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

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

“Earlier, more than 90% of use cases our users needs was one generic onboarding to start. And then we could personalize from there. When we started to personalize, Generally, we found Bucketing customers by their learning style and their building style was more effective than more classic segmentation. Like, do you work in marketing? Do you work in product management? Do you work in operation? The reason for this is that there are many different types of building or workflows that are possible in Airtable. Some are sophisticated for use at work. Some are simple for use at work. Some are somewhere in between and are for a hobby use case or a consulting use case. And knowing how someone would go about building was more effective than what do you actually want to see on the other side. This means that something like a template, which can give you an example of how to build a use case for project management, can be helpful for inspiration, but might not actually be the best way to teach you how to use a product like Airtable when instead we could learn that you're someone who”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. So at the very, very beginning, we sort of said new users broadly need help. Who are they? What do we know about them? How can we help them? And we spoke to a bunch of customers and also watched them get started and looked for patterns in behavior and also clusters. So someone who is familiar with databases, somewhat technical, and prefers to and has experience in building things might have a different need from onboarding than someone who is exploring a tool that was recommended to them for project management. And with that in mind, there were some clear segments of personas or buckets of users that we could split out to give different experiences. Now that said, when we rolled out the guided onboarding wizard, it was actually just one generic onboarding that was one size fits all. And while escape patches are great, we felt like we could solve, as I think I referenced.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which gives me confidence that it is transferable beyond Airtable and that there's probably something to it. That's definitely a big learning. And then, you know, I think one other big learning for us was that we had to meet users where they are. We have some awesome advanced features of really cool stuff you can do with Airtable, automations being a great example. However, Users don't necessarily need to get that started on day one. They don't need to learn about the advanced stuff when they haven't even looked at a workflow before. So we really worked hard to prioritize what the user actually needed and to consider what was necessary education versus what could be ongoing education and building it up.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there is something to be said for reducing reliance on tooltips, but I'm not sure I would go so far as to say the tooltip is dead. As much as I maybe would like to because there are too many of them out there. The reason for this is that I do believe Airtable's customers had a very specific need, which was that the effort required to build basic scaffolding was too much and they needed more support, guardrails, bumpers to help them through that. And this kind of guided or immersive wizard was the best mechanism we could come up with to reduce that effort required and to make it them feel more supported in their journey. I'm not sure that this pattern is one that works for every product. I think it's one that works well for a complicated product where figuring out where to go next and how to get started is actually very challenging or has a high cognitive load. So I would keep that in mind. But in this case, it did work really well for us. I have seen some other products in the wild adopt similar patterns.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. Imagine being in a step by step guide where you are asked questions. Example, pick which kind of project you're working on. Pick what kinds of things you'd like to track for this project. And then as you select from beautiful, easy to click buttons that require very little work on your part, something is visualized for you on the right half of the screen. So you can see your workflow visually come to light as you do the work on the left half of the screen and all of this is done for you in a very guided and instructive way.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the guided onboarding wizard, which is the immersive wizard that helps you figure out how to get started, was the most impactful thing we did.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's awesome. I would say celebrate any clear statistical significant improvement in activation rate. It's a big victory and credit goes to the team that really spent many, many hours with customers and designing precisely to build something that could have that big of an impact. I think it speaks to the importance of really understanding what a user needs to be onboarded well, which is not the same as what your business wants the user to be onboarded to. delineating those and building carefully is really what made it successful.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were working on activation for. A few years before I arrived at Airtable, there was already an awesome activation team hard at work. Overall, are the investments we made in onboarding over about a six to eight month period that included the wizard, the mole with ongoing education, and also some personalization together drove a 20% lift in activation rate for Airtable.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The first piece. We also then introduced some personalization to use case on top of that. So instead of helping you build something generic, having you build some something that's relevant to you. And then we also worked on ongoing education. So once you're in a workflow, once you've built something, how do we help you level it up to go from a beginner to intermediate to advanced? And one funny anecdote about this is that we actually called that project the mole M-O-L-E because the design pattern in product looks like a mole. It pops up from the bottom of the screen and gives you tips as you're exploring. There are some of the biggest changes we made. We did retire a bunch of our tooltips, which were a big part of onboarding for a really long time. So happy to chat more about that. And then also did a bunch of To what we did”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We could talk about onboarding all day. This is my favorite things to chat about recently. So we did have a wonderful activation team rebuild Airtable's onboarding flow over the past 12 to 18 months. This included many projects, including several big ones. So what you've probably experienced if you signed up for Airtable recently or what you might experience if you create a new account soon is we'd built an immersive wizard that we called guided onboarding that helped guide you through setting up your first workflow on Airtable and in doing that reduced the cognitive load of getting started, helped you make more progress faster and created scaffolding that more than 90% of customers would benefit from to be able to get up and running on a product that's pretty complicated.