Melissa Tan: evaluation

Transcript context

…You said Dropbox essentially there was a late investment in sales and there's a sense maybe product led growth's going to take us really far. And I imagine look at Jira and Atlassian, they're just all product led and that's amazing. I guess what's your current framework for when it makes sense to start leaning into sales and hiring a sales team for say a product led product that is working? It really comes down to the product because initially I think most companies are leaning heavier into sales or heavier into product-led. You're usually not doing both at the same time. And so a trend I've seen is starting product-led first and the signal is that is a good motion for you is if the product is really intuitive to onboard onto. There's a low learning curve so you don't need a human to onboard the user. Also, if there's a viral component to it, that is really what can take. Dropbox is massively viral. When I think also about Miro or Figma, those also are very viral products. Those have a kind of the DNA of product led. And initially I think when you have scale, you're getting a lot of signal on what is resonating with the user. Initially, you also don't have ... It takes a while to build out the features for enterprise. And so as you're building out the product-led motion, you have probably larger companies in your self-serve base and they are often knocking on your door. This happened at Dropbox being like, "I need you to build SSO for me. I need you to build all these enterprise grade features. It's not secure enough." And so you are also collecting the list of things you need to build on the enterprise side. And so I think it's typically looking like you might start product-led, then go enterprise. And then the other direction I've seen is some companies initially are just more conducive to an enterprise in sales motion. Potentially, you need to build custom things for these users. It's also not a bottom-up motion. Maybe the way you sell the product starts with the legal team or the finance team or some important stakeholder, but then a lot of companies now are trying to make that shift to make the product more accessible and go product led. And so then you're thinking about, okay, how do I make this product simpler to onboard onto? How do I think about reaching the end user at scale? And so I think it's basically first figuring out where do you start and then starting to invest in the area. And I guess maybe lastly, knowing how the whole picture fits together. There's a lot of companies that do consumer and B2B and I think the earlier you can figure out how they go together and what the paths and journeys look like, it just ends up being more seamless to the user and, yeah. Awesome. Okay, so let me start to transition into talking about building awesome teams and high performing teams. And something that I know about you that I've heard from other people is that you have this reputation for being a person that people follow from company to company, which is the ultimate sign of, I don't know, retention and NPS and product market fit as a leader and a manager. So I'm just curious, what is it that you think you do that gets people to follow you from company to company?…

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