Top 5 Rules for Building Hypergrowth Teams with Lucie Buisson, Anique Drumright and Casey Winters

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For growth and retention. It's the two metrics we look at the most. If the product is very new, you're going to optimize for growth and so you're going to make more big bets. If it's a more major product and you already have a good growth and you have a huge customer base, you need to optimize for existing customer happiness and retention. And in that case, we're going to invest much more into optimization.

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I thought we'd start by introducing a little bit more about our teams and some of the bias that we'll bring to the answers we give today. With you Lucy, why don't you talk a bit about your team and the type of business you run.

Yeah, sure. So hi everybody. Very happy to be with you. So Contentsquare is an experience analytics platform. It's SaaS business for enterprise. So we are very high touch model. Everything we sell goes through a sales team, very senior sales team and our customers are always in touch with customer success people. So I think this is about my bias and how we approach business and in terms of who I have in my team I have product management, product design, product marketing, product strategy and product ops.

Hi, my name's Annique and I lead product at Loom and Loom is a video platform for Async work. My biases on this one is Loom is almost entirely plg. So product led growth with a little bit of sales on top for more complex, more complex partners that want to use Loom at a fully company wide level. And I have a little bit of bias towards that as well because I was previously at Trip Actions which is a largely sales led Customer success motion. And then on my team I have product managers, product design, user research as well as a cross functional growth team.

Great. And I'll represent a little bit more of the consumer side. So Eventbrite has consumer marketplace elements as well as B2B SaaS elements. But those SaaS elements are all self serve PLG and my background is a lot of consumer growth. So my bias is all about what's going to grow, the number of users, the number of revenue in terms of a lot of the decisions I make. So hopefully it'll be a good mix of different perspectives. All right, so first topic we'll talk about is something that happens a lot in hyper growth which is hiring. And the first question is about hiring people like us. So when should founders hire a head of product and what is the head of product's role when a founder is thinking about opening that role maybe. Lucy, you want to start?

Yeah, sure. So I'm going to take, I'm going to talk about my perspective and I don't pretend that it's the rule for everybody but I joined Content Square a bit more than eight years ago when the team was 10 people. And so I like I was hired very early on so I was on the customer success side and I think it really depends on the founder. Our founder is the best salesperson I ever met. He's not a product guy. So I think our CTO felt the need of product very soon, very early on and so I think it was three months after I started on the customer success side they asked me to create a product team and what I think was very helpful starting that early on is that we co founding the the product vision with the CEO and I think this is this save a lot of trouble later because we really share the same vision and the same passion. I think if CEOs need to be ready to let you some room right? If they do that. And I think it's really the most important thing if you are a CEO. It's when you start to be ready to give some room and some slack to someone else to to make decision on your product.

I agree with everything you said. I definitely think it is CEO dependent. So both CEOs that I have been in this role with are both very product minded and it's amazing because they're so passionate, they're so invested and I think that you should hire when, if you are a product minded CEO, you hire when you're ready for a partner and when you're ready. Like the business just requires you to Be in more places than you can be and you want a partner to think through the product with you and you are to your point, willing to give space and autonomy to build a product organization and a bench under even the product leader that can work with levels of autonomy. And then I think there's like tactical pieces. If I think about when I stepped in at Trip Actions, which I think I came in at around 40 and I actually think that was a little too late because there are already a lot of pain points from not having a day to day product owner in the sense of we already had tons of customers that were sophisticated and just I think especially in a sales led side, in a sales led business you want to make sure that you have the product resources to partner with customers as you're scaling.

Yeah, I think someone's doing the product work inside a company. It might be the founder, it might be engineers. So if the founder is really passionate about doing that product work, maybe it can be a little bit later. If that person is a sales background, it's going to be a little bit earlier. I tend to bias towards get a few PMs in the building so that what some of your pain points are and not in theory what you want out of a product leader, but in practice, what are you getting or not getting from people working on product management. And I think that helps. Anique, maybe we could follow up on how do you primarily work with your founders today? Like how does that relationship work? How did you align on that?

