Naomi Gleit: belief

Transcript context

…One of the most interesting lessons from this activation metric that people talk about, because right now everyone's like, "Yeah, of course retention is what you need to focus on. That's what product-market fit is." I think right now that's what everyone knows. I love that you guys basically figured that out, was one of the first times of, "Here's how we understand if our product will last and how to grow retention because it matters most." And retention cohort curves I think was one of the innovations y'all thought about early of just like, "Here's how we track retention, people joining at a certain time, how long do they stick around?" Totally. And that was Danny Ferrante who really came up with the growth accounting framework, which I guess is quite obvious, but the plus new minus stale plus resurrected. The thing that I feel like may be valuable for PMs and is one of my Naomi-isms is I think what the growth team really pioneered was being data-driven and product-driven, especially in an area that was historically more of a business function. So I think at that time a lot of the growth in new users was expected to come from marketing or comms, whereas the insight that we had is actually the product is the biggest lever to drive growth, and that means we should have a product and engineering team working on optimizing things like the registration flow, the invite flow, the new user onboarding, getting you seven friends in 10 days. One of my Naomi-isms is really understand, identify, and execute. That framework came from 2009 where the growth team at the time, it was fledgling and it just started, was focused on only instrumenting data. And Alex often wears a shirt that says, "I guess when you can know." We just didn't have the data that we needed to make informed decisions to know really what were the biggest levers to drive growth. And so in 2009 in January, we basically stopped doing anything on our roadmap except data instrumentation. And that's when we instrumented every step of the registration flow, instrumented every step of the news or onboarding experience. We knew where there was drop off. And so we understood, which allowed us to identify what were the key opportunities to drive growth and maybe, hey, it's increasing friending in the user experience or 20% drop off on registered users at the email confirmation step, how can we address that? These are the opportunities that we identified and then we would execute by building products. So having this data-driven product-driven approach to what I think historically was more of a business responsibility at a company was sort of the special sauce of the growth team. We eventually extended that approach. I think that approach started with the growth team, but we extended to other areas. So for example, one of the projects that I took on after growth was social impact. And instead of what I think a normal company might do, which is start a corporate social responsibility wing, we decided, no, we're going to take a data-driven product-driven approach to driving social impact. Instead of having a foundation that's distributing money, we're going to build a product that actually raises money from our community. And many years later we've raised billions of dollars from the community for charity. So that's sort of the approach that I think is unique about the growth team that expanded to other areas and that I think that the company in many ways has taken to most of the problems that we face. That's such a good point. And I almost took that for granted, but there was such a huge shift that y'all started from moving from marketing being the driver of growth to product and data and experiments and all that stuff. And so I think that's such a good reminder that, fun fact on the social good team, I'm really close friends with the designer that was on my team, his name's Mickey. He was on that team for a while and really enjoyed and yeah, really enjoyed working with you. Fun fact.…

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