How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite
Casey Winters, CPO at Eventbrite and growth expert, shares insights on product leadership, communicating trade-offs, justifying non-sexy product work, the spectrum of PMs, and new growth trends like product-led sales and building growth loops early for scalable distribution.
Deep Dive Analysis
11 Topic Outline
Casey Winters' Career Arc in Product and Growth
Communicating Upward and De-risking Executive Meetings
Preparing Effectively for Important Presentations
Striving for Perceived Simplicity in Product Design
Justifying Non-Sexy Product Improvements and Protecting Value
The Downfall of Functional Operations Roles
The CPO Role: Definition and Path to Get There
The Spectrum of Product People and Skill Development
New Growth Trends and Tactics: Product-Led Sales
Kindle vs. Fire Growth Strategies and Timing Growth Hires
Underappreciated Growth Strategy: Data Network Effects
5 Key Concepts
Perceived Simplicity
This concept describes a product design approach where advanced features are easily discoverable for those seeking them, but effectively hidden from users who are not looking for them. The goal is to prevent complex functionalities from making the product harder to use for the majority of users who may never need that level of sophistication.
Product-Led Sales
A growth trend that unifies self-service loops (typically driven by product) and sales loops in a B2B business into one more complex, efficient engine. This approach aims to break down silos between sales, product, and marketing, allowing for more efficient customer acquisition and leveraging product-qualified leads for sales.
Kindle Strategies
These are non-scalable hacks used to acquire early users for a product. They are typically executed by founders or early team members and exist primarily to unlock 'Fire Strategies' by proving initial value and finding early adopters.
Fire Strategies
These are scalable growth methods, such as content loops, sales loops, viral loops, or paid acquisition, that can take a product to millions of users. They are the ultimate goal of 'Kindle Strategies,' which aim to find the initial traction needed to justify investment in these larger-scale approaches.
Data Network Effects
This refers to leveraging product usage data to continuously make the product's value stronger over time. Examples include personalized results or better targeting data for advertising, providing a competitive edge by generating proprietary data rather than solely relying on external platforms.
11 Questions Answered
PMs should frame their work as a story, starting with how it aligns with company strategy, metrics, and assumptions, rather than diving into details too early or re-explaining common knowledge. It's crucial to find the last point in the story that would be completely obvious to the executive and proceed from there.
PMs should conduct pre-meetings with key individuals to address major concerns beforehand and role-play the presentation with their manager, anticipating questions from different executives to weave answers into the narrative and avoid surprises.
The time varies per person, but the key is to know the material deeply and anticipate every possible question from the audience, ensuring all necessary data is at hand to avoid casting doubt on the presentation and to be prepared for any eventual outcome.
Companies can strive for 'perceived simplicity' by making advanced features easily discoverable when sought but effectively hidden if not looked for, ensuring complexity doesn't hinder the majority of users who will never need that level of sophistication.
It's crucial to get peer leaders (engineering, design) aligned, build custom metrics, run small tests to prove worth, establish team principles, and use experiments to build broader buy-in. Also, emphasize that protecting existing value becomes increasingly important at scale, as user expectations and the competitive landscape continuously rise.
Functional ops roles are often a temporary 'hack' to address inefficiencies; their explicit job should be to find inefficiencies and build process or software to eliminate them, rather than becoming a long-term, stable function that perpetuates manual processes and exacerbates inefficiency.
A CPO is responsible for leading and facilitating the development of products and features that deliver value for customers and, in turn, for the business. This includes defining and improving product strategy, prioritizing projects, ensuring effective execution, identifying and removing bottlenecks, and training the product team.
Focus on understanding the entire business, optimizing for the whole company (not just your team), learning to speak the language of executives, and refusing to specialize to develop a broad skill set. Strategic thinking is identified as the biggest bottleneck and a great filter for advancing to top leadership roles.
The spectrum ranges from 'crazy innovator types' (many ideas, often poor execution) to 'executional focused PMs' (strong execution, less strategic ideation). CPOs ideally seek people in the middle who are both strategic and capable of execution, often needing to train executors to become more strategic to advance.
