YouSaid · the spoken record

Lauryn Isford

lines on the record: 73
first: 2023-02-12
most recent: 2023-02-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You all can find me on Twitter. I'm at Lauren Isford. I love hearing about how folks with all different kinds of cool products are thinking about growth in general. I find all of us are better at growing businesses when we study the awesome winds and learnings of others. So please, my DMs are open. Send me cool things you're working on. I'd love to learn about it.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There was a great embedded view, which is the internal term, for when you put Airtable on your website in an embedded way so people can check out cool stuff. Related to finding COVID vaccine when they came out, which was really awesome. I also appreciated that a similar use of Airtable has become quite popular this year in support of facilitating folks who've been laid off to help them find new opportunities.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm looking for someone to help me understand how they define impact and what it means to them. I think a good answer for growth practitioner is intrinsic motivation about having an impact on the business.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like the white lotus season two. White Lotus was very fun to watch. I also, on the movie front, am in a habit of watching Best Picture nominees every year. And last year there were a couple movies I really enjoyed. One of them was Belfast.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right of a lifetime by Bob Eiger. I give this to new reports on my team. Great book to read when you're thinking about your leadership style and rocketman. Really fun story. I love a good story about ambition and achieving awesome things.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More important than it is in B2C growth. So we'll see what happens. I'm really excited to see more folks who have given growth a try in B2C or in consumer spaces try applying it to B2B because it will become increasingly common in the industry”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can experiment at large volumes, or you can make changes that impact thousands or millions of people pretty easily. In B2B growth, generally you're working with a much smaller set of customers, and also the risk profile can be very different because smaller numbers of customers that represent larger percentages of your company's total revenue must be treated with absolute care, as opposed to a world where you might have millions of folks coming through your product every day and small changes might not have as big of an impact in an enterprise organization. It's important to be very careful and rigorous in to prioritize that customer's needs all the time. This means that rigor, that customer conversations, that beta testing, that live prototypes and demos are significantly more important and that FaceTime with the customer is significant.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the playbook hasn't been written the same way that B2C growth or consumer social growth has been. It's a new space. And there are quite a few companies that are really excited about exploring B2B growth and how to apply the DNA and the mechanics of a growth organization to more of that B2B motion or to working with more upmarket customers or enterprise customers. So it's very top of mind for me. It's an active conversation in the growth community, especially in San Francisco. And overall, I'm really excited to see what we can do by applying this approach to growing businesses, to new types of businesses. It will require some differences in execution model. So in B2C or in consumer social as to example,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in general, they were most thematically aligned with that upgrade step of the funnel. One area that is more emerging that's interesting is expand. So when we got started on Airtable Growth, we didn't have a team dedicated to that expand piece. And it became increasingly interesting to us over time as we started to notice that larger companies were using the product. This meant that there was a bigger opportunity than there had been before to really help drive expansion and get more folks using the product in those accounts. That's an area that emerged later that's a really good example of revisiting your priors and being resilient or agile in your org structure because it wasn't something we set out to work on initially, but it became a really clear opportunity later.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had what I think is a pretty Relevant set of teams if you're thinking about building out a few in your own product or organization that focuses on sort of a PLG shape of business. We had one team working on acquisition and they were really responsible for the join. So they mapped actually really well to this funnel. One team working on activation and they mapped pretty closely to evaluate. It wasn't a full representation of what's possible in evaluate. We were pretty focused on the self-serve business and that was different than, for example, helping an enterprise customer evaluate the right offering for them. But that activation team was most closely tied to that second step in the funnel. And then we had a monetization team that worked on monetization and pricing. And they mapped really closely to the upgrade part of the funnel. They did touch some other things as well. So they worked on turn prevention and downgrades. They worked on some billing related projects.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also, you can derive from it more specifically what are the opportunities that are relevant to us with this framework in mind and then revisit it over time to gut check if you feel like maybe what you're investing in now is a bit outdated and needs a refresh or if there are other pockets of the business that need more attention that you might be able to work.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this framework is a step too abstract to represent exactly how you should structure your teams or to be represented with your metrics or KPIs. However, it's a really good conceptual way of grounding your team or your organization in the mechanics of how the machine that is the business you work on runs. And from there, it can become much easier to communicate with each other on where you see opportunity, on specific pockets of the product that might be impactful. So, for example, you might be working on a strategy related to landing pages and be able to name that that's going to help drive joins in new organizations. And that's a really awesome way to communicate why you might invest there versus investing in something related to onboarding that would help with evaluate. So I love this framework because it helps everyone communicate clearly.