Morgan Brown (VP of Growth at Shopify, ex Product at Facebook)

Hey everyone, this is Erik Torenberg and you're listening to Execs by On Deck. Execs is a show for founders, operators, and leaders who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks, and tactics that leading tech companies today have used to scale. Our guests are tech execs in key roles at top tech companies who share their hard-won, earned secrets on how to scale faster. Morgan Brown is Vice President of Growth at Shopify. Prior to Shopify, he was Director of Product Management at Facebook and COO of Inma News. In today's episode, Morgan walks through different phases of his career, what he learned from Facebook's product development framework, and how to nail performance marketing.

Hey Morgan, thanks for joining us. We're excited to chat. To kick things off, we'd love to hear a little bit more about your background and if you consider yourself more of a growth marketer or growth product person and why.

Yeah, absolutely. And thanks for having me, guys. I think my career has really been through a few different phases. I got my first job right out of college at a dot-com startup, but I was a failed biology major and so didn't really have a marketing degree.

You know, I didn't go to like Kellogg School of Marketing or have an MBA or that type of thing. And so basically learned what customer acquisition was, you know, in, in the belly of a startup, frankly, and came at it from a very digitally native perspective. And so over the course of my career, I went through several phases, kind of started first learning a lot about digital marketing, customer acquisition.

And then as I did more and more of that, kind of learning what worked and what didn't, a lot of the things that seemed to work really well felt more like product, more like things that you built to acquire customers than ads that you put up, banner ads, or, you know, running, running ads on AltaVista way back in the day. And so Kind of this evolution of, you know, coming from a non-marketing background, but a very kind of hypothesis-led, exploratory, curious background about just what works online kind of led me to this intersection of marketing and product.

So, you know, at Facebook, I was leading a full product team, which included a growth team. At Shopify, I'm on the growth team leading growth marketing, which is focused on performance-based customer acquisition.

And so I think I've kind of carved out this role that kind of straddles both product and marketing, which I think we kind of all call growth now. But that's kind of how I found my way to where I was. It wasn't anything initially intentional, but just started to discover that what worked online was kind of different than what you might read in a marketing textbook.

So kind of followed that curiosity to where I'm at today.

And how would you describe the difference between those 2 areas today at Shopify and how they might work together and also what might separate them?

Yeah, for sure. So Shopify is a wide-ranging business and the marketing at Shopify is decentralized. So we have marketing teams for all different parts of the business. So the shop app or employer brand or audience expansion, these are all different teams, but At Shopify, the growth team is really responsible for the number of merchants that use Shopify to power their online stores.

And so we're really focused on that self-serve business.

And so the growth team has 2 main pillars, growth marketing and growth product.

And then we work in a cross-functional matrixed working model where we share a shared roadmap Shared set of resources against, you know, our objectives, kind of driving that, that audience and that the growth of that part of the business.

So growth marketing is really performance-based customer acquisition, really what we're focused on. Everything from digital advertising, offline advertising, organic SEO, email marketing, international marketing, conversion rate optimization, creative.

And then on the product side, It's engineering, data science, product management, operations, so on and so forth.

And then we're organized, like I mentioned, in what we call missions, but you can kind of think of them as pods or work groups that share a roadmap against the objectives in any given area. So it's a true full-stack growth team. It's a pretty unique setup based on my experience. Sometimes growth is all product or sits in product, or sometimes it's all marketing without a lot of product. And at Shopify, it really is a hybrid org.

It sounds like you went through a lot of scale so far at Shopify. I'm curious, you know, in the growth, especially like from like the team size perspective, how you did it, what you learned from it, and sort of what you're building today.

Yeah, so the Shopify business has been on a tear, and some business models have really benefited from the shift in consumer and business behavior as a result of the pandemic, and some have suffered. And for Shopify, it's definitely been a tailwind. And so as the company has grown, the growth team has also grown, but it originally started off as a pretty small group, mostly focused on marketing.

And when I joined the company about a year and a half ago, with Luke Levesque, who's my boss here.

