great people and sometimes they can act as more of a stability-loving people, so to speak, which is a great trait if you're in a specializer, an optimizer. But if you're in an innovator and you like stability, or if you're a settler and you like stability,

• 19:26Speaker 02

  I don't know, that's a questionable characteristics for me.

• 19:30Speaker 03

  Know what profile they need.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 19:32Speaker 03

  Look at those.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  No, they don't because everybody just chases after head of growth. I have growth problems. I need head of growth. That to me is the problem. You literally, you want to outsource your growth model to some third party person that you don't know that you just interviewed and you ask a couple of questions, you spent an hour, two, maybe three hours with. And you outsourcing your entire growth model to them. Imagine outsourcing product market fit to somebody to say, you know what? I don't want to work with product market fit. I'm just going to hire head of product for myself right away as the first hire and have them figure it out.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, you don't ever see that. I do have to ask this. So say we know that we need a head of growth. We've built the first growth model post product market fit. I'm the founder and you are the advisor to me. I'd love your help in terms of the process itself. Staying on the contrarian theme, Elena. How should we think about not structuring the process for hiring the first growth team and the first growth team members? What's the wrong way to structure the process?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I think the biggest mistake that I see is what's the symptom that usually triggers? Just think about growth in general, slowing growth, right? You're seeing slowing growth in revenue or slowing growth in engagement, maybe monetization, whatever it is, which makes you think, hmm, I need a head of growth. Not understanding how you're supposed to grow and hiring for growth is the biggest mistake. Let me give you a very specific example. We have a slowdown in monetization. So our revenue is starting to go down and you go and you hire a growth marketer. What if your monetization is all product led? So it's all self-serve and product is failing to build awareness. Maybe there's wrong value metrics that you're monetizing on. Maybe there's a lot of friction in your monetization funnel. What is growth marketer?

• 21:08Speaker 02

  That is usually, by the way, just performance marketers that are work on organic and paid channels is going to do with that. Or if you're all marketing led, let's just say you focus specifically on SEO, like your business is growing through SEO or through paid marketing loops. And you hire a growth PM to accelerate that, then what? What are they supposed to do? So going after just saying, oh, everybody's hiring growth PMs or everybody's hiring growth marketer, without actually understanding where the friction is lying within your growth system to hire for the role that will be able to unlock that friction based on the hypothesis that you. Of that growth model is the biggest mistake that you can make.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Is that not just like a sticky plaster? If you think about it, because you could have a product led growth motion and you could hire an amazing content marketer or growth marketer. And they could actually solve for that kind of usage problem that you have or the growth problem that you have. Without solving the core problem, it's just like sticky tape on top of the cup.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Well, listen, I think every company can do better at content marketing, at product marketing. There is always wins to be had in every function. But if you're truly trying to reverse a trend in your growth model. You need to hire a settler that is going to be able to work in that part of the user experience. So just hiring a growth marketer, if you're all product led, what do you expect them to do? They're going to be set up for failure, you're going to be frustrated because you might see some improvements that growth marketer is going to do on acquisition. But they're not going to help that with monetization of the issues that are happening in product.

