Melissa Tan: evaluation

Transcript context

…I could spend another hour talking about interview strategy, but I want to make sure we have time for the growth team stuff. So let's transition to that. And my first question here is you've worked with a lot of different teams, a lot of different companies on helping them figure out their growth strategy, hiring their growth teams, just kind of figuring out growth. I'm curious what the most common pitfalls and mistakes you've seen across companies trying to figure out growth and build growth teams. One of the most common pitfalls I'd say is not having, and I've alluded to this, not having a sense of the big picture from the start and not being strategic about what your go-to market strategy is going to be. Also, what is your pricing and packaging going to look like? So I wrote actually an article for the YC blog a few years ago with Abby [inaudible 00:50:48] who was on my team at Dropbox about this because I felt like even at Dropbox, I mean it's a great thing. We were haphazardly finding amazing things. We had a freemium consumer product. Then we realized people wanted a Teams product, so we built a Teams product, but we never created that whole blueprint of what should it look like and what are the different connection points across consumer business? What should our model look like? I've also seen companies that maybe weren't intentional enough about pricing from the start, and so thinking about what is the value metric? And then they've already have massive scale and then they're rethinking their pricing. That's actually quite a big headache to actually think about, okay, how do we grandfather users? How do we bring the legacy customers onto our new pricing? And so thinking about your pricing from the start is important thing might go to market from the start is important. The other thing I have seen a lot is just like, again, this goes back to learning from Dropbox is the execution folks taking a class or reading a lot about growth and trying to do the same thing and not really actually starting from first let's look at our data. Let's talk to our customers. What do we think are the biggest hypotheses? And starting your experiments based on your own data and right-sizing the experiment. I think sometimes teams are experimenting on things that are too small, that aren't going to move the needle because they heard it was really successful company X, but that company X might be a Dropbox where every 0.5% improvement in conversion makes a difference, but if you're early stage doesn't matter and you need to actually think bigger. The other thing is the opposite problem, redoing a whole thing but not having a hypothesis, this was an early mistake I made at Dropbox where I redid the checkout page to something that I thought was better UX, but then I changed so many different components that even when it failed, it was unclear why it failed. So really distilling it to hypotheses. And then the last thing I would say is figuring out what I call the flying formation of how the different growth teams will work with other companies. And again, I alluded to this, but growth shouldn't feel like it's a layer on top. And a lot of the things that are tricky early on is figuring out how you work with other teams. I think the best or the ideal way to work is to have growth infuse in the company. And so an example here is often the growth team is going to be potentially the closest to the user. They're going to get a lot of feedback. e ideal way to work is to have growth infuse in the company. And so an example here is often the growth team is going to be potentially the closest to the user. They're going to get a lot of feedback. They're going to hear directly from the user. As a growth team, I think one of the big values that we can have is actually giving that feedback back to other teams at the company. And so even as a growth team, can we help inform the product roadmap? Also on the reverse, thinking about as PMs, how can PMs be more growth oriented as well?…

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