He was also my boss at Facebook, so we've worked together for a long time, kind of identified a lot of the opportunity for sustaining this incredible growth and accelerating this incredible growth at Shopify was to build out the technical capabilities of the team. So we went from an org that had about 60 marketers to now a team that's about 350 people with 150 of those people being engineers, 65 data scientists, so on and so forth, to really build out the technical capability to continue to scale our customer acquisition and overall growth efforts towards that north star of the number of people being successful on Shopify.

I'm curious, what'd you learn through the process?

Yeah, a ton. So what we learned a lot is that going through this kind of hypergrowth phase where you're kind of doubling every 12 months is you have to just continue to communicate about why you're doing what you're doing, why it's important, where you're heading.

There's a lot of change, a lot of teams being reorganized, a lot of existing systems and capabilities just hitting their breaking point that have to be rebuilt. Different tactics and programs work and don't work at different scales.

And so really being comfortable with change, it's actually one of Shopify's core values is to embrace change.

Tobi Lütke talks a lot about antifragility, as a key principle.

Antifragile's on the reading list here for everyone at Shopify, but kind of embracing that as an advantage and then essentially identifying, okay, where we're headed, make sure everyone knows that and why, what are the milestones to get there, and then getting the right people in the right seats on the bus, to use a— Yeah. Jim Collins Kind of phrase has been really the most important.

And then I think the thing that I personally had to learn the most was just patience. You want to go fast, you want to say things once and then keep moving.

And I think one of the things that I learned a lot going through the process is some of these things just take time, take repetition. You're not going to get things right every time. It is going to be a bit messy. But if you can keep everyone kind of understanding what the North Star is, why you're going where you're going, you can make up for a lot of that along the way.

Knowing what you know now about that growth spurt that you went through, what, if anything, would you do differently next time?

Yeah, it's a good question. I think what I might do differently is spend more time upfront explaining that why and where we're going and really kind of making sure everyone's on the same page there. When you're kind of in the midst of it, there is a reaction to like, hey, we just have to go. We can't wait. Tell people where you're going, why, but then just really get into it.

And actually taking the time to really make sure people are very clear on that and then having regular checkpoints, again, quite frequently to make sure that people understand, yes, this is still where we're going, this is still important, or maybe the thing we thought was important a few months ago is no longer as important.

I think those are probably some of the things that I would've done differently.

Andrew Bosworth from Facebook says, communication is the job. And I think often if you say something once or twice, you kind of feel like the job is done, but that's really not the case, especially in hypergrowth.

And so I think really being a bit more intentional there, I think, is something that I would go back if I had to do it again and spend more time on.

I want to talk a bit about experimentation. How did you— what was your general approach to experimentation and what was your determining factors of how you would evaluate success versus failure?

Yeah, absolutely. So coming from Facebook, experimentation is a huge part of the product development process.

Facebook is known for running thousands and thousands of experiments at any given time, and really understanding how the product evolves and what gets shipped at Facebook really comes down to understanding the impact on the people that use the product, mostly through metrics and user research. And so experimentation for me is a key part of learning.

Also coming from that biology background, just inherently having a hypothesis-led Kind of approach is basically how I think about trying to understand the world.

And so experimentation is a huge part of that.

So when I got to Shopify, the team was running some experiments, but not a ton. And that was the result of just bandwidth.

I kind of mentioned there wasn't really a lot of engineering or data science capability in the growth team when I arrived. So fixing that ability to execute and then just really embracing it as a way to understand what matters most to the people that use Shopify and discover Shopify. And so just building that muscle as an org, and I think we've gone from running 100 experiments a year to 1,000 experiments a year as part of that, and it's helped us up the speed of our learning.

And Alex Schultz, who's the CMO of Facebook, has a famous saying in the building that the companies that learn the fastest grow the fastest. And so we try to embrace that on our team.

What's an example of an early growth experimentation that was successful? And curious how you scaled a successful one. How did you 10x it?

