YouSaid · the spoken record

Laura Schaffer

lines on the record: 98
first: 2023-03-09
most recent: 2023-03-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“A very data driven person. I self describe and think of myself that way because, you know, in large part because of that, Phil Right, that you have to be constantly checking yourself and data is a really great way to do that. But I definitely think that I would be described as someone who's going more by their gut when looking at data end results.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's fail fast by using those tools rather than figuring out a way that you can rise above where everyone else is operating and figure out ways to solve all that complex stuff better because that's going to be challenging. But you can always get better at experimenting and validating things faster.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have an impact. So, all of that is extremely expensive. And so I think the key is to just think through, okay, what are the things I can do to quickly validate what these ideas are that we? And you can do that with painted doors, right? Which is where you test rate the concept and the idea before it exists versus the actual experience. You can do mocks, like create have, you know, create, you know, if you've got a designer, create those mocks without experience, put it in front of people, see how they engage with it. That can be so powerful. You can invalidate tons of hypotheses at that state. You really want to only things you want to get to that kind of that deep AB testing environment or ones that have been kind of vetted along the way. And that way you reduce your fail rate, right? Because you're failing faster by using other methods. So, you know, I think that's, I more advocate for that side.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's the thing. I mean, I think there's very little that we can do to make that space easier, right? All those things have to be figured out. And so I definitely think that you that everybody is going to be in a space where their original ideas, untested ideas are going to be around that hit right. However, the way that you go about validating those can be totally different. And you can be very fast about validating those ideas. And that's the key, right? And, you know, AB testing is one of the most expensive kinds of ways to validate an experiment, right? It often requires design and engineering and the PM or growth person or marketing person who's crafting it, right? All these things are investments that take a lot of time, even for simple things. And then you have the time factor. How long's the thing I have to run to have?”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's got the problem, right? All that stuff right, but your solution off, or maybe your solution is right, but maybe it's just not presented, not communicated in the right way. You could have any one of those things off. And it's not going to succeed, right? It's not going to have, you know, the metric impact you're expecting to have. So in that context, it's almost like incredible. We do succeed 20 to 10% of the time given everything that has to line up. And so I think it's one of those things where, you know, you really want to go into it embracing that. Okay, this isn't about how smart I am or how good my team is or any of that stuff. It's just, hey, the logic of this is challenging to get it right. And let's embrace that and let's lean into, let's lean into that knowledge and make it a part of our strategy instead of fighting against it.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's funny. I mean, in the articles, and you'll see, like, it was written by somebody from Microsoft who kind of built the documentation platform and did all these cool things. As he went into actually trying to apply a scientific method of figuring out how often people are wrong about their hypotheses and what they're planning to do, he's like, I wonder if that applies to us here at like Microsoft. Even for him that kind of question of like or out, right? Like it's just, you know, and I think it's challenging to, you know, when There's a lot of smart people in the world in this space doing things and it's very difficult to think, gosh, am I really wrong? Like 80 plus 90% of the time. But when you think about it, it makes total sense, right? Because what has to happen for something to be successful? You have to understand the problem perfectly. You have to then understand who's having the problem perfectly, the customer. At what time they're having the problem, then you've got to put the right solution in front of them to solve that problem.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not embarrassing you've gone too far, right? Gotta be embarrassing. The first thing that was embarrassing kicking people out, you know, onboarding, spend all this money and whatever to get them into your son afloat, then the first thing you do, get out of here, right? I mean, that's nuts. But if it hadn't validated, that would have been a very cheap but very valuable learning. Instead, it was a very powerful cheap learning in the other direction. We're okay, now we know we can invest in it. We know that's the right thing to do. So always better to be iterative so that you are letting failure work for you instead of having it be a trap that you fall into.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really takes a scientific approach to proving that out. Companies like Netflix and Microsoft, over and over again, 80 plus percent. Some companies say 90% of things fail. And so when you, the closer you get to something that is, you know, you kind of go barrier your, you know, head in the sand or go into an attic and build something for six months and ship it, the more likely it is that you are going to ship the 80% wrong stuff, right? Whereas the more iterative you are, the more likely it is you're going to catch it sooner. And, you know, failure doesn't have to be a wall. It can be a compass, right? It can be the thing that leads you to the right thing. And so, you know, you always want to, as best you can, get stuff in front of customers so that you can get that compass and get that compass activated, know where to go. And yeah, and so that means doing ugly things. I tell my teams all the time.