Tag Archives: scaling

Finding the Next Wave of Growth: S-Curves and Product Sequencing

I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at TCV’s Engage Summit the past two years. The Summit gathered ~40 CPOs and product leaders to chat through topics centered around product development and product-led growth. This year, topics ranged broadly from incorporating AI to deliver world-class consumer experiences to defining and measuring different forms of community-powered growth. I never posted my talk from last year, so I’m adapting it into a blog post here, and will do the same for this year’s talk in the following weeks and as well as some follow up questions from the Summit I’ve had a chance to ruminate on.

Also, I publish on Substack now! So subscribe here.

After product/market fit, most companies’ obsession is not thinking about how to create their next amazing product. Their obsession is thinking about growth. Specifically, how do I get this product I know is valuable in the hands of everyone it can be valuable to. Most companies have a primary acquisition loop that drives this scalable growth, and unfortunately, there aren’t that many acquisition loops that really scale. Even when they scale, they eventually asymptote, and companies need to find new ways to grow. This can be new growth loops for the same product, or entirely new products. In this post, I’ll explain how to think about the timing of that, and show some of the successes and failures of my career.

As I have discussed in previous essays, product/market fit can be hard to interpret at the time. When you find product/market fit, problems don’t go away. Customers don’t stop complaining. In fact, they complain more, because they like the product enough to care. What they stop doing is leaving. And you start being able to acquire more of them in a scalable way i.e. an acquisition loop.

Because of this and other factors, when you find product/market fit, you can’t stop iterating. Product/market fit has a positive slope. If you find product/market fit and don’t continue to make the product better, a rising competitive landscape and customer expectations can have you fall out of product/market fit over time. But when you do achieve product/market fit, while you don’t stop iterating, your portfolio of what you work on needs to change.

At Reforge, we talk about the four types of product work. Once you find product/market fit, zero to one product/market fit work goes away entirely for a while as your portfolio shifts to different types of product work:

  • Features: improve current product/market fit
  • Growth: connecting more people to existing product/market fit
  • Scaling: being able to scale the product to more users and more teams internally
  • Product/Market Fit Expansion: new segments, markets, and eventually products


The growth work in particular becomes a major focus, strengthening and discovering new acquisition and engagement loops. Most companies when they find product/market fit with their first product only have one acquisition and engagement loop that is successful, and the job of most of the team is to refine and scale those loops. At Pinterest, I was originally in charge of building a new acquisition loop built on top of Google. It looked like this:

We eventually re-architected our engagement loops to be based around personalization instead of around friends. When you stitch these acquisition loops and engagement loops together, it creates a more complicated growth model that looks like this:

The acquisition loop now feeds new users into a personalization loop that increases engagement over time, and emails and notifications reinforce that loop by distributing relevant content to users outside the product to bring them back. The entirety of Pinterest for the first few years I was there was tuning these loops in one way or another. Eventually, the company needed to layer in new advertiser focused loops to monetize, but I’ll skip that detail for now.

When I arrived at Eventbrite, the company was a lot more mature than when I started at Pinterest. But similar to Pinterest, it started with one acquisition and engagement loop driving its growth.

Creators market their events to bring in new ticket buyers. Many of those ticket buyers, once introduced to Eventbrite, start creating events themselves. And when event creators are successful at selling tickets, they come back and create more events. But Eventbrite didn’t stop there. It kept investing in making its overall growth model stronger.

Why did they do this? Well, all growth loops eventually asymptote. If you get good at modeling your loops, which basically takes the diagrams above and turns them into spreadsheet based forecasts of the impact to your business, you can start to predict when they will stop driving the growth the company needs. Modeling both helps you predict when those asymptotes will happen and unconstrain those loops by finding their bottlenecks and alleviating them. At Pinterest, we 5x’d conversion rate into signup over time, and doubled the activation rate of signups to engaged users over time as a couple of examples.

Some constraints in your growth loops can’t be fundamentally unconstrained by optimization though. The company requires either new growth loops or new products to acquire, retain, or monetize better. Modeling your loops helps you start investing in building out those new growth loops or products well in advance of when you need them to sustain your growth, because of course developing them takes much more time than improving a current loop. We think of this as sequencing different S-curves of growth.

By my arrival as an advisor by 2017 and CPO by 2019 at Eventbrite, the company had layered on many more acquisition loops onto its original loop to continue to grow, creating a much more complicated growth model.

Now, I know this looks complicated, but all that is really going on here is Eventbrite took its monetization of ticket sales and re-invested all of that money into new acquisition loops to bring in more event creators (sales, paid acquisition, content marketing). Also, Eventbrite took the increasing scale of event inventory created on the platform and started distributing it themselves to drive more ticket sales per event to places like Google, Facebook, Spotify, and its existing base of millions of people who had bought tickets to previous events.

People don’t talk enough about how much S-curve sequencing work went on at all these successful companies, so I wanted to give you a taste of what it looked like across my experience at Grubhub, Pinterest, and Eventbrite because it’s a lot, and a lot of it didn’t work. Let’s start with Grubhub summarizing ten years of decisions that both helped and hurt Grubhub as it scaled to be a public company (+’s show up where I think the decision helped, and -’s where I think the decision hurt):

  • 2004: Grubhub co-founder collects menus of Chicago neighborhood restaurants, scans them, and puts them online (+)
  • 2005: Grubhub expands to cover all of Chicago (+)
  • 2006: Grubhub launches online ordering from restaurants (+)
  • 2007: Grubhub optimizes sales model and expands into second market (+)
  • 2008: Grubhub unlocks demand side channels and refines expansion playbook (+)
    • Grubhub launches Boston and New York (+)
    • Grubhub landing pages for restaurants that deliver to X start ranking well on Google (+)
    • Grubhub unlocks paid acquisition to drive demand (+)
  • 2009: Grubhub scales market launch playbook (+)
    • Grubhub switches from flat fee to percentage model (+)
  • 2010: Grubhub launches pickup (-)
    • It doesn’t find product/market fit and hurts delivery use cases (-)
    • Grubhub now launching at least one new market per month (+)
  • 2011: Grubhub acquires Campusfood and launches restaurant websites (+)
    • Grubhub acquires Campusfood to expand to many college markets (+)
    • Grubhub acquires Fango to build in-restaurant tech (+)
    • Grubhub launches restaurant websites to drive in-restaurant growth (+)
  • 2013: Grubhub acquires Seamless (+)
  • 2014: Grubhub goes public and starts building a delivery network to compete with Uber and Doordash (+)
    • It doesn’t matter as those companies raise billions of dollars to destroy Grubhub’s network effect (-)

What you can see here is despite a successful outcome of an IPO and $7.6 billion exit, Grubhub made a lot of mistakes. If you strip those mistakes out, the sequencing of S-curves looks like:


The main lessons that matter here to me are that Grubhub tried product expansion too early with pickup. But market expansion became a major strength and well oiled machine through sales and SEO expertise as well as strategic M&A. That strategic M&A failed them, however, in responding to the threat of delivery networks. Grubhub was integrating its largest acquisition when Doordash and Uber Eats rose to prominence, and while Grubhub acquired over a dozen companies, it never acquired the one that was truly disruptive (Doordash).