Yeah, so it's a great question. So I think basically the idea with experimentation is not just to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

The idea with experimentation is to understand how the business grows, where the greatest points of leverage in the business are, where the greatest points of friction in the business are, and then run experiments there To see if you can improve and maximize that part of the growth loop, basically. And so the first thing to do is kind of come in and kind of understand how the business grows and what's important to customer acquisition or customer retention or whatever piece of the business you're working on, and then come up with some hypotheses about what's important there and what could be better. And so Some of the early things that we did is Shopify on our customer acquisition side, like many companies, has a pretty healthy paid advertising budget and a lot of digital advertising. And so as we were looking at our paid media spend, one of the best ways that you can improve that is by giving the ad platforms better data to help you do targeting of the right type of customers. And so a lot of the— Early work we did was sending different signals from our platform back to those platforms and finding which ones led to higher conversion rates, higher quality customers. And then in terms of scaling that, you know, you can go from running that in a very small campaign to shipping that to the entire platform, to testing that same concept on additional platforms, to then building the technical infrastructure to do that repeatedly at scale, to constantly be looking for the deeper signals. And so that's one of the journeys we've been on in terms of It's not just like, hey, we're going to A/B test this and A/B test that, but we have these very strong hypotheses about how we can improve our audience targeting and then working systematically through experimentation to scale that to greater and greater impact is— that's one example of the type of work we've done so far.

Segue a little back to your Facebook experience. Why don't you talk about just the differences between how the growth teams were structured at Shopify and Facebook and And why that's important or interesting.

Yeah, for sure. So at Facebook, there's really like 3 types of growth teams. There's the core growth team, which is really responsible for the core metrics and levers towards those metrics in the business. So when most people talk about the Facebook growth team, they're talking about this core team, and they're really responsible for the monthly active users and daily active users of Facebook. And then they have some of the key things that control that. So friending, sign in, sign up, login, all of those types of things fit, notifications all fit in that org.

And so they're really just relentlessly focused on the active use of Facebook.

Then you have, as part of that core growth team, you have a team called product growth, which acts as consultants to the rest of the product orgs in Facebook to help bring some of the growth best practices to those product teams who are trying to drive growth of their own product, like Facebook Groups or Facebook Marketplace, so on and so forth. And then each product team in Facebook has its own growth team. So for example, Marketplace will have, as part of its product team, it will have engineering and product focused on the growth of that product, which is usually About retention and active use of that, whether it's a daily or weekly or whatever the right use case is. And so these 3 growth teams all complement one another where core growth makes sure people are continuing to use Facebook and that active use is going, so all the products that are built in Facebook benefit. Then the product teams themselves are working on improving adoption and retention and use of their products. And the product growth consulting org brings the best practices and wins from all of these different places to bear in each and every product team as an advisor to help product managers figure out the right types of experiments to run on their surfaces. And so it's a very robust— I mean, Facebook has basically defined what growth means for digital products for the last decade. So it's a very robust and evolved system. Companies like Shopify, have evolved from, hey, they have a product org and a marketing org and have been separate, and then identifying that some of the best opportunities going forward for the stage that Shopify's in is to work in the middle between those 2 realms where things like starting your Shopify store, signing up for Shopify, internationalizing or localizing the product, and the early experiences in the product to different locales has a lot of leverage. And so it's evolved from just a pure marketing org to one that has the engineering capability to work on those surfaces and those parts of the code base to find wins.

So I think it comes down to a stage thing and then what is the main problem the teams are trying to solve?

Facebook has less of a customer acquisition problem than an earlier stage company, and so the resources and the focus is shifted accordingly, if that makes sense.

Totally.

At Facebook, you had the Understand, Identify, Execute framework.

Yeah.

Talk more about how that worked, some examples of how to use it and what you learned from it or what others can learn from it.

Yeah, for sure. Understand, Identify, Execute is kind of the product development framework and the growth framework kind of all in one at Facebook. It was coined by Naomi Gleit, who was, I think, the first PM at Facebook, and she's still there today.

And so essentially it's a way of thinking about the problem you're trying to solve and how to solve it.