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's what I would say to this that from a high level, it's always going to be better to be iterative. The reason that it's better is that roughly 80% of the times, or at least in the time, our hypotheses and the things that we believe will be true. And this is like amazing. I mean, there's an amazing article out there. I'm happy to share with you so you can put in the show notes.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And guess what? Even they were a good amount of the console and they were going off and we had no easy return button, it converted better because we were addressing the big problem that was there at the time, which is their psyche. They were not ready to come in immediately be thrown into a phone number experience. That was, you know, letting the bogeyman out party. And that's not what was going to work. We needed to put that bogeyman pill in the hot dog. And so, you know, then, you know, once that validated, then we can actually go through the business of putting that into the onboarding float correctly. And then that can hurt even better. But yeah, so again, the psyche of your user is such a critical thing to be thinking about. And if something like very logical isn't converting well, sometimes it means that you're battling against the psyche of a user and you want to take a step back and, you know, think about and learn about where someone is psychologically in your space.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly right, yeah. Hot dog peanut butter, all that right, you kind of bury it, right? You embed the scary, unpleasant thing. And so that's what you said with the phone number stuff, that telecom stuff.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And its first one in the MVP, they kicked them out of the portal entirely and put them into a docs page where we could kind of manufacture an experience where the first thing they saw was code and either in the docs, safe place, the language that they're coding in. And then like knuck in there was like, oh, get a phone number. Let's go configure it, right? Not as like step one, not as like the leading thing, but sort of embedded and the analogy I have for this is like hill in the hot dog. So like if anyone ever has, if you have anyone's got a dog or an animal, you have to feed a pill too. It's like, you can't just feed the pill to the animal. It's never going to happen. But if you shove it inside of a hot dog, which like looks good and That's exciting. Then you can get them to consume it more easily. We do peanut butter.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For most developers. And guess what was step one? Get a phone number because that's step one. Anytime that anyone's trying to teach one of these Twilio, like one-on-one, they're always going to sit down next and be like, okay, like here we're going to go get a phone number and configure it. And that's what anyone every time will do. However, in a self-serve experience, when you don't have that safe person sitting next to you and like, don't worry, it's going to be okay. I'm going to take you through this crazy telecom journey. They're on their own with that psyche. I'm like, oh my God, telecom, well, I can't do that. That sounds scary. Getting a phone number configuring like, whoa, I'm out of my depth, right? And so what did we do to test this out? Like test out whether that was the issue.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, sort of talk to some users. And there wasn't anything particularly obvious that was coming out as to like what the issue was. It was like, oh, yeah, I could do step one. And we did like mocks with people like, okay, now I do step two. But there was one thing that I was hearing that was coming out that's like feels like something. And that was that the telephone number, the telecom part. developers when they were coming into Twilio was like things that were familiar to them APIs, the language they're coding in, code samples, documentation, things that like the bogeyman, right? The things that would like psychologically trip them up, telecom, phone numbers, things that like, you know, these things that just were completely out of the zone of anything that they'd ever worked with before, especially early on until his journey, but even now, right? Telecom's very different beast.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Same concept, a totally different situation, which is later, you know, in onboarding, one of the things that we tried to do over time to make Tulio less complex was to offer steps. Like, you know, seasonal onboarding, like welcome. Step one, like, here's what you want to build. Great. We all know that. Now, okay, step one, go do this thing. Step two, go to this thing, three this thing, four, this thing. Vi, bam, you're live. Congratulations, aha, all these things. So, you know, we shipped that and got that out there. And I was like, improved conversion. It wasn't like that great. It's like, man, like, we went from like there being like absolutely nothing like choose your.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experiences within their early onboarding, not just for you selfishly so you can learn and same with them appropriately, but also so the user can feel more confident as they get going, like, hey, I'm in the right place. This is going to do what I need to do. But I think that the carryover there is just the psyche of the user, right? And just being so aware that it's not so cookie cutter as what is the problem my market experiences and what can my product do to help them? There's also this other thing in the room, which is so important to people's success and our ability to succeed with your products and your self-serve experiences, which is what is the mentality and the psyche of the person at the various stages in your journey. And if, you know, if you're not incorporating that or addressing that, you will absolutely miss things or things will fail and you'll be very confused as to why. We had a great experiment that I'm happy to talk about.