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that expansion drives net dollar retention. It drives brand awareness. It drives more usage in more pockets of the company. It is awesome for renewal rates if you're working with enterprise contracts and ultimately then also brings new referrals into the product that loop all the way back to the beginning at joint.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next is upgrade. Ideally, someone has gone from beginner to intermediate or even advanced in their ongoing education and in getting to know your product over some amount of time. And they see premium value and raise their hand and say, I will convert to it. Now, if you offer self-serve premium plants, that's awesome. They can do it with a credit card right in the product. Sometimes this means raising their hand to talk to sales, and that's great too. they upgrade to some sort of premium experience or to more value than what they had when they got started. And finally, expand. In vertical sales, this can be nuanced, but with more horizontal tools, ideally a few folks, maybe one, maybe a few, are using a tool in an organization, and then many more adopt it over time.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This funnel represents the journey of a customer in a PLG product as they advance and develop in their lifetime of using the product. It starts with becoming a part of the account that's using the product or signing up. And you might join because you found Airtable on Twitter, or you might join because Lenny invited you to use Airtable. So there are different ways that you can join that product in the first place. Then importantly, you evaluate if it's right for you. And that word choice of evaluate is To see that they are going to get the value that they want in using your product and in building a habit around it.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about how to grow With PLG in a business that has some element of PLG self-server fremium, I usually start with a funnel that roughly maps to the same scaffolding regardless of business. Whether I've worked on the business, whether I'm supporting the business as an advisor, I love starting with this framework. The first step is join The second is evaluate. The third is upgrade, and the fourth is expand.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should always be thinking about whether you are a data analyst in functional specialty or a PM or an engineer or a designer. So that's how I kind of like to think about it. I do think guardrail metrics help. And then just being well reasoned and thinking about what's best for the business and speaking about your work as being what's best for the business and the customer overall rather than being too narrow in your own swim lanes of what you work on.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think North Star Metrics help? Because a team can be singularly focused on the most important result for their roadmap and their charter. However, guardrail metrics are equally important. So an onboarding team that builds amazing onboarding that causes a 10% drop in revenue would need some sort of guardrail to make sure that they knew that that might not be the right trade for the business. And importantly should have the rigor and passion to go deep and understand what caused that drop in revenue and figure out what it was about that onboarding that ultimately caused a guardrail metric to suffer. So with that in mind, I think guardrail metrics can be very useful and are important to choose wisely. I love working with strong analytics partners on a growth team because rigor and education around how to think about Guardrail metrics is something that”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe automations to use the same example of the same feature is something that's generally premium. That if somebody uses automations, they're more likely to be a paying customer. It can be tempting then for an onboarding team to try to push automations to people when they're getting started, because of course we'd prefer if customers use premium features because then they might be more likely to become premium customers. But that is not in the best interest of educating a user on how to get started. So I do think it's very important to be careful that you are rooted in the customer need and rooted in helping that customer achieve maximum value rather than sitting in the priors of what your packaging scheme might suggest or what might be in the best interest of the company.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, there was one other suggestion, which is if you're working on a SaaS product, especially a freemium product, there's probably some pricing and packaging scheme that explains which features are available for free, which features are not, how many you get, and sort of maps out usage of the product, both for free users if you offer a free plant and then for premium users if you offer premium plants. I find sometimes teams working on onboarding will map onboarding to that pricing or packaging. So for example,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. There's also an element here of segmentation or personalization where you should be sensible about if everybody needs to know what anonymation is or if there are only certain folks who actually need to learn about it and others might not need to know”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So instead of that, I think what would be more useful given the constraints of using a tooltip that's pushing someone to try an automation would be to explain how the automation is relevant to them, or even better, to enable a one-touch turn on of the automation feature, or set up an automation to complete your workflow, where we actually do some of the work. And if you click into here, we will show you what value is possible and help you get it to the finish line. So really focusing on that contextual application. For helping to drive towards an outcome rather than just educating on a name.