Okay, let’s do Pinterest in the same format:

  • 2010-2011: Founder visits DIY/Craft Meetups and convinces Influencers to start “Pin It Forward” Campaign (+)
    • This gets people to learn how to use the “Pin It” functionality in their browser (+)
    • Pinterest uses Facebook Sign-In to bootstrap network of friends as more people join the platform (+)
  • 2011-2012: Pinterest leverages Facebook Open Graph to share every Pin into users’ Facebook feeds (+)
    • Pinterest starts to amass enough content to make discovery, not saving, primary value prop (+)
    • Retention and frequency of use improve (+)
  • 2013: Facebook turns off Open Graph and growth stops (-)
  • 2014: Pinterest fails to unlock growth with new products, but does unlock User Generated Content distributed through SEO (+)
    • Pinterest launched a maps product, a Q&A product, and a messaging product, and all fail to drive growth (-)
    • Pinterest finds another channel in Google to distribute its high quality content to after Open Graph turned off by Facebook (+)
    • Users come in with less match to existing network, so friend graph ceases to drive ongoing discovery. Retention decreases. (-)
  • 2015: Data network effects kick in (+)
    • While friend graph ceases to work, Pinterest now has the scale of content to recommend great content just based on users’ interests. Moves to interest, not friend based discovery. Retention improves again. (+)
    • Pinterest pauses all U.S. work to make sure we unlock international markets (+)
    • Pinterest tries to re-ignite user sharing and fails (-)
  • 2016: Pinterest crosses 50% international active users (+)
    • Focus shifts to building advertising business to make money (+)
    • Growth team starts seriously experimenting with paid acquisition as new channel (+)

Despite Pinterest being worth *check’s today’s stock price* $21.5 billion on the public markets today, you still see a lot of the mistakes we made. Too much new product development that didn’t pan out and too much trying to regain what we had lost vs. leaning into new areas that were working. Network effect products rely less on new product innovation unless it’s the only way to monetize. And Pinterest tried the harder expansion before the easier ones. Market and category expansion tend to be much easier than product value expansion. But, Pinterest did make a very successful pivot from direct network effects to data network effects and from Facebook to Google as the primary distribution channel. When you strip the failures out, our success looks like the following sequence:

Okay, for the last one, let’s do Eventbrite:

  • 2006: Eventbrite launches to allow event creators to accept payments online (+)
  • 2007: Event creators start putting $0 in the payment field to create free tickets, driving huge awareness (+)
  • 2008-2012: Eventbrite builds more features to help event creators run their business and includes them in ticket fee (-)
  • 2012: Eventbrite builds sales team to scale to more upmarket event creators (-)
    • Eventbrite launches new countries with sales-led strategy (-)
    • These countries never build the self-serve growth motion of the U.S.
  • 2016: Eventbrite launches consumer destination to help consumers find events (+)
    • SEO landing pages featuring events in different cities become large drivers of ticket sales (+)
    • Eventbrite begins scaling emails to consumers of events they might be interested in (+)
  • 2017: Eventbrite launches packages and acquires Ticketfly to move upmarket into the enterprise music segment (-)
    • Packages makes Eventbrite more money in the short turn, but drive churn and less acquisition over time (-)
    • Many Ticketfly customers are a poor fit for Eventbrite from a service / functionality perspective. Segment is low growth. (-)
  • 2018: Eventbrite acquires Picatic to build developer platform (-)
  • 2020: Pandemic hits, and Eventbrite rewrites strategy to focus on independent, frequent creators and help them grow
    • Focus on self-service and helping creators drive demand
    • Cancel separate music product and developer platform
  • 2021: Eventbrite launches Eventbrite Boost, a suite of tools to help creators improve their own marketing
  • 2022: Eventbrite launches Eventbrite Ads to help event creators reach more consumers searching for events on Eventbrite

Since this shift is happening in real time, I’ll describe the S-Curve sequencing Eventbrite was investing in as of the end of my full-time role. The value prop is shifting from payments and ticketing to helping event creators grow their ticket sales. Eventbrite has launched new pricing with tools like marketing tools that help event creators get better at their own email and performance marketing as well as let them get more distribution inside Eventbrite’s platform. The revenue from this will help drive more investment in the consumer product side of Eventbrite, which hopefully drives more consumers looking to Eventbrite to find things to do and buying more tickets from our creators.


Hopefully you see from these examples that sequencing S-Curves to drive growth of companies over the long term is not only quite difficult, but the craft of doing it is under-developed. All three of these companies made some critical successful moves as well as major mistakes that set them back years. I hope that by studying these and other examples startups can get smarter about how they sequence their S-Curves and drive long term success for their companies. In my next two posts, I’ll go deeper on how to think about how platform shifts like AI affect this and publish a lot more on when and how to invest in building your second product successfully.

Currently listening to my Rhythym & Bass playlist.

And don’t forget to get on my Substack list for future posts here.

What Type of Job is This: My First Year as Chief Product Officer

I have written about the Chief Product Officer role in the past, and why the job is so hard. I also wrote about being a product leader during a crisis. But not much is written about starting as a new product leader. So, I thought I’d write a post about my first year as CPO, and share some general lessons. First, a reminder of the situation I started in. I had been an advisor for Eventbrite for about two years, so I had a lot of comfort with the CEO and many of the executives before ever starting the role. I believe this is an underrated way to start new roles for senior people because you can de-risk the culture fit and alignment issues that plague many new executives. When I started advising Eventbrite, the company had a business unit structure, so it didn’t even have a CPO role, but product leaders embedded into different business units. The company reorganized functionally, and created this role and asked me to consider it.

