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

And like the, you know, dead of the night. And by that, I mean, like, you know, 7 p.m. or something on, I think it was, I'm pretty sure it was a Friday. We just asked for forgiveness and kind of put these questions into the sign up flow and ran his Navy test with a small group. And, you know, I'm full expecting, okay, this is going to, like, hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad, you know? And I'm going to be prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting, and I was totally, I'm thinking with like written start to write, like the framework for how I wanted to surface this. And we start to get the data for this thing. I'm not kidding, it improved conversion. Like there's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions, it improved conversion by like 5%. Like just improved signups. And it's one of those like, what? Like, okay, this, like what is going on here?

Welcome to Lenny's podcast, where I interview world class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard won experiences. building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Laura Schaefer. The week we recorded this chat turned out to be Laura's first week in a new gig as head of growth for Amplitude, taking over for a previous legendary guest, Elena Verna. Prior to Amplitude, Laura was VP of product and growth at a company called Rapid. Before that, she spent over seven years at Twilio as head of growth and PM lead of the growth platform and the experimentation platform at Twilio. In our conversation, we dig into Laura's career growth framework and the importance of carving your own path versus waiting for one to be carved for you. We also get into a bunch of tactical and surprising advice around running experiments, making decisions on gut versus data, developing your growth strategy, and how to sell your product to developers. Laura has a wealth of wisdom, and I learned a lot from our conversation. With that, I bring you Laura Schaefer after a short word from our wonderful sponsors. this episode is brought to you by public.com who want to tell you about their new treasury accounts which earn a 4.8% yield on your cash that is higher than a high yield savings account while still being backed by the full faith and credit of the US government. Treasury yields are at a 15-year high but buying US treasuries is super complicated if you go to a bank or navigate an ancient government website or at least that was the case now you can move your cash into US Treasuries with the flexibility of a bank account. You can access your cash whenever you want, even before your Treasury bills hit maturity. There are no hold periods, no settlement days, just a safe place to park your cash and earn a reliable yield. Public will automatically reinvest your Treasury bills at maturity so you don't have to do anything to continue growing your yield. And you can manage your Treasuries alongside stocks, ETFs, crypto, and any alternative assets. Do all your investing in one place and earn 4.8%, a higher yield than a high-yield savings account, only with a Treasury account at public.com/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more. delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your north star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at geteppo.com, get @bpo.com and 10x your experiment velocity. Laura, welcome to the podcast.

Awesome. Thanks, Lenny.

It is so great to be here.

Thanks for having me. It's great to have you.

So I asked Elena, Elena, Elena, I'm not even sure how to pronounce your name. Maybe you know. Elena, okay. Okay. I think I've said it wrong all the time, all this time. Okay, Elena. So I asked Elena, Forna, who's a popular guest on this podcast. who I should have on this podcast. And you are the first person that immediately came to mind. And so I'm really excited that we're doing this and that you agreed to be on.

Well, she's the best and I'm really happy that she referred me because I'm just stoked to be here. So thanks for listening to her guidance.

Absolutely. And it's kind of a cool time to be chatting. You're kind of the newly minted head of growth at Amplitude.

And so congrats, first of all. Thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, this is my day two and a half. here. Wow. Very.

You're veteran. Yeah.

Right. I love it.

Some companies, there's like a little percentage that shows you how many people have joined before you. And I wonder what that percentage already is.

We had that at Twilio, and I got pretty, pretty high up there. After a while, we had like a stack rank and a spreadsheet and. Yeah, but it's, it is funny. So wherever, wherever that thing exists in.

Amplitude, I am like, right fresh there at the very bottom.

What was the number you got to Twilio? Any, do you remember? Yeah, no, I was very proud to crack the top 50. That was my claim to fame. Because as people left, you kind of move up, right? Yeah, super sweet.

Well, yeah, right?

It's kind of a, it's like on one hand it's like, oh, very cool. And one of the OGs, on the other hand, it's like, oh my gosh, this person's coming. Like, that's bummer.

It's a shift, but I'm excited about it for sure. So you have this new exciting role, and I thought it'd be fun to start to chat about Career growth and just how you think about career growth. I know you have a framework of how you think about your own career growth and clearly it's worked out. So I'm curious to hear about it and see and see how it could be helpful to folks that are, that are listening. So yeah, can you just tell us about how you think about career growth?

Career growth is often, right? Like it's definitely not a straight line up, but there's definitely some kind of frameworks and methods that have worked really well for me. And I think to dive into it, it's first good to just talk about the one that I most typically see people use to try to grow their career and why that can be a little problematic, which is that I see most people are, you know, try to work really hard at kind of the job that they have, right, within the role that they're, that they have at a company. Do whatever you can to grow there, show your manager all these things. I've seen people keep spreadsheets that sort of wins so you can come up with performance reviews, you know, maybe try to get better advocating for yourself. Maybe try to get peers to notice or your manager's peers. and that's all good. Like, it's all good stuff. But the problem with it is that you're limited to what your manager's ability is to advocate for you, to promote you. And you're also limited by the explicit trajectory of your role at that company and where there's room for that or not at the company. And then often that perception can sometimes be a little bit in contrast to what your perception is. Right. And also other things that happen, like your, you know, your manager leaves, and then you kind of have to restart with someone else.

Right.

So. the method that I use kind of tries to take that power back a little bit. And something that I learned really early on in my career, I was very lucky to learn by accident, was at a company called Bandwidth, which is like my first kind of quote, unquote, real job. And, you know, Bandwidth is now a public company, and they've done all kinds of crazy, amazing things. But I joined when it was just 50 people, and I actually joined in sales. and I was, you know, just hungry to kind of make it succeed and grow and, you know, bright eyes, everything, you know, first kind of real job. But I realized after a few months of being in sales that I was often, like, repeating the same thing over again, like, using the same thing to sell over and over again. And it's like, gosh, like, this isn't ideal for the customer. So I'm gonna call me and ask me these questions and wait and get these answers and all this stuff. And it's not ideal for the company because they're, like, paying commission on this every time. Like, that's not going to be efficient for our growth. and because we were small, I was able to catch our GM and I was just like, Hey, you know, I've noticed this pattern where like, I'm repeating things kind of over and over again and like, they're asking the same thing. Like, I think we should put that online. I think we should make that available so they can just like, see it and then buy it. Cause we had an online checkout process and I was kind of expecting him to be like, oh, well, I know it's important, but, you know, for this versus another, like, we need to like, You know, we do it this way and obviously thought all about it and kind of thinking like, oh, I'm going to come in like this new person. He's going to help me understand what I'm like missing here. There's like a little bit of that that I was expecting. And he goes, wait, wait, like, tell me more about that. What do you mean? And by the end of the conversation, he was like, Hey, why don't you like go do that? Why don't you go build that like experience? Why don't you put that stuff in like in a self serve flow? And we called it e-commerce manager and it was like, Kind of growth before this, but this is like 2010 and that that moved me into a totally new position. And the main learning that I had from that was, which really kind of took life at Twilio and I absolutely worked for me there. I'm happy to talk about that too. But the core of that learning was your executive team and executive teams at companies are often very sharp, but the nature of their day to day just does not link them with customers. Right? And that means that over time, especially as a company grows, they often lose access to some of the best insights and, you know, in the heartbeat of the people who they're providing value to in contrast to folks that are closer to the problem. And so that means that your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing. And there's a lot of those. So especially, you know, when they align to North Star metrics, those, those ones are, are sort of the powerful ones. That was the way that I grew my career at Phil and I'm happy to share kind of that journey too.

Yeah, it'd actually be cool to hear maybe another example of that. But I think, I think an interesting thing that comes up for me here is sometimes you may have an awesome idea. and it may not immediately happen. It may not be like, yes, Laura, let's move on this right immediately. And I think it's important to just recognize they're not going to follow all your ideas, but they're always looking for better ideas. And to your point, they may not have the information that will lead to an idea that you will have because you're on the ground dealing with real problems day to day. So I think it's important to recognize you're not going to always get your way, and that's normal.

