Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20Product: The Secret to Successful Onboarding from Notion and Airtable, The Biggest Mistakes Startups Make in PLG Today& Why 90% of Onboarding Today is Done Poorly with Lauryn Isford, Head of Product Growth @ Notion About this episode Lauryn Isford is the Head of Product Growth at Notion, managing Notion's product-led growth engine and self-serve business. Before Notion, she led growth at Airtable, and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox, and Blue Bottle Coffee. Lauryn is an active angel investor and advisor supporting companies building product-led go-to-market motions. In Today's Episode with Lauryn Isford: 1. From Blue Bottle to Airtable and Notion: How did Lauryn first make her way into the world of product and growth? What are 1-2 of her biggest takeaways from Dropbox, Facebook and Blue Bottle? What does Lauryn know now that she wishes she had known when she started? 2. What is Growth: 101: How does Lauryn define growth? What is it not? When is the right time to make your first growth hire? What profile should your first hire in growth be? What are the single biggest mistakes founders make when hiring growth teams? 3. Mastering the Onboarding Experience: What are the core elements of a successful onboarding experience? How important is time to value in onboarding today? What are the biggest mistakes product teams make in company onboarding? What is the most effective onboarding technique and workflow in PLG today? Why are 90% of current onboarding's done badly? 4. Making Growth work with the Rest of the Org: What are the single biggest barriers to growth and product working together well? What can leaders do to make their growth teams work well with product teams? How can growth teams experiment and test with product without messing up codebases?
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 There's a difference between missing a goal because your hypothesis was disproven and missing a goal because you didn't execute well. The biggest red flag to me is when I hear a heavy bias towards experimentation. Time to value is critical. The large majority of users who sign up in a product-led motion will not come back.
0:21 Harry Stebbings? This is 20 Product with me, Harry Stebbings, and 20 Product is the monthly show where we sit down with the best product leaders to discuss starting, scaling, and managing product teams. And I'm thrilled to be joined today by Lauren Isford, Head of Product Growth at Notion, managing Notion's product-like growth engine and self-serve business. Before Notion, Lauren led growth at the Airtable and previously worked on growth teams including Meta, Dropbox, and Blue Bottle Coffee. And if that wasn't enough, Lauren's also an active angel investor and advisor. But before we dive into the show today, and speaking of tools we cannot live without, I need your input on the 20VC Miro board about new guests we should feature for 20VC in 2023. Just head on over to miro.com/20vc.
1:03 Harry Stebbings? Miro is a tool I consider to be truly game-changing. It's a visual collaboration tool packed with the right tools, tech, and templates to help you think of and create that dream product. That means you can brainstorm the perfect product with your team, vote on the best ones, and explore with your customer journey roadmap all on a Miro board. Whatever you need, Miro's infinite whiteboarding capabilities help you get there. It acts as your team's single source of truth. And now I'm using it to hear from you. Go ahead and add your suggestions for 20VC guests on our Miro board at miro.com/20vc. And finally, you have to try EPO, the next-generation A/B testing and feature management platform designed to help you run reliable, impactful experiments.
1:47 Harry Stebbings? EPO saves you time across the entire experimentation workflow. Planning tools help run experiment scenarios beforehand. Best-in-class diagnostics mean you spend less time debugging issues. Their cutting-edge stats engine helps you reduce experiment runtimes. Plus, EPO sits directly on top of your data warehouse and your North Star metrics, so it gives you this real confidence in experiment performance and ease in conducting follow-up deep dives. No more extended analysis cycles to understand results. And that's why companies like DraftKings, ClickUp, Momentive, and Cameo all rely on EPO to power their experiments. Get access today at getepo.com. That's getepo.com.
2:30 Speaker 00 One, zero.
2:33 Speaker 00 You have now arrived at your destination.
2:36 Harry Stebbings? Lauren, this is such a joy to do. I've heard so many good things from many prior guests on the show. So, thank you so much for joining me today.
2:43 Speaker 00 Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
2:45 Harry Stebbings? Now, I would love to start. I love some context. And I also want to start with a definition because I get confused by growth. It's thrown around as a word so much. So, how do you define growth? And how did you make your way into the world of growth for you?
2:59 Speaker 00 Great opening question. I would define growth as the practice of kickstarting, fueling and scaling business outcomes. Once you have a product with market fit, you focus on growing and scaling that product by building the mechanisms that fuel and accelerate its growth. That could be bringing more customers to the product, helping those customers get more value, helping them progress to different outcomes. Generally, all of this would be in service of maximizing the number of users or total amount of revenue that a business or a product generates.
3:34 Harry Stebbings? What would you say then was your first role in growth? If you were to diagnose that entry point?
3:40 Speaker 00 It actually was quite a coincidence. I joined Dropbox as part of a program that they called the Dropbox Rotation Program, where when you graduated from school, they placed you on a variety of teams. And the very first team that I worked on after I graduated was Dropbox's growth team. That was really my first exposure to the world of growth, which at the time didn't even really have a formal name, but now has become really a staple part of a number of consumer and SaaS software businesses.
4:10 Harry Stebbings? When I was looking at your history, Lauren, I looked at the incredible companies and I thought, we normally do a quickfire round at the end, but there's like several amazing companies here that I want to understand what you took from them in a relatively condensed timeframe. And so, we're going to do a quickfire on a lesson from each company and how it impacted your mindset. And so, I'm going to start in chronological order. Dropbox, what was the biggest lesson and how did it? Impact your mindset.