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I definitely agree. It depends, of course, on the shape of business, not every business should prioritize onboarding first. But if you have some sort of self serve element of your product, if someone can give your product a try, maybe you have a playground or a sandbox demo, if there is a freemium element to your pricing scheme, if you maybe offer things totally for free and don't even have monetization yet, onboarding is that first really important choke point, that from which downstream of onboarding so many important metrics and results flow for the business from converting someone to a paid customer to closing a deal to growing, how many people in an organization are using your product. So all of that really comes back to onboarding and you can get that right. Lots of good things will follow.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it does. And it also cannot be an excuse for rigor around building well and being precise in what customers need. But overall, if you can be a results-oriented organization that just wants to do the right thing and move with urgency, then in my opinion that's the way that you can have the most impact.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rate from folks who signed up, it would be net good for customers who were using forms and who were submitting them. So we did roll that one out without an A-B test. It did have a big enough impact on our signup metrics that we saw at top line and didn't need the A-B test to see what was happening. And we also were able to use attribution to make some analysis possible after we rolled it out so we could learn from what was happening to the base afterward.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly So something we noticed is that there was a gap in feature parity for Airtable forms, where the submitter could not request a copy of their submission. So I might send my t-shirt size to Lenny for a form around ordering swag for the company, and then I might want to remember which t-shirt size that I ordered and get a copy of that in my email. We created that feature, which as a result was gated on creating an account with Airtable. And we just turned it on and wanted to see what would happen because we knew from rigor of a wonderful product team doing robust customer analysis and also doing the data work that this is something that people wanted, that it was a feature that would bring value to customers, and that even if it didn't move certain metrics like a sign up percentage, even if it might affect the mixture of activation,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Airtable Forms is much like other forms products. You can create a form and then send it to anybody to submit. The people who submit your form don't need to be a user of Airtable.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a feature, a product, really, that Airtable offers called Airtable Forms. It's possible you've used it. I'm not sure if you have, but”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The business, and whether or not you measure those precisely in an AB test, you still ship them or you didn't. So the rigor around your process was either there or it wasn't. This means, though, that there have to be other ways to motivate, reward, retain, and develop really good talent. So a culture around the impact you had on customers as measured by qualitative feedback or as measured by deals that were closed or deals that weren't lost or other kinds of indicators that you did the right thing for customers is important. And there shouldn't be, especially in engineering within the world of growth, a culture around having to point to numbers to demonstrate your impact because if there is, then the team will bias experiments all the time. And that's not necessarily the right thing for the business. It's a very expensive cost.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It feels to me like that is the default culture, especially as growth teams become organizations and as those organizations grow with companies into growth stage, public company territory and beyond. However, I do think you can build a different culture. And the only way to escape the trap of experimenting everything is to have a very intentional culture about doing right by customers and doing the right thing for the business. A growth team or growth org exists in service and”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More time with customers, be more rigorous in understanding precisely what problem you're solving. Get mocks in front of people and see how they react and hopefully have more conviction than you otherwise would when you ship something that it's okay if every customer sees it tomorrow and that the experiment doesn't actually matter as much.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes you don't need to experiment. Sometimes if the business, you know, let's say activation, right, activation rates go up 6% versus 7%, that precision actually doesn't help all that much beyond being able to say, in your performance review, hey, I increased activation by 7%. So it also is expensive to have folks on the ground, be it engineers, analysts, product managers, spending time understanding the results of an experiment that could otherwise be spent on roadmapping, on foundational analysis, on shipping things. So experiments can be expensive. So with all that said, generally my advice is to experiment when you need to and to primarily see it as a risk mitigation tactic when you're making dramatic changes and to let the product development process do more work.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that there's generally two reasons why Egrosim wants to experiment, and one of them To understand more precisely the metric impact of what they're building and what they're putting in front of customers. And the other is risk mitigation, where you're making so many big, dramatic changes that there's some risk that while this could be really great for the business, it could also be really bad. And it would be good to understand that before everybody's experiencing that in production. So with that framework in mind,”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so experimentation is a really big part, growth hacking culture, PLG culture, gross marketing culture, any kind of growth, at least in my sphere. And sometimes teams can be really, really dependent on experimentation when trying to grow a business. A great example of this would be consumer growth at scale. Think your classic big social company. I worked at one of them. I am a former employee of Meta back when it was called Facebook. And when you're at scale trying to grow a social app, experimenting can feel second nature. It can feel like a necessary step in your product development process that you want to drive more signups or you want to drive better activation with new customers so you change some buttons, change a design, and A-B test it, and then see if numbers go up or down and then make your ship decision based on that.”
2023-02-12 · Lenny's Podcast · Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe 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