Yeah, totally. And right, and it's kind of about like almost like building up your individual like brand a little bit. And I think one of the most powerful and accessible is when you see that is learning about your customers. There's always those people at companies who's like, oh, well, you know, I mean, she just knows our customers or he just knew our customer. They just know our customers. Like they just know. And it's like, well, how do they just know? Like, let's ask that person. Let's get their feedback. And those people, often have a good amount of kind of, you know, brand recognition and powers in the company. And they're often thought of when the company needs to do something new or different, or, you know, someone is, you know, hiring, maybe they're thinking about that person for like a cross team thing. So it's, it's one of the ways that you can kind of build, build that, that brand. And again, it's, it's, I think it's a sweet spot because it's something that is very valuable to all, everyone, all the way up to the most senior leaders, which we can talk about here in a, in a a minute. And so it's going to be valuable for you and a valuable tool kind of no matter where you're at in your career. And yeah, that's not always an immediate payoff, but it often does give you a trajectory outside of just your role and just your manager. It gives you something a little bit broader.

So maybe a simple way of describing to kind of mirror back what you're saying is kind of carve your own path. Don't necessarily assume your managers will give you , the path that makes most sense for you or even give you the biggest opportunity, just like propose, Hey, I think this might be a better opportunity and I'd love to pursue it. I'd love to hear the Twilio example, if that's generally, yeah.

So I actually joined, when I joined Twilio, there was no growth team at all, like not even a breath of it. I joined in product marketing and I was leading our product marketing for messaging lines and, you know, but I followed the same guy that I just mentioned. I made it a my own kind of personal policy to like, Hey, I'm going to do my job. And I'm going to do well and keep notes of things I'm doing well and all that kind of stuff because it's good. But I'm also going to get to know our customers and I'm going to get to know our customers really well. And I'm going to pay attention when I'm connecting with them, not just about the space I'm in, but broadly what are some of the pain points and things they're articulating that are relevant to the business and what we're trying to get done. And one of the things that came up was that users were struggling and folks were struggling to get started and use Twilio. And that contrasted so deeply to some of the things that our executive team was saying and had high conviction in our company had high conviction, which is that Twilio was so easy to use. In fact, it was like top three things about Twilio that we were really trying to get all their brand. We're so easy. Developers love us. They say we're so easy. And there's always like, there were tweets coming all the time, like, you know, developers saying like, oh, my gosh, they got started in a couple minutes. So there's all these things that kind of made that compound and made that conviction stick. But as I was talking to customers, I was hearing a very different story. And it made sense as we were penetrating new markets, adding more products, we were adding complexity, and we were pulling in folks who were a little bit less motivated. And those things contributed to people saying, this is difficult. And so, you know, at the time, you know, this wasn't a, you know, 50 person where I could just kind of go to the floor and like go to someone and be like, hey, like there's this thing I heard about, like, I think we should do something. But there was another tactic that I could take, and this is, I just started sharing, Voice of the Customer Report. I started sharing my insights, started writing them down and just sharing them. And it became this kind of digest. And eventually people were like, Hey, can I, can you share with me? Can you share with me? Can you get on your list? Can you share with me? And this was in like a few months of me joining, I was doing this. And then that turned into, Hey, you should like host a quarterly Voice of the Customer session for, for all of product, right? And, and, and this was a request that was coming from some of the senior leaders at the company. And when our Jeff Lawson, who's our CEO at the time, heard about it, he started attending too. So now in the session, I started pulling in other people's insights too, right? Because these were, now they had a forum for this, I could kind of do that and have people send that to me and I could compile it and all of these things. And so then this kind of established me as that person who knows about the customer, even after short tenure. And then, you know, when, you know, came time to do annual planning that, that year, and I joined in 2014 at the end, so this is 2015, I pitched this idea, hey, we think that it's easy. It is not. Here's data that I have, the information that I have, and I think that we need to start a growth team here, and that needs to be a core focus. And I was able to bring in a really critical, you know, kind of partner to that and other folks who could support that because I built up some of that trust. So by the time I was making that pitch, I had someone like, you know, Andre Crow, who was like the seventh hire at Twilio and got to like number three on that spreadsheet or whatever. He was really close to seal being like, yeah, like we desperately need this. I'm seeing this. He led a, you know, website. He basically created the Twilio brand and he like led all the website stuff and he's like, yeah, we definitely need this. So not only did I have that kind of a little bit of trust right from the executive team, but I also had folks who were just trusted on their own advocating and supporting this that I was doing. And so it was approved with like almost very easily. I mean, I put stuff together for it, but it was, you know, kind of the meeting before the meeting had already been done by those other things. So it helped me create the growth engineering growth product team at Twilio.

I love just how proactive your advice is here. There's a lot of people that don't do well and then just like, oh, I never had the opportunity or I kind of got looked over all this time. And I love that there's all this just like, here's things you can be doing to get in front of people, to provide value, to just create opportunity for yourself. Any other advice along the lines of just like, here's the kind of things you could do for yourself versus waiting for someone to come and give you opportunity?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's the most easily actionable because to do all of our jobs, we need to know CustomerS like we need to know about customer insights, product we need to know, but then also customer facing teams, such as those who want to crack into product. Your insights are extremely valuable. You're talking to customers every day. You know more about their problems and their pain than a lot of other people do. And so, you know, that's, that is by far and away to me, the most powerful and accessible one by, by anyone in any role, in any space. But, you know, I'll also say that, you know, that broader concept of just, hey, like, there's things that you know and things of value that you know that others can benefit from at your company. And, and building your brand as someone that is supportive, smart, creative, able to solve problems, you know, make sure that you're sharing that. Right. And so, you know, maybe you're really freaking good at communicating with brevity. I suck at that, by the way. So, like, more power to anyone that can do that. I'm ActiveLy working on it. So, so share that, like go to your general Slack channel or whatever and just be like, hey, like just wrote up like some tips for how to do it, you know, some ways that I am good at this. Those kinds of things can really go a long way towards people starting to view you as, you know, an SME and not just the space that you're in, but in sort of broader areas. And that can always present and open doors for you when other people are sort of looking up to you and seeing you as someone who's, who's strong and ways outside of just the role that you're in.

And SME is a subject matter expert, is that right?

Yes. Gonna thank you for unpacking my acronyms. That's another thing that I am actively working on.

Thanks. I got you. I'll be on the lookout. Maybe one last question along these lines is, do you have any advice for framing the proposal, framing an opportunity to, you know, your manager higher ups that you see has worked best broadly? Yeah. So, yeah.

And one thing I wanna say too is like with this stuff, I don't think that necessarily does go like counter to what your manager is doing. It's more like supporting them, like, right? I've done this kind of stuff and then it's helped my manager promote me, right? So it's not necessarily, oh, we'll do this if your manager is like failing you, or they, you know, are not supporting you, or they can't support you. It's more like, do this because this is gonna be an accelerator for yourself, irrespective of your manager. But then also it'll be an accelerator for your manager in supporting you. 'Cause one of the things that, you know, it comes into play a lot when managers are figuring out promotions and doing those things is like they'll sit in a room, off on calibrations and, you know, with a bunch of people. And it makes it a lot easier when those people have had some kind of access or exposure or whatever to you in a positive light. So these things can all run, you know, with, you know, your manager and not against, but it's just another way of you kind of taking, taking back the ability to build that momentum instead of relying on all of that going through One single other person.

And what I like about your second example is you just did it. You just started doing that kind of report for the company. It wasn't like, Hey, I have a proposal. Here's what I think you should do. Should we do it?

Exactly. Just like, yeah, just do it. Yeah, like, ungate your knowledge, I think is the, the buzzword that I'm, I'm hearing. Right. Um, and you could do that within your, I think that's an Alena ism. Like, we'll see if we can, how many times we can, we can bring her up. But, right, it's just, you know, like you can do that within your own, you know, company, like everybody, everybody is skilled at things that they aren't, you know, explicit to their role or their space. And I think that ungating that opens opportunities. And if you're not sure, then go to my favorite go to, which is talk to customers, get insights. Those are incredibly valuable. So, related people share those when they find them. So, so be the person that does that.