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Still alleviated a problem, alleviated the problem they had where they were coming in and worried that it was going to be difficult or that they weren't going to be able to figure it out. They weren't going to be able to get their footing. And I'd say that that's not unique to Twilio. That's something that I think users experience at any front door at any company, any sign up beginning to sign up loads. Like here we go, right? Like buckling up, especially when it's in a work context. There might be extra pressure on you to succeed or, you know, for you to make an accurate assessment, right? So you're just kind of, you know, I think that psyche of like, okay, am I like in the right place? Is this going to do what I needed to do? Can I figure it out? Am I capable? Like that's these are extremely common things for people to feel when they're signing up. And so, you know, certainly, you know, that I think can concur to any place. I'd encourage absolutely everybody to be putting those kind of”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you doing anonymous communications, like for a dating app or something, right? So those were the very first questions.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a question around what language are you coding in? And then as an option to that, it was like, oh, like, I'm not, I'm actually not coding. Like, I'm not a developer. Like, so that was, for us, it actually gave us two really, really interesting data points. One was like, you know, how many developers versus people who are not coding or in our flow? And then what language are they coding, which was massively helpful, not just for growth and onboarding, but our documentation team, docs team. You're going to like, well, we should, you know, would that end up being a critical way for us to gauge trends over time and catch things before like, you know, whatever, you know, reports would come out at the end of the year of what people are doing, sort of see it. And then also product, what product are you interested in using? That was very critical for knowing kind of the basics of how to organize someone's onboarding, right? Even SMS, you're doing voice, you know, 281, whatever. And then use case and use cases like you're doing a point reminder or are you doing like auto responder?”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But for sure, like, you know, use such You know, processes with caution for sure. Yeah. The right way to do advocating for the engineers here is the right way to make any changes in production is through or with the approval of engineering. But it was the right move overall and definitely helped business, right?”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It ended up being like very helpful for everyone. I shared the insights from it and like all these things and share the data.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was going to be difficult, just the questions because it was aligning to some of the things that they were organically thinking about, which is, what if they don't support my language? Or like, can I even do this use case I want to do? And so it was just a really interesting takeaway for me for this. Like the really interesting takeaway was the psyche of the user is so, so critical, right? Like that's just as important as understanding your product and the broader like market you're applying to and all those things. Like just the psyche of users, new people doing things for the first time in your user flow, like understanding that it's powerful, you know, and the simple like kitchy thing I say is that ultimately the learning here was bad friction is bad and good friction is good, right? There's no such thing as being simple as just all friction is bad, which is sort of kind of what I assumed going into this.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For folks, it was like comforting. You know, when you think about it, when users are signing up for your product for the very first time, like it's new, right? This is new. That means it's scary. They're expecting it to be difficult. They're anticipating that there's going to be friction and challenges and that they're not going to figure it out. They're almost like looking for the bogeyman, right? And that's the headspace. That's often the headspace that any of us are in when we're doing something new for the first time. Like, this is very challenging. And so by putting in these questions, it's like, what's your language? It's like, oh, like I do. I code in JavaScript and I can select that. Well, that's something uncomfortable. That would make my journey easier. Like, yeah, bingo. Oh, and you're, you know, that's, that's my use case. Okay, like I'm in the right place here. Like, you know, it was actually giving folks something comforting and challenging the notion that.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think pretty sure it was a Friday. We just asked for forgiveness and kind of put these questions into the Sign of Low and Rana's Navy test with a small group. And I'm fully expecting, okay, this is going to like hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad, you know, and I'm going to be prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting. And I was totally thinking of like written start to write, like the framework for how I wanted to surface this. And we start to get the data for this thing. I'm not getting an improved conversion. Like there's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions. It improved conversion by like 5%. Just improved signups. And it was one of those like what? Like, okay, this, like, what is going on here? And I actually dug into it and what I found from just talking to a few customers went through the flow and just like learning about how they felt about it. It was actually.