And I think one of the challenges with working at a company like Facebook where you have a lot of engineering capacity, you have a lot of talent, is that it's very easy to jump right into the doing stuff part of the work, right? Like, it's very easy to be like, oh, we're just going to go do this without deeply understanding if that thing that you're going to go do is actually the right thing to go do. And so because that's true, you can get to what I mentioned earlier, which is like, hey, people just have this desire to throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks. And so the understand, identify, execute framework helps kind of undo that kind of knee-jerk reaction, which is to say like, okay, Before we, before we really break into, you know, doing the work, do we truly understand the problem or the opportunity we're trying to, to solve? And so how well do we understand the problem, the, the opportunity, uh, what, what users are looking for, what the pain points are, what we're trying to solve?

How, how, like, deeply and at what fidelity do we understand that?

And then once you understand kind of the problem space, it's important to identify what the biggest points of leverage in that problem space are. So one example I always like to use is we were trying to improve the conversion rate of the facebook.com homepage. Now that's a homepage that's been visited billions of times. It's been tested over and over again. And so if you don't start with a super high understanding of the problem you're trying to solve, like the, the true root causes of the conversion rate issues of that page, and you don't identify what the biggest points of leverage are within that system, you can do a lot of work on that page that, you know, well, they'll— you'll always lose because it's been optimized and tested and run against billions of people. And so having this framework of deeply understanding, then identifying and then executing really makes sure that the quality of ideas, the quality of hypothesis, and the rigor of understanding what you're actually trying to solve is as high as possible, which is the most important constraint to get right basically in that environment.

And so I try to bring that everywhere I go.

And one of the early mistakes that I see with a lot of growth teams is that the level of hypotheses is just very surface level. It kind of exhibits a a lack of real depth of understanding.

And so the first thing there is really just to, you know, always try to peel the onion a bit further to get very clear on what the core problems are, what the core drivers are, and, and then think about the hypothesis and tests that you want to run.

Within growth marketing, what's your approach to building an effective performance marketing engine?

Yeah, I think For me, it really comes down to 2 big pieces or maybe 3 big pieces.

One, you want high craft expertise.

So as part of that understand, identify, execute framework, one of the important things about execution is that it has to be excellent.

If you ship crappy work, you never know if the hypothesis was wrong or if the work was just bad. And so you got to do great work. In order to eliminate that from your learning agenda, that it's just bad work and that's why it didn't work.

So great craft expertise, people who understand platforms deeply, people who understand user psychology deeply, and all of the different crafts you need in customer acquisition and product development, you want exceptional work in all of that area. The second thing is you want enough, you want like great understanding. And that usually comes down to 2 main things.

One is the quality of your data and your ability to understand it, right?

So data tells you what's happening.

You need to be able to talk to your customers to understand why, the why behind what you're seeing in the data. And so oftentimes when growth teams try to get spun up, and this even happened at Facebook early on and still was happening when I was there, is you'd go to understand a problem, and you'd realize you actually don't have great data to understand that, right? So if you want to understand why a landing page is not converting well, or, you know, your kind of user acquisition funnel is not working well, you kind of go in and try to look at the analytics, and the first thing you'll realize is you probably don't have all of the analytics that you would actually want to understand that funnel deeply.

So, you know, a very robust data platform with highly observable and aggregated data that anyone can go and look at.

So great execution capability, a great data infrastructure, and then the ability to move quickly.

So do you have the experimentation process? Do you have the ability to have the highest learning rate possible?

And so Those are kind of the 3 big components, I think, of like a great growth marketing team.

And then, you know, the rest kind of sits on top of that.

And for companies who are leveraging content marketing as a main top-of-funnel driver, what would be your advice to them on how to build it out effectively?

Yeah, I think content can be a huge lever. Obviously, you guys know, and You know, it really comes down to the problem that you're trying to solve and how you expect your end user to leverage and use that content. And so, you know, it's such a broad kind of surface area that you can go a lot of different ways with the, uh, with the tactics that you choose. So for example, companies like Pinterest, TripAdvisor, you know, YouTube, so on, Like, that's content marketing.

They're using, you know, programmatic generation of content collections to rank in Google search to help people discover different collections.

But that kind of user-generated content aggregation model is very different from, say, you know, um, like, uh, MasterClass, for example, or any media company where it's the company that's generating the content. So you kind of have to figure out which way your content's gonna get generated first. Is it gonna be your audience or community that's going to generate it for you?