Another area I want to chat about is experimentation. and growth in data, which makes sense you have strong perspectives on being the new head of growth amplitude. So maybe we start with experimentation. You mentioned that there's a really interesting, surprising result in an experiment you ran at Twilio that maybe changed your perspective on experimentation and what you think might work and not work.

100%, yeah. I'm fortunate to have two mind-blowing experiments that really shifted the way that I think about growth. One of them, one of my favorite ones happened very early on at Twilio. So after I created this growth team, one of the things that I saw as to me an issue was that at our sign up flow, we just asked people for a username and an email, like a password, and that was it. And that's actually relatively common at the time. This is kind of a while ago now, everybody kind of is segmenting users, but we didn't. And we actually, there was a lot of existing conviction around that. I was like, Hey, we're targeting developers, developers. you know, they just want to do, they just want to get their hands on things, don't put anything in their way. It's going to be disastrous. We don't want any shenanigans here with these, these folks. Let's just let them in the gates. But to me, this was a really big assumption to make and, and very costly one. It's like, okay, if that's the case, we don't know, we're not gonna know anything about anyone. And we didn't know who was signing up. We didn't know what they wanted to do. And that hurt our ability and understand how people were performing from a quantitative perspective. You know, we were a little bit lost with prioritization. There's a number of implications here, but it's obviously a very contentious kind of space. So I, you know, this is the very first thing that I, that I did, the first experiment that I ran. I, I did, you know, some research to understand, okay, what are the most important questions that's like, what would I do really, really need to know? And it was stuff like, you know, what, what language are, you know, you coding in and what's your use case, what product do you want to use? And then, you know, there's, you you know, one around like, are you developer at all or are you something else? Because there is sort of rumors that you were having not just developer sign up, which is this whole other interesting kind of story. And I, you know, singing these questions, it would also, you know, potentially be things that, that our developers signing up would sort of understand why we're asking that it would feel natural. And, but anyway, you know, again, like adding anything to the sign up was very contentious, but I really just wanted to get a little bit of data on it. So I wanted to run a test. I didn't have a team. I didn't have an engineering team yet. And none of that stuff had built out. It was just me myself and I, but like I said, I had started to build a little bit of trust and holding good old Andre, who I mentioned earlier, who because he was early employee and just, he kind of had access to everything like one of those, those people. And he had also was, you know, supportive of, of this and kind of had similar haunches. And so, like the, you know, dead of the night and by that I mean like, you know, 7:00 p.m. or something on, I think it was, I'm pretty sure it was a Friday. We Just asked for forgiveness and kind of put these questions into the signup flow and ran his Navy test with a small group. And, you know, I'm fully expecting, okay, this is gonna like hurt our numbers, but maybe it won't be so bad, you know, and I'm gonna be prepared to advocate the power of this data that we're getting. And I was totally, you're up, thinking of like written, started to write, like a, like the framework for how I wanted to surface this. And we start to get the data for this thing. I'm not kidding. It improved conversion. Like, there's no personalization, nothing past it, just the questions. It improved conversion by, like, 5%. Like, just improve signups. And it's one of those, like, what? Like, okay, this, like, what is going on here? And I actually dug into it. And what I found from just talking to a few customers, I went through the flow. I'm just, like, learning about how they felt about it. It was actually. for folks, it was like comforting. You know, when you think about it, when, when users are signing up for your product for the very first time, like, it's new, right? This is new. That means it's scary. They're, they're expecting it to be difficult. They're anticipating that there's going to be friction and challenges, and then they're not going to figure it out. They're almost, like, looking for the bogeyman. Right. And that's the head space. It's often the head space that any of us are in when we're doing something new for the first time, like, oh, this is. It could be very challenging. And so by putting in these questions, it's like, what's your language? It's like, oh, like I do, I code in JavaScript and I can select that. Well, that's something uncomfortable. That would make my journey easier. Like, yeah, bingo. Oh, and you're, you know, that's my use case. Okay, like I'm in the right place here. Like, you know, it was actually giving folks something comforting and challenging the notion that this was going to be difficult, just the questions because it was aligning to some of the things that they were organically thinking about, which is what if they don't support my language? Or like, can I even do this use case I want to do? And so it was just a really interesting, you know, the takeaway for me for this, like the really interesting takeaway was the psyche of the user is so, so critical, right? Like that's just as important as understanding your product and the broader like market you're applying to and all those things, like Just the psyche of users, new people doing things for the first time in your user flow, like understanding that it's powerful. You know, and the simple like kitschy thing I say is that, you know, ultimately the learning here was bad friction is bad and good friction is good, right? There's no such thing as being simple as just all friction is bad, which is sort of kind of what I had assumed going into this.

I love that you were new to Twilio. and he just yoloed an experiment to production.

Yoloed.

That's, it's a big move.

It ended up being like very, you know, very helpful for everyone. I, you know, shared the insights from it and like all these things and.

Shared the data and the conversion.

But for sure, like, you know, use such, you know, processes with, with caution, for sure. Yeah. I love that. The right way to do this is not like advocating for, for the engineers here is the right way to make any changes in production is is, you know, through or with the approval of engineering. But it was, it was, it was the right move overall and definitely helped business. Right. So, yeah, I love it.

That's great. I like that move. I think we need more of that, probably. I want to dig into what you actually, so what is it you changed? You added how many questions? And then what were the questions?

There was a question around, like, what language are you coding in? And then as an option to that, it was like, oh, like, I'm not, I'm actually not coding. Like, I'm not a developer. Like, so that was, It, you know, for us, it actually gave us two really, really interesting data points. One was like, you know, how many developers versus people who are not coding are in our flow. And then what language are they coding, which was massively helpful, not just for like growth and onboarding, but our documentation team, docs team, figuring out like what we should, you know, that ended up being a critical way for us to gauge trends over time and catch things before like, you know, whatever, you know, reports would come out at the end of the year, what people are doing, we could start to see it. and then also product. What product are you interested in using? That was very critical for knowing kind of the basics of how to organize someone's onboarding, right? Are you doing SMS? Are you doing voice? You know, 281 or whatever. And then use case. In use cases, like you're doing appointment reminders or are you doing like a, you know, auto responder? Are you doing anonymous Communications, like for a dating app or something? Right. So those were, those were the very first.

Wow. Okay. So it was like four, four drop down questions and that increased conversion. I love these examples where friction and increased conversion, like there's so few of them, like you hear about this could work and it's rare. And so what did you take away? Like, like what's the pattern you took from this? Like there's the idea it's good friction, but is there something that you're like, here's what is a sign of this is gonna be good friction?