What Type of Job is This?
I believe the most important question a product leader needs to ask when they get started is what type of job it is they have to do. I wrote in the past that there is frequently a misalignment on vision vs. execution roles. There may also be a misconception of what type of product work is needed to help the company i.e what the product strategy should actually be. In the Reforge Product Strategy course, we teach that there are four different types of product work:

  • Feature development: adding new things to the product that improve value proposition e.g. Uber’s Split Fare
  • Product/market fit expansion: adding totally new products that create new value propositions e.g. Uber Eats
  • Growth: tuning the product experience so more people can connect to the current product’s value prop e.g. Uber improving driver onboarding
  • Scaling work: tuning the underlying technologies or process to help the product and team continue to be effective e.g. Uber rearchitecting its data pipelines

Old school product leaders would just do their preferred type of product work even if it wasn’t what the company needed, or adopt a primitive portfolio approach to the four types of work even if part of the portfolio was wasted work e.g. building a ton of features for a network effects business, or doing a lot of growth work for a pre-product/market fit product. As a modern product leader, it’s important to understand based on the company and its lifecycle, what type of product work has leverage, and these crude approaches are usually not the best approach.

Usually, the best place to start is looking at what the company is actually working on right now. In Eventbrite’s case, the company was:

  • Integrating the acquisition of Ticketfly to move up-market in a specific vertical and build an enterprise sales motion
  • Building a consumer marketplace to drive incremental ticket sales to event creators
  • Paying down technical debt with duplicate versions of Checkout and Create
  • Launching a developer platform so external developers can add more features for Eventbrite’s broad base of event creators
  • Launching new SaaS products with its incubation arm

Julia, our CEO, had told me she wanted me to focus on growing the self-service business faster. So, first off, what you should notice is that there are too many things going on for a company of Eventbrite’s size (sub one thousand people). In other words, the product strategy lacked focus. So, I had to spend my first few months understanding these different strategies to understand which ones to focus on. So I gathered as much information as I could about these different strategic initiatives, as well as digging into the core self-service business.

What Was Going On With the Core Business?
The core self-service business was growing steadily at significant scale and was profitable. Most of the sales clients we brought in stressed our product/market fit, which we compensated for with manual services at no charge, straining margins. We didn’t have a good sense of who our self-serve customers were, how we acquired them, or what retention looked like. As we dug into these questions, we found that while Eventbrite’s product/market fit was strongest with making it really easy to host a single event, but the bulk of our growth and profit was coming from frequent creators hosting small events very often. So, while the product roadmap was scaling for size of event, the market was scaling with frequency of event. The product did not handle this frequency very well, causing these event creators to hack the product to get what they needed, and a higher churn rate over time as those hacks proved problematic to execute. The gaps in our product to strengthen product/market fit for these creators didn’t seem insurmountable, but none of them were actually on the roadmap.

We also were able to get a clear picture of the core competencies and competitive advantages of the Eventbrite product. The fact that Eventbrite supported events of all types and wasn’t focused on one vertical e.g. conferences meant the company had a scale of data no other company had. Secondly, the self-service acquisition model meant the product had very low acquisition costs overall. That model was also a good fit for many different types of creators. Lastly, the company had leveraged its scale of events to drive consumer demand through channels like SEO, emails to previous ticket buyers, and distribution partnerships with companies like Facebook and Spotify.

What Did the Team Say?
As I talked with the team about the state of the product and what they were actually working on, let’s just say the team had a lot to say. Breaking it down by project:

Upmarket Music Vertical Expansion
We tried to integrate music customers too quickly into the Eventbrite platform, and we were much further away from product/market fit with the more traditional enterprise approach those customers were used to than we thought. The space is low growth and low margin, and relies on enterprise sales, relationships, and high touch human service, which doesn’t match our self-service capabilities well.

Consumer Marketplace
Frequent creators drive most of the inventory consumers are interested in, and if frequent creators’ efficiency tools on Eventbrite don’t work for them, they will leave the platform even if they sell extra tickets because of the platform. This is an interesting strategy, but needs to be sequenced after we have a great product experience for frequent creators.

Technical Scaling
Internal developer productivity was incredibly low due to low level of investment in developer tools. Our infrastructure was rickety and frequently had stability problems during big “on sales”. Multiple versions of every feature made it hard to build new things quickly and at high quality. We never deleted features because some sales clients use them and would complain. Everything we build is an MVP, and we rarely iterate.

Developer Platform
While the strategy of leveraging external developers to build specific features for a large array of customers with different needs makes sense at Eventbrite’s scale, we internally lacked the capability to service our own engineers well, much less external developers.

New SaaS Products
Many of these products are very far away from product/market fit and do not have a path to scalability. There is one partnership related to creator marketing tools being run out of this program which is doing well though, and it has been easier to talk with creators about that than our marketplace demand.

Developing A New Product Strategy
Strategy is about making choices among many options that optimize across a few key dimensions like:

  • Company Focus
  • Business Model
  • Target Customer & Market
  • Competition
  • Core Competencies & Competitive Advantages
  • Consequences & Risk
  • Sequencing

Eventbrite failed to make a lot of hard choices with its product strategy when I arrived, so it was time to make some tough calls on what to focus on. There are no simple answers here, but in evaluating the initial strategy, it became clear we should do the following:

  • Upmarket Music Vertical Expansion: We are too far away from product/market fit trying to rebuild the Ticketfly model, and there is little margin or growth to be had once we get there. There is a lot of competition, and the go-to market approach leans out of our core competencies. It felt like we were trying to win the music industry’s last war instead of building a more technology-forward experience many up and coming music venues would appreciate. We need to focus our music creators towards a self-service experience like the rest of our product, and if that means that some of the less tech savvy customers won’t come with us on that journey, that’s okay.
  • Consumer Marketplace: The product needs to have a good experience for frequent creators before they will value our demand, and we should probably help them improve their efforts to drive their own demand first. Sequence to this strategy when frequent creators are in a good state.
  • Technical Scaling: Developer velocity is the purest form of leverage in a software company. We should be investing more in this area so we can increase our strategic appetite over time.
  • Developer Platform: If we are not providing a great experience for our own developers to build great features, we are even less likely to provide a great experience for external developers. Pause until our technical infrastructure is in a much better place.
  • New SaaS Products: Creators drive the majority of ticket sales through their own marketing efforts, and they are not expert marketers. Our knowledge can help them improve and automate their efforts. Cancel everything else in this area.
  • Core Self-Service Growth: Make the product experience great for frequent creators of small events as they drive most of the profit for the core business. We are not far away from strong product/market fit here.

The new product strategy is remarkably simpler and more sequenced over time:

2021

 2022

2023

Frequent Creators

 Marketing Tools

Consumer Marketplace
Technical Scaling Technical Scaling

Technical Scaling

Frequent creator investment will be measured by improved frequent creator retention. Technical scaling will be measured by internal developer velocity and our say/do ratio. Marketing tools and consumer marketplace will both be measured by revenue from those sources. So, going back to what type of job this is, my initial directive would have made this product leadership role to be primarily about growth. Instead, the focus is on scaling with some product/market fit expansion. 