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do see a very common trap that I would love to caution against, which is that Employees of a company build onboarding for customers, but they build what they think customers want rather than what customers actually want. And that manifests in an onboarding experience that's not very helpful. So there are two patterns that I typically see. One is naming features. So imagine you're using Airtable for the first time and you see a tooltip and it says, this is automations. And it explains what automations is to you. That's not that useful for a user who doesn't really know what's going on yet because they aren't sure automations are relevant to them if they're suited to their use case, what exactly the word automation entails. We've named a feature, but it's really sort of an announcement of something awesome that Airtable built rather than an application that can help educate the user on how they'll receive more value from that feature.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I think the key is to figure out. What it would be like for someone to experience value when there's no human sitting next to them. And that value doesn't have to be full functionality of the product.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contracts with a couple really large Fortune 500 companies and somebody wants to join and signs up on your website from the same email domain, then you can provide an experience for them that might feel like it helps them learn the mechanics. That's actually only available to folks who are part of organizations that already have contracts with you. It's a different way of thinking about PLG and not necessarily something you would offer for free. You know, they're already an enterprise customer. Some of those concepts can still have a lot of value and help you grow the footprint of an accountant and an organization. And those are definitely awesome things to try if you can't offer something self-served.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If that's not possible, there aren't different ways to be creative that don't require having freemium pricing. You can think about how to use concepts related to PLG and related to topophennel adoption in different ways. So maybe you can create custom landing pages or experiences that help showcase value without a full signup or free plan or free trial experience. Maybe you give folks the ability to sign up. And while they've sort of signed up as an interested customer, they're not fully experiencing things. They might not even have the option to pay for something yet, but they can learn. There's some resources. There's some education for them to experience. Or maybe you can think about top of funnel adoption or traffic as being most helpful for expansion within customers you already have. So if you've”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do really agree with what Elena said. I really look forward to the day when self serving Freem are possible for every product, but I also recognize that that can be really expensive to build and implement and is not for everyone. So that's cool too. There are other options. In general, I think freemium and also free triangles tend to be most effective when there's something that the person who signed up can actually do on their own without being handheld. It doesn't have to be full functionality. It can be exploring a sandbox or a demo or something they can poke around in and, you know, experience value, see that aha moment. That's great. That's a moment where you can give value to that person who's chosen to spend time with your product.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of that, you can offer a free trial to show what's possible with premium value, and then that really can just be focused space for you to say, hey, look what's possible if you pay us $5 a month, $10 a month. And you might even get some extra conversion out of that and some more paid customers. So in general, that's how I think about it. I like the refirst trial because user growth is important. And if you're in a long game where you're trying to grow a business for a decade or more, ideally you're trying to get millions of people onto your product and you can always have that monetization conversation later, but you only get a couple moments where you can say, hey, pull out your credit card or let's get on the phone and talk about an enterprise contract with a customer before you lose trust or lose patience. And so that focus on helping them discover value and build loyalty to you is much more important.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Case a freemium pricing structure can be really great for your product and give you the space to see if your product can become that household name that everybody is familiar with and can give it a try and get some early value and even experience some aha moments.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advanced offerings that could be possible if they decide they want to settle on a premium plan. When you are deciding if this is something you want to do, I would actually take a big step back from looking at competitive pricing pages and getting into the details and reading blogs and just think about what your philosophy is as a business on monetizing customers. The reason for this is generally the reason to offer a free plan or a free trial, but really a free plan, the freemium type of pricing model, is if you value letting millions, tens of millions of customers give your product a try even if they never pay you a dollar. That shows to me prioritization and value of user growth, brand awareness, and exposure of your product more than just revenue. And if that's the case,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personally, I'm in the camp of offering a reverse trial. Funky name, but what that means is offer a trial? But also offer freemium, do both. And the reason why I like this is you get an opportunity when somebody shows up and says, hey, I'm going to give your product a try today to show them everything that's possible. Onboarding is a huge component of that. Help somebody get started. Have those aha moments and experience initial value. But also, this is your moment to showcase everything that can be done with your really cool product and you have some limited number of days, maybe seven days, 14 days, 30 days, to showcase all of the cool things that your company is building for your customers. That is the beauty of a free triangle. It's not just that someone can try your product without paying. It's that they can try even more of the product, all of the premium, amazing advantage.