This still alleviated a problem. Alleviated the problem they had where they were coming in and worried that it was going to be difficult or that they weren't going to be able to figure it out. They weren't going to be able to get their footing. And I'd say that that's not unique to Twilio. That's something that I think users experience at any front door, at any company, any sign up beginning the sign up flows. Like, here we go, right? Like buckle up, especially when, you know, it's in a work context and, you know, there might be extra pressure on you to succeed or, you know, for you to make an accurate assessment right? So you just kind of, you know, I think that psyche of like, okay, am I like in the right place? Is this gonna do what I need it to do? Like, can I figure it out? Am I capable? Like that's, these are extremely common things for people to feel when, when they're signing up. And so, you know, certainly, you know, that I think can, can carry out to any, any place. So I'd encourage absolutely everybody to be putting those, those kind of experiences within their early onboarding, not just, you know, for you selfishly, so you can learn and say with them appropriately, but also so the user can feel more confident as they're getting going, like, Hey, I'm in the right place. This is going to do what I need to do. But I think that the carryover there is just the psyche of the user, right? And just being so aware that it's not so cookie cutter as, what is the problem my market experiences and what can my product do to help them? There's also this other thing in the room, which is so important to people's success and their ability to succeed with your products. in your self-serve experiences, which is what is the mentality and the psyche of the person at the various stages in your journey? And if, you know, if you're, if you're not incorporating that or addressing that, you will absolutely miss things or things will fail and you'll be very confused as to why. We had a great experiment that I'm happy to talk about where, like, same, same concept, but totally different. situation, which is later, you know, in, in onboarding, one of the things that, that we tried to do over time to make Toleo less complex was to offer steps like, you know, see the lawn onboarding, like, welcome step one, like, here's what you want to build. Great. We all know that now. Okay, step one, go to this thing. Step two, go to this thing. Three, this thing, four, this thing. Five, bam, you're live. Congratulations. Aha. All these things. So, you know, we shipped that. you know, got that out there and I was like, yeah, it was like, it improved conversion, but it wasn't like that great. It's like, man, like we went from like there being like absolutely nothing, like choose your own adventure, figure it out, go figure it out, good luck to this kind of prescriptive thing and it like wasn't converting as well. And, you know, sort of talked to some users and there wasn't anything particularly obvious that was coming out as to like what the issue was. It was like, oh yeah, like I do step one and we did like mocks with the people like, okay, now I'm gonna do step two. But there was one thing that I was hearing that was coming out that was like, feels like something. And that was that the telephone number, the telecom part. Developers, when they were coming into Twilio, it was like, things that were familiar to them. APIs, the language they're coding in, code samples, documentation, things that like the bogeyman, right? The things that would psychologically trip them up. Telecom. phone numbers, things that, like, you know, the, these things that just were completely out of the zone of anything that they'd ever worked with before, especially, you know, early, earlier on in Twilio's Journey. But even now, right, Telecom's very different Beast for most developers. And guess what was step one? Get a phone number. Because that's step one. Anytime that anyone's trying to teach one of these Twilio, like, one-on-one they're always going to sit down next and be like, okay, like, here, we're gonna go get a phone number and configure it and. That's what anyone, every time will do. However, in a self serve experience, when you don't have that safe person sitting next to you, being like, don't worry, it's gonna be okay. I'm gonna take you through this crazy telecom journey. They're on their own, but that's psyches telling them like, oh my God, telecom, well, I can't do that. That sounds scary. We're getting a phone number configured, like, whoa, I'm outta my depth, right? And so what did we do to test this out? Like test out whether that was the issue? Actually, and it's first we're in the MVP. They kicked them out of the portal entirely and put them into a docs page where we could kind of manufacture an experience where the first thing they saw was code, and they're in the docs, safe place, the language that they're coding in, and then like, knock in there, I was like, oh, get a phone number. Let's go configure it. Right? Not as like step one, not as like the leading thing, but sort of embedded. And the analogy I have for this is like pill in the hot dog. so, like, if anyone ever has, if you, if anyone's got a dog or an animal that you have to feed a pill to, it's like you can't just feed the pill to the animal. It's never going to happen. But if you shove it inside of a hot dog, which, like, looks good and that's exciting, then you can get.

Them to consume it more easily.

And so we do peanut butter. That's our move. That. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Hot dog, peanut butter, all, all that. Right. You, you would, you, you kind of bury it. Right. You embed the, like, scary, unpleasant thing. And so that's what you said with the phone number stuff, that telecom stuff. And guess what? Even though they were good in the amount of the, you know, console and they're going off and, and we had no easy return button, it converted better because we were addressing the big problem that was there at the time, which is their psyche. They were not ready to come in immediately thrown into a phone number experience that was, you know, letting the bogeyman out to party. And that's not what was going to work. We needed to put that boogeyman pill in the hot dog. And so, you know, then, you know, once that validated, then we can actually go through the business of putting that into the onboarding flow correctly, and then that can convert even better. But yeah, so again, the psyche of your user is such a critical thing to be thinking about. And if something like very logical isn't converting well, sometimes it means that you're battling against the psyche of a user and you want to take a step back and think about and learn about where someone is psychologically in your space.

It feels like you had this experiment that was a complete redesign of the onboarding flow and that didn't work. And then your second attempt was a different approach that's a full onboarding flow. And I'm curious, do you have a take on just when you run experiments? And this is something we dealt with a lot at Airbnb and other places. You just redesign the whole thing. or is it better to iteratively work from where you are today and just experiment piece by piece towards some future, much better experience?

Here's what I would say to this is that from a high level, it's always going to be better to be iterative. The reason that it's better is that roughly 80% of the times or is in the time, our hypotheses and the things that we believe will be true are, and this is like amazing. I mean, the, there's an amazing article out there. I'm happy to share with you. You can put in the, the show notes.

Yeah, absolutely.

That really takes a scientific approach to proving that out. Companies like Netflix and Microsoft just over and over again, 80 plus percent. Some companies say 90% of things fail. And so when you, the, the, the closer you get to something that is, you know, you kind of go bury your, your, you know, head in the sand or go into an attic and build something for six months and ship it, the more likely it is that you are going to ship the 80% wrong stuff, right? Whereas the more iterative you are, the more likely it is you're going to catch it sooner. And, you know, failure doesn't have to be a wall. It can be a compass, right? It can be the thing that leads you to the right thing. And so, you know, you always want to, as best you can, get stuff in front of customers so that you can get that compass and, you know, get, get that compass activated and nowhere to go. and yeah, and so that means doing, you know, ugly things. I tell my teams all the time, if it's not embarrassing, you've gone too far, right? Got to be embarrassing. The first day, that was embarrassing. Kicking people out, you know, onboarding, spend all this money and like whatever to get them into your startup loan, and then the first thing you do, get outta here, right? I mean, that's nuts. But if it hadn't validated, that would've been a very cheap but very valuable learning. Instead, it was a very powerful cheap learning in the other direction where, okay, now we know we can invest in it. We know that's the right thing to do. So always better to be iterative so that you are letting failure work for you instead of having it to be a trap that you fall into.

I know that stat you just shared is like per experiment, you're probably wrong 80% of the time. In my experience, launching a whole redesign is negative 100% of the time. I've grown weary to avoid that as much as possible. It's like, you kind of know that you're taught that as you go into growth and product, but you're just like, nah, come on, let's just make it awesome. Just redesign this whole thing. Especially, you know, your designers are always like, now let's start again. Let's make it amazing, but it always ends up being negative.

And you're like, okay, well, it's too late now. We gotta launch this thing. We don't have time to start again. Well, it's funny. I mean, in the articles and you'll see like it was written by somebody from Microsoft who kind of built the presentation platform and did all these cool things. as he went into actually trying to apply a scientific method of figuring out how often people are wrong about their hypotheses and what they're planning to do, he's like, I wonder if that applies to us here at Microsoft. There's even for him that kind of question of like, and it, and it bore out, right? It's just, I think it's challenging to, when there's a lot of smart people in the world in this space doing things, and it's very difficult to think, gosh, am I really wrong? Like, 80%? Plus 90% of the time. But when you think about it, makes total sense, right? Because what has to happen for something to be successful? You have to understand the problem perfectly. You have to then understand who's having the problem perfectly, the customer. At what time they're having the problem, then you've got to put the right solution in front of them to solve that problem. Maybe you've got the problem right, all that stuff right, but your solution something off, right? Or maybe your solution is right, but maybe it's just not presented, they're not communicated in the right way. You could have any one of those things off and it's not going to succeed, right? It's not going to have, you know, the metric impact you're expecting to have. So in that context, it's almost like incredible. We do succeed 20 to 10% of the time, given everything that has to line up. And so I think it's one of those things where, you know, you really want to go into it embracing that. Okay, this isn't about how smart I am or how good my team is or any of that stuff. It's just, hey, the logic of this is a, you know, challenging to get it right. And let's embrace that and let's lean into, let's lean into that, that knowledge and make it a part of our strategy instead of finding against it.

Have you found anything that helps you increase those odds or is it just this is the way of the world and you probably can't significantly increase the chances your experiment works out.