Your Product Strategy Probably Isn’t That innovative
One dirty secret behind the work of many executives and product leaders is that our strategies aren’t that innovative. There are a few playbooks we generally run to improve performance in companies depending on the business situation after we’ve gathered the right insight. You can run through them and rule most of them out like the con men strategies in Ocean’s 12:

Yes, product leaders also rule out strategies because we don’t have enough people or can’t train a cat that quickly.

The new Eventbrite strategy was a combo of two common strategic playbooks. The first part of the strategy is what Chris Zook calls “profiting from the core”:

“The greatest strategic error stems from an inaccurate understanding of the core and its full potential.”
-Chris Zook, Author of Profit from the Core

However, if you’re an Arrested Development fan, you might call it the “there’s always money in the banana stand” strategy. The idea behind this strategy is that many companies as they scale pursue too many expansion strategies and leave behind growth that is closer to their initial core business, plays more to their core competencies, and requires less work and less risk to execute. Eventbrite was pursuing expansions in verticals (music), business model expansion (SaaS), and value props (driving demand) while ignoring improvements that could help the growth of the core product (features for small, frequent creators). At Pinterest, VP Product Jack Chou ran a version of this he called “make the basics great”.

The other component of the strategy is probably most known from a blog post (and soon to be book) by current Snowflake and former ServiceNow CEO Frank Slootman. In Amp It Up, Frank Slootman basically divides up his strategy into three elements:

  • Improving velocity
  • Raising standards
  • Narrowing the focus

Personally, I would flip the order and revise the language to be more software specific:

  • Improve focus
  • Raise quality bar
  • Reduce tech and design debt (usually the biggest hurdle for velocity inside software companies)

By the way, if you’re a public market private equity investor, and you aren’t running this strategy on every sub-rule of 40 tech company, I have a question for you.

So, in Ocean’s 12 language, Eventbrite is running a banana stand combined with a Slootman Special. We… may need to work on these code names. Recently, Etsy has run this same strategy combo to grow its market cap from $2 billion to $25 billion in four years after many years of no market cap growth at all.

There is one other element to Eventbrite’s strategy, and that is presented by the table above: sequencing vs. parallelizing. There is a reason Eventbrite started to pursue a lot of these adjacent opportunities in the first place: fear the core business could not grow itself fast enough. But in trying to pursue multiple adjacencies at the same time, it not only failed to make the progress it wanted on any of them, but many were not set up for success because they would gain from other strategic elements of the plan already having been completed.

The goal of this post is not to geek out on all the generic strategies, though I could do that all day, but to give a sense of the work new product leaders need to do to understand strategy and make it explicit to the organization. Frequently, there is a mismatch between what the customer or business needs and what the team is working on today. Usually, by talking to the team, your customers, and looking at the data, you can identify the mismatch and position the team toward a more likely to be successful product strategy. Then, product leaders can move to the meat of the role, which is building and optimizing the structure and processes of the team to execute against that strategy more effectively over time, or adjusting to changing market dynamics *cough* pandemic *cough*.

Currently listening to the Housewerk EPs by Tusken Raiders.

Why Product Leaders Fail

I’ve yet to meet a fellow Chief Product Officer or Head of Product say, “yeah, I’m crushing it right now.” In my conversations with fellow product leaders, there’s even a meme that’s started to form around product leadership roles. Effectively:

“Yeah, you just try to put some points on the board before you inevitably get fired.”

So, if a typical CPO feels their role is about trying to survive a couple of years i.e. long enough to help the business a little bit, what is causing that? Why is it so hard to endure as a product leader?

I would say there are three common failure modes depending on how far along the company is. The earlier stage of a company it is, the more likely the answer is going to be misalignment with the founder/CEO. What no one tells product leaders when they accept product leadership roles is that nine times out ten the founder and CEO still wants to drive the product vision. They want you to help execute that vision. And as founders scale, their founder intuition ebbs in effectiveness in comparison to product expertise in-house, but it takes a long time for founders to accept that. That transition period can be very rocky.

For later stage companies, the more likely answer is that the CPO is really only good at one type of product work, and the type of product work needed for the business changes over time. This can manifest in two ways: The product leader has skills that don’t match the type of job needed today, or as they execute, the skills needed change, and the leader cannot adapt. Not only is the product leader not good at that new job, they are also less likely to be interested in it.

Let’s talk about each of these failure modes and what both product leaders and CEOs can do to make them less likely to happen.

Failure Mode #1: Who Owns Product Vision?

Founders tend to have insanely good intuition about their customers and products because, let’s face it, no one has spent near as much time thinking about them and their problems. When startups tend to hire product leadership, it’s their first time hiring this type of leader. Interview processes can be clumsy or unoptimized, with the founder still figuring out how to articulate the real need. Commonly, what happens during this process is both the founder and prospective product leader end up jamming together on the future product vision. Both sides love this engagement, but for the founder, it’s not an effective test on how much the prospective product leader will help the founder, and for the product leader, it can give a false impression that they will have a ton of say in the product vision.

If at all possible, founders should leverage outside expertise to structure the recruiting and interview process for this type of role. One of the key questions to get explicit on before the process begins is what role will this leader play in setting the product vision? For non-product/eng/design founders, they may be asked to define it. For founders with product, eng, or design backgrounds, that is typically not the case until the company becomes much larger. Product executives usually play a consulting or execution role in a vision that is founder led. Founders need to tell candidates which one it is, and candidates need to ask. Neither of these happen as often as they should. 

Once founders understand their answer to this question, they need to vet for the appropriate skills. If what you really need is help executing on the vision, don’t spend much of the interview process jamming on the vision. Sure, candidates need to understand the vision, but what you really need to learn is are they comfortable receiving a vision from you and bringing it to life in the myriad ways that are difficult. 

Failure Mode #2: Does the Expertise Match the Type of Product Work Needed?

Different companies require very different approaches to their product strategy to be successful over time. Most of us understand there are different types of product work. There is tech and process scaling, there is building new products to find new product/market fit, there’s building new features and iterating on the user experience to strengthen current product/market fit, and there is growth work to get the maximum number of users to experience the product/market fit that exists. Traditionally, product leaders lean toward being experts in one or another. For example, I am definitely most known for my expertise in growth.