I think it is always evolving based upon what Loom needs. I think something that was really important when I joined Loom was the interview process and, and what did Joe want and what did that autonomy look and how did we want to build a really trusting relationship. So I think we in some ways we do follow like the product life cycle of every three months. We readjust, we talk about what is he really excited about, what is he really passionate about. If he has 20% of time to spend on product, where does he want to spend that time? And I think planning up front is really helpful and frankly I don't think I do it enough. I'm like constantly pipping myself on that.

So.

Sorry.

Pipping is something I say to myself. I'm constantly like performance improvement planning myself that I need to spend more time just aligning because I think it is so beneficial and that alignment is really what creates autonomy and space to be creative and owner. And then the other thing that I would say is when we are making really big decisions, I proactively try to socialize it beforehand and then I'm like, okay, let's get the reviews on the calendar with go to market with product with support. So it's very cross functional but for big changes I always try to socialize it a bit one on one. So I know where his concerns are and so the team can be best prepared with what he needs to make a decision.

How about you Lucy?

You heard about product vision drives product strategies that drive tactics. And I think what's very important is to align with your CEO on where you can have autonomy and where he wants to be involved. Ideally you don't want him involved into the tactics, but this might take some time because you need to build the trust as that your tactics and your solution are going to be the right one. But ideally you align on the vision and the strategy, which means you align on the big dream and what you want to do for the next year and then you report back on success metrics and etc to show that it's going into the right direction. That's the ideal way of working. But then it's also always it depends on founder, it depends on how fast you can bring that trust. And a colleague of mine like a few years ago told me something that I think is very true is that CEO and founder, they are like athletes and they are very unique and so you have to adapt to their strengths and you have to magnify their strengths and you have to compensate for their weaknesses. Exactly. Like a staff or a coach we do with a professional athlete. And in my case, our CEO has an amazing intuition and understanding of the problem we need to solve. But he's also always going to formulate that as a solution and it's not always the best solution. So the way to work with him is to ask the five why all the time, you know. So I think you really need to take some time to understand your CEO personality to see what is the best way to make that work and to really create this trust relationship that is going to give you a lot of autonomy into the tactics, but great conversation into the vision and the strategy.

I think it's a really important point that founder intuition is real. And when we join companies as product leaders, there's going to be what we think are crazy ideas the founders have that are actually correct. But there is this transition, right as we build up our teams and we talk to customers more often than the CEO does or whatnot, where we start to maybe have better intuition or better data or better insights than the founders do. And that Transition can be very uncomfortable for us and for the founders. But to go back to Neek's point like that, trust is earned over time. I think the mistake a lot of first time product leaders or marketing leaders make is they expect to come into the building and just get automatically all this trust to do what they want. A classic example in marketing, not in product is a CMO will come in and say, oh, this is a marketing best practice. And they're really not prepared. When an engineering says, I don't think marketing is a best practice, that's like not a question a lot of people are prepared to answer. So you have to find other ways to take people who haven't worked in product before, who haven't worked in marketing before and show like, this is why it's a best practice, this is why it works. And then you can build up more authority, autonomy over time. Okay, so let's shift to something that's become a little bit more in flavor in the types of orgs that we build at scale, which is product operations. So I think people are familiar with what product managers do and product designers do, but what's the role of product operations in your company? When do you think about that and what success metrics matter for that type of team? And maybe we could start with you, Anique.