So here's the thing. I mean, I think there's very little that we can do to make that space easier, right? All those things have to be figured out. And so I definitely think that you, that everybody is gonna be in a space where their original ideas, untested ideas are gonna be around that hit rate. However, the way that you go about validating those, can be totally different and you can be very fast about validating those ideas. And that's the key, right? And, you know, AB testing is one of the most expensive kinds of ways to validate an experiment, right? It, you know, often requires design and engineering and the PM or growth person or marketing person who's crafting it, right? All these things are investments that take a lot of time, even for simple things. and then you have the time Factor. How long is the thing I have to run to have an impact? So all of that is extremely expensive. And so I think the key is to just think through, okay, what are the things I can do to quickly validate what, what these ideas are that we. And you can do that with painted doors, right? Which is where you test rate the concept and the idea before it exists versus the actual experience you can do mocks like create, have you know, create, you know, if you've got a designer, create those mocks for that experience, put it in front of people, see how they engage with it. That can be so powerful. You can invalidate tons of hypotheses at that state. You know, you really want to only things, the only things you want to get to that kind of that deep A/B testing environment are ones that have been kind of vetted along the way. And that way you reduce your fail rate, right? Because you're, you're failing faster by using other methods. So, you know, I think that's, I more advocate for that side, like let's fail fast by using those tools rather than figuring out a way that you can rise above where everyone else is operating and figure out ways to solve all that complex stuff better because that's going to be challenging, but you can always get better at experimenting and validating things faster.

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I'm a very like data driven person. Like I self describe and think of myself that way. Because, you know, in large part because of that, I feel like you have to be constantly checking yourself and data is a really great way to do that. But I definitely think that I would be described as someone who's like going more by their gut when looking at data and results just because of the way that I approach it, which is I am very comfortable and very common using qualitative responses and things like that and supplement to quantitative data to make a decision. And that puts less of a burden on the quantitative to really make an assessment of whether something was working or not. You know, one of the things I.

See.

I think sometimes goes against other folks deal though. I'm seeing kind of things shift a little is that 95% confidence rate, right? I came from my background, like in college, I was in a lab running experiments or really publishing to a journal and stuff. And we had to have that 95% confidence. We had to because the things that were coming out of the lab and being published were influencing things like how we do education and how we understand how bias works and when it shows up and therefore how we can combat it. Things were we're wrong and sending a bunch of baloney, like that can cause some significantly bad things, like false positive, false negatives in that context can be very dangerous for lack of a word. You think of other, you know, pharmaceuticals, like there's the 95% confidence rate belongs in some companies and some industries because the risk of, you know, finding the impact of a false success is very high. But those of us converting users and trying to upsell folks like We are very fortunate to not have that level of burden on us, and we can take advantage of that, right? And so there are definitely times where I will advocate for and I will push for and I will myself use lower confidence intervals and 95%, especially if that like doubles the amount of experiments that you can run in a year, right? End of the day, these are all methods that we use to try to validate the hypotheses that we have. And if you have, like, if you're doing a 95% confidence interval, you're still accepting a 5%, you know, some amount of false success. Do that a little bit more, challenge you to do a little bit more, and then run way more experience. If you look at the net of what your team is doing over the course of a year, what you're doing over the course of a year, you will be positive.

Wow, that is a big idea. Idea of releasing the P value, confidence interval for experimentation and data teams. Everyone would be happy to be excited about this. Probably maybe not some data scientists on teams. Do you do that? And how do you actually, is that how you operate on your teams? Just like, we don't need 95% confidence.

So I'll say this is actually very critically important. You must have this game plan set before you run something. Failure mode that I've seen so many teams fall into is They'll run the experiment or whatever it is, and then they'll, like, make the data fit the hypothesis, right? Or sometimes they'll go in without a hypothesis and just be like, this is gonna do better things for our metrics, but not like a core reason as to why, or what, you know, what exactly are we testing here? And so this, this is another area where you could absolutely fall into that trap. Well, it's hovering like at 80. I think it's good. That, that Laura person said it was cool, so I, I think that that's fine. like that will always be a trap, right? So it needs to be very deliberately thought of in advance as a way of like, hey, here's where we're going to validate this. And always, always, always, if you're going to, you know, accept more risk of a false success or false positive, false negative, you want to then be really thinking about how you're going to harden your, your validation of a hypothesis. For example, let's take that one we talked about with, truly, where we're kicking people out and we're sending them to that, you know, that the pill and hot dog experiment, right? And we're sending people to that experience to kind of hide the phone number. You know, in that case, right? Let's say that we were going to accept a lower confidence interval. I would very much want to see qualitative feedback to confirm that that hypothesis was true. I want to be looking at the qualitative data from the ones where people were thrown into the existing flow. and ones put into the docs that one of them felt more confident and more like this was really easy to get through. And like they, they felt from other territory and things like that. And I'd be wanting to hear from the ones who were in the other one things like, oh, I kind of got stuck on that phone number thing. Like, ah, like, kind of figure this out, but it just, it feels like it's, I'm out of my depth. Like I would want to be looking for other things to corroborate, the hard data that I'm seeing, right? And yes, It opens the door to, you know, whenever you open the door to more risk acceptance, you are going to have some false successes there. But all of these things together can overall make it more likely that you're shipping more things that are going to positively influence the customer. And again, I can't say it enough. It is a huge risk in and of itself to not ship as much as you possibly could in a year. That is a huge risk given that very high fail rate. So, you know, I wouldn't, you know, to those data scientists and I've had, you know, chatted with a few of my time, what I try to explain is that that article, that data, that the 80%, like, that's hard data, right? About what a detriment it can be if you are, you know, if you don't run it off experiments, you can literally, if you just run 10 in a year, odds are maybe two around impact, two of a course, an entire year, if you kind of take that approach. So data scientists can understand, hey, if we do this, if we move this down, we can double or triple, or whatever it is, the number of experiments we can run, and overall net, that's going to result in more successes that will overall net us to a positive place. You can still tell a data story to the data scientist about why you're doing this. Again, this is why when you ask that question, identify, it's a very data-driven person. But I think some of the methods that I use can you know, sound at the service level as more like, oh, I'm going by my gut. But again, very data driven is just embracing the reality of some of the hard data that I don't think we all Embrace or are even aware of sometimes about that, that sale rate.

This is awesome. This is a big idea. Have you written about this anywhere for folks that maybe want to try this approach at their company? And if not, you should appreciate that.

I It's funny, it's like all my general life to-do's is to start writing some of this down. I have three children, one of whom is five months old, two and four. And so sometimes I'll start to write and then like one of them will like crawl across the keyboard and, you know, like this, by one of them, I mean all of them multiple times. But eventually, yeah, I'll be very happy to do that if folks would be interested. I'm always happy to, do whatever I can to help folks, help empower folks with knowledge to do better. Cause this, none of this is like secret sauce really. It just sort of learn from experience and it's always better to learn from others experience than your own. It's faster. So yeah, I would definitely aspire to Lenny. Is that, I think that's the best that I can say. But eventually my kids will get older. I hear this and, and maybe I, I can do so.

Hopefully. Uh, cool. So maybe if you're watching this YouTube, leave a comment if you want Laura to write in depth about this idea. and spread it to your company. Okay, I want to talk about growth, but I have one last question just along the lines of experimentation. Is there any other just like, I don't know, big lessons or takeaways of just running experiments that would be interesting to share?

I think we kind of got into this one like a little bit, but I just really want to exclamation point underline it, which is that notion of kind of making the data wrap to fit like a concept, you know? I think a lot of teams are, you know, feel and, and are under a lot of pressure to show progress. Right. And what did you do this month? Where, where are the metrics move? And, like, you know, and, and it can cause folks to feel like they, they have to do that. Where it's like, oh, gosh, it's experiment. Like, everyone's got the experience where you run an experiment, you're, like, looking at the data, refresh, refresh, refresh. Oh, my gosh. It actually perform worse, you know, or it's like, not the same. gosh, we got everyone really excited about this thing that we all like worked on really hard. Like, oh my God, what are we, what are we gonna say in the QBR or, you know, the, the monthly report or whatever it is that, that sort of these things, you know, the results come to light. Um, and, and to this, I'd say this, that it's incredibly important for growth teams to educate out and for folks outside of growth and leading growth especially to, to understand. that the, the best way for a growth team to succeed, the, the only way really for them to succeed is to embrace the fact that they're there to validate, to, to understand what the biggest opportunities are and to go after them. And that is not something that can be done on a weekly timeline, sometimes even a monthly, depending on the space you're in and what's known and unknown. And so any growth team that's, that's beholden to short timeline wins and improvement is always going to be dangerous. That's a, that's an environment that's conducive to vanity metric usage and Fab, you know, massaging the data to fit. And ones that are more successful are ones that are reporting over longer periods of time. Because any growth team given enough time to kind of fail enough times to learn the right thing to do is absolutely going to have shows success, real success, right? Like, not that okay, we're gonna make this data fit, but like real moving the metrics is up. And so definitely, you know, educating out, if you find yourself in a position where you are beholden to that, you know, share that 80% fail rate, like just math, statistics, data, like that is not, you know, you cannot be successful in an environment, but over time you can be. And so that's one thing I definitely would draw on that they spent, you end up spending a decent amount of my pie chart at Twilio and then also at Rapid where I was after that. And I'm sure I'll spend some time at Amplitude as well, just helping folks kind of understand what is the healthiest ecosystem, the most powerful ecosystem for a growth team to operate in. And time and expectations over time is a big part of that.

