Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude)

Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career

Lenny Rachitsky

Technology, Business, Entrepreneurship

5 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2023

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Brought to you by Public—Invest in stocks, treasuries, crypto, and more | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments | Writer—Generative AI for the enterprise

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Laura Schaffer is the brand-new VP of Growth at Amplitude. Prior to this role, she spent over 10 years leading product management and growth teams at Twilio, Bandwidth, and Rapid. In today’s episode, we talk about the role of experimentation and data in growth, and Laura shares stories of big wins from her time leading growth teams. She explains how customer insights helped her uplevel her career and how she (surprisingly) thinks about qualitative versus quantitative data. We wrap up our conversation by discussing where the best ideas come from and what you need to know if you’re selling to developers.

Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/career-frameworks-ab-testing-mistakes-counterintuitive-onboarding-tips-selling-to-developers-laura-schaffer-vp-of-growth-at-amplitude/#transcript

Where to find Laura Schaffer:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraschaffer/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

Referenced:

• Elena Verna on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/elena-verna-on-how-b2b-growth-is-changing-product-led-growth-product-led-sales-why-you-should-go-freemium-not-trial-what-features-to-make-free-and-much-more/

• Bandwidth: https://www.bandwidth.com/

• Twilio: https://ahoy.twilio.com/

• Jeff Lawson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/

• The Surprising Power of Online Experiments: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-surprising-power-of-online-experiments

• Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/

• Online Experimentation at Microsoft: https://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/ExPThinkWeek2009Public.pdf

• The Simple Path to Wealth: Your Road Map to Financial Independence and a Rich, Free Life: https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Path-Wealth-financial-independence/dp/1533667926

• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones: https://www.amazon.com/Atomic-Habits-Proven-Build-Break/dp/0735211299/

• James Clear on The Tim Ferriss Show: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/648-james-clear-atomic-habits-simple-strategies-for/id863897795?i=1000592431628

• The Great British Baking Show on PBS: https://www.pbs.org/food/shows/great-british-baking-show/

• Hotjar: https://www.hotjar.com/

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Builder: https://www.builder.io/

• ChatGPT: https://chat.openai.com/

• Lenny Bot: https://www.lennybot.com/

• Segment: https://segment.com/

• Senior Growth PM, Monetization, at Amplitude: https://boards.greenhouse.io/amplitude/jobs/6636704002

• Lead Growth PM at Builder: https://boards.greenhouse.io/builder/jobs/4814755004?gh_src=30cfda2d4us

• Growth PM at Rapid: https://jobs.lever.co/rapidapi/8d2611d1-6463-4919-9817-31f61e730831

In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Laura’s background

(04:15) How to carve your own career path, and an example from Bandwidth

(05:50) Laura’s career growth framework

(10:18) The value of customer insights

(12:25) The “voice of the customer” report

(16:14) Leaning into your strengths

(18:16) The experiment that shifted the way Laura thinks about friction

(20:20) Questions that improved Twilio’s onboarding and conversion rate

(28:53) Thinking about the psyche of your users

(31:26) The hot dog analogy for burying “scary stuff”

(33:58) Why it’s better to be iterative and why experiments fail

(36:21) Saving money by validating fast

(41:58) Where the best ideas come from

(49:51) Experimentation lessons

(52:54) The amount of time a growth team needs to be successful

(54:43) The big change at Twilio that led to tens of millions of dollars

(58:41) The need for both PLG and enterprise, and how Amplitude plans to tap into PLG

(1:05:42) What it’s like to serve developers

(1:11:16) Lightning round

Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	And like, the dead of the night, I mean, like, you know, 7 PM or something on, I think it was a pretty sure it was a Friday.
0:06.8	We just asked for forgiveness and kind of put these questions into the sign up low and ran as Navy test with a small group.
0:15.9	And you know I'm fully expecting okay this is going to like hurt our numbers but maybe it won't be so bad,
0:20.7	you know and I'm prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting.
0:24.8	And I was totally, you're not thinking with like written, started write, like the framework for
0:28.6	how I wanted to surface this.
0:31.4	And we start to get the data for this thing, I don't like getting an improved conversion.
0:35.4	Like, there's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions,
0:39.7	it improved conversion by like 5%. Like just improved sign-upsups and it's one of those like what like okay
0:46.0	this like what is going on here?
0:50.3	Welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth
0:55.0	experts to learn from their hard-wound experiences building and growing today's
0:58.7	most successful products. Today my guest is Laura Schaefer. The week we recorded this chat turned out to be
1:05.2	Laura's first week in a new gig as head of growth for amplitude taking over for a previous legendary guest Elena Verna.
1:13.2	Prior to amplitude, Laura was VP of product and growth at a company called Rapid.
1:17.0	Before that, she spent over seven years at Twilio as head of growth and PM lead
1:22.0	of the Growth Platform and experimentation platform at Twillio.
1:25.4	In our conversation we dig into Laura's career growth framework and the importance of
1:29.2	carving your own path versus waiting for one to be carved for you. We also get into a bunch of
1:34.3	tactical and surprising advice around running experiments, making decisions on
1:39.1	gut versus data, developing your growth strategy, and how to sell your product to developers.
1:44.4	Laura has a wealth of wisdom, and I learned a lot from our conversation.
	...

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