And can you then programmatically aggregate it, have it make sense to search engines so that it's easily discoverable?

Or are you going to create it yourself and more of like maybe a traditional B2B kind of content marketing operation where you're creating and distributing the content? And then once you've made that decision, Or that understanding, then it's like, how are people actually coming across this content, right?

Some content's very driven off of search intent, so people are actually looking for the problem that you're writing about, and that's great because you can write to that intent, and Google's a great place to help solve that and make that connection.

But there's some content that is, you know, not—

people don't know that they're looking for it, but it's more often discovered through word of mouth, virality, social networks. And so really understanding from first principles what the job content's trying to do and then where you can make the most of it is the first thing to figure out.

And they can often go hand in hand.

I was the COO of a media company before Facebook called Inman News, which is a trade publication for real estate. And we had 2 different types of content and 2 different content engines running there. One was high-quality subscription-based content award-winning journalism, couldn't find it anywhere else.

And that was all subscription-driven. It was about retention and customer acquisition.

We had a whole other content engine, which was contributor-based content, which was all opinion-driven and was meant to be shared via social networks. And so top of the funnel was contributor-driven, viral-driven kind of driving traffic. Bottom of the funnel was high quality, can't find it anywhere else, something very much worth paying for. And so I think you can mix and match exactly what you're trying to solve for in content to solve for the business.

Let's talk a little bit about the role of a VP of growth. I'm curious, there's VP of growth at all different sizes and stages of companies, but what do you consider to be the biggest challenge for that role today?

I think the biggest challenge for the growth role is— the VP of growth role is kind of where in the org do you sit?

And then what are you trying to solve for the org?

So Keith Rabois, who's a famous VC, famously says that if you have a head of growth, it's just because you don't trust your head of product.

And I think the standalone growth org is very much an experiment itself. I think if you look at companies like Uber and Pinterest and so on and so forth, they've gone back and forth between, hey, we have a standalone growth team, now growth is part of product, now there's just product and marketing, now it's gone back to standalone.

So I think you still see companies trying to figure out how it can fit best in their model.

And the reason we have it at Shopify is that the product team and the growth teams are playing 2 different infinite games. And so we talk a lot about infinite and finite games at Shopify.

Infinite games are games you always hope to keep playing. Finite games are short-term games that you try to win. And so the infinite game of growth is to bring Shopify to the world, to make it easier for entrepreneurs to discover, try, and succeed with Shopify. The infinite game for the product team is to build the platform for commerce in the world. And so because they're playing different infinite games, it makes sense to have them in separate orgs. That's not necessarily always true.

And so I think for your given company, it's like, hey, why do I need a head of growth?

Is it because the games are very different for the different orgs? Is it because we don't think we have this capability in our core product team today? Is it because we think our marketing needs to be more performance-driven? These are all very different And so I think that's why you see growth show up in different places.

In many places it's in the revenue org, in some places it's embedded in the product team, and in some places it's standalone like it is at Shopify.

And in your mind, what makes an A+ VP of growth?

Exceptional ability and desire to just seek the truth, I think, is real. To be the most objective and rigorous person in the org. Right. So to have the best view of reality, like what's really working and what's not, and be crystal clear on that, I think is the most important thing.

So someone who's a strong structured thinker, someone who comes from a place of humble inquiry, can step back and take themselves out of the equation and just objectively say whether something's good or something's bad or something's working or not working. Yeah. Chamath, who was one of the original growth team members at Facebook, has famously said that a growth team's job is to eliminate lore. And I really like that idea where you go from opinions and beliefs to objective truth.

And I think the best people in growth have that mindset of seeking that truth.

And then the other thing that they have is that they understand very deeply what matters to how a business grows.

What are the inputs into the growth flywheel of a company, where they can have the most leverage, where within that system are the opportunities to grow and add value, and then just constantly looking for those and delivering those.

So I think those are kind of the two sides of the What would be your advice to founders about the right level, experience, time to hire their first VP of growth?