When you say pie chart, it's like the pie chart of your time. Like a big chunk of your time goes to this. That's awesome. I like that. I use pie charts a lot to describe that same idea. just to be a little more concrete there. What is the time frame you think is the minimum for a growth team to be thinking across?

I think it's good, especially for, for newer teams, but even teams in general, commit. Commit to something that you can kind of do over the course of a year. And, you know, low medium high, right? Is, is always helpful in that space. I mean, you know, a lot of times, by that, by low medium high, low medium high. More like, you know, hey, we've got a few Bets that we have are a few core hypotheses. And if they take off, that's going to be our high bucket. Like, wow, they, like, we think these things could be kind of lightning on a bottle here, but they could also be, you know, a bunch of vapor or Mist. So. But until we run it, we're not going to know. And if those bear out, though, then, yeah, that's, that's our high. And, hey, we've got a few things that we think are safer, you know, maybe it was sort of validated a bit in the previous year or what have you. And, you know, he's looking to move the metrics this amount. So it's helpful to, to give people, though, that, that. that construct, right? It deviates from it very hard deviates from this notion of like, here's the single number that we're going to hit, right? Just things that help people kind of understand that space a little bit better and what to expect. And because of that, it can be a little bit lumpy. Like, you know, there were some things that we released. I mean, it was totally for the most number of years. It's can be easy to talk about this construct here, but like, you know, there's one thing that we did that generated like tens of millions of dollars in the pipeline was really, really powerful and took you know, sometimes kind of navigate and validate. Other times we did like that onboarding stuff that's talking about like kind of like catching those things like that was, you know, could happen on a little bit of a faster clip, but still, you know, took some time to validate and understand. But yeah, over the course of a year, you just generally kind of be able to commit to movement, but help people understand the methods there so that they're not coming at you on a weekly basis being like, and what did you do? these past couple days.

Okay, I gotta follow up on a couple of these things. What was that big change at Twilio that led to tens of millions of dollars?

This is part of the course that I teach at Reforge.

Amazing. Good luck for Reforge. What's the course called? Just a one shot.

Active Interest and Retention. I think it's live. This is my part. I think it's live. I'll give you a link so we can link to it in the show notes. But yeah, the high level version is we, you know, this is, this was kind of deeper into my, my journey at Twilio. This is, you know, fast forward a few years, you know, to kind of blow up this, this team and some cool things going on. But I was really looking for kind of what's like the next big thing for us to do. Like what, what could that be? And I noticed, you know, remember as, you know, that question very back in the day when I asked about like the kind of developer versus not developer folks. Yeah. We saw that that little non-developer little doodad was kind of growing, right? We were actually the number of people in the ecosystem who were identifying themselves as not a developer, we were in the space. But very interestingly, they were, as we kind of got more refined in our understanding of those folks, a lot of them wanted to build with Twilio. Like it, you know, there was a hypothesis of like, oh, well maybe they're lost. Maybe they just want pricing. Like maybe they sent a bite mistake. And I was like, nope, they're here to build. They want to build. And they kind of struggled through the developer onboarding and some of them would succeed and some would not. But anyway, it was all about identifying what did they need to succeed? If we made them successful, could it contribute to dollars? One of the core learnings I'd heard from sales at the time was, hey, it's very challenging for us to get the kind of folks when a developer's not involved yet to go from zero to one to get something off the ground. But man, if we can get them to do that, if I can get them to $1 and spend, I can get them to five and get them 50, because they're like 10,000, then I can get them 100,000. This whole long journey, like, hey, Laura, if your team could just get them off the ground, man, we can do so much. So yeah, the journey is all about, okay, what were the things that were missing in the experience we were offering? And ultimately was they couldn't write code from scratch. That was really difficult. And also, we're going to stand up a server. that was difficult, but we ended up iteratively experimenting a way to validate those hypotheses and what's the right way to do this. And, yeah, it was great. It's called a quick deploy on code exchange. Anyone can go there and deploy an app without having to write code and kind of get an aha moment there with Twilio.

That is awesome. So basically it's like a low code Twilio app.

Yeah, I ended up kind of being like, we had a lot of, like, Like pet names, like nicknames for it. I think probably the one that, that most succinctly describes it is just, it ended up being kind of a create your own demo experience, which, you know, made, made you talk about the psyche of people, you know, you know, we talked about how developers telecom until it can be intimidating. We'll talk about like this, you know, the, the non developer, like sometimes the buyers or like the people who are, you know, instant buying decisions. Like for them, it was like, not only was it like telco, but it was like the developer stuff was, inaccessible, but they still wanted to, you know, jump in and they wanted to have that experience. And so this was a way for us to give them momentum, give them, well, geez, if I can get this running, my development team can definitely do it. Right. And so it was a very powerful kind of, you know, moment where we could really address the psyche of those users, get them excited about Twilio and then give sales kind of the ability to give something powerful to those non-engineering buyers and folks they're talking to.

So genius looking back seems like an obvious win. I imagine it was not. One of my readers suggested that I start a series of the story of a feature and kind of walk through the discovery, ideation, development, iteration. And this feels like a really interesting example of that. But anyway, I got just a couple more questions. I know we've been going for an hour now, so, but I have questions. I don't want to let you go just yet. And they're on growth. so, so one question is just, you worked at Twilio, which is very product led growth. You're gonna be, you're now at Amplitude, which is more sales driven. And I know it's, you're trying to go more product led. I know Elena talks a lot about this, how every company needs to have product led motions, otherwise they're gonna be disrupted by someone that comes product led. And I don't know what hires, which, which bucket would they fall into?