• 22:33Speaker 03

  I totally get you. Let's take the stance that we did it well and we did it right. And we've hired this personal team and now it comes to the onboarding process. And again, sticking with kind of the contrarian slant. Why do most families go wrong on the onboarding process for growth teams? And I'm I'm sure you've got some thoughts on this one.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  I'll tell you number one mistake, not having data team ready for growth team. So hiring growth team even before you have data analysts or data literacy in your company, well before you're data informed. Or hiring growth and attaching any data analysts into their purview. Because if you do that, what is growth person or growth hire supposed to do? Use their intuition, then that's not really a growth mindset. They're just going to pick an area and most likely have a strikeout versus creating something that is more sustainable. So data, even though it's a different department, a lot of times that it does fall into growth. Um, because that's the most department that uses data the most.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  But not equipping them with data team and data analysts is the biggest problem that you can create. And then there's number two that I have as well, really quickly, and which is expecting wins right away. You hire your growth, your growth person, your growth team. And then the three months you expect a forecast lift, where you put assumptions that they're going to drive forecast lift. It's the worst thing that you can do to a growth team in terms of really messing up their onboarding, in terms of them creating that predictable, sustainable system.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  I want to unpack both of those actually, because you mentioned kind of data literacy there. I speak to a lot of founders like, yep, we've got Google Analytics, we know how many people are on the site. We are so data centric, yes. And I'm like, ooh, that ain't data centric. How do founders know when they are truly data literate and ready to adopt beyond, we have Google Analytics, we know how many people are on the site right now?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  My fellow E I R reforg, Crystal, wrote a really fantastic blog post on it. I think there's two main stages that each company has to go through in their data literacy. Stage number one, you have to be able to be data informed. What data informed means you know the metrics that matter that are not revenue. If you look at your revenue as a measurement of performance, you're not even data informed. You're just financially driven. You don't know key predictive indicators that are actually going to result in revenue. So it has to be something around acquisition, number of new accounts. It has to be something around activation or engagement in terms of how many weekly active users you have. It has to be something around monetization of how many people can you convert into your monetization funnel.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  That is data informed. I just know what's important for my business that will create revenue for me down the line. That's stage number one. Stage number two is being data driven. Not that I know what matters, I'm able to explain fluctuations and trends, and I know correlative K P I's to those levers that I can prove causation in. So I can identify friction in my data informed metrics, and I'll be able to do the tactics to see if I can move them. But it's data driven originating decision. And Google Analytics is fantastic. By the way, I use Google Analytics all the time. But it's very rarely, unless that there's, you have G A three sixty that you can actually drill them into the cohort behavior, that you can exit data informed stage with just being on Google Analytics.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  You said there about also the second one, like expectation setting and not pushing people into the wrong expectations. In terms of helping me, again, you're my advisor, I'm the C E O. What should I ask the new head of growth to do in his first few months? How do I not? Set those expectations that could mislead him and his actions. Help me.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yes, so there's three main stages that a growth team should go through. The main tool of any growth team is experimentation. I am able to figure out in a scientific matter which correlations are causations or which are the levers that I can pull to drive impact to my growth system and the growth model and accelerate the growth. So the stage number one is just to be able to run experiments. It sounds simple, but it's not depending on your infrastructure and experimentation tool or lack that you have. And it also very much depends on the metrics that you're able to track and explain what's happening in experiments. So number one, learn how to walk, learn how to actually set up, run quick tests

• 26:48Speaker 02

  that don't take six months, by the way, to go out to production. So you're able to experiment. Stage number two, you're able to learn from those experiments. One of the most important things that growth team can add to your entire data and just company culture is the third data set of data. You have quantitative data set, which is transactional data set of what's happening in your product, which is your Google Analytics data, your mix panel data, your segment data, whatever it is. Then you have a qualitative data set. Those are all the user interviews, maybe surveys that you're sending with people who share their emotions or their views about the products or how they see the value of the product. That's quantitative and qualitative. You can create hypotheses of where there is perception versus reality gap between those two.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  And then there's experimentation data set that growth team provides back to your company that actually proves causations between the two. So my metrics say this, my customers say this is why it's happening. And I'm able in A B test show that this impacts this. And that's the third most important data set and learnings of library, library of learnings that you should be encouraging the team to build that will elevate your entire organization in their ability to be data driven and understand your customer as opposed to just have a perception of the customer. And that's where comes the learning, which is the second step. So remember, we're learning how to experiment first, then we're learning how to learn, which is most everybody skips.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Then we start winning because then out of the learnings, we can come up with actually pointed and effective hypotheses and tests that will get us the wins. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't hit some low hanging fruit from the beginning. I'm not discouraging you from doing that, prove your worth, get some wins if it's very obvious in what's happening with the user journey. But I would say that expecting consistent wins without first expecting um ongoing learnings is how you will set up your team really for burnout and ilium.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  Any of those learnings in those different stages, I think kind of reviewing and postmortems is key to that kind of realization of those learnings. How do you think about how often to engage with postmortems, the right people to involve and how best to engage in in actual kind of active review?