This is such an opinion-driven part of it. I think there isn't a perfect answer.

Kind of the general advice that you hear, and I'll share my misgivings with some of the general advice, but it's like a decent rule of thumb, is the general advice that you hear is that like, hey, once you have Before you have product-market fit, don't worry about growth, just worry about finding product-market fit.

The company should be solely focused on that.

If you're trying to drive growth too early, you're basically lighting money on fire. It's a reasonable heuristic to use for certain business types, primarily business types that don't rely on network effects to be successful.

When it's an e-commerce business, if maybe it's a SaaS business, That's fine advice. I think that advice really falls apart with network effect-based business where your product market fit is really driven by your growth. You can't really—

for a social networking product, a product that really relies on the value of the product is the software plus the network, not the software and then the network.

And so there, these 2 things have to go together.

And so I think you really need to be thinking about growth from the outset.

I mean, I think if you look at any, even today, like the Web3 projects, they all start with a Discord server.

They all start with the network first, right? They don't start with the product market fit first and then try to build the network.

And so I think it really depends on your business model.

And then I think what you want is you want product leaders and executives who understand how the business should grow.

They have an opinion of how that growth loop is going to work and so that they can bring that vision to the company.

And then you can add in growth professionals to help really accelerate that or come experiment and figure it out. But I think the head fake or the mistake is to be like, growth is not my problem as a leader.

I'm going to hire someone and make it their problem, and I will like let, let it run kind of over here on the side.

And I think that is the biggest, uh, failing.

Um, but, you know, the when and why really comes down, I think, to the business model and, and the makeup of the team.

I'm curious, what advice would you give to people who are earlier in their career who aspire to be in your position one day?

Yeah, so if I had to go back and do it all over again, um, I think the things that I would've done sooner is just really invest in the technical side of things right off the bat. I'm reasonably technical. I can write some SQL. I used to be able to code in HTML, but I am miles away from people who are experts in data science or engineering.

I'm definitely not one of those people.

And I think earlier on, just building that technical capability, it just helps you understand the areas of opportunity and what's happening better than anyone else. So like, if you want to be a great growth marketer, learn SQL, learn Python, learn R, you know, kind of build, build that technical capability. I think the other thing that I wish I knew earlier was I wish I was a better structured thinker.

I think for a very long time I learned through analogy and I learned by watching what other people are doing. And that can be helpful to a point, but it also can steer you wrong in a lot of ways because what you perceive to actually be happening is maybe not exactly what's happening.

And so I think one of the things that I learned deeply at Facebook was the value of structured thinking, thinking from first principles, really reasoning about problems.

And I wish it didn't take me 12 years or 15 years to kind of get that lesson.

And so those are 2 things I definitely would've done very early on. And I think the one thing that I did do that I would definitely do again is I tried to practice a lot of the stuff myself.

So I started a blog and tried to grow a blog, and then I sold my blog.

I tried setting up video content and podcasts and basically trying to figure out how stuff grows on the side. You can't really read that in a textbook or in a case study.

You kind of have to get your hands on with it. And so yeah, those are the 3 things that I would definitely encourage anyone starting out to work on.

So Morgan, I'm going to hop in here. And for listeners, this is Jackson. I'm Helping to produce this podcast. And it's exactly this podcast that has me hopping on wanting to ask this question. So I know that you have released a book that has performed very well. It's been translated into, I think, 14 languages, which kudos, that's awesome. As we think about this podcast, what would you do if you were in our position? How would you think about this podcast as a project, as a marketing initiative with all the different channels that we should be conscious of?

So I will kind of shoot from the hip and give you some thoughts, but I think really, and kudos to you all, I think you've done kind of the most important part, which is most people think about who the product is for once the product is ready.

They kind of, they do the community part, the audience part, after the product part. And I think the best launches, the best products, they actually start with the community and start with building the audience first and then launch the product into the audience, right? Like, I think those are the ones that you see kind of the most success, the, the ones that get the earliest traction. And so, um, you know, one of the keys to, I think, to launching anything is Knowing very well and very clearly and very honestly, back to that truth-seeking thing, is like, hey, do you have the audience ready to go for this?