Yeah. So my experience with product operations is largely at Uber and at Uber it made a ton of sense because so much of the product experience is the operations, right? It's where are the cars, where are the drivers, are they on time with the riders? If so, something is lost, right? How does a writer retrieve that? And similar products to me would be an Airbnb, et cetera, where the product experience and the operations experiment experience is very much one in the same. And so I think a company like Uber, product operations played a massive role, right? It was like, how do you help your product team understand the physical aspect of your business and ensure that is all connected? Similar at trip actions where it's a huge like the support experience is so much of the product experience ensuring that you have someone within the product team that is obsessed with making sure that the human operations is connected with the product, both in ensuring that a launch goes well, but also in ensuring that all of that learning of what's not scaling from an operation side is coming back into product. And so I do think in some ways it is product specific specific and also scale specific. I think at a company like Loom that is much more product led growth, it is less of a need because the business the product experience is less reliant on an on a physical operation.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. I think it's a team you start bringing on when you start feeling the pain of the scale. If I had to say. The mission of the product ops team at Content Square, we call it product excellence is to help us scale with efficiency by giving to the team enough autonomy or as much autonomy as we can without completely diverging in the way we work. And this is the kind of pain you start having when you have 15 plus product manager. I think before that you can maintain consistency in your way of working without introducing those team. And then we have three profile into the product excellence team. We have the product ops and they are really here to create the toolkit. So framework for discovery, framework for solutioning that the team can use whenever they need tooling for roadmap or tooling for product communication. So we make sure that we have someone basically for me, they are the product manager of the product team. They think about the needs, the pain and the desire of the product manager and the product team and they try to solve that. Then we have the program management team and I think this is closer to how your business work for us. We can create the best product in the world. If sales doesn't want to sell it, our customer success doesn't want to onboard customer. Nobody is going to get this amazing value. So it's part of the go to market to make sure that we have a good operability and that sales team is trained, enables. They know the pitch, they know how to drive the pitch and customer success team is ready to support those products. So they have a huge role and into the coordination of the cross functional team and the product and the business team. And finally we have the product analyst because one of the things that one of the pain of the scale is how do you maintain customer knowledge and how do you maintain fact based or data based decision. So we also have this team part of the product excellence because they help us continue driving making tough decision faster and better.

Yeah, I think different companies have very different perspectives on where they staff analytics. And the main thing is staff it somewhere because I think of analytics like salespeople they should either be making you like millions of dollars in the insights they generate or they're not going to stick around very long. So it's a very de risked hire in my opinion. If you know what you're looking for. You had a follow up comment.

I was just going to say I think product marketing, product operations, sales enablement have a Lot of they take on different roles at different companies depending on what the product growth strategy is and as well as like the talent within your leadership team. So I definitely would bucket out how those three fun what of those three functions you need and what roles what functions happen within all three. Because some of what you're describing I'm like oh, product marketing does that at loom and so I think there is in terms of supporting products to be successful in market with the people and customers that are using it. I do think that different companies take on different forms within those roles.

Yeah, definitely. Sorry one follow up comment on that but I think you're completely right and for us the program management is just making sure everybody works together and I think we're going to touch on that later also on collaboration but definitively like this is a scale issue because I agree with you it's product marketing but making sure that everybody follows the same program and everything is something things that we solve with those guys.

Yeah, I think it's definitely okay for as you're building your company to have slightly different bullet points on what these functions are responsible for than others do PMs write tickets or do engineering managers or things like that are all different at different companies. Yes, I think for but being really clear as to who owns what in the product development process is pretty important. So how we use product operations at Eventbrite is really to try to iterate on the product development process the same way we iterate on our product. And there are processes that break at scale. There's coordination that isn't really humming as much as it should like with support or with sales or whatnot. So really having a team that's trying to find the parts that aren't going super smoothly or need to be more standardized and then running some experiments to see if oh we go try to improve that process, does it help? How do we measure that? So it's really about driving efficiency and effectiveness. And yeah, I agree you wouldn't probably think about adding something like that until you have dozens of of product managers. But you might add product marketing depending on the definition a lot earlier or certainly analytics a lot earlier. Okay, switching to team. I think in a lot of cases when someone like us takes over there is an existing team or you've hired an early team and then it's a few years later. How do you think about building up your existing team? Promoting from within hiring externally especially as you're starting to build up your management or leadership layer. Maybe anique we could say start with You? Yeah.

