Melissa Tan: evaluation

Transcript context

…One kind of tangent that I wanted to touch on is there's this trend of product teams owning revenue. Elena talked about this on a recent podcast. You have a perspective on should product growth teams own revenue and have revenue numbers as their goals or not? Yeah, really it depends on the company and what product growth is driving. I've always, in the companies I was at and actually even the companies I advise, the product growth team owns revenue, so it's not always the case. I've actually seen revenue owned by marketing. So marketing makes sense if it's more top of funnel growth. I've also seen it, this is an interesting one, by finance actually. This is usually early in the company. So early at Canva, it was owned by finance and that's because finance had a view on everything happening in the business and would actually be maybe advising other teams on, "Hey, our conversion rates could improve, we need to do X." Or we're not driving signups and customers efficiently, but over time it doesn't really sit in finance. That has evolved and then now sits under the person that is driving product growth in product. So I have seen it more often than not being owned by product. Our team at Dropbox moved a ton actually. We started marketing. We actually then report into the revenue org with sales, and then we finally moved into product because we realized so much of our revenue was that product growth motion happening in the product that we felt it was important that that product team owned revenue. A lot of the things you're talking about are based in how growth starts at a company. I imagine one of the most common questions you get is, how do I start to invest in growth? How do I hire my first growth person? How do I build a team around them? It's one of the most common questions I get. So let's spend a little time here. What is your advice to founders that are just starting to think about building their initial growth team and how to approach that to look for initially and kind of think about that longer term?…

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