Will they— do you have kind of that product-market fit with that audience? Do you have their attention?

Will they notice? Will they care?

And so if I had to guess, I'd imagine a lot of the great work that you all have already done in building audience, Erik, building your brand and following and all that, is a great way to kind of have that warm audience ready to go. And so I think that's kind of a huge prerequisite most people get wrong.

And so I don't think that will be maybe necessarily your all's problem. I think the second thing though is to kind of prime people and let, you know, build attention and kind of mental availability for a launch that's coming, right?

Like things that go viral, like on Twitter or whatever, unless it's like a really funny meme or something that Elon tweets, it actually like a lot of virality is premeditated, right? It's kind of Particularly with launches.

So for example, at Shopify, we launched a Growth Apprentice Program, which is basically a way for non-traditional people to get into the growth field and work on the Shopify team and kind of build their chops. It's kind of like an apprentice product management or rotational product management role at like a Facebook or something. And so in order to do that, what we did is we went out ahead of time, like weeks ahead of time, to all of the influential growth people that I know and have connected with and been part of my career and said, hey, we're doing this thing. We'd love your support when it comes out. Here's why it's important. Here's why it's different.

And we knew we had—

the response that we got from it was great. We got a lot of questions about it, which helped us shape how we were going to launch it. And then we had a lot of support already locked and loaded for when we launched it. And then when we launched it, It took off and kind of blew all expectations because we didn't just assume that just because we knew it would fill a need, we thought it would resonate, we knew we had the people that would care about it, but we didn't assume the last step, which is just that they would do something about it automatically.

We actually were very intentional in mapping it out ahead of time and basically pre-gaming, hey, we think we need X for this to be successful.

How do we work backwards into making sure all of that is true ahead of launch and then going through and doing that? And so yeah, that's kind of what I would do is based on the distribution method, you know, if it is going to be influencer-driven, word-of-mouth-driven, you know, getting those commits very early on where you can just have like a hit list so that when it does come to launch day, you can follow right back up and say, hey, like we talked about, it's live, would love your support.

You get a much higher hit rate than, than kind of doing it day of. And then really identifying who those people are in the right set. I think if you think about it last minute, you kind of have too narrow of a focus and there's probably other people that are important there.

And so at Inman, the media company before Facebook, when we launched our subscription product, we started off with, hey, the heads of real estate associations. We started off with the top 250 influencers in the space. We started off with the people who read and loved Inman the most and kind of worked methodically through them so that by the time it launched, when it launched, we had lots of people congratulating us and excited about us.

And that was a whole key to kind of making it successful.

So that's kind of how I would start or to tackle it anyway.

Yeah, I really appreciate that answer and echo your recognition of Erik's brand and the On Deck community that we've built to date. There's, I think, 9,000 fellows out there that we might want to lean on with this launch. So appreciate that all.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I would love to hear from—

I would take a class from you all on how to do it. So, but cool.

Yeah, Adam, back to you.

So let's talk a bit about hiring. What's your approach to hiring A talent at scale?

I'll sound a bit like a broken record here.

We know what we want to test for, right? We know what are the key inputs into the people that are most successful at this, which is dramatically upping the technical requirements of the roles and really testing for the key things that we've seen be successful with people in growth.

So great structured thinking, technical capability, the ability to get stuff done.

The willingness to come at something and explore something from all angles and really be hypothesis-led, the ability to be creative and problem solve and solve really hard problems. So everything from, hey, here's a SQL loop, here's a SQL exercise, see if you just— can that person pass a SQL exercise? And we don't do that for every role, but we do that for many roles.

Structured thinking, we kind of Ask people to reason about different problems, ask people like what are some of the hardest problems they've solved in their career, and really looking for people who have kind of you know found ways to kind of chop through like the Gordian knots that they've kind of come across in their career.

And then creativity, like hey, how would you you know just like the question Jackson just asked, right? Like how would you scale this from X to Y? and see how the person just reasons about what some of the leverage and some of the opportunity might be. And so those are some of the key things that we test for.