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What is it about all these growth people with their strong opinions? I guess I have so many of them. You're educating me on my own perspectives today. Freemium and free trial. So to get on the same page with definitions for all of our wonderful listeners, a free trial is when you can use the product for free for a limited time, and then your only option beyond that limited time is to pay for use of the product. Freem would be when there are multiple options for how to use the product, and one of those options is an infinitely free version of the product. So you can use Airtable for free forever, or you can pay some amount and have access to premium features. So with all that in mind,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest opportunity is to chase, and you can literally draw a funnel on a whiteboard and map it out and brainstorm together, do some analysis on the side. And when you see what opportunity feels like the most important thing to chase, try to build a North Star metric that reflects the output of that work rather than drives all of your decision making from the beginning. A North Star metric should really be a measure of what you plan to do, the strategy you plan to deliver is delivering results for the business on the other side rather than the other way around.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In general, I would say having stability in North Star metric for at least six months feels like table steaks to me. And that's for the reasons that I cited before, for building momentum, for building domain expertise, and also for compounding impact in areas where you see success, where you notice growth flywheels that you can optimize. However, if you're reaching a point where that North Star metric feels like it's old news, maybe you're outgrowing it, maybe you want to work on different things. I think that's great. Be open-minded about changing it up. I would generally try to start with the mechanics of the business and what you think you might be able to drive in terms of metric impact with the resources you have on your growth team. That can look different for every growth team because some of them have marketing, some are more product and engineering, some are kind of a mix of both or even something different than that. So I would start with what impact do we think we could have? Where do we think?”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Means that often in a PLG company, there's some ideal end goal of handing off certain customers to have a sales conversation or to close an enterprise contract. In that case, you might actually prefer to delay revenue for months or quarters or years to manifest it later. And when that's the case, your growth team should be fully aligned in lockstep with sales and with go-to-market team, focusing on user growth is actually the right call. So that's an example of a big pivot that we made. And in doing that, we felt more strategic clarity and were able to move faster.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this for us was a really important moment where we decided that it was most essential in our work to grow the business, to bring millions more people onto the platform using the product and finding value in the product because we were taking a decades long view that they could always become monetized or converted customers later. And there wasn't really a rush. We felt that focusing on revenue led us to make some decisions that were a bit more short-term oriented than would be ideal. There's also a dynamic here where in the world of enterprise SaaS, the world of B2B SaaS, there's a new theme called product-led sales that's very hot right now.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've gone through plenty of times. We actually, at the organizational level, on the Airtable Growth Award, changed our North Star metric a couple times, which is a big deal that manifests for several teams. Roughly the arc of that change for us was shifting from being a growth org focused on revenue to a growth org focused on user growth and customer growth.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Team activation looks really healthy because your growth team did some really amazing work on it. Maybe user retention is the right place to focus next year. Maybe it's more about conversion. Maybe it's more about some other signal for long-term retention. And I would be open to being dynamic and changing that metric over time. Stability in metric is great. It helps with momentum. It helps with building expertise. But sometimes we overfocus on picking the perfect North Star metric. And by the time you feel like you found the perfect one, it's actually time to move on to something different and work on a different opportunity.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this means that North Stars, Kimetrics, focus metrics will change. And if you're working on the same metric forever, there's probably some inefficiency in actually chasing the biggest impact for the business. So I would be open-minded about if a workspace or team or account activation metric is always the right thing to focus on.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really like this question. I agree it is a great debate. I'm not sure there's a clear answer because it does depend on your product. In the case of Airtable, which is a product that has seat-based pricing and generally horizontal adoption, it totally makes sense to have a workspace activation metric because you want to understand in an account in an organization how many folks are actually using a product and finding value. That can be different for tools that might look like Airtable but have different mechanisms for growth or different pricing or different vertical personas that tend to adopt it. So I do think there is some variance. I do have a reaction to share with you that's a little spicy. Is that it's important that growth teams are agile.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. It also helped us grapple with some of the tensions we felt, which I know a lot of teams working on activation and onboarding feel, which is picking one metric doesn't paint the whole picture of what you're trying to achieve when you help a user onboard. Educate them about what's possible. So, in having sophistication and retention and an element of team use, all as part of the fabric of how we talked about activation, it made us much more well-rounded as a team.