Founders often lack the understanding of what type of product challenge they are actually facing when they attempt to hire a product leader. Network effects businesses tend to focus more on growth because more users make the product stronger in a much more meaningful way than new features. DTC ecommerce companies / brands are always launching new products. SaaS businesses tend to need to launch lots of new features over time. Hiring a product leader that wants to build new features all the time into a network effects business likely isn’t going to work that well.

Failure Mode #3: Can the Product Leader Adapt as Needs Change?
Even if founders hire the leader with the right skills at the right time, as companies scale, how much weight they put on these will need to change over time. Today, the product leader’s job is to be what the business needs them to be. So while the old school product leader is a specialist, the new school product leader needs to be a chameleon, who can balance a portfolio across scaling, new product work, feature work, and growth weighted toward the needs of the business, and re-weight it considerably over time as business needs change rather than leave once business needs change. That’s hard, but inevitably how product leaders have to evolve to be successful over the long term within a company.

As a growth oriented leader, I am actually spending more of my time at Eventbrite on scaling, features, and new product expansion work, because that is what the business needs right now.

—

Product leadership is incredibly hard. Both founders and product leaders can eliminate some of what makes it so difficult by aligning on expectations before hiring roles, and on aligning which problems the organization is focused on right now. It is then up to product leaders to be able to evolve as the product needs change over time. They are both the best equipped to understand when needs change and help the organization change with them.

Currently listening to Rare, Forever by Leon Vynehall.

Career Paths, Personal Missions, and Concentric Circles of Impact

Often, people ask me for career advice or how I got to where I am, or more tactically if they should advise companies, invest in companies, start a company or become an executive or whatever. My first instinct is to say, “Why would you ask me? You certainly don’t want to follow any of the steps I took!” To try to make my advice more actionable than that, I thought I’d document some of the key decisions I went through to make a signal out of my career noise.

My career choices have been somewhat unconventional from the outside. I graduated summa cum laude in undergrad to just take an internship at Apartments.com. I joined a 15 person startup to start a marketing team at 25. To say I was unprepared is an understatement. After building up a team and growing Grubhub over five and a half years into a public company, I took an IC role at Pinterest, instead of many executive offers. After three years there, where we tripled the user base and unlocked international, I then decided to… hang out at a venture capital firm. Then started an advising business. Now, I’m a Chief Product Officer at Eventbrite, a public company.

No one would draw up a career path this way, but I focused on learning potential at pretty much the cost of anything else, and it’s served me well. What a lot of young people don’t understand is that if you bet on increasing your learning potential, your earning potential compounds over time. The money will be there if you gather differentiated skills the market values (my knowledge of obscure electronic music, for some reason, is not one of those skills the market values).

This advice is fairly easy applicable and, I think, well understood by a lot of people. If you are making a choice between learning and earning, the former will almost always make sense not only from a happiness perspective, but also from a financial perspective long-term. I want to talk about what happens after you self-actualize in this direction.

Let’s say you’ve spent a decade plus collecting valuable skills, applying them in interesting ways, and you are differentiated on the market. Problem solved, right? You’ll never have to worry about a job. You’ll have all these opportunities. Well, not really. They say in startups the problems never get easier; they just change to different problems. I think optimizing your career is the same way. What people don’t tell you is if you optimize for learning, there are fewer and fewer jobs where you can mix all that you’ve learned together. And that you actually have to pick amongst many competitive opportunities. Not picking or not leveraging all your skills can leave you unfulfilled, like you’re not at peak potential, or lead to some of your skills atrophying from lack of use.

As someone who went through this issue after Pinterest, I did some deep reflection on what makes me feel fulfilled on a path to a personal mission. I’ll share that mission as perhaps a useful example, but yours will almost certainly be very different, or even optimize on different attributes like industry, problem type, relationships, etc. After reflecting on what I liked and didn’t like at all the different companies I worked for or with, I realized I really enjoy problem solving. Specifically, figuring out problems related to building businesses and ensuring those solutions can be shared with others. Now, those solutions aren’t growth hacks or tips and tricks, but generalizable frameworks that can be wielded in the appropriate situations. I eventually landed on a personal mission of discovering and scaling the best practices of building companies.

What I found from my advising work is that the best practices of building companies are very unevenly distributed. And it isn’t that one company has all of them and isn’t sharing. It’s that companies are good at different things, and there isn’t even cross-pollination of these best practices so that every company gets better at operating. In fact, I’d say most companies in Silicon Valley in aggregate operate poorly. It’s a weird paradox that the best performing companies are some of the most poorly run, because they can be. As Rick James might say, product/market fit is a hell of a drug.

Like finding product/market fit for a company implies a product people value and a way to make money at it and scalably distribute it, the next question comes in how to deploy this personal mission. I played around with almost every model: full-time employment, advising a handful of companies in-depth, investing and helping the companies I invest in, creating courses with Reforge that anyone can take, and blogging for anyone who wants to read. There is an implied breadth and depth of impact and learning from this model. Focusing all your time on one company has the most impact on how it operates, but that scales the least of any model. Blogging reaches the most amount of people in aggregate, but with no customized learning.

What I have found interesting about my personal mission is that while there are clear trade-offs, there are also win-wins. The blog creates advising opportunities. Operating full-time at one company makes me a better advisor, course creator, and blogger by the depth of problems I get to work on. Advising allows me to see fresh perspectives that broaden my problem solving at my current company. I have not found a perfect formula to optimize the ratio of time spent between these different avenues to deploy against my mission, but what I did learn is that it is likely best to vacillate between the different circles, which is part of the reason why I am not a full-time advisor like I was in the past. This is basically a form of optimizing for different steps in my learning loops to continue to unconstrain my personal growth, much in the same way I optimize for unconstraining growth in the companies I work with.

Finding a personal mission and thinking about how to deploy against it is something I would recommend more people spend time exploring for themselves. I think it helps optimize for personal happiness and growth in an environment where there are seemingly competing opportunities all the time that are hard to judge against each other.

Should You Pay Attention To Competitors? It Depends On Your Company’s Conflict.

I don’t remember much from high school literature classes, but one of the key frameworks I do remember is the different types of conflicts in storytelling. Now, the internet is confused over how many types of conflicts there are. Much like the 4P’s of Marketing are now 7, scholars are adding more types of conflict in storytelling over time. When I was taught this, however, there were three we focused on; whether the protagonist was fighting against:

  • nature
  • another person
  • themselves

Why am I talking about high school literature frameworks? Because every company has a conflict as well. The type of conflict a company is in will determine how you think about competition. I’ll describe these conflicts in more detail, how they apply to companies, and how to think about what to do in each situation.