A lot of it comes down—

those are less craft dependent. You didn't hear me say the world's best copywriter or the world's best Google Ads expert. And for some particular roles, that's really important, but generalizing down to the best talent that is great at growth really comes down to some of these second-order drivers and skills that then can be applied to a large amount of problem spaces.

But I mean, at the same time, if you spend a lot of money on Google Ads, you want someone who understands the platform deeply.

But at a base level, those are the attributes that we're trying to solve for and hire for.

How would you advise other VPs of growth that are going through hypergrowth types of hiring to think about hiring generalists versus specialists?

Yeah, so I think this kind of goes back to the stage question. I think early on when you don't have a—

when there could be many things that are true about how the company grows, it can be helpful to have generalists who have the ability to deploy experiments across a wide range of surface areas and solve for many things at once. Bringing some of that structured thinking, analytical rigor, and so on and so forth to that space.

And so having that kind of T-shaped marketer or, you know, kind of that person with range is really valuable in places of ambiguity. And that doesn't necessarily have to do with the scale of a company.

It just has to do with the understanding of the problem space. So I think in higher ambiguity problem spaces, more range, more surface area can be helpful for figuring out what matters as long as you have some of those prerequisites that I mentioned right.

I think when you get into well-defined problem spaces that require incredible expertise, that's really when you want that incredible specialist.

If you need to spend billions of dollars in television advertising, you want someone who's done that before.

You don't want a general generalist trying to necessarily figure that out at that scale. But if you kind of have a more nebulous problem like, hey, what digital channel should we be using? Or what's the right content marketing format?

Or what's the right acquisition funnel? Like when there's more uncertainty in the solution, having that range is, I think, is a benefit. So that's basically how I'd reason about, do I need a true specialist or do I need someone that has more breadth?

And then last one on hiring, how do you think about and how have you thought about your approach to promoting internally versus hiring externally and how you balance that?

Yeah.

So one of the interesting kind of anecdotes or actual realities of the Facebook growth team is they don't hire leaders from outside of the org. Like, you can't go onto the Facebook growth team as a director leading a huge team from like outside of the team.

You have to come in start at the very bottom of the team and their leadership comes from the people that have worked their way up.

And so what that guarantees for them is that all of their leaders know how they are successful, how they work. They've kind of been trained in how Facebook does things.

And so that kind of de-risks any of their leadership because everyone's really on the same page and has been through the same kind of training. Now, I don't think everyone has necessarily that luxury. And so I think it's important to have that pipeline, that ability to—

the ultimate unfair advantage is that where you can groom everyone from the beginning, have them learn it the way that you want them to learn it, the way that's successful and works for the company, and kind of create this everlasting wellspring of of new talent that comes up and through the org, and that's kind of the ideal state. I think as you're building out orgs though, depending on state and scale and what works, you don't necessarily have the liberty of starting everyone from square one and bringing them along. The business just doesn't have time to wait for it. And so I think you want kind of, if you're not the Facebooks of the world, you want kind of a healthy mix of, hey, when I do know I need specialization, I want to go and try to find the person that can really help me understand how to take that to the next level. I think the people that I look for in leadership are like, I have a reasonable idea of where we have to go.

I don't know exactly how to get there.

So I want to find people who have gone to where I think we need to go before and do have that mental model of how we can kind of take that journey and what needs to be learned and what needs to be true. So that we can spend less time kind of fumbling around in the dark and more time going through a very structured learning process to see if what we believe to be true is actually true.

And so that's how I kind of distinguish when I want to bring in someone very senior to help us go to that next horizon versus when we're going to kind of bet on the people that we have and nurture our talent through the early stages.

We try to do both right now, but ultimately I hope we can get to a place where the majority of it is bottoms up.

Awesome. Morgan, well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

This has been a great episode.

Where— for people who want to learn more, where can, where can our audience find you?

Sure, you can find me on Twitter @morganb or my website's morganbrown.co. Thanks for having me, guys.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. Execs is produced by On Deck, where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers. If you're looking to start a company, uplevel your career, or navigate a career transition, I encourage you to visit beyonddeck.com. See you next time.

Bye.