Yeah, between the AI, like SLG and PLG, I mean, yeah, for me, it's, they're, they're kind of two sides at the same time. like, you know, growth, part of growth and sales, it's all, it's all to me very thematically the same stuff. The difference is that with growth, you are selling with your product and with sales, you're selling with person, like one to one. And, you know, so, so companies need to be, you know, employing both of those forces to optimally convert their audience. You know, we're in a world where people are expecting both. They're expecting to be sold by your product. and sold at the enterprise level in large companies by human being. It's going to listen to their specific needs and really break it out for them. And if you only have one, you're going to miss stuff. So absolutely, I think you want to, those two forces together working well. And obviously there's different stages, things work differently in different spaces. But I think when it comes to amplitude, I think there's a huge opportunity here. I think the key is, and that the challenge, you know, for companies that have done like the sales thing and are trying to crack into the PLG thing is, you know, really comes down to how you fundamentally are approaching that space. And again, your users and, you know, where they're at and the psyche of where they're at. I think a lot of companies will say, well, okay, like, hey, we're going to do this PLG stuff. Let's take that sales like enterprise, whatever offering that we have. And let's, you know, chop it up a bit and like cut access here and like cut out this feature here. And we're going to like slap this plan out and we're going to put a price on it. And we'll maybe have like hours of debates over whether it's like 10.99 or like $104 or like $75. And eventually we'll like someone will win that battle and like slap it on and then kind of see what happens. And anyway, the discussion or the focus is a lot around the product. What are we going to do with this product? How are we going to crack it open and shift it? and then give it to these people, these users, these visitors. And what it's missing, I think, is, and a lot of times it's easy to miss, is that when we're doing PLG and we're shifting from sales to PLG, we need to reset. We need to recognize that, again, this is sales, sales via the product. What do you do when you're, what does a good sales rep do when they're engaging? They understand what the problem is. of the person and the space you're talking to. So we need the same thing here. What are the unique problems of people who are coming into our self-serve space? And I think, you know, when it comes to a company like Amplitude, you know, you're, you know, a lot of the folks that we'll be kind of looking to address via the PLG motion, you know, there's a number of things we want to achieve there. But one of the primary things is to kind of tap into the SMB market and really give them a really, you know, startups and give them a space to land and to grow. and you have to think, what are the challenges and unique problems that they have? Because we're going to be using our product to kind of settle them. We need to meet them where they're at with the problems that they've got. And I think one of the things that I've observed from being in all these startups and advising some startups is I very rarely, I don't think I've ever come across a startup where they have the right number of analysts for their needs. In fact, a lot of them don't have any. And so what that means is that the CEO is, you know, being an analyst to create their dashboards for the board. And, you know, the product manager is like being an analyst to figure out like what the heck's going on and creating the reports for their product. And it's happening all over the place is that people are in their roles and they have to be an analyst too. And I think that that's a problem that especially, you know, younger companies and early stage companies have. And so when they're, you know, connected to their psyche, what are they caring about? What are they thinking about when they're signing up for product analytic product or something? They're looking for something that's going to help them feel reassured they're going to be able to actually get to the bottom of the right metrics, create the reports that show things the right way. I, you know, what's the best way to show churn? There's got to be a best way. Like, so many people are doing it. Guess what? There are some really good ways to do it. And there are some really successful you know, ways to set up dashboards for the board. People have done that too. Like there's a lot of that knowledge that exists and all those templates and frameworks that exist. Benchmarking, are these numbers even good? Right? And so one of the hypotheses that I have is that, you know, if we take that perspective and we understand, you know, that that is the problem, that there's a number of things that we can do to really change the way that self-serve experience works to help convert people and show them how Amplitude can make them kind of that powerful. But the thing that I think sticks across all companies, not just Amplitude making the shift, is just that, that when you're doing this, do not think this is a copy paste, but like chop it for parts thing. Don't start with your product when you're building out your strategy. Start with your customers, your users, your prospects, your people who are going to be coming into your self-service flow. Make sure you're understanding how their problems differ because they do. from the people that you're addressing at the sales-led side, and then make sure that you're orienting your experience and product around those people.

It's interesting that you almost have to kind of start again as a product company, as a product, because you may need to solve completely different problems that eventually lead to the same place. But it's interesting what you're saying that you may end up targeting analysts or PMs, or I know Amplitude has always focused on PMs, but Yeah, and it's.

Right, and there's always the nice thing about it is it's in some ways it does feel like you're starting fresh because you do need to kind of start with the customer again and like what's their problem? But in a lot of ways, you know, you can carry over a lot of the same knowledge. I mean, at that point you kind of know what's working well. Amplitude, for example, does have a ton of knowledge around what some of the best ways artists set up reports. There's a lot of things that they have the momentum going sort of like where do you choose that momentum and how do you put that and curate that in front of users and make sure that they're getting the right things. There's a ton of momentum already there. It's just a little bit about harnessing it and understanding, yeah, where are the gaps? Because there are going to be gaps. But, you know, anchoring in a customer problem is, I think, the way that you start any new product, any new thing that you're releasing, should always think about, like, the customer and the pain point. So no different than when you're doing, you know, PLG for the first time or cracking into it, you need to be thinking again, starting again with the problem, the problems they have, the psyche that they have coming to your space so that you can build something that is going to effectively make them feel like, oh, you can solve my problem, you get me, and show them how your product's going to do that.

Final question, and this is around developers. You worked at Twilio. Obviously Twilio sold developers, I think Rapid where you worked right before Amplitude also sold developers. selling to developers feels like such a hot space right now. There's so many startups that are just building developer tools, such a huge market. It used to be not. It used to be like, there is not a market in developers. They're not gonna spend money. There's not enough of them. And now it is a big popular spot. And so I'm curious, what have you learned about building a startup and a product that sells to developers? I imagine a lot of founders building.

Search of tools would be really curious. The first is that developers are just a very different audience from any others. I've seen so many people who have come in strong done growth really well or product really well with other audiences and like, oh, like, I'm going to take all those learnings off pivot into serving developers and ends up being a very steep climb because developers are so different. And let me give you like a couple just fun facts that make them really different. And some of these have kind of some interesting stories. One is developers like almost 2-1. Do not look at your marketing website at all. They go straight to your sign up flow. So what that means is all that beautiful context that you're setting and, you know, the product page and pricing, all that stuff, like very, you know, very often they're skipping all of it context free and going straight to your sign up. And so anything that is not that, you know, anytime you make an assumption like, oh, well, they probably know this coming in to sign up, or like, well, we don't need to click. That's on the marketing website. Like, none of that's going to apply to group of people. They are like, they're there. They're, they're looking to do. I, I describe them, like the analogy I have for, for this group is like they're the, the Ikea buyers who, you know, when the Ikea package comes, they're not opening up the instruction manual and reading it and then starting to go through. They're in there tearing open the bags and starting to, like, pull the pieces together and trying to build it. Right. They'll come up for context and, and, and steps and such when, when they get stuck, if they're motivated. So that's one thing. And then another one is just the aversion to talking to sales. And I think everybody can, peering out times like, oh yeah, well I hate sales too. When I sign out and get bombarded by sales, that's the worst. I totally get that. But I have just developers are on this whole other level. There was a fang company who signed up for Twilio, built a POC, launched to production, All this and, and operate in that space for months without engaging once with sales. So it's trying to reach them, right? And I, I ended up being the one that talked to them like first because they like reached out to support because there was something about their delivery that was, was, was off. They were like missing a feature and they did not want to talk to sales. They end up talking to me and I was just, when I was in product marketing, I was like my first exposure of like, these people now don't want to talk to Sales, you know, and then there's another one where like a giant retail company where like the engineering team signed up with their personal email addresses so they wouldn't get bombarded by, by sales. It was only like later that we like found out. Anyway, it's so, but, but the thing that's most important, these are fun facts, but, but the thing that is, I would say is the most important to leave, thing to leave with, with listeners here is why, like what makes them so different? Like, like why, like why, what's the deal here? and it stems from their charter and their responsibility. So, you know, if we put ourselves in developer shoes for a minute, a developer, if a developer is required to use your product, especially if they're like the primary user, the primary builder, it's really important to recognize that they are responsible for that. If your service goes down, that's their responsibility, not just for themselves, but their team. If the pager wakes up someone because the service they bought from you goes down, that's on them. If, oh, turns out that doesn't work with the systems that they said it was, well, that's on them. Like, doesn't integrate with the data the way that, you know, everyone wanted it to. That's on them. Everyone lives to develop or when it's not working right and it cannot work right in so many ways, that's their failure. That can, it can cost them their job. It could cost them the trust of their team, cost them their reputation. you know, and that means that the stakes are very high for them every time that they're adopting something new. So they can't afford to take someone's word for it, especially a sales rep who might be, have some other motivations, right? From their perspective, right? They can't afford to trust your content or someone's word. They must do it, they must prove it to themselves. And so that's why they, for developers to be bought in, they need to do something, build something, a proof of concept at the very least, if not kind of like moving further than that. And so that means they're going to be pretty darn deep in their self-serve experience with you before they're ready to commit. And so if you're a company that is providing that requires developers to build, right? You must invest in self-serve experiences in order to effectively convert your audience and you should be thinking of them something akin your self-serve function and growth folks someone akin to Salesforce because your sales developers are not going to accept sales coming in and trying to convert them at that stage.

I love that you always come back to the psyche of the user and how, you know, in this case, developers like, here's why they're responsible for this thing. Salespeople are going to convince them this is going to work and it's not and That's a really interesting tool, and that's a really cool takeaway. Is there anything else that we didn't cover before we get to our very exciting lightning round?