Company Vs. Nature

Every founder I speak with can name dozens of competitors. That does not mean they are in conflict with another company. Take Grubhub, for example. When I joined, we had raised $1 million in venture capital, and had three competitors all about the same size, but with different strengths and strategies. But this was not a competition about who would become the leader in online ordering for food delivery. This was a competition against nature and to make food delivery more attractive to consumers, and if they were ordering delivery, competing against calling restaurants on the phone. At the time, 99% of people were not ordering food online.

Most startups are in a conflict against nature. There is a status quo in the market – or some other type of barrier to adoption like, say, a global pandemic (“too soon!” shouts my co-workers) that has to be overcome for any type of company in the space to be successful. Normally, startups engage in trench warfare to grind against the status quo over time. Online ordering for food delivery went from a very fringe thing to a completely normal thing that everyone does. Mike Evans, Grubhub co-founder, famously said, “we were an overnight success ten years in the making.” Occasionally, nature provides catalysts to growth as well. Just talk to any telemedicine startup, grocery delivery service, or remote work tool about what happened to them when the pandemic started. The technology already existed for all those companies, but consumers needed a forcing function to accelerate adoption.

If your main goal is to grow the category and make people want its value prop in general, obsessing over competition isn’t very helpful. This is how we felt at Grubhub. We didn’t care too much about competitors at all and focused on our customers. This prevented us from wasting precious time analyzing our competitors instead of our customers, which is what would really help us be successful. Eventually, Grubhub acquired those initial competitors or made them irrelevant. When we acquired those companies, we found they spent a lot of time thinking about us. Now, one can make the counter-argument that that is because we were winning. This is a very important point. If any competitor working to grow a category is being materially more successful than another, you may shift into another type of conflict.

Company Vs. Another Company

In many markets, companies fight vehemently against competitors. Companies are embroiled in a Red Queen effect, where each company is trying to out-innovate or outwork others in the market to gain market share. Think of Uber vs. Lyft as a recent example. Startups frequently think they are in this type of conflict when they are not. I have seen quite a few startups emphatically compete before they are even sure the category will be successful. In many of those cases, it would be better to cooperate and grow the category faster by being coordinated. Stripe and Shopify are an interesting example of this. The categories of ecommerce and online payments are growing so fast that instead of competing with each other, they have tightened their partnership to make sure the category continues to grow quickly. Uber and Lyft however tracked each other’s moves, and responded in kind to new product launches, pricing changes, and market launches. Both of these moves look correct in hindsight. Uber and Lyft’s market, while growing fast, would ultimately be capped by consumer transportation needs, and lean toward a winning take most model due to the strength of the local network effects involved in the model. While Uber and Lyft have been competitive, they ultimately saw value in presenting a unified position on local regulations and working together to ensure its services would remain available throughout cities worldwide. So company vs. company can change depending on the fight back to vs. nature.

Company Vs. Self

The third type of conflict within a company is one many founders and employees seem to forget: competing with themselves. In this type of conflict, the primary fear of the company is not that the market doesn’t unlock or that a competitor will take your opportunity; it’s that the opportunity isn’t realized because the company cannot execute on the strategic vision. This type of conflict can be dominant for many reasons:

  • Internal politics
  • Lack of focus
  • Execution issues e.g. technical and process debt

Investors frequently call this “execution risk.” A company in conflict with itself means the vision is definitely technically possible (hence, not technical risk), but the company struggles to build toward it either due to being unfocused, people internally competing vs. cooperating, or building is very difficult due to technical or process issues. These types of companies can be appealing to certain types of executives who think they can fix the underlying execution issues. The reason for this is that if these companies do everything right, they win. This is certainly true. But it is not easy. Evernote is a recent example. Technical debt slowed their progress to a crawl, so the new CEO spent two years rebuilding everything. During this time, growth was slow, and more competitive risk emerged with companies like Notion, Coda, and Roam Research. If the company is finished with its conflict with itself, it likely finds itself in conflict with other companies now.

It is tempting to say in this example that Evernote should have paid a lot of attention to these competitors early on, but I think that would have been a mistake. The entire issue with Evernote seemed to be that they spent too long building new things on top of a technology stack that became unbearable to maintain. Movements in the market have no impact on fixing that core problem.

—

The type of conflict you are facing affects a lot of how you build and what you focus on as a company. Spending some time to think through where the real conflict is can help focus the company on the right activities to win. This can affect how much you invest in marketing, the focus of the product roadmap, and even organizational structure. Tackling the appropriate conflict is where the real leverage is in growing a company.

Currently listening to my Vocal Tones playlist.

Product Visionary vs. Product Leader

Many people want to work in product management. One of the most common questions I receive is how to break into product management. It’s a hard question for me to answer, because 1) there is no default path (the same is true for trying to land a business development role), and 2) most of these people really don’t know what they’re asking for. My most common response is, “Are you sure? Product management can kind of suck.” The reason for the dichotomy of people who haven’t done product management finding it so alluring, and people who have done it cautioning people trying to get in is the difference between what I call a product visionary and the product leader.

Product visionaries are who we all hear about in the press. They are the people who come up with brilliant products that go viral or solve real needs in the market that no one else thought of. They appear to be masters of finding product/market fit. I’ve been lucky enough to work with a few of them in my previous jobs and a few in the portfolio at Greylock. These tend to be founder/CEOs, and they generate brilliant insights that create product opportunities others don’t see. Ev Williams is on his third breakout product in Medium after Blogger and Twitter. Ben Rubin created two products that hit product/market fit in two years with Meerkat and now Houseparty.

Anyone working in technology hears these stories, and they think the shortest path to that sort of glory is becoming a product manager. They are excited to get to a role where they can drive the vision of a product, even if it’s only one part of the company. This excitement is exacerbated by the commonly propagated myth that the product manager is the mini-CEO of their product. The reality is that in 90+% of cases, product management is not about being a visionary. It’s about being a leader.

What does a product leader do at a tech company? It’s actually very little of creating a vision and a strategy from scratch. It’s about helping everyone understand what the vision and strategy is. It’s about communicating to the entire team why the company is doing what it is doing. It’s about building a process that helps a team execute on that vision. It’s about when there are competing visions, aligning and motivating the team to focus on one, and getting people to disagree and commit (including sometimes yourself). It’s about looking at data to measure if product changes are having a positive impact on the customer and the company’s growth. It’s about talking to users to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and the problems they still face even though your product exists. It’s about mentoring more junior people on your team, across product as well as engineering, design, and analytics. And they don’t have to listen to you, so you have to use influence rather than authority to be successful.