I think ideally it's a combination of hiring externally and building within. I definitely think building within is, as time has gone on has become my preference. I think especially at A series A, series B, series C stage, there's so much magic in the beginning and you want to keep that magic as long as possible. And there's so much empathy and intuition that you build as you build that product. And I also think it's a way to return that investment on the team that's gotten you there. Right. If they are prepared and they want to do it and you think you can safely build that bench. I definitely would. I think one of my learnings from my time at Trip Actions where when I first stepped into this role, cause I was originally the first product manager, very similar path and then became the VP of product. And I think I rushed to hire externally because it made me feel more confident. It wasn't that the people around me couldn't step up, but there was something mentally happening within me that it made me feel more comfortable to hire externally. And I think at Loom I've done the inverse where I've been very mindful to grow the bench to try to really coach and mentor as much as possible and give opportunities for scale. And I'm a big believer. But I think ideally it's a mix where.

Right.

Because diversity is just always an incredible thing. And I think in hiring PMs I am very mindful of we want a mix of people coming from large companies, startups, entrepreneurial backgrounds because they bring all these different types of strengths on systems and questioning and first principle thinking. But I think in terms of building your team and the layer underneath you, if you can do it from within, I think it's a really powerful thing. So a little bit of my hard lessons learned.

No, I completely agree. I think it's one of the biggest dilemma you're going to have to face as a product leader. I think it has to be a combination what you get externally. Most of the time you try to find people that has been into the stage you're going on. Right. Like when you scale, you're doubling your revenue and your team every year. And so the size of the cake is becoming so big that perhaps the people you had at the beginning, they don't have enough perspective or they're going to have to make the mistake in order to learn. And if you hire someone that has been through this kind of growth, you expect that they have done the mistake before and so it's going to be easier and Faster for them on the other side, when you grow that much. Maintaining the culture. And I think it's what you are referring also with the magic of the beginning. Maintaining the culture, maintaining the knowledge is super important. So I think you really need both. What I always say to my product director is that it's either you're going to hire people in your teams that are going to help you grow and take the bigger, have a bigger perspective, or at some point going to bring in someone that is going to lead the team. I think anyway, if you want your historical people and team to continue doing the job, you have to help them hire people that know better, that have more experience than them, so they can get these different perspectives.

Yeah, yeah, we faced a bit of that problem at Eventbrite. So Eventbrites. I came in after we were a public company and one of the things I noticed is that we had promoted a lot from within because we had a healthy culture. We had a lot of people who've been there 10 years. But then what that meant is there weren't these kind of fresh perspectives coming in from the outside. There weren't like, oh, this is how we solved it at this other startup. So like one of my early conversations is, what the hell are we doing with a San Francisco office if you're not going to go talk to the people like literally next door who have certainly faced a lot of the same challenges we are. So bringing in people or building relationships and network that can help you learn from the ecosystem instead of just what's happening inside your product I think is important. And that's why you're going to need to bring in some people. But a lot of our best leaders are the people who have been here 10 plus years and they just know in and out and they have that ownership mentality which might be hard to get from later stage hires. All right, let's switch to the types of people you hire in different stages. I think we've worked at early stage, mid stage, late stage companies. What's the difference in the types of people you're recruiting? Early stage startup, pre ipo. Like maybe Lucy, we could start with you in terms of how you think about that profile changing.