Lenny, I think we covered it all, man.

You got all my questions and more. So with that, welcome to the very exciting lightning round. I've got six questions for you. Are you ready?

I am so ready.

What are two or three books that you recommend most to other people? I'm a big believer in happiness, not.

Just like, you know, because, you know, being crunchy or, you know, we should all be happy, but also because it helps us do our best work. and just we're more creative and all of this. So one is Simple Path to Wealth by JL Collins. I don't ignore the data that money is something that often gets in the way of our happiness. And so many smart people that just have not figured out the whole like managing their finances thing. And this book will cover all of your basics. It's very easy to read. He's got an audiobook that he marries himself. Simple Past Wealth, Dale Collins. He's fantastic.

What's a recent movie? Oh, wait, wait, there's more?

Oh, there's one more.

Oh, let's do it.

Let's do it. Happiness, which is Atomic Habits by James Clear. It is, if you ever want to change something about yourself or something's not quite working for you, this guy will give you a framework to change it.

Guaranteed. I really enjoyed that book. That guy's killing it. He was on Tim Ferriss. He had a great interview. Folks that don't want to read it, they can listen to that. There's a lot of cool tips there.

Favorite recent movie or TV show? Unabashedly, the Great British Baking Show. I love that show. I love that show for like all the reasons everyone loves that show. It's like heartwarming and like makes, you know, makes you feel good and out lives you, but also because it is a competitive show. Like they're trying to be the best baker and they're out there helping each other. They're like a big family. Like I've, most reality competitive TV shows that I see, all of them are like cutthroat, they're sabotaging. So I'm just endlessly fascinated also by like the psychology of what's happening here. I want someone to do like a research paper on it. Like, what gets the bottom of why they're all like helping each other? It's wonderful though.

Wonderful to watch. Interesting.

It always comes back to psychology with you. I know, I know. I feel like I'm just, I'm like really, really sinking deep in there, but, and it's true though. It's like, Very interesting to me. So, and I love that show.

What's a favorite interview question that you like to ask in interviews?

I love asking about a ship or release that is not cherry picked by the person you're talking to. You can get it in a lot of different ways. The thing is everyone has like a big success story. Everyone does. It really doesn't actually tell you very much to ask someone like, what's a great thing that you released? Cause everyone can tell that. instead, take that away. What's the most recent ship is a really easy one because recency time. But there's other things you can do to take that out, like just give specific parameters for a ship that they've shared or whatever. And that will allow you to listen more and learn more about their frameworks versus the outcomes. Because if you're picking a random ship, odds are it probably wasn't fantastic. So they're going to want to talk more about how they approach getting there, and that's what you want to know about, to know if they're going to.

Succeed, what their frameworks are they approaching. That is cool. I've never heard that one. That is a really clever idea. What are five SaaS products that you use in your day-to-day work?

Can say amplitude. I know, right? Still learning what, which ones we have here. But yeah, I'll share, I'll just share sort of like the ones that I like, like a lot that I've used elsewhere. So one is Hotjar, Hotjar Qualaroo also works. Just anything that allows you to put some Quick little thing in front of customers, get that qualitative feedback we talked about. It's a critical, critical supplement to quantitative data to understand what's really causing the change or not causing the change, T or C. So that's important. I will say Amplitude is a fantastic tool that I have used, and I would have said that if I weren't, hadn't just joined Amplitude. So I got to use it. I know I got to use it for the first time at RAPIDS Amplitude, and it was It was awesome. So again, like asterisk, because I'm like working there now, but it is, I do actually like it. And, you know, Slack, they're boring. Everyone says Slack, but I just have to have to hand it to them. It makes life so much easier and just not another way. And then Builder, which also put an asterisk on that one, but I really want to serve says a lot of people don't know about it and it's really helpful. I do advise them. So I'm like, you know, in their corner. but this is another one I also say would, would be a powerful one. I think a lot of teams get stuck. They're not able to, they're, they're lying too much to their Engineers to make changes. Again, we talk about rapid experimentation, getting things out, out, out. And Builder makes it really easy for folks to do that. Also, like a headless, you know, CMS, you can, like, drag and drop headless CMS. So they do make it easy for non-Engineers to make changes. So especially if you're trying to figure out how to, figure out how to get around that 80% foxy man that I mentioned, this builder would be a good way. And then, yeah, if you want one more, I'll give you chat GPT, which is really boring. And, you know, everyone's saying that, but I think I'll just say I don't have any, like, crazy things to say about it, except that I do think we all need to figure out how we pull that in to our sex. I think people who don't do that are probably gonna lose out, you know, or, or like, you know, smart AI, whatever. bots, but that, that would be it for you, Lenny. But if you asked me in a few months after I've actually been in amplitude for a bit, I'm sure I'd.

Give you a different answer. That's a good time to plug, Lennybot.com, so when made a, and I wrote a newsletter or Dan Shipper who created the bot wrote a newsletter post about how you built this thing. And so you could go, ask me questions using the content of my newsletter as answers.

And it's very cool, Lennybot.com or Lenny's bot.com. Amazing.

I didn't know about that.

Well, there you go. I've changed my answer.

Yeah, yeah, that's all you need. Two more questions. What is something relatively minor you've changed in your product development process that has had a lot of impact on your team's ability to execute?

Yeah, the be embarrassing. Like I mentioned earlier, be embarrassed by the first iteration. If you are not embarrassed, you've gone too far. That really speeds up chips and helps people celebrate the unpolished as opposed to feel embarrassed about it. So embracing that.

Awesome. And final question. I know you just started at Amplitude, but do you have a favorite pro tip for how to use Amplitude or maybe hidden feature people may not know about?

You tell me day two and a half, but I'll say one thing that was super cool actually that someone put together on my team at Rapid, literally right before I left, he put together a video of how powerful amplitude could be when linked up and integrated with other things, like in this case, Hotjar and Segment. There was like an amplitude report that someone had kind of created, and there was something that was kind of an anomaly happening there. Like users were kind of using something in a way we didn't expect. And amplitude, one of the reports surfaced it, but of course then we wanna know, like, why is that happening? And so we could take, find out what the event is, and then using Segment, find out what that name was, and look in Hotjar, and actually go in and get screencasts of people doing that exact event. And from that, we were able to kind of form some really concrete hypotheses about what actually was causing it. And so, you know, obviously, you know, talking to customers is very powerful, but in this case, just that simple use of kind of connecting and threading those technologies together could really get a good picture of that. without needing to engage customers. So kind of the power, I'd say, of the tip would be how you can really amplify when you can have amplitude when you use it with amazing.

Laura, we covered a lot of ground, career, experimentation, growth, embarrassment, psychology. Thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find me online if they want to reach out, learn more, maybe send you an appreciation or two. And two, how can listeners be useful to you?

Yeah, find me on LinkedIn. I don't post a lot. Yeah, I will blame my three children. Eventually, I promise that I will, but I'm pretty good about responding to messages, so definitely link with me there. And then, yeah, what listeners can do, I think, yeah, I mean, I'm always happy to hear feedback, suggestions, all that, but I'll just say I also know that it's a little bit crazy out there right now, especially folks working in tech. so I'm also cognizant of what I might be able to do to help all of you. I know there's a few places I advise and, you know, rapid hiring. I know of a few folks that are hiring growth, strong growth people and product folks. So if you are interested in learning more about that, don't hesitate to hit me up. I want to make sure that I help as many people as I can in that respect, because it's, you know, trying times and then it's, I'm sure you've heard it and read it, but if you're laid off, this is not about you, it's not your fault. This is crazy world we're in. Things will get better and I would be very, feel very lucky if I could help even one person land.

So feel free to hit me up about that too. Awesome. And maybe if you share some links, we could include links to open roles.

In the show notes. Yes, I know there's a few that don't have JDs open yet. They're that hot off the press, but I'm happy to, yeah, surface a few things there for sure. I know that makes it easier for people to know. Awesome.

We will do our best with the show notes then, Laura. Thank you again for being here.

Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. This was awesome and so much fun.

Bye everyone.

Thank you so much for listening.

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