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Built was actually not any more impressive than if they had done it on their own. So this group of metrics actually really set us free. It gave us those constraints where we could actually measure success in a few different ways and think about activation as being more complicated than just a single metric and celebrate anything we could do to help on a couple of dimensions. So I know it's a little unconventional to have a few metrics that you work with, but we did find that that was really helpful when we were making big changes.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our activation rate metric week for multi user active to make all of our decisions, we introduced a few more. And one of them was purely a retention metric for an individual. Are you week two retained? Are you weak four retained? The other was what we called build with a capital B. And this was roughly a sophistication score. So for someone who's building something, have they reached sort of intermediate levels of use of Airtable? The reason why we added these metrics is we were building new mechanisms for onboarding that were helping users build more effectively and find more value in Airtable, but sometimes those treatments helped users become more sophisticated but didn't help them invite more teammates. Or sometimes those new mechanisms made someone more interested in giving this a shot for a few more weeks.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. So, one of the first things that we did when Me and my team started to revisit week four multi user active right before we started to rebuild onboarding is break that metric down into all of its components. So if you really think about what goes into that number, how many teams sign up as a team versus as an individual? How many of them make it to week four? How many of them have more than two people invited versus more than two people who've ever been active versus more than two people who were active in the fourth week? Maybe they have one person active in the fourth week. And then what does active mean? And what are the different kinds of behaviors that constitute contribution or being active? Doing that really detailed work on the metric helped us understand what levers we could pull to have a really big impact on activation overall. Additionally, we actually started using more metrics. So we didn't just use”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a rough idea. Of course, the metric should be correlated with retention no matter what. But if 40% of your customers are still active at week four, maybe with a metric that would be week four active rate. Only a fraction of those are still going to be active in month 12 and month 18 and month 24. And I would much prefer to pick a more specific, more precise metric that maybe only 5% of users reach, but know that those 5% of users will be with us for the long haul. And if we could get that 5% even to 6% or 7%, it would have huge downstream effects on long-term metrics for the business. So that's why I would opt for a more specific metric.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“High bar. So it requires a number of things to be true that something of substance has been built, that people persist and continue to collaborate, that they're collaborating on a weekly cadence, and also holds a relatively high bar on exactly how they're contributing, meaning that the sum total of this is somewhat hard to achieve, which means that we have a hard job and also a high bar as an activation team to achieve that for as many customers as possible. In general, I think an activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range may be for most companies 5 to 15 percent is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so overall, every growth team needs a North Star metric. It's so important to have singular focus on what the business results are that you are working to drive in your team. On our activation team, which, as I mentioned focused on onboarding, though in theory there could be other ways that you want to focus on driving activation, we had one North Star metric, which was what we called our team activation metric. So this represented a team of people were activated on Airtable's product and using it in a way that suggested they would be long-term retained. And for us, that was week four, multi-user active, meaning in the fourth week, more than one person on that team is active and contributing to a workflow on Airtable. This metric is something that our wonderful analytics team determined to be highly correlated with long-term retention. It's also a metric that holds a relatively”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much low hanging fruit there is to personalize and segment that onboarding experience in so many products that are out there, you just need to be really detail oriented and precise on who you're working with.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had a really awesome research team that From our production experience and away from individual projects. So we had a really robust read going in to the project of who these different personas were, different building types, different learning types. That said, we do also ask folks when they sign up some questions and depending on who you are or what we might think we know about you or want to know about you. We might ask you different questions and that's the service of helping you get started. big ideas for how we might you know bring this to life even further that might come to life in the future, such as if somebody's there to just help out, if there may be a teammate rather than a builder, if they're just there to work with someone else because they, you know, Lenny invited Lauren to work on Airtable because he needs Lauren to do something or update a sprint, whatever, Lauren needs really different onboarding than Lenny. So actually getting that data in the flow is really useful because then we can route customers to a fully different experience. And it's amazing how.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needs more familiarity with databases and to be able to get to the next level, or who might need a more visual learning experience instead of a more data forward learning experience. So we tried to segment the experience that way and found that that yielded better results on activation than some of the more traditional segments.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source