In the scaling phase of a startup, it’s product leadership that drives performance, not vision. Vision is needed early to find product/market fit and plot a course to scale, and then the less that vision wavers over time the better. This vision is usually done by the founder/CEO. The reason founders hire product managers and VPs of Product is not to set vision, but to help execute the vision. Don’t get me wrong; that will sometimes mean coming up with solutions to problems your customers face. If a company is scaling by having the founders solve all the customers’ problems instead of product teams, it will struggle. But much of the time, it will be wrangling the ideas of the individual engineers, designers, and analysts on your team and matching that to an overall vision set by the founder(s). It’s very rarely your ideas you’re executing on as a product leader, and it shouldn’t be.

https://twitter.com/stevesi/status/943945949352665088

I also don’t want to make it sounds like I am devaluing visionaries. They are, of course, critical in finding the initial idea(s) that create a growing company and maintaining a vision for that growing company. Having visionaries also becomes more important as you saturate your core market and need to tackle new value propositions to drive new growth opportunities. That is the ideal time for non-founder visionaries to enter a growing company. These are not going to be typical product managers or VP’s though. They are usually ex-founders. The best outcomes for these people entering an organization that is scaling is giving them a team and space to experiment with ideas until they find their own product/market fit, where a business unit is built out around that vision with product leaders to help them scale.

As you’re thinking about your business, think about whether you need a product visionary or a product leader. Most founder/CEOs are already visionaries, so they need a product leader to help execute. Some businesses minded founders need the opposite to be successful. If you’re thinking about product management, think about whether what you really want to be a is product visionary instead of a product leader. In that case, it might be a better idea to start a company than take a role expecting to execute on your vision and instead managing other people’s visions.

Currently listening to Ambivert Tools Vol. 3 by Lone.

Why Focus Is Critical to Growing Your Startup, Until It Isn’t

When I was a teenager, I told my dad about a friend and his dad and how they had seven businesses. He immediately replied, “And none of them make money.” I thought it was an extremely arrogant thing to say at the time, but later, I realized it might be the smartest piece of advice he ever gave me.

When I joined Grubhub, I quickly noticed the founders were incredibly good at staying focused. They said we were building a product for online ordering for food delivery — and only delivery — not pickup, not delivery of other items, not catering, and that’s all we would do for a long time. I remember thinking, “but there’s so much we could do in [XYZ]!” I was wrong. By staying focused on one thing, we were able to execute technically and operationally extremely well and grow the business both very successfully and efficiently. When we added pickup functionality four years later, it proved not to be a very valuable addition, and hurt our conversion rate on delivery.

If you have product/market fit in a large market, you should be disincentivized to work on anything outside of securing that market for a very long time. There is so much value in securing the market that any work on building new value propositions and new markets is destructive to securing the market you have already validated.

There is an interesting switch in the mindset of a startup that needs to occur when a startup hits product/market fit. This group of people that found product/market fit by creating something new now have to realize they should not work on any new value propositions for years. They now need to work on honing the current product value or getting more people to experience that value. Founders can easily hide from the issues of a startup by working on what they’re good at, and by definition, they’re usually good at creating new products. So that tends to be a founder’s solution to all problems. But it’s frequently destructive.

If a product team can work on innovation, iteration, or growth, they need to quickly shift on which of those they prioritize based on key milestones and value to the business. In this scenario, it’s important to define what innovation, iteration, and growth mean. In this context:

  • Innovation is defined as creating new value for customers or opening up value to new customers. This is Google creating Gmail.
  • Iteration is improving on the value proposition you already provide. This can range from small things like better filters for search results at Grubhub to large initiatives like UberPool. In both cases, they improve on the value proposition the company is already working on (making it easier to find food in the case of Grubhub, and being the most reliable and cheapest way to get from A to B in the case of Uber).
  • Growth is defined as anything that attempts to connect more people to the existing value of the service, like increasing a product’s virality or reducing its friction points.

I have graphed the rollercoaster of what that looks like below around the key milestone of product/market fit.

Market Saturation
The time to think about expanding into creating new value propositions or new markets is when you feel the pressure of market saturation. Depending on the size of the market, this may happen quickly or slowly over time. For Grubhub, expansion into new markets made sense after the company went public and had signed up most of the restaurants that performed delivery in the U.S. The only way the company could continue to grow was to expand more into cities that did not have a lot of delivery restaurants by doing the delivery themselves.

All markets are eventually saturated, and that means all growth will slow unless you create new products or open up new markets. But most entrepreneurs move to doing this too early because it’s how they created the initial value in the company. Timing when to work on iteration and growth and when to work on innovation are very important decisions for founders, and getting it right is the key difference to maximizing value and massively under-performing.

Starting and Scaling Marketplaces Podcast

Brian Rothenberg, VP & GM at Eventbrite, and I discuss how to start and scale marketplaces. We discuss certain topics such as the chicken and egg problem, going horizontal vs. vertical at the beginning, and traditional and non-traditional growth tactics to grow marketplaces. You can check it out below or read the summary here.

The iTunes link is here, and here is the Soundcloud link for email readers.

You Are Not Your Customer

Startups are successful in the early days usually for one of two reasons. One is having a unique insight or pain point in the world that you want to solve (usually for yourself as the founder first), and assuming it is pain experienced by others. The other is to listen to customers, deliver value to those customers, and make sure they understand and appreciate the value you’re providing. The second way requires founders to hone specific skills in the early days of a startup — which can actually make it harder to scale out of the early stage, but pays off with sustainable growth in the long term.

The people that try your product early on see the potential of your product and are willing to forgive flaws — at least for a while. They have done an incredible amount of work to make the product work for them. By most definitions, they become “power users.” These power users are heavily engaged with your product, but they also deliver a ton of feedback on how the product could be better for themselves.

The early employees of your company tend to be very similar to your early customers. They (hopefully) use the product quite a bit, and joined the company because they understood the long term vision. These employees then start recommending and building products for themselves also, especially in consumer businesses. Everyone is excited to build these features because employees want them and existing customers want them, so the company builds them. The features get built, and there is no impact on growth of the business. Our partner Sarah Tavel talks about this in her lessons from scaling Pinterest.

Why is that a problem? Well, in an old Quora question someone asked, “What are some of the most important things you’ve learned in marketing?”, and my reply was “You are not your customer.” As a company employee, even if you look exactly like the early customer, and you built the product for people exactly like you, you have way too much domain knowledge to truly represent the long term customer. Your early users are also no longer the customer. Both employees and early users have have built up too much domain knowledge.