Yeah, I think it's a very interesting question for me, the people you hire at the very beginning. So when we started the product team at Content Square, we were four people. A product designer, a product knowledge and a product manager. But everybody was doing a bit of everything. We were also in charge of onboarding clients. We were in charge of super so at the beginning you need Swiss knife and you need people that love to overstep and take a problem and go talk with everybody. And then when you start skating, you need to make the model a bit more repeatable to make it scalable. And so you need more and more specialized people. So I think it's also a follow up to your previous question because if you want to invest on your historical people, keep them and have them growing in the company, they also have to change their mindsets because they have to go from this Swiss knife approach and whatever it takes going to do it chooses. Okay, we're going to bring the playbook, we're going to bring the framework, we're going to bring processes. So for me this is really the difference and but I would say that what is common to both is that for me the most important thing is the willingness to because again the company is changing so much each year because the size is changing that they're going to change job every year. So willingness to learn the energy and the positivity and these for me are the three things that never changed no matter the size of the company, plus one to everything.

I think the only thing that I would add is I think as 100% agree on like the general, you want someone who spikes in being flexible, being an owner, being a first principles thinker at the beginning because they're just going to see such diverse problems and they cannot be overwhelmed by the lack of success systems, right? Like they need to find that exciting, that they can metabolize that. But I think as like the company begins to mature, the product organization begins to mature. I think it becomes more important to find people that have seen excellent product organizations at scale. You have a pattern recognition of how to improve the prd, how to improve the process, how to improve the bug triage, how to improve that to sales, to marketing, etc. And so I think that's really where hiring a diverse set of product increasingly hiring a diverse set of product managers based upon how the company is maturing, I think increasingly becomes important. And then my three would be curiosity. I think you want to find at any level of product manager, whether you're an associate PM or a director of product, you want someone who's endlessly curious, who at 6:07 is going to slack you and be like do you know this? Did you see this ticket? Did you read this gossip? Because what is strategy? It's like all these different ideas coming together and so you want a team that is endlessly curious. The other one is just Execution. Right. Execution is more important than a perfect strategy because if you can't execute the strategy, then you're not going to improve the strategy. And then the third one is just leadership. If I, I love my team right now and I think one of the things that I admire so deeply about everyone on my team is they genuinely care. They have a really different leadership styles, but they're pretty meta about what their leadership styles are. And I know that they care about every engineer on their team, every support person that they work with, and I just think it's really important for product managers.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I don't have like pithy three attributes like either of you. Maybe I need to work on that. But the point you made about their styles, even at your stage, are all still pretty different. I think on every product team, as you build it, you're not going to have an assembly line of people that do things the exact same way. Every product manager is going to be bringing a unique perspective, a unique background, a unique approach. It's a gang of misfits that any product team I've worked on and we gain from that diversity in terms of how they operate. Some things need to be standardized as we scale, but you still want to keep people that have different strengths and weaknesses in order to have the best overall team. And as I think about this, our company scaling, or in general startup scaling, I generally think of it as there's three different kind of phases, right? You're starting a company, you're scaling a company and then you're expanding into multi product, multi country, that sort of thing. And I think not only is it a struggle sometimes for product managers to go through those phases, it can be a struggle for the founders to go through those phases. So part of what we have to counsel our founders and CEOs on is, hey, we've hit a new phase. These are the types of things that need to change. We're no longer going to have Swiss army knives, we're going to bring in some player coaches. We're no longer going to have player coaches, we're going to bring in a lot more specialists and what signals we're seeing in the business that trigger that type of change. When I was at Pinterest, my previous company was Grubhub and I started at 15 people and left like shortly before the IPO. So I'd seen all the phases and then there was a time at Pinterest where we were moving into that late stage business and I went to my Boss. And I was like, look, I'd heard. I'm an early stage startup guy. I'm gonna try to make lemonade out of lemons. At some point, you're just gonna have to slap me on the face and say, hire 10 people to solve this problem, because I default won't do that. I'll try to, like, make good with the resources I have because that's like the DNA I have. And I think that's sometimes conversations we have to have with our leaders, especially if they come up from seed or series A to be like, no, the solution is no longer for you to, like, work 80 hours. It's still hire five people and do this. So there's a bunch of changes like that. I think we get more and more intuition around over time. And part of our job is to, like, train not only the people that report to us, but also the people we report to. Hey, this shift is happening and here is some process that might change. Here's who we recruit. Might need to change things like that. All right, so in thinking about that, if you're lucky enough to have these amazing early employees who are super engaged when you do shift into a new phase like that, how do you keep them engaged if maybe their skill set isn't as relevant as to where you're going over the next five years, you're scaling into more mature org. How do you use them? Do you move them out of the organization? Do you change their role? What's your tactic? Maybe, Anique, we could start with you.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think generally understanding, are they still growing Is the most important question. And if the answer is yes, then you probably don't need to change entirely a lot. If they no longer feel that they are growing, I think that's where I begin to have more exploratory conversations, whether it's, hey, I. In order for me to stay beyond, like, in order for me to go from three to four years, I actually needed to learn a new skill set. And that new skill set could be a different domain. I have someone who leads part of our product organization who came from engineering, and he and I became really close. And that's how those conversations started. So I think it could be a different domain. I think it could be the opportunity to manage. It could even be, as much as I want to learn this skill from this person at the company, can you help me do that? But I. Great. We all love to grow. It makes us feel amazing. We love to learn. And so I think that question is Very simple of just are you still learning how do you want to learn? But I do think it's, it's specific to that person into their journey. I don't think it's a one size fits all.

Yeah, I think you, you said it like product people are all about curiosity and wanting to learn new things. So I think if you want to keep your people you need to make sure they continue learning stuff. And I think as, as long as they are learning stuff they're going to keep engaging and stay with you. I think it's also super important to make sure they still believe into the dream because at the end of the day what's. It's a tough job to be a product manager. I think it's also something we have to say and what bring you in the morning with the right energy to move, to move forward and to coordinate with all those people is that you believe into the dream. So making sure they keep learning by changing as scope or by focusing on new skills etc. But also I don't know it's very, if it's very politically correct to say it like this but I think you should not try to keep your people at any cost. Also I think I was talking about the energy. We know how draining it can be to work for a scale up company and as much as we try to this draining effect if someone at some point doesn't have any more the energy to move things things forward I think it's better to let them go even if they have amazing knowledge, amazing impact and etc. So I think it's also something to.

Keep in mind that is so important and also say goodbye. I feel like so many early stage companies make this mistake say goodbye like you spend all this time doing something amazing, feel comfortable and normalized saying goodbye when it's in the best interest of that employee.

Yeah, I think this is something I've seen a few different times. Right. So if you have a person that's built incredible value into the company but maybe they're not and there isn't a great next role for them or whatnot, invest the rest of their equity, see them off in a dramatically awesome way. Right. Because I think one of the things especially if a company grows quickly is the valuation has grown quickly and people feel like a little bit stuck like they have to like that's a meaningful financial impact to them. And even if they're not as into the mission anymore as into their role, they're going to stay around in a little bit more of a zombie mode. And I think that's what you don't want because that is a drag on the rest of the team. So instead you want to celebrate the impact they had and reward them financially for it and then go find the person that's like the best fit for the next. I think another opportunity is in. Sometimes they just have a skill set or a passion that doesn't necessarily fit the area they're in anymore. But every part of the company is in a different phase of maturity. So if the broader company is scaling, there might be one part that's in just starting and needs that zero to one thinking or whatnot. So you might be able to find different roles that are a better fit for their passions and skills and if that's what they want to continue to do. But it might be a meaningful change. It might be taking someone who is managing five people and moving them to an individual contributor role or whatnot and being able to have those conversations with your team, honestly I think is pretty important.

And one more thing on that, if we have Fondle and CEO in this room, I think also this is why you need to invest in a strong HR team and especially at some point in HR business partner. It's been new for us at Content Square only two years. We're working like this and it changes everything because you have someone that understand the need of your business is here to help those transition. And I think it really helps saying goodbye or transitioning people in the right way. So I think it's also something you want to think quite early on.