• 28:56Speaker 02

  I don't like postmortems. Postmortems means something happened and something unexpected happened and we need to figure out a better way to deal with it. I learned from Fareed, who was director of growth at Slack, that pre-mortems are far more effective than postmortems. So what I mean, in pre-mortem, you actually go and figure out everything that could be going wrong before you launch anything. You come up with all of the scenarios of things that can just go downhill. And you come up with the workarounds or at least hypothetical, what would I do if this happened ahead of time? So then when you launch or you launch a test or you launch an initiative and something does go wrong, you don't go all stand in the room and say, how did we miss this? Why did we not track this? Why did it take us so long to respond? What do we do now?

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Versus you already know a plan of action that you're gonna take that wasn't created in a panic mode when something is rolling down the hill. What was created when you were very excited about the launch, you had a clear head, you had time to think. And you came up with an action plan that was very constructive and probably very well constructed. So do pre-mortems, don't do postmortems. To me, if you have to do postmortem, you messed up on your pre-mortem. And you've had something happen that was unexpected, solve for that in the pre-mortem.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  I absolutely love that in terms of pre-mortem, not post-mortem. I do have to ask, well, the experimentation front. When I spoke to Casey, he told me that one of his biggest challenges was actually at Pinterest, he would go in, experiment. In his words, kind of mess up a load of code and then leave it and the product team were left with a load of messed up code from his experimentations. How do you experiment, test iteratively without impacting other people's code that they've carefully created and crafted beautifully?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Hey, listen, I'm probably one of the worst people to ask that because I've ruined so many relationships with product teams by not doing this correctly. So what would I do incorrectly many, many times until I figured out how to do it right? Is I would hoard the wins. I was like, what? Our idea, my idea, let's go do it. Look how much we can improve on the experience that you've created. What you did was awful. We found a better way and look at the metrics improvement that we've gained. A B test, thirty percent lift in conversion. We're amazing. Growth team is amazing. Now here, let me throw this over the fence to you, to the product team and you go fix it now. Now you go productionalize it. Because by the way, we only did it on Chrome, on Mac only, in US only.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  We didn't deal with any of the edge cases and all of that messiness and all of that boring work. We just got the win. We own the win and you go product team, you go fix it and you go figure out how to productionalize it. That's like the best way to create absolutely awful dynamic in the company, absolutely ruin your relationship, completely prevent collaboration from happening. And even though you and the growth team will be held on the pedestal from a company perspective because look at you, you gained so many wins and you created so many amazing learnings for the company and business value for the company, your relationship with the rest of the company will be completely ruined. So don't do that. Now, what is the opposite of that is sharing the wins. It's creating collaborative brainstorming sessions with the product owner.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  It's letting them make the final decision as opposed to you just gloating on the win that you've had. So really being an enabler to the company as opposed to whole source of all of the ideation and the win is the key here in order to create successful relationships with the rest of the teams.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  I mean, I can totally see why that would piss people off.

• 32:23Speaker 02

  But that's the natural thing to do it. It's like I had a leadership team come in and give me a target that I need to hit. I went and I figured out how to do it. Of course, the natural thing is to take on, take ownership of that win. Cause like we did it. We did it.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Listen, I totally agree and you did move the needle, but yeah, that's a tricky one to navigate. Can I ask on, you know, we mentioned there the relationship between product team and growth team, growth leader. If we think about growth leader, growth team and CEO, how do you think about the optimal relationship between the two there? And what you'd either most like to see or taking the contrarian theme, where do most go wrong in the relationship between growth and CEO?

• 32:59Speaker 02

  So I think if CEO is not involved in the development and evolution of growth model, I question of how successful the company will be in the long term. Everybody understands that product is important. For some reason, we believe that great products will just sell themselves. Which can happen if you have a good growth model that actually is embedded to drive acquisition monetization and retention within that product. But just having a great product is not enough. So I see growth as really being another major pillar of your overall business strategy. And if you ignore it, you're not likely to succeed in the long term. So they have to have it seated at the strategic table. Now, I'm not advocating that head of growth has to be part of your leadership team. That's a local decision to you and your company.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Sometimes your CMO is an incredible head of growth if you're a marketing led model. Sometimes your CPO can also be incredible head of growth as one of their titles, so to speak, if they're in a product led model. But if you're have a CMO, let's say, that is very heavily focused on brand. And then you have a CPO that is heavily responsible for core product functionality. And their superpowers are not establishing effective growth models, then do you have a growth actually at the leadership level? But there's incredible CPOs, CMOs, CROs that are fantastic growth leaders, as well as leaders for their core main function. So that's really depends on the people.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  But if you don't put growth at the decision-making table of when you're making business strategy, you're just thinking about your product market fit and maybe how to scale your sales team or which new, how to grow your brand. You're not necessarily thinking of how you're gonna be sustainably and predictably growing your business.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  I do wanna ask one final question before we do a quick fire, Elena, there. And it's like, when you look back at the many growth decisions that you've made, can you talk to me about a growth decision you made without data to back it up? How did it go and what was some takeaways for you?

• 34:55Speaker 02

  I think any new growth team has to initially rely on intuition or just overall feeling within the company of what needs to be worked on. Because you don't have data at the beginning. Data takes a while to stand up. And that doesn't mean that you don't do anything at the beginning without data. So I'll give you an example. I just started with this incredible company, Crisp, that I'm advising them on. So I'm not a true growth leader there, but I'm working with newly founded growth team there. And we're working on setting up all of our metrics there, on how to define activation, how to define engagement. But at the same time, entire company plus all of the user interviews say that people fail to realize the aha moment in the company.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  It happens, but it happens passively because it's a noise removal cancellation service for your voice when you're doing Zoom meetings. And some people don't even realize when it happens, even though the product does its job. So do we have the data to support it? Not really, not from quantitative side. Do you believe strongly that this is something that we need to work on? And we can improve the company's performance and just people's satisfaction with the product and retention? Yes. Are we still in parallel working to get the data? Yes, absolutely, because we wanna be data driven in our prioritization and have very clear metrics for success. But we don't have them yet, but we're moving forward with those efforts anyway.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  So we have a good enough system of belief from all of the patterns that we hear from the customers that this is the area of focus, regardless of what data says.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  I mean, I love that. And by the way, I love the Crisp tool as well. Big fan of user. So that's great to hear. I do wanna move that into my favorite, which is the quickfire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yes, let's do it.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so what tactics have not changed over the last five years?

• 36:40Speaker 02

  I believe personalization efforts are extremely important. Creating a lot of those referral loops or user generated content and figuring out how to engage your user base in the ecosystem around your product. To create that sustainable system is all great work. Tactically speaking, a lot of the user flow optimizations in terms of making it predictable, delightful, informative. All of that tactically was five years extremely important is still very important, which means you're onboarding. Your monetization flows of pricing entries, pricing to checkout flows. And your referral links of how you add people to the team or how you refer other customers to there.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  All of that been there, done that, and it continues being just as important to figure out and lay down the foundation for your system.

• 37:26Speaker 03

  What tactics have died a dap on the other side of the table?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  So I remember very early on, a lot of successful wins on color optimizations, like which colors to use. And customers will like really react differently to different colors. I see it dying down really quickly, except if you use red color as your main CTA's. Red is just like a error color, so that would be the only, but the green versus purple versus blue. A lot of it has been completely fading away. Customers are becoming a lot more sophisticated. I really don't see a lot of benefit coming out of that. Also, the one that has completely died down is walk me tours. And before we would fix the problems in the product UI by creating elaborate walk me tours. I see those dying down quickly, less and less. You need to focus on fixing your UX as opposed to just slapping a walk me tool on top of it.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  So it becomes less and less as a sustainable, long-term growth tactic, although it can be fantastic initial jolt into the system. If you're still working on the complex UX problems. And then I would say also oversimplifying onboarding. At the beginning, five, even 10 years ago, we were all about fewer steps, the better. And now we actually see not only very different trends from our customers where they actually, okay, giving you some information in return for much better experience. They sustain a little bit more steps in onboarding before it's like, oh my gosh, one screen, that's all we can have. Now you can have three screens and that's totally fine to collect additional information to improve customer experience. So oversimplification and over-minimization are not the tactics that work now that worked five years ago.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  What one piece of advice would you give to a growth leader starting a new role today?