Your customer focus should always be on new or potential users, not early users. Early users will bias experiments, prompt you to build more and more niche features, and stunt growth. Power users can’t be much more engaged, so building more things for them doesn’t usually help the business. It does, however, make the product harder to understand for new customers. Sure, you have to do enough to keep these power users happy enough to stay, but the much more daunting and important task is to find new people to delight, or to figure out how to delight people who weren’t initially delighted by your product.

This post originally appeared on the Greylock blog.

Currently listening to Ambivert Tools Volume One by Lone.

Starting and Scaling a Growth Team

I get a lot of questions about how to start and scale growth teams. Growth teams need to spend as much time thinking about how to scale themselves as they do on scaling the product. In this post, I’ll outline how I’ve seen growth teams start and evolve, define the ideal end state, and describe some of what you work on at each stage along the way.

The first question to ask is why you need to start a growth team. Why not just have traditional product and marketing teams? It’s a good question, and not well understood. Traditionally, product teams make the product, and marketing is in charge of getting people to try and continue using the product. Marketing can include traditional efforts like events, advertising, and PR, and perhaps some branding efforts and some online marketing. Of note, online marketers and traditional marketers have historically been very different, so depending on the manager, all of the budget and team allocation typically went to either online or traditional — not evenly split.

However, the best startups grow super fast not because of traditional marketing or online marketing, but because they tune the product to drive growth. This is why growth teams matter. Marketing teams typically don’t have access to the product roadmap to make changes to things that will impact SEO, conversion, optimization, or virality, nor the expertise to work with engineers and designers on making these changes. And product managers often prioritize new product features over engineering that will drive more people to the existing value. Growth teams are the connective tissue between product, marketing and engineering.

Starting a Growth Team: Focus On One (Easier) Problem
Goal: Improve one area important to the growth of the business
Team: PM, Designer, Engineer(s), Analyst/Data Scientist (sometime PM or engineer assumes this role as well early on)

It can be overwhelming to consider all the problems you need to solve. When you start a growth team, do not to try to solve all those problems at once. A growth team should start by going deep on one carefully chosen problem:

  • Pick a problem the company is not currently working on (to prevent turf wars)
  • Pick one of the easier — not harder — problems to improve (to build up credibility and drive toward early wins)

Since growth teams are typically treated with a healthy dose of skepticism by other teams when they start, carefully choosing your first area of focus will help maximize the growth team’s chances for success. Let’s say a growth team starts with a hard problem: Trying to increase activation of new users. It takes a month to measure increases in activation rates, and it has one of the smaller sample sizes in the traditional growth area. You run an experiment. It doesn’t work. You run a second, and another month goes by, and it still may or may not work. Now two months have gone by without a growth team win. People on the growth team are questioning if this is the right team to be on, and other teams in the company begin to question your purpose. (Hat tip to Andy Johns from whom I am blatantly stealing this example).

There are common growth problems where you can likely show quick progress. One is conversion optimization. Another is returning users via email and notifications. Still another is improving referrals or virality. These areas allow you to run multiple experiments quickly because the metrics will move immediately (they don’t take time to measure like activation), and because they have high sample sizes (all new users or all existing users opted in to communication).

Last note: When starting a growth team, it’s important that they sit together and not with their functional team members. The collaboration between the different skill sets and short feedback loops is how the magic happens.

Growing a Growth Team: Own the Growth Funnel (And Some Real Estate)
Goal: Improve metrics across the growth funnel
Team: PMs, Designers, Engineers, Data Scentists/Analysts

As a growth team grows, the team can start looking at multiple problems. These problems are typically across the AARRR framework by Dave McClure, (however revenue is frequently a separate team in an ad supported business.) The growth team separates into sub-teams who have their own meetings, and entire growth team meetings become less frequent. PMs, designers, and analysts may work on multiple teams. At this point, the growth team assumes ownership of certain areas of the product, including (but not limited to):

  • The logged out experience, which can involve both SEO and conversion
  • All emails and notifications (sometimes coordinating with marketing)
  • The onboarding flow, sharing flows, et al.

Owning these areas creates easy swim lanes between teams and prevents turf wars with the core product team. Growth leaders have to determine how to allocate people to work on the most impactful problems across the growth stack, and if a sub-team does not have enough support to make an impact, the growth leader should consider whether to support that problem at all. Growth teams also have to own goal setting, which means understanding historical performance and setting absolute goals.

At this point, teams start to work on both improvements in infrastructure and experiments. For example, at Pinterest, I was managing both the acquisition and retention teams. The retention team was struggling to grow because of an unwieldy email infrastructure. The infrastructure was built to support triggered, social notifications, but our strategy had evolved to more personalized, content-based recommendations. These jobs were taking days to run and would send automatically when complete, even though someone might have received a social notification five minutes before. So we spent nine months rebuilding it to allow us to scale more effectively. The retention team saw a step change in its performance and actually hit its Q1 goal in the middle of January after it was complete.

Evolving a Growth Team: A Special Forces Team Operating Across Borders
Goal: Reduce friction across the product that prevents people from connecting to product’s core value
Team: PMs, Designers, Engineers, Data Scentists/Analysts, Researchers, Marketers, Operations

As the growth team continues to grow, it involves more stakeholders and expands its scope. Instead of having clear areas of focus separate from the core product, the team shifts to analyzing the entire product and trying to figure out the biggest obstacles that are preventing the company from growing faster. At this point, the growth team has built up enough credibility that it doesn’t fight turf wars — it is laser focused on finding and solving the biggest problems that prevent people from connecting to the current value of the product.

Usually, the problems at this stage are deep inside product features and go beyond improving SEO, signup, viral and on-boarding flows, and sending the right emails and notifications (though growth teams still work on those too). The growth team is now identifying the friction that prevents people connecting to the core value elsewhere in the product. A lot of this work is simplifying product flows or building country-specific optimizations for slower growth countries. Growth teams can also become service organizations to marketing initiatives around this time, and I’ll talk about that in another post.

At Pinterest, we migrated to this phase rather recently. As we started to look at friction in the entire product, we saw in qualitative research that new users were getting bombarded with so many concepts it confused them: what a Pin is, where they come from, how to add your own Pins, what a board is, group boards, profiles, etc. The growth team made a list of the core things new people needed to know to get excited and start to build an understanding of the service. Then, we started experiments to remove everything else from the new user experience and only introduce it back once the core concepts were clearly learned. This helped improve activation rates.

What I described above is an amalgam of what I’ve seen in the market that works best. Of course, you should always tweak your approach based on the talent of your team and your company’s culture. I would love to hear what you think of this approach, and any additional insights you think would be useful to share with other growth leaders.

This posted originally appeared on the Greylock blog.

Currently listening to 28 by Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko.