Deb Liu: evaluation

Transcript context

…Go Substack. I want to move in a slightly different direction. Talk about growth for a little bit. You have a really nice perspective on how to think about growth. I think a lot of people think of growth as like, "Here's a magic bullet. We're going to do this thing. It's going to go, "Wow, we're going to win." And your approach is, you talk about it, it's a game of inches. Growth is a game of inches. Can you talk about your perspective there? Yeah. Sometimes we think it's like what is the huge step function? But actually most companies are like... We call it points of growth, right? It's like if you can move things 1% a little bit faster every single week, think about the amount of growth you get at the end. And so it's not just, "Okay, what's going to get you the 3X? You can get to 3X 1% at a time, 5% at a time. Single digit growth. And sometimes it is the small things that matter the most. And so we think about product-led growth, it's really about finding the aha moments, the opportunities. And sometimes opportunities are things that seem really silly. I heard the story at Facebook that one of the big things was just adding the, next to ads, they put the word create an ad, was one of the biggest growth drivers. And that was it just putting a link because people just didn't know how to get to the ads flow. It was things like that where you can actually bend the curve of choices that you make. Same thing, each of the growth teams I've ever worked on, it's like really the small things adding up. It is a list we used to work on payments growth and we had a list of a hundred things we were working on hypotheses. And then we would pick and we would grow them by picking the first 10 and we would start working on them, the next 10, the next 10, and we would go through these sprint cycles. And the same thing when we were growing the ads product as well. Marketplace, each of them were just like, "What are the small things that add up to big things?" And I think sometimes we overthink it. Instead, you probably have a hundred ideas. And by the way, it is absolutely okay if the 80% of them don't work. I tell people sometimes we overthink as product manager if we just had the perfect plan, the perfect battle plan, but instead imagine you're a team and you can ship, I don't know, let's say four things. But what if you're a team that can ship 20 things with the same with a 20% success. You get just as much output and yet you know what doesn't work also. What if you can move it from 20% to 30%? Suddenly six things work, not just four things. And so in the same amount of time you have all the lessons of what didn't work, plus you're getting 50% more output. And so you thinking about growth as this engine of, it's a learning machine of what doesn't work, what you reiterate on, what you change, and you're constantly getting better and better and better. I think what you're saying will resonate with a lot of product people where there's always this like, "We're just doing a bunch of optimization, incremental work. Still sucks, boring. Let's take some big bets." And in my experience, and sounds like in your experience, a lot of the wins actually... And Facebook is famous for this, just relentlessly looking for ways to grow, optimize, optimize, optimize because that's where a lot of growth comes from. At the same time, obviously you need to take some big bets and take some swings and look for step function changes. But I guess for someone that's just like... I don't know. Is there any advice on just creating that culture of like, "It's okay to optimize for a long time, there's a lot of opportunity optimizing"? Is there anything you've learned there or is it just bringing in a Deb and it has to be a top down?…

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