Lauryn Isford: evaluation

Transcript context

…You talked about this experience as activation, and so just digging a little bit further into that idea. One of the important kind of metrics, milestones you got to figure out when you're working on onboarding is what is an activated user, what's the activation milestone, what's the activation metric. I know you have some strong opinions and some really interesting insights into activation milestones based on your experience at Airtable. Can you chat a bit about that and just share what Airtable's activation metric ended up being? Yes. So, overall, every growth team needs a north star metric. It's so important to have singular focus on what the business results are that you are working to drive in your team. On our activation team, which as I mentioned focused on onboarding, though in theory there could be other ways that you want to focus on driving activation, we had one north star metric which was what we called our team activation metric. So, this representative, a team of people were activated on Airtable's product and using it in a way that suggested they would be long-term retained. For us, that was week four, multi-user, meaning in the fourth week, more than one person on that team is active and contributing to a workflow on Airtable. This metric is something that our wonderful analytics team determined to be highly correlated with long-term retention. It's also a metric that holds a relatively high bar, so it requires a number of things to be true, that something of substance has been built, that people persist and continue to collaborate, that they're collaborating on a weekly cadence, and also holds a relatively high bar on exactly how they're contributing, meaning that the sum total of this is somewhat hard to achieve which means that we have a hard job and also a high bar as an activation team to achieve that for as many customers as possible. In general, I think an activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention and you're really working hard to get most of your users to reach a state that they're not reaching today. I really like that heuristic. So, the idea there is when you're picking an activation metric, you want it to be in the single digits potentially because you're saying that's more likely to be correlated with retention because retention's probably pretty low long term. Is that kind of the rough idea?…

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