Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude)

Mar 9, 2023 1h 21m 16 insights Episode Page ↗
Laura Schaefer, Head of Growth at Amplitude, shares her career growth framework, emphasizing proactive customer insight gathering. She also discusses surprising experimentation insights, the importance of user psychology in growth, and strategies for Product-Led Growth and selling to developers.
Actionable Insights

1. Carve Your Own Career Path

Proactively seek out and share valuable customer insights, as executives often lack direct customer contact, making your observations a powerful way to build influence and create new opportunities for yourself, rather than waiting for a path to be carved.

2. Proactively Share Customer Insights

Start sharing a ‘voice of the customer’ report or similar insights proactively, even if not asked, to establish yourself as an expert and build trust with senior leaders, which can lead to new initiatives and roles.

3. Ungate Your Knowledge

Share your unique skills and insights beyond your explicit role (e.g., communication tips, customer knowledge) to build your personal brand as a subject matter expert (SME) and open new opportunities within the company.

4. Frame Proposals as Manager Support

When proposing new initiatives or career paths, frame them as supporting your manager and the company, rather than working against them, as this can accelerate your growth and aid your manager in advocating for you during promotion discussions.

5. Prioritize Iterative Experimentation

Opt for iterative experimentation over full redesigns, as most hypotheses fail (80-90% of the time), allowing for faster learning and adaptation rather than investing heavily in potentially flawed large-scale changes.

6. Embrace Failure as a Compass

View experiment failures not as roadblocks but as a compass guiding you to the right solutions, as the high failure rate of hypotheses means rapid iteration and learning from what doesn’t work is key to eventual success.

7. Validate Hypotheses Quickly

Before investing in expensive A/B testing, use cheaper, faster validation methods like ‘painted doors’ or