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just me, myself, and I, but like I said, I had started to build a little bit of trust and pulled in go to Andre who I mentioned earlier, who because he was early employee and just kind of had access to everything, like one of those people. And he had also was, you know,”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a number of implications here, but it's obviously a very contentious kind of space. So this is the very first thing that I did on the first experiment that I ran. I did some research that I said, okay, what are the most important questions to ask? Like, what would I really, really need to know? And it was stuff like, you know, what language are you coding in and what's your use case? What product do you want to use? And then, you know, there's, you know, one around like, are you developer at all or are you something else? Because there is sort of rumors that you're having not just developers sign up, which is this whole other interesting kind of story. And I was singing these questions that would also, you know, potentially be things that are developers signing up with sort of understand why we're asking that it would feel natural. And but anyway, you know, again, like adding anything to the signup was very contentious. But I really just wanted to get a little bit of data on it. So I wanted to run a test. I didn't have a team. I didn't have an engineering team yet. And none of that stuff had been mailed out.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“100%. Yeah, I'm through to fortune have two mind blowing experiments that really shifted the way that I think about growth. One of them, one of my favorite ones, happened very early on, actually. So after I created this grow team, like one of the things that I saw as to me an issue was that at our signup flow, we just asked people for a username and an email, like a password. And that was it. And that's actually relatively common at the time. This is kind of a while ago. Now, like everybody kind of is segmenting users. But we didn't. And we actually, there was a lot of existing conviction around that. I was like, okay, we retard any developers, developers, they aren't, you know. They just want to do, they just want to get their hands on things. Don't put anything in their way. It's going to be disastrous. We don't want any shenanigans here with these folks. Let's just let them in the gates. But to me, this was a really big assumption to make and very costly one. It's like, okay, if that's the case, we don't know. We're not going to know anything about anyone. And we didn't know who was signing up. We didn't know what they wanted to do. And that hurt our ability to understand how people were performing from a quantitative perspective. You know, we were a little bit lost with prioritization.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, like ungate your knowledge, I think, is the buzzword that I'm hearing, right? And you could do that within your, I think that's an Elenaism. Like, see if we can, how many times we can bring her up. But right, it's just, you know, like you can do that within your own, you know, company. Like everybody, everybody is skilled at things that they aren't, you know, explicit to their role or their space. And I think that ungating that opens opportunities. And if you're not sure, then go to my favorite go-to, which is talk customers. get insights. Those are incredibly valuable, so rarely do people share those when they find them.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one thing I want to say too is with this stuff, I don't think it necessarily does go counter to what your manager is doing. It's more like supporting them, right? Like I've done this kind of stuff and then it's helped my manager promote me, right? So it's not necessarily, oh, we'll do this if your manager is like failing you or they, you know, are not the boarding you or they cancel you. It's more like do this because this is going to be an accelerator for yourself, irrespective of your manager. But then also it'll be an accelerator for your manager and supporting you because one of the things that you know that comes into play a lot when managers are figuring out promotions and doing those things is like they'll sit in a room off on calibrations and you know with a bunch of people and it makes it a lot easier when those people have had some kind of access or exposure or whatever to you in a positive light. So these things can all run with your manager and not against, but it's just another way of you kind of take.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone that can do that. I'm actively working on it. So share that. Go to your general Slack channel or whatever and just be like, hey, just run up some tips for how to do it, you know, some ways that I am good at this and those kinds of things can really go a long way towards people starting to view you as, you know, an SME and not just the space that you're in, but in sort of broader areas. And I can always present an open doors for you when other people are sort of looking up to you and seeing you someone who's strong in ways outside of just the role that you're in.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that's the most easily actual because to do all of our jobs, we need to know customers, we need to know about customer insights, product we need to know. But then also customer facing teams, especially those that want to crack into product, your insights are extremely valuable. You're talking to customers every day. You know more about their problems and their pain than a lot of other people do. And so, you know, that is by far and away to me the most powerful and accessible one by anyone in any role in any space. But, you know, I'll also say that, you know, that broader concept of just, hey, like there's things that you know and things of value that you know that others can benefit from at your company and building your brand as someone that is supportive, smart, creative, able to solve problems, make sure that you're sharing that, right? And so, you know, maybe you're really freaking good at communicating with brevity. I talk at that, by the way. So like more powerful.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The seventh hire at Twilio and got to like number three on that spreadsheet or whatever, who was really close there. So you'll be like, yeah, like we desperately need this. I'm seeing this. He led a website. He basically created the Twilio brand. And he led all the website stuff. And he's like, yeah, we definitely need this. So not only did I have that kind of little bit of trust right from the executive team, but I also had folks who were just trusted on their own, advocating and supporting this that I was doing. And so it was approved with like almost very easily, I mean, I put stuff together for it, but it was, you know, kind of the meeting before the meeting had already been done by those other things. So it helped me create the growth, engineering growth product team at Twilium.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Easy, it is not your data that I have, the information that I have, and I think that we need to start a growth team here, and that needs to be a core focus. And I was able to bring in really critical, you know, kind of partner to that and other folks who could support that because I built up some of that trust. So by the time I was making that pitch.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this is in like a few months with me joining. I was doing this. And then that turned into, hey, you should like host a quarterly voice to the customer session for all of the product, right? And this was a request that was coming from some of the senior leaders of the company. And when Jeff Lawson or CEO at the time heard about it, he started attending too. Now in the session, I started pulling in other people's insights too, right? Because these were, you know, now that a forum for this, I could kind of do that. And have people send that to me and I could compile it and all of these things. And so then, you know, this kind of established me as that person who knows about the customer, even after a short tenure. And then, you know, when, you know, came time to do annual planning that year and I joined in 2014 at the end. So this is 2015, I pitched this idea, hey, we think that it is.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top three things about Toledo that we were really trying to get out of the brand. We're so easy. Developers love us. They say we're so easy. And there's always like, there were tweets coming all the time, like, you know, developers saying like, oh my gosh, like they got started in a couple minutes. So there's all these things that kind of made that compound and made that conviction stick. But as I was talking to customers, I was hearing a very different story and it made sense as we were penetrating new markets, adding more products. We were adding complexity and we were pulling in folks who were a little bit less motivated and those things contributed to people saying this is difficult. And so at the time, this wasn't a 50 person where I could just kind of go to the floor and like go to someone and be like, hey, like this thing I heard about like I think we should do something about it. But there was another tactic that I could take. And this is I just started sharing Voice of the Customer report. I started sharing my insights, started writing it down and just sharing them and it became this kind of digest. And eventually people are like, hey, can I share with me? Can you share with me? Can you get on your list? Can you share with me?”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, I joined. When I joined Twila, there was no growth team at all, like not even a breath of it. I joined in product marketing, and I was leading our product marketing for messaging lines. But I followed the same guy that I just mentioned. I made it my own kind of personal policy to like, hey, I'm going to do my job. And I'm like, do well keep notes of things I'm doing well and all that kind of stuff because it's good, but I'm also going to get to know our customers. And I'm going to get to know our customers really well. I'm going to pay attention when I'm connecting with them, not just about the space I'm in, but just broadly what are some of the pain points and things they're articulating that are relevant to the business and what we're trying to get done. And one of the things that came up was that users were struggling and folks were struggling to get started and use Twilio. And that contrasted so deeply to some of the things that our executive team was saying and had high conviction in our company had high conviction, which is a Twili. It was so easy to use. In fact, it was like.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here in a minute. And so it's going to be valuable for you and a valuable tool kind of no matter where you're at in your career. And yeah, that's not always an immediate payoff, but it often does give you a trajectory outside of just your role and just your manager. It gives you something a little bit broader.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, totally. And right. And it's kind of out like almost like building up your individual brand a little bit. And I think one of the most powerful and accessible ways of learning about your customers is always those people at companies who's like, oh, well, you know, I mean, she just knows our customers or he just knows our customers. They just know our customers. Like they just know. It's like, well, hi, they just know. Like, let's ask that person. Let's get their feedback. And those people often have a good amount of kind of, you know, brand recognition and powers in the company and they're often thought of when the company needs to do something new or different or, you know, if someone is, you know, hiring, maybe they're thinking about the person for like a cross team thing. So it's one of the ways that you can kind of build that brand. And again, it's, I think it's a sweet spot because it's something that is very valuable to everyone all the way up to the most senior leaders, which we can talk about.