• 39:02Speaker 02

  I would say, and it's maybe a little bit skewed by what I did as a growth leader, and that is, growth is all about patterns. Growth is all about frameworks that are sustainable and repeatable. What's hard to do as your growth leader in the company is see the forest instead of the trees in front of you. The way I think through ability to unlock your strategic thinking and to really learn more from the market is to do advising for other companies as well. It helps you look at your problems in your full-time role a lot more strategically. It helps you understand if there's what you're seeing is just an individual success point or an actual pattern. So I've always held advising positions from early on in my career that have been incredibly helpful in me growing up professionally.

• 39:47Speaker 02

  And I think to any growth leader specifically, it's if you wanna be truly data-driven, get other data points outside of your company.

• 39:54Speaker 03

  What would you most like to change about the world of growth, Elena?

• 39:56Speaker 02

  For it to be convoluted with CMO. If you're a recruiter and you're reaching out to me with CMO, or even if you offer, or if you even a founder that is reaching out to me as a CMO offer, it seems like you don't understand the difference between marketing and growth. And your growth can be marketing, but your growth can also be product. And the fact that people just fully don't differentiate the two and think marketing equals growth blows my mind that we're still almost ten years into growth as a discipline and we're still, as an industry, cannot differentiate between different motions that you can apply to your growth model, that marketing-led, sales-led, product-led. And by the way, the reason that growth teams stood up in general, because we used to always have marketing teams, always sales teams, always product teams.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  The product-led growth is the new motion that got added in the last five to ten years. And a lot of core product leaders were not able to transition because they were too technical, which is great quality by the way, but they're too focused on the product-market fit that they didn't know how to hold a revenue target on their back. Marketing and sales always held a revenue target on their back. They know how to grow. So CMOs can be great growth leaders for marketing-led motions. CROs can be great growth leaders for sales motion. It's very where the difference is not all product leaders know how to be growth. Leaders as well, because that's a fairly new motion on the product led side that has been added to our industry in the last ten years.

• 41:20Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, when you look at the landscape today, what one company growth strategy have you been most impressed by recently?

• 41:25Speaker 02

  I'm gonna deviate and not name specifically software tech company, but it's actually the heart rate and fitness tracker. I got myself into fitness recently and I got whooped to track my strain, my sleep, my recovery. Not blown away by their growth tactics. I don't know if they realize what they're doing or not. But their ability to create recurring revenue out of a wearable device is fascinating. And it's something that I'm learning as I'm going through the experience myself over and over again.

• 41:59Harry Stebbings?

  Elena, this has been so much fun to you. I cannot thank you enough for giving me the time today and I love the contrarian stance. So huge thanks and this has been awesome.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Harry.

• 42:11Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what an incredible guest. Elena was just fantastic there. If you'd like to see more from us behind the scenes, of course you can on the twenty minute V C dot com. However, before we leave you today, if you're a founder or running a startup, I want to tell you about Brex. Brex combines high limit credit cards, expensive software and payments into one platform to help you scale smarter and faster. Go to brex dot com forward slash growth podcast to get a corporate card with ten to twenty times higher limits, great rewards and expense tracking. Plus a business account with no transaction fees and there's no personal guarantee or credit check. Apply a hundred percent online at brex dot com slash growth podcast today and you'll get up to fifty thousand rewards points. And if you're a startup founder, you know that early decisions can be the difference between success and failure.

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