Yeah, I agree. It's definitely been super helpful at Eventbrite to have a partner to think through these kind of career path and goals for each person on the team. But it's also important to hire the right HR people so that it doesn't become like this occasionally it almost feels protecting the company at the expense of the employees and you're really trying to find the win win between the employees and the company at all times. And of course great HR leaders do that, but unfortunately not always the case. All right, I'm done talking shit about hr. All right, let's move on. All right, so we talked a bit about expanding the teams that help ship product at scale. Right early on. Like I always say, it's usually just an engineer shipping code, yolo. Right. And then they may get design support and then eventually a PM will come in. But then you fast forward that to some of the scale we are at. And now you have a dedicated analyst on the team, you have a dedicated product marketer, you have dedicated researchers. How do you not just slow to a cross crawl, having that many people to coordinate in shipping a global product or a product that's used by millions? Do you want to start?

Yeah. So when I read the question, when I read the question, I love and I think it's one of my favorite question of this interview, actually. You don't. You will slow down, I think. And it was something that was very frustrating for me in the early days of Content Squad, because every time you introduce collaboration, it slows down a little bit, but the result, the output is so much richer. So I think we always need to remind ourselves that alone you go very fast, but together we go further. And that said, I think our role as product leader is to optimize the collaboration and we know that it's going to come with a little bit of slowdown, but we need to minimize how much it's slowing down the team. And I think the more your company grow, the more your team become your product and the less you do actual product management and the more you think about how you can optimize the way your team works the same way than before, you were obsessing about how you can optimize your product.

So.

I would say that there is no recipe. The only thing is that you need to constantly obsess about how I'm sure that when I'm bringing this new role is going to help achieve a better impact rather than slowing down too much the team, because too many cook in the kitchen is horrible and can lead into nobody making decision anymore. So I think it's really the thing you need to be super careful about when you start bringing those new roles into the team.

The other thing that I would add there is most likely, if you're lucky enough to have a really incredible growing product and company, your systems are going to outgrow you every six months and that's okay. And ensure that you are actually updating and maturing the systems and taking the time to retro. I think when I make mistakes on systems, it's because I didn't slow down enough to actually understand to your point, my users, which is my team and the company, and I haven't actually internalized what the problems are. Right. Like I'm just going too fast. And so I think anticipating that you need to mature your systems every six months and that's okay. Right. Like you're trying to find that balance between moving autonomously and quickly and having enough system so there's alignment and clarity. And the other thing that I thought about As I was hearing, the question is often you need to slow down to move faster during the build and during the launch and it's okay to slow down at the beginning. And one of the things that we've done recently that's been helpful on like major cross functional decisions is we've actually started planning out the alignment process. So it's not, it's not an invisible cost that you're paying, you're actually planning for it as you plan the product release process. And that's extremely tactical. But I do think has been helpful for where we are at our stage.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. I think this is something that confuses founders a lot as well. Oh, I raised my Series B and I have way more people, but it's going to slower than it used to when we were smaller. Like how could I have more people and feel like less is getting accomplished? And I do think as long as you're optimizing for the less that's getting accomplished is way more impactful. I think startups tend to like ready, fire, aim and then you have to switch to like ready, aim, fire after a while and that's a really important shift. So that's something I think a lot of startups struggle with. I think in regards to eventbrite, one of the things I really focused on coming in was we have these cross functional teams. They're a little bit larger than there might be at like a series B startup. But one of the things I learned at Pinterest from our co founder Evan Sharp is he had this concept of knit. And what knit means is people from different backgrounds working together on the same problem create solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts. So if you're adding a new person to the team, their perspective should make the ultimate outcome stronger. And if they're not and you're just going slower without getting a stronger outcome. Yeah. Then maybe you're adding like too many people into the kitchen as you mentioned. So I think that's really important to keep track of. Right. It's okay if things move on slower if you're more likely to be getting hits when things like do ship. So I think it's really important. One of the things I think helps this is being really clear about the role every team member plays. And Anika, you mentioned this a bit earlier. So we try to make sure we have a charter for every team. So first off, who's on the cross functional team and who's not? Be really clear about that. Which role do Each of them play who's driving this decision, who's driving that decision, who's approving these decisions, who's just informed and who's collaborating. And the more you can get that aligned on by the team, everyone knows the role they play and then they can get more and more efficient over time. Okay, all right, we're going to shift to some strategy questions. One of the things that product leaders tend to struggle with is and certainly founders is the big bold bets versus the making the product just incrementally better every day. So how do you balance those ideas as you scale? And maybe Anika, we could start with you.

Yeah, so we are series C. So we're like a growth stage startup and I think what we try to balance is one to two key investments per product team and then like a backlog of 1% better. And I think there's times where we get that balance right and there's times where we don't get that balance right and we need to like re correct the next planning cycle. But I ideally would like to see a roadmap that has 1 to 2 key investments and then 1% better. Because we already have people that love our product. They just want it to be better, they want it to be more performant, more reliant, they want the integrations to be richer. And those things things are really can really compound even from a business perspective. From a growth and retention perspective.

For us, I think it really depends on the maturity of the product. We have a multi product platform, five products with different level of maturity. Everything we do we optimize for growth and retention. It's the two metrics we look at the most. If the product is very new and you are trying to find finds a market fit, you're going to optimize for growth and so you're going to make more big bets. If it's a more major product and you already have a good growth and you have a huge customer base, you need to optimize for customer existing customer happiness and retention. And in that case we're going to invest much more into optimization.

Yeah, I think one of the things that especially if you're a fast growth startup, it's easy to not reach realize until you face some existential crisis is when you're an early stage startup, everything you're doing is trying to optimize for upside. But then when you found really strong product market fit, you have a bunch of customers that can go away. So you have to invest some of your roadmap in protecting the downside of am I going to keep up this growth? Am I going to be able to keep product market fit? And if you don't, you may not notice an issue like immediately or in the next quarter, but you could find yourself having a real challenge in a couple years. So that's like a shift that a lot of product leaders and founders need to make over time that I would say most of the time we don't make. And then we just get some massive issue and then we finally start thinking about it, which is certainly what happened at Pinterest and Eventbrite too, I think for the macro answer. For me, I try to map the model of the business and how it grows and what are the key constraints to the business growing faster Right now, now. And sometimes that's going to be a lot of 1% optimizations. Network affects businesses. That's super common to just focus on a lot of the optimization, grow the network bigger. Right. But sometimes it's we haven't invested in our ability to scale and all our technical systems are falling down or we need to build a totally new product to unlock the next market. The better you understand what's slowing the business down, the better you can have a portfolio that might have a few of these because as our products get larger, there's not going to be one answer to that question. There's going to be like a few. And of course we should have teams large enough to go attack each of them or at least some of the most important ones. So that's what I try to build with any company I advise or join. And you may not get it right first try. Right. Sometimes you're like, oh, that's the constraint. I know how to move that constraint. You go do a bunch of work, thing doesn't move. Turns out that's more of a just constraint to the business forever or for a long time.

I just wanted to add one thing on that because I think what you guys said is really important and I think it goes back to the top of the panel which is like, how do you build the right relationship with your CEO is like the product strategy and whether you're building zero to one or part of the team should be working on those 1% improvements. I think slowing down during the planning cycle to be like, this is the percent of investment that is going to the 0 to 1 product. Do we think that risk is worthwhile? Is this the level at which we want to invest? This part of it is going to go towards quality. But I actually think breaking down the percentage of investment that is supporting the product strategy, but also the company strategy is a really important moment of alignment.

Yeah, absolutely. And with that, we're out of time. So really want to thank you all for joining us today.

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