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Work for me there. I'm happy to talk about that too. But the core of that learning was your executive team and executive teams at companies are often very sharp, but the nature of their day-to-day just does not leave them with customers, right? And that means that over time, especially as a company grows, they often lose access to some of the best insights. And, you know, in the heartbeat of the people who they're providing value to, in contrast to folks that are closer to the problem. And so that means that your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing. And there's a lot of those. So especially when they align to North Star metrics, those ones are sort of the powerful ones. That was the way that I grew my career at Phil. And I'm happy to share kind of that.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like they're asking the same thing. I think we should put that online. I think we should make that available so they can just like see it and then buy it because we had an online checkout process. And I was kind of expecting him to be like, oh, well, I know that's important. But, you know, for this and other, like, we need to do it this way. And obviously thought all about it. Kind of thinking like, oh, I'm going to come in like this new person. He's going to help me understand what I'm like missing here. There's like a little bit of that that I was expecting. And he goes, wait, wait, like, tell me more about that. What do you mean? And by the end of the conversation He was like, wait, why don't you like go do that? Why don't you go build that like experience? Why don't you put that stuff on a self-serve flow? And we called it e-commerce manager. And it was like kind of growth before this growth. This is like 2010. And that moved me into a totally new position. And the main learning that I had from that was, which really kind of took life at Twilio and I absolutely.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Real job. And bandwidth is now a public company, and they've done all kinds of crazy, amazing things. But I joined anyone who was just 50 people and I actually joined in sales. And I was just hungry to kind of make it succeed and grow and bright eyes, everything, first kind of real job. But I realized after a few months of being in sales that I was often like repeating the same thing over again, like using the same thing to sell over and over again. It's like, gosh, like this isn't ideal for the customer because I'm going to call me and ask me these questions and wait and get these answers and all this stuff. And it's ideal for the company because they're like paying commission on this every time. Like, that's not going to be efficient for our growth. And because we were small, I was able to catch our GM and I was just like, hey, you know, I've noticed this pattern where like I'm repeating things kind of over and over again. And”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then often that perception can sometimes be a little bit in contrast to what your perception is, right? And also other things that happen. Like, your manager leaves and then you kind of have to restart with someone else, right? So the method that I use kind of tries to take that power back a little bit. And something that I learned really early on in my career is very lucky to learn by accident was at a company called Bandwidth, which is like my first kind of”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Career growth is often right, like it's definitely not a straight lineup. But there's definitely some kind of frameworks and methods that have worked really well for me. And I think to dive into it, it's first good to just talk about the one that I most typically see people use to try to grow their career and why that can be a little problematic, which is that I see most people are try to work really hard at kind of the job that they have, right? Within the role that they have at a company, do whatever you can to grow there, show your manager all these things. I see people keep spreadsheets. It sort of wins. It's going to come up with performance reviews. You know, maybe you try to get better advocating for yourself, maybe try to get peers to notice or your manager's peers. And that's all good. Like it's all good stuff. But the problem with it is that you're limited to what your manager's ability is to advocate for you, to promote you, and you're also limited by the explicit trajectory of your role at that company and where there's room for that or not at the company.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you have, right? It's kind of like on one hand, it's like, oh, very cool. And like one of the OGs, on the other hand, it's like, oh my gosh, like this person's color? Like, that's commercial just to shift. But I'm excited about it for sure.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, I was very proud to crack the top 50. That was like my claim the same because as people like left, right, you kind of like move up, right?”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had that at Twilio, and I got pretty high up there after a while. We had like a stack rank and a spreadsheet. Yeah, but it is funny. So wherever that thing exists in amplitude, I am like right fresh there at the very bottom.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While she's the best, and I'm really happy that she referred me because I'm just stoked to be here. So, thanks for listening to her guidance.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like the dead of the night, and by that I mean like, you know, 7 p.m. or something on, I think it was, I'm pretty sure it was a Friday. We just asked for forgiveness and kind of put these questions into the sign up loan, ran as Navy test with a small group. And I'm fully expecting, okay, this is going to like hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad, you know. And I'm going to be prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting. I was totally geared up. Think of it like written start to write, like the framework for how I wanted to surface this. And we start to get the data for this thing. I'm not getting an improved conversion. Like, there's no personalization, nothing past it, just a questions. It improved conversion by like 5%. Just improved signups. And it's one of those like, what? Like, okay, this is going on here.”
2023-03-09 · Lenny's Podcast · Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source