4:40 Speaker 00 My biggest lesson from Dropbox was probably that growing a business is a game of inches. We worked on trial conversion, helping folks convert to premium plans after trying Dropbox with their team for the first time. I understood just how much impact could compound from ensuring that different markets, different payment methods, different customer profiles could all experience Dropbox and get value out of that experience. And going really, really deep in the data to figure out where different pockets of customers weren't converting as well as they could be. I don't think I really understood how much return you can get simply from being precise and rigorous and detail oriented
5:21 Speaker 00 and ensuring every customer is getting maximum value. And I really learned that there.
5:26 Harry Stebbings? That is hilarious. I did hear from many of your colleagues about your data centricity, so we're going to get to that later. But sticking on the theme of the quickfire, Airtable most recently, how did that impact your mindset? And what are the one or two biggest lessons?
5:40 Speaker 00 Airtable is an area where I started to really focus on product led growth for SaaS. Something that I think we did really well at Airtable is thinking of PLG or that product led motion and the sales led motion or sales assisted motion as being part of one engine for the business. I find that businesses will say, well, I need to pick one. Either I'm a product led business or a sales led business. And we were actually able to work the two in concert and make sure that when folks gave Airtable a try, we were actually thinking through the full journey of that customer over time and when it would actually be the right moment for them to graduate from a free plan or small team use into something more sophisticated or a more complex deployment.
6:25 Speaker 00 This is something that to me feels under understood, if you will, that we did pretty well at Airtable.
6:30 Harry Stebbings? Sod the schedule, you've just blown it up. I have a lot of companies that are like, oh, we're doing PLG, but we're going to layer on the enterprise, the sales heavy motion. The common advice is actually it's too early. Do one well, understand the customer type, the product type is very different. How do you do both from the very earliest days?
6:50 Speaker 00 So I will say that for an early stage business, just finding its footing, developing product market fit, monetizing customers for the first time or in those early chapters of monetization, picking one motion makes sense. There should be, of course, a learning period to think through what is the right go-to-market for you. Maybe you collect a waitlist of sign-ups on your website. You experiment with some product-led motions, which could be community-led growth. It could be content marketing. It could be SEO. And then you might bring in a sales hire to help figure out outbound sales versus inbound, you know, qualifying the folks who have signed up, who are using your product in a limited capacity, and make a call from there on if your product
7:33 Speaker 00 is most amenable to a product-led motion or a sales-led motion. If you decide that something like a product-led motion makes sense, users should be able to experience your product and learn its value by being inside the product and becoming a user. Developing a sales team later on takes on a very different flavor. Your reps will be working with existing customers, who might even be paying customers, and selling additional value on top of what they've already experienced, which, of course, is very different than emailing outbound and trying to find people who haven't been exposed to your product yet and teaching them that. Both, of course, should be done together if you ultimately want to build that upmarket motion, but the composition of your sales team will actually look and
8:16 Speaker 00 feel very different because of the nature of how you find and qualify and convert leads. And then additionally, there should ideally be some efficiencies for you in having that product-led motion at the beginning because there is a larger pond of great customers who already know and understand the value of your product. So that sales conversation is really more how to get the most out of using the product rather than experiencing it for the first time.
8:41 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned that, kind of, those early steps, especially in terms of that user experience. My question to you is, what makes truly great user onboarding? And how do you think about that today?
8:52 Speaker 00 Onboarding is a term that's used very broadly, and there are many tools that you can buy to help you, or that claim they can help you with onboarding, where you help orient a user to your product with the hopes that they are more likely to be more successful. The metric Many companies use to represent this is activation rate. So the percentage of folks who sign up for your product, who then ultimately are expected to retain long term. And usually, there's two dimensions on which activation is defined. The first is either engagement or retention. So, did Harry sign up today and keep coming back tomorrow, next week and next month? But then also sophistication or early habit building. So, did Harry also take an action that was high value?
9:36 Speaker 00 Did he create a document in Notion that was meaningful? Did he build something in Airtable that was usable? Those together indicate that someone has found value. They keep coming back because they see something that they want to come back for. And also that they're doing the right things to experience that recurring value over time and uncover and unlock the magic of what your product offering is. To me, onboarding is one of the most important things you can invest in. Interestingly, it can be very hard to move that activation rate metric. Unlike a lot of growth experiments where, you know, maybe the classic is that you add a big button or you make a button bigger and you see more people click on it. Onboarding is more complicated because ultimately, you're in the business of helping people learn more effectively,
10:19 Speaker 00 trying to simplify and make digestible all of the functionality that your product offers. Today, many of the design patterns that are used in products are tooltips. You know, you sign up for something and you see eight or 10 or maybe even 20 different pop-ups that define terms for you and ask you to learn a bunch of things. And the reality is that nobody's actually learning that many things that quickly. The real impact, in my opinion, comes from being patient and breaking down what actually the user needs to know right now to be able to find value that's relevant to them.
10:54 Harry Stebbings? I have so many questions for you. This is fantastic by the way, this is exactly what I wanted. But in terms of like finding value for you, the challenge is with Notion, with Airtable, these are horizontal tools that are incredibly powerful, but to many different users with many different needs. The way that I, as a podcaster, turned investor is very different, even in my job compared to how someone else uses it in their job. How do you have a horizontal user onboarding when the needs and value derived is very different?
11:25 Speaker 00 Very, very good question and hard to do right. Something that we do at Notion that I think generally is tried and true is to ask someone what they're here for. Many businesses will actually cast or assume or segment that a user is a certain kind of user. Maybe they sign up with a Gmail account and one might assume that they're there for a personal use case. But it's possible that they used their Gmail but are actually evaluating your tool or your product to deploy at their business. Just starting with that simple question of, are you here to do work with your team? Are you here as a student can really help you as the builder of the product, understand the value the customer is seeking and reflect it back to them. And then demonstrating value is more of an exchange.
12:10 Speaker 00 So when you ask a customer to tell you something about them, you can meaningfully change the product experience and reflect that back and help them see that this product can be relevant and specific to their use case. And in fact, the product will help them get there. So there might be templates or examples or different customizations that the product can make for them to help them get there along the way.
12:32 Harry Stebbings? How important is time to value or time to wow? You know, with Uber or with any DoorDash, it's like clicking and it's like, oh, it's quite a quick and compressed time to value. How important is that in that early onboarding phase?
12:46 Speaker 00 Time to value is critical. The large majority of users who sign up in a product-led motion for a consumer product or a SaaS tool will not come back. So the reality is that that first impression means everything. It's not realistic to teach everything about most products in that first session and in that first impression. With that in mind, it's important to ask smart questions and also to be realistic about what the right cross-section is of features you offer that are both useful and relevant and also magical and demonstrate some sort of wow factor or inspiration that will make the user feel like this is something differentiated that they should keep using.
13:25 Harry Stebbings? Is simple always better in user onboarding?
13:29 Speaker 00 I think simple is always better.
13:30 Harry Stebbings? Is there ever the concern, and sorry, I'm really going granular, but I'm enjoying this so much. You know, there's like the loading screens and sometimes there was like the rumors that they have them just because they want you to feel like they're doing work in the background. Like it's, it's more difficult than it is. Is there ever a case where for enterprises, for heavy enterprise use cases, actually it's better to have more thought or simple isn't better? Is that ever the case?
13:56 Speaker 00 You make a good point, though I would say that that loading screen instance, or even in an enterprise deployment, really what you're getting at is demonstrating power or demonstrating the high ceiling that a product can offer, inspiring and creating that feeling that something magical is happening under the hood, but you're not asking the user to do that hard work. You're doing it for them. So in that case, actually, the setup process happening under the hood ideally should make that end user experience feel more simple. Now, in the case of significant enterprise deployments, often there will be a human assist in getting something set up. So activation and onboarding may be less incremental to the business, but they still can help a customer move forward
14:40 Speaker 00 and make time spent with customer-facing teams more efficient so that that time can really be used on more complex questions, more advanced feature setup, rather than just getting the basics in motion.
14:51 Harry Stebbings? You said time spent there, and I, as an investor, say, Lauren, a lot of my time spent is with founders who are focused on the wrong metric in the first place, misunderstanding an activation metric, which doesn't accurately define value in a lot of cases. How do you advise founders on choosing the right activation metric, right metric to focus on in this early stage of onboarding?
15:15 Speaker 00 In general, I have some controversial opinions here, which I will share, but caveat that they're not shared universally. An activation metric should correlate with long-term retention. So if you activate this week, you should be more likely to be active in six months. It should also demonstrate both retention and also sophistication, some sort of use that indicates that a habit or value has been found, that a certain feature that's important has been used. And probably around 20% of your customers should be able to reach that metric. Now, the last piece is controversial. Many activation metrics that I've seen in working with companies can be more narrow. So you have to do this set of five or seven things in order to be activated, and only a small percentage of customers get there.
15:59 Speaker 00 The reason why I don't like very, very narrow activation metrics. They tend to over-focus, to me, on what the company projects as being value for the user, rather than measuring if the user has found value themselves, which is often best measured by them coming back and continuing to visit and build a habit over time. I would prefer to go with something a little bit more broad. The other thing I'll say, it's helpful to do an exercise in correlation and ideally causation to understand if some early things that users do in the product ultimately correlate with retention, as I mentioned before. But that exercise is not one I would spend too much time on, because the reality is, especially in earlier stages, your customer base is going to evolve and change pretty dramatically in the years following when you define that metric.
16:43 Speaker 00 And you'll probably want to change it and revise it to something that reflects actually what your users are doing today with the features that you've launched, rather than the ones that were focused yesterday. So I wouldn't spend too much time really trying to find the perfect metric, recognizing that it will evolve.
16:57 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned in terms of how a certain part of the onboarding would correlate to a certain retention or in a cohort. What would an example of that be when you said about the correlation and causation? Just so I understand what that actually means in real life.
17:11 Speaker 00 I think a great example to call on Airtable would be if a creator of a new base, which is the spreadsheet interface that's central to the Airtable product, were to build something of substance. So there's some number of entries in that spreadsheet, and bring a collaborator into that base to work with them. That, to me, would be a signal, and I've done the math, so I can tell you that's correct, that they are much more likely to keep using Airtable six months from now, because they've done substantial work. They've brought in a collaborator in a product that's designed for teams. And together, those two people are working on something that they can ultimately grow into a more sophisticated deployment of the product over time.
17:52 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you a really unfair question? What is good retention for a E2B PLG motion? What's baseline good? What number is it? D30, D1AC, D360? What are we looking at here?
18:05 Speaker 00 Some loose rules of thumb, I would say you want the large majority of signups to come back to your product again in the first seven days. Roughly 15 to 20% of teams using your product continue to collaborate after a month. And over the long term, somewhere in the order of 10 to 20% of teams continue to find value. Maybe even that number increases as folks discover new use cases and new value in your product over time.
18:32 Harry Stebbings? What are some other very common mistakes you see startups make when it comes to user onboarding? I'm sure you go through onboarding flows and you're like, oh no. What are some that you see very often?
18:42 Speaker 00 There are a couple that come to mind. I mentioned briefly that I generally don't like tooltips. They're basically a quick wall of text, usually defining a bunch of terms that the user doesn't understand and will continue to not understand. The other pattern that I don't love is a checklist or a more passive opt-in. So you could imagine you sign up for a product tomorrow and something pops up that says, do these 10 things. And if you choose to do them, you know, you will be all set up to use this product. The reality is that something passive like that, where you can choose to engage with educational material, is probably only going to have about a 10% opt-in rate. So 90% of your customers will never actually learn any of those things.
19:23 Speaker 00 This means that actually if you want effective onboarding, you have to be more assertive, more opinionated, and actually ensure that 90% of your customers are completing that educational material. Now, there's a balance there because you have to pick the right material that's relevant to most people. But in general, a checklist is just not going to get you the breadth of engagement that is needed to really move the needle on activation.
19:48 Harry Stebbings? How do you do assertive education? Because I'm with you in terms of the pop-ups, this button does this, this does it. But like, what do you do? Is it like a hard paywall of education where you can't get through the flow without it? How do you assertively present education?
20:02 Speaker 00 There are a few patterns in the market that I like and biased. I think Airtable's onboarding is very good. I also think Linear's onboarding is very good. In general, something more visual, more progressive and more...
20:15 Speaker 00 Experiential is generally better. And so what I mean by that is asking a user to do something. In the case of linear entering a command, showing somebody the visualization of what will manifest in the product for them, rather than just telling them, here are the terms you need to know. And then progressive, I actually would love to see a product do this really well. I'm looking, so let me know if you find one, but progressively disclosing different pieces of the product. So instead of giving a customer everything all at once, teaching them pieces of it over time and graduating them into the full experience so that they can focus on understanding the most important pieces.
20:53 Harry Stebbings? I love that. I actually thought of games, actually, when you were talking about that, often games, the early levels are so easy that they are essentially onboarding in the most base functionality. I totally agree with you there. For a lot of founders listening, they're thinking, great, I do also have to run, you know, a sales team, a CS team, a product team. And actually, this is a growth function in a way. I should probably need to hire for growth. When's the right time to hire for growth, do you think?
21:19 Speaker 00 It does depend on your go to market. If a business decides that a product led go to market is the right approach in the early days, I would have somebody, usually an engineer, though it could be a technical PM, focused on growth earlier than in other businesses. You can actually deliver more scaled impact early as you're developing that initial motion. I guess if PLG is not necessarily the crux of go to market, or you're still figuring it out, the rule of thumb is to introduce someone working on growth after there's product market fit and to invest more if you see good return. But it does depend, and I've seen some companies bring in one person, usually an engineer who's passionate about the area, pretty early to set up the scaffolding, make sure experimentation
22:04 Speaker 00 is possible, do some of the initial data logging, try out initial onboarding, and that has good return.
22:09 Harry Stebbings? We're getting granular here, but people love it when you go granular. So I'm diving straight into the deep end on this one. Data logging and data acquisition in the early days. What does good look like for you in terms of the infrastructure that I can give you when you come into my company? As a growth leader, growth advisor, what would you like to see?
22:29 Speaker 00 In general, the ability to experiment is nice. There are some tools out there that can make this easier. It depends a little what you're trying to do. If the goal of bringing someone into work on growth is really to help with acquisition at the top of the funnel, that's more growth marketing. Maybe Google Analytics is enough to work on SEO and SEM. If more is needed, or if you're interested in doing more, including stuff in the product, maybe experimenting with your pricing model, onboarding. In general, some degree of data engineering is necessary. So actually having somebody in seat who can help set up the initial data pipelines and logging for you to be able to understand if changes made to the product are good for users and good for the business is necessary.
23:11 Speaker 00 Some sort of analyst-facing tool could be Amplitude, could be Mode, could be Hex, is necessary to make sure that what you are learning can also be digested by and acted on by whoever's working on growth. And then ideally, an experimentation tool like EPO to round that out and make sure that you're able to actually try stuff and learn from it.
23:31 Harry Stebbings? We're hiring for these people in the early days. It could be that first technical PM who's going to be on growth, or it could be actually growth people to work with the PM. I need to know what to hire. And in my head, I've got a data-centric experimentation brilliant. But then I've also got someone who needs to be creative and needs to understand that we don't have all of the data, we don't have a rigid structure to our growth. What are we hiring for? And what is the right process to hire those first growth hires?
23:59 Speaker 00 So the first question I would ask, if the goal of this growth hire is to bring more signups and customers in, so acquisition, or to improve return on total users, customers or revenue, once those customers sign up for your product in the first place.
24:17 Harry Stebbings? How does that change the person that you have?
24:19 Speaker 00 In the first camp, where you're really focused on acquisition, the right archetype of a hire is growth marketing. This is someone who's worked in data-driven marketing, who understands the dynamics of key data-driven campaigns. In some cases, maybe has experience with community-led growth or content marketing, depending on exactly what you think might work well, given what you know or what you don't. In the second case, You're looking for someone who is more comfortable interfacing with or is an engineer. And the reason for that is that actually meaningfully changing the code base of the core product is necessary to have the change that you're seeking. In general, it's hard in growth because LinkedIn might just say growth. And it's not clear if that candidate is someone who's got more of a marketing background
25:02 Speaker 00 or more of a product and engineering background, but the work they're experienced in will vary.
25:07 Harry Stebbings? Can you have someone who does both? Or is this a mythical unicorn?
25:10 Speaker 00 I think it's a bit of a mythical unicorn, especially if you're only hiring one person. If your team is small, if you're focused on making sure that you get good return and you just want to try with one person, it's going to be very hard to find someone who can do both.
25:23 Harry Stebbings? What questions should we ask to understand the quality of candidate? Let's actually be specific. Let's focus on the maximization of value post-product, the engineering-led candidates. What questions will be asked there? What case studies will we do to understand the quality of candidate? I've never done this before. You're educating me.
25:41 Speaker 00 I think interviewing for growth is really fun, especially if you're looking for someone experienced, because the prompt can actually be pretty straightforward. What I would do is give that candidate our website and have them sign up for the product. Maybe ensure they can have access to more than just what they would normally have if they signed up today on the website. Ask them to spend some time and come back with their ideas for what we could be doing better to grow the business more effectively and to have more impact, more users, more revenue. The reason why I think such an open-ended question is effective is a great growth practitioner should be very creative, deliver probably, you know, at least a few, three or four net new ideas in that interview process that you haven't thought about before to be an additive hire to your team.
26:26 Speaker 00 And a good growth practitioner should understand comps in the market, to my earlier point, very well, and be able to say, hey, looking at your onboarding, looking at your pricing, I see some gaps here. I think you could be more effective if you followed this tactic. What I understand from my community is that these other mechanisms might be more impactful and give you some recommendations, even without seeing the data or understanding the details of how things are working today.
26:50 Harry Stebbings? Do you give them time? Is this a take-home task or do they do it in the office with you?
26:55 Speaker 00 This is a take-home.
26:56 Harry Stebbings? That's what good looks like. What would some red flags be? Are there anything where you'd be like, yeeesh, didn't like that?
27:03 Speaker 00 The biggest red flag to me is when I hear a heavy bias towards experimentation, maybe requiring every change made in the product to be an experiment, or over focusing on optimizing, adding friction, removing friction, raising prices, reducing prices versus making substantial changes to the core product experience itself. And the reason why this is a red flag to me is it suggests an over focus on needing experiments to validate judgment, where in early companies, actually having the right judgment before you make an investment is important so that you get return on how you spend your time. And also, it would suggest to me an over focus on optimization rather than an ability to think more critically
27:47 Speaker 00 about how the product serves the user and how value is derived from that. So ideally, things like new features might even be something that a growth leader could suggest or contribute because they have a thesis on how that feature will help the business, rather than just saying, you know, let's add a couple of tool tips here or a couple of buttons over there.
28:04 Harry Stebbings? But my question to you is, you mentioned kind of changes to core products. That's great, but it's also hard because you have product teams who are like, well, please don't ruin it, please don't break it. So the first question there is, should growth teams sit within product teams to ease that dislocation potential?
28:20 Speaker 00 I think so, especially in early to mid-stage businesses, because the reality is that there is one engineering team that is delivering all changes to the product. And it's important that the quality bar is as high for growth as it is anywhere else in the org. So I do think colocation helps. I also think for recruiting purposes, it can be favorable to make sure that everybody in growth and everybody in core product is together, learning from each other, versus having sort of an island where growth does its own thing and hopefully everybody has fun.
28:52 Harry Stebbings? I think you learn a lot from mistakes, either the ones you've made or that you've seen around you. When you think about hiring for growth teams, whether it's your previous hires or founders that you've worked with from 25 portfolio companies or advisory roles, what are some of the biggest mistakes you see founders make in those hires in the early days for growth teams?
29:10 Speaker 00 One mistake I've seen is assuming that best growth practices and experience in consumer will translate to SaaS and the other way around. That risk was taken on me. When I started at Airtable, I actually came from Meta. And so I was jumping from consumer to SaaS. And I experienced the steep learning curve firsthand. I learned that they aren't exactly apples to apples. But if you're hiring for someone to do growth in SaaS, I would try to find someone who's done it in SaaS before. And the inverse is also true. If you're hiring in consumer, find someone who has done growth in consumer before.
29:42 Harry Stebbings? What are the biggest differences? Because in my mind, I would be like, oh, great. They bring a consumer lens. They bring the creativity and virality of consumer growth to B2B, which is more stodgy and sticky. Talk to me about the differences and why that may be not the case.
29:57 Speaker 00 So if you think about Facebook or Instagram, a growth tactic that may be effective in either of those apps would be making a critical action more prominent. Making a button bigger, making stories appear at the top of your Instagram feed instead of in the middle, which they used to, if you may remember. Reducing friction. Maybe there's only two steps to complete signup instead of three. Generally, those optimizations will yield relatively meaningful changes in behavior for a consumer user base for whom there's more of a choice to be using that product today or tomorrow. And little differences in effort required might actually make the difference on if they take an action. In SaaS, often a tool is used at work. If my boss asks me to send them a Notion doc
30:40 Speaker 00 to use Notion to deliver something, I will do it. And that means that a slightly bigger button or a slightly shorter signup flow is actually not going to move the needle on if I use a tool. I find that in consumer growth, there tends to be an over-focus on very small detail changes. Whereas in SaaS, it's more important to make bigger or bolder changes that really react to the user's intent so that their behavior will change.
31:04 Harry Stebbings? What's the biggest and boldest change you've made, do you think?
31:07 Speaker 00 Just last week, my grocery item Notion relaunched our template gallery, released more than 4,500 new templates for what you can do on Notion. This is a pretty big change for us. We had only about 500 before the launch. And also a bet on leaning into the horizontal nature of the product. And so as one example, we have more than 100 habit trackers in our template gallery now.
31:30 Harry Stebbings? I have to ask, one, how do you think about effective product discovery when there's now 100 habit trackers? People need curation and people need direction. How do you do that with the depth of content you now have?
31:44 Speaker 00 So the thesis that we have here, which is inspired by some of the work that we've seen Canva do, is that people love to shop. If you say, "I would love a red shirt," you might get a red shirt given to you by, you know, someone at a store. But if you can browse a whole bunch of different red shirts and decide this is the one that's right for me, that I'm really excited about, then that actually gives you a much more personal experience and you probably walk away much happier with the red shirt. So we'll see how it plays out, but we're really excited to bring this thesis to life.
32:13 Harry Stebbings? Do you think it will be a 95-5 situation, which is kind of common in a lot of cases in life, where 95% of the downloads really are driven towards 5%? Or do you think it'll be quite an even dispersion across the gallery?
32:28 Speaker 00 I don't think it will be 95-5. I would assume a product like Canva might have a similar effect, where it wouldn't be that most people choose the same RSVP invitation pattern, but that there are many and that there's room for all of those. There are so many things you can build on Notion and I suspect that that diversity will be valued.
32:44 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned this quite big change really to how Notion organizes content and delivers it and what the content is that it provides. Postmortems are fascinating to me. How do you do postmortems? Who's invited? Who sets the agenda? How often are they? Can you just take me into the world of postmortems and how you do them?
33:02 Speaker 00 We do them all the time. We call them retros and they're recursive. So it could be that a small team, maybe even a pair, a PM and an engineer who worked on something, will retro together. But generally, for something substantial like a new launch, I would allow for time to see results. And then hold of meeting where everybody can share their rosebud thorn equivalent, you know, what went well, what we could do better, what didn't go well. And also assess and understand the performance of that launch and feel and follow through on accountability for if the original hypothesis in launching that feature delivered and also what surprised us about the behavior we saw from customers and the business impact that we saw on the other side.
33:43 Speaker 00 This is something that can be pretty second nature in growth because we are so close to the data. But I find that that focus on metrics, on results, on impact can sometimes be less central. In places that are further away, there's so much you can learn from saying, hey, we launched this feature. What did we expect to see in terms of usage, in terms of engagement, in terms of conversion, behavior changes?
34:05 Harry Stebbings? But you have not hit metrics and leave the meeting happy.
34:09 Speaker 00 Absolutely.
34:10 Harry Stebbings? Talk to me about that. Does that not mean you don't hit your goals, but you're still happy?
34:15 Speaker 00 There's a difference between missing a goal because your hypothesis was disproven and missing a goal because you didn't execute well. So in the first case, you've actually learned something really valuable, that a hypothesis that you held in building a product for your customers was incorrect. And ideally, you understand the why behind that and you fix forward and build differently and better for them. In the case of missing a goal because execution didn't go well, that is where really getting into the details in a postmortem or a retro and saying, what didn't we do well and what can we do differently next time to make sure we do? Give it our best shot on goal is really important. But in the first case, you've actually been blessed with learnings that you didn't have before. So that's actually a great outcome.
34:58 Harry Stebbings? How often is it the first? How often is it the second?
35:01 Speaker 00 I would say rule of thumb is for growth teams, maybe a 20% batting average. So you'll See metric wins or hit that goal 20% of the time. That's a little different than how to set a goal that's sufficiently ambitious. So when my teams set goals, we usually aim for a 70% hit rate. Meaning that if there were 10 teams in the growth org, seven of them probabilistically would hit the goal that they set. The other 30% wouldn't. And that's by design to make sure that goals are both ambitious and pragmatic. And it also means that then the team needs to have so many ideas that even if only 20% of them contribute to that goal, that will be enough to get to that metric.
35:40 Harry Stebbings? I'm always stuck on growth in the way that I'm never sure, Lauren, whether it should be like, oh, we increased activation. You said a brilliant quote earlier on. I can't quite remember, but it was like learning by inches and kind of incrementality actually leads to great progression. But then I have other growth leaders on who are like, we need to like expand, like blow shit up. And if it works, it's like a 10x on the company. And I'm never sure which camp growth should really fall into, which is like the binary one in 50 work. But when it works, it's a halo. Or the 70% work and actually we build yard by yard.
36:15 Speaker 00 I think it depends on where the product is at and also the stage of company. So if a business maybe has product market fit, but is not seeing even close to the top of funnel signups or new users that it needs to achieve its ambitions, then maybe more of that hail Mary approach is warranted to say, let's come up with some big, bold ideas that could completely change everything for us. Because that's the only thing we care about. And incremental gains will not be enough to help us achieve what we want to achieve. Similarly, there could be a point where the funnel from signup to activation to conversion maybe looks really good for a great product with market fit. And so actually, the best use of a growth team is to aim higher and say,
36:59 Speaker 00 instead of optimizing this thing, which we think is doing pretty well, let's consider new bets or take new risks. And then the flip side would be if there is a business that's had a lot of success, but there's so much low hanging fruit to just optimize little things, introduce the right payment methods, provide the right onboarding, make sure landing pages on the website convert well, then that more incremental approach of optimizations can actually compound and yield so much impact. Something that I think about when I'm looking at different components of what drives revenue for a business is sometimes you look at something like a churn rate. And even a very small percentage reduction in that churn rate, compounding over many years, will be really meaningful for the business.
37:42 Speaker 00 So it does actually start with understanding what you're building for and also how the product is doing.
37:48 Harry Stebbings? You said consider new things there. I'm always stuck, honestly, when I'm thinking about, how long do I give an experiment? Is it a week? Is it a month? How do you think about enough time to know whether something works versus this isn't working and we need to make a change?
38:04 Speaker 00 It does depend on how many users you put an experiment in front of and also if you're looking for statistical significance. So in general, I worry less about how long to run an experiment and think more about what are the key signals that will help us determine if the behavior we seek from our customers is happening or not happening? And then what are the guardrails that we want to look at? So even if you run an experiment for a week or two, you might see that more people are paying for your product or fewer people are paying for your product. And without significance, it could give you enough signal to say, let's keep moving and let's get this out the door and ship it to everyone.
38:37 Harry Stebbings? I can literally talk to you all day. I do have one more thing to ask. You've invested in many great companies. You also advise many great companies. How has investing changed how you think about growth, PLG, onboarding? Because it is a different hat and window into the world of startups.
38:53 Speaker 00 I actually think it's one of the areas where I learn the most. To be a great growth practitioner, you can't have tunnel vision just on your own product. It's important to understand the ecosystem, to study different puzzles rather than just working on one. When I work with startups, it actually helps me take a step back and think differently and learn about different growth tactics and flywheels that work well for products that are not the one that I spend all of my time on. And I think it makes me better at what I do.
39:20 Harry Stebbings? Have there been any really tangible takeaways, either from companies that've really worked, that really haven't worked, where you're like, oh, that was an interesting insight from that moment, or not experiment, but that journey that I didn't think about before?
39:33 Speaker 00 One of the things that I think I've become much crisper on is if you're focused on top of funnel, so if you're focused on bringing more people into your product, being thoughtful about which strategies will yield the right customers that fit the profile of your ICP or your ideal customer profile. And an example of this would be if you have an amazing YouTube strategy or community strategy, that will bring in lots of passionate folks who want to give your product a try, but it may not actually be the way to get a large enterprise to discover who you are. So being smart and thoughtful about that, where actually your first touch in getting to know a customer will bring in a certain profile of customer that ideally you should then be able to serve all the way down funnel and your go-to-market should match. That's something that I feel I've gotten a lot sharper on in working with companies that are earlier
40:18 Speaker 00 and are trying many different things to see what works.
40:21 Harry Stebbings? What's been the most surprising thing about investing?
40:23 Speaker 00 Most surprising thing about investing recently is that I actually think there's a really cool space emerging in PLG around developer tools. There is a lot of interesting stuff, ideas, new strategies for how to garner developer interest and bring developers into your product, more product-led, that to me feels emerging, kind of the way that PLG and enterprise SaaS has emerged over the past few years.
40:48 Harry Stebbings? How do you invest? Final one before we do a quick fire. Is it out of funds? Is it angel? How do you do that?
40:53 Speaker 00 I invest as an angel. I generally meet companies in my work because I'm so specialized in PLG and in giving advice and guidance on PLG, so the referral network is quite strong. Overall, I'm seeing so many great companies right now. I think some of the pessimism around investing in 2023 is not warranted. We will see.
41:13 Harry Stebbings? Should more operators be investors at the same time?
41:15 Speaker 00 Absolutely, but you need to understand why you're doing it and how it fits into your fulfillment formula for yourself. And then I also think being opinionated about what your niche is and where you add value to companies is critical so that it's easy for companies to assess if it's actually valuable to have you on their cap table.
41:33 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, I totally get you. Quick fire. So I'm going to say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Is that okay?
41:38 Speaker 00 Yes.
41:39 Harry Stebbings? Okay, so what tactics in growth have not changed over the last five years?
41:44 Speaker 00 I think the core investments of top of funnel acquisition, onboarding and conversion monetization, those three areas have remained very consistent over time.
41:54 Harry Stebbings? What tactics have totally died to death? No more à la pubel.
41:58 Speaker 00 Referral programs. They still exist, but you probably haven't seen one in a while. Or if you have, you probably haven't referred someone in a while. The $10 credit for referring a friend seems to be a little outdated.
42:08 Harry Stebbings? What one piece of advice would you give to a growth leader starting a new role today? You're calling them up the night before their first job.
42:15 Speaker 00 I would give three months to just learn, study the business, understand what data you have, talk to customers, attend a sales conversation, learn from folks at the company around what they've tried and what's worked and what hasn't worked. Because every customer base is different and it's easy to have bias from the customers that you've worked with in your previous job.
42:34 Harry Stebbings? What is the biggest challenge about layering on a sales assisted motion to an existing PLG motion?
42:41 Speaker 00 At some point, the two motions will compete. So a dollar earned through a freemium or self-serve motion from PLG may be a trade-off against $2 or $5 earned through closing a contract in a sales assisted motion. And it's very important to be explicit about those two motions working in concert and to make the right trade for the business overall.
43:01 Harry Stebbings? Is it fair that sales reps get comped with sales commissions and PLG don't?
43:07 Speaker 00 It's a good question. I think it can be harder to predictably deliver numbers while managing product changes rather than working a book as a sales rep. But the question comes up a lot and I would be curious actually to learn if there's anyone out there who's done more of a variable comp structure for growth that I could learn about.
43:26 Harry Stebbings? If you could be in any other growth team in the world hypothetically for a day, just out of curiosity, fly on the wall, where would you be?
43:33 Speaker 00 I always have admired the Pinterest growth organization from its earlier days through. I actually don't know a whole lot about the specific stuff they've built on the inside.
43:41 Harry Stebbings? They have actually an amazing like growth alumni that have come out of it. By the way, the Dropbox alumni is the best I've ever seen. When you look at, also they've turned into investors as well. Most investors actually worked at Dropbox. But I want to ask one, which is you've seen incredible trends in the productivity space. What are the biggest trends in the productivity space, having seen two of the best internally?
44:01 Speaker 00 In general, I feel like over the past five to seven years, this idea of collaboration by default or a more multiplayer use of a tool has become much more commonplace. Some of the productivity tools that were more for individual note taking or private note taking that were more popular five, seven years ago, something like Bear, that's a lot less common now. I think that trend is going to stay, that our tools will become even more multiplayer and that actually building a product experience that helps you maintain a private space and also engage with others will be really important.
44:32 Harry Stebbings? Final one, which one company growth strategy recently have you been really impressed by? Where you're like, ooh, that's smart. I like that.
44:39 Speaker 00 I think Figma did a really great job with the launch of FigJam. It was smart feature development to bring in a different section of the market with a product that plays very nicely with their core offering.
44:51 Harry Stebbings? I totally agree with you. I think they nailed it. Listen, Lauren, I love this. Thank you so much for putting up with the discussion. I hope you didn't spend too much time with the schedule that I sent you last night. Otherwise, it was a surprise, but I love this. So thank you.
45:04 Speaker 00 Thank you. This was a lot of fun.
45:07 Harry Stebbings? What a fantastic episode. If you'd like to see more from us, of course you can by searching for us on YouTube by 20VC, that's two zero VC. But before we leave you today, and speaking of tools we cannot live without, I need your input on the 20VC Miro board about new guests we should feature for 20VC in 2023. Just head on over to miro.com/20vc. Miro is a tool I consider to be truly game changing. It's a visual collaboration tool packed with the right tools, tech and templates to help you think of and create that dream product. That means you can brainstorm the perfect product with your team, vote on the best ones and explore with your customer journey roadmap all on a Miro board. Whatever you need, Miro's infinite whiteboarding capabilities help you get there.
45:52 Harry Stebbings? It acts as your team's single source of truth. And now I'm using it to hear from you. Go ahead and add your suggestions for 20VC guests on our Miro board at miro.com/20vc. And finally, you have to try EPO, the next generation A/B testing and feature management platform designed to help you run reliable, impactful experiments. EPO saves you time across the entire experimentation workflow. Planning tools help run experiment scenarios beforehand, best-in-class diagnostics.
46:21 Harry Stebbings? Mean you spend less time debugging issues. Their cutting edge status engine helps you reduce experiment runtimes. Plus, EPO sits directly on top of your data warehouse and your North Star metrics. So it gives you this real confidence in experiment performance and ease in conducting follow up deep dives. No more extended analysis cycles to understand results. And that's why companies like DraftKings, ClickUp, Momentive and Cameo all rely on EPO to power their experiments. Get access today at getepo.com. That's getepo.com. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode on Friday with one of the leading CTOs in the business with Jean Denis at Plaid on the show.
Previous 20VC: Top Three Lessons from Working with Jeff Bezos for 23 Years at Amazon, How the Best Leader Hire, Fire, Prioritise and Make Decisions & How to Be Responsible for 1M Employees and Be a Rockstar Husband and Father with Dave Clark @ Flexport Next 20VC: Why Hiring in Tech is Broken and Founders Need to be as Good at Firing as they are Hiring, Why Product Differentiation is Unsustainable & Why the Current Generation of Tech Employees are Entitled and What Needs to Change with Jean-Denis Greze @ Plai Page updated September 29, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