While truly new channels are rare, companies are finding leverage through better flows and lifetime value, such as 'product-led sales,' which unifies self-service and sales loops in B2B to operate more efficiently and break down silos. This trend is in its early days but shows promise.
Founders should think about building growth loops early, even before product-market fit, to have a distribution advantage when ready. A dedicated head of growth should be hired *after* a 'fire strategy' (a scalable growth loop like sales, viral, or content loops) has been unlocked and proven to scale.
12 Actionable Insights
1. Communicate Upward Effectively
Escalate issues to executives to get help changing circumstances or ensure they are aware of trade-offs, allowing for fair evaluation of results. Frame your story starting from company strategy and metrics, avoiding too much detail or re-explaining known information.
2. Prepare for Key Meetings
Role-play presentations by anticipating questions from specific executives and pre-meet with key individuals to de-risk the meeting. Ensure you know the material deeply and can answer all possible questions to build confidence and impact.
3. Justify Non-Sexy Product Work
Get your engineering and design leaders aligned on the importance of non-sexy projects like performance or stability. Build custom metrics, run small tests, or establish team principles to demonstrate value and protect existing gains, preventing future erosion of product market fit.
4. Strive for Perceived Simplicity
Design products with advanced features that are easily discoverable when sought, but effectively hidden if not needed. This prevents complex functionality from confusing the majority of users who only require basic features, like WhatsApp’s approach to new capabilities.
5. Embrace Product-Led Sales
Unify self-service loops (driven by product) and sales loops in B2B businesses into one complex, efficient engine. This breaks down silos, allows sales to pick up product-qualified leads, and optimizes the skill sets of sales, product, and marketing teams.
6. Build Growth Loops Early
Think about and build growth loops into your product before achieving product market fit, not to prematurely scale, but to ensure built-in distribution. This provides a strategic advantage to grow scalably once the product is ready and retains users.
7. Leverage Data Network Effects
Utilize product usage data to continuously strengthen the product’s value over time, such as through personalized results or better targeting for advertising. This creates a competitive edge by generating proprietary data, reducing reliance on external platforms.
8. Optimize for Company First
As you advance to executive roles, learn to optimize decisions for the entire company, even if it’s at the expense of your own team’s immediate interests. This mindset shift is crucial for effective company leadership.
9. Refuse to Specialize
Focus on learning a wide array of skills across different functions to combine them and work on the most impactful problems. This broad understanding can lead to a faster path to true executive roles by enabling better communication with CEOs on diverse topics.
10. Upskill in Product Strategy
For PMs aiming for director or CPO levels, prioritize developing strong strategic thinking to write strategy documents independently and drive decision-making. This ability to push forward new ideas is a critical filter for career growth beyond senior PM roles.
11. Treat Ops as Inefficiency Fixers
View operations roles (e.g., Product Ops, Marketing Ops) as temporary functions whose explicit job is to find inefficiencies and build processes or software to eliminate them. The goal should be for these roles to become unnecessary, promoting efficiency rather than empire building.
12. Sequence Growth Strategies
Start with ‘Kindle strategies’ (non-scalable hacks) to acquire early users, with the goal of unlocking ‘Fire strategies’ (scalable acquisition loops like viral, content, or paid). Hire full-time growth specialists only once a scalable ‘Fire strategy’ has been identified and proven.
5 Key Quotes
If you're not an executive, whatever you're working on, you're basically writing and telling a story. And when you talk to an exec about that story, you have to start with chapter one, which is, you know, what part of the company strategy are you working on? What metrics are you trying to improve? What assumptions are you making that are guiding, you know, what you're building?
Casey Winters
Executive communication is actually executives' communication. You're communicating with individual executives that all have different styles and different concerns about the business or about the particular problem you're working on.
Casey Winters
The goal of business operations did not exist.
Casey Winters
The goal of your Kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the FHIR strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.
Casey Winters
If you've got a product that retains well, and you can't find more users for it, I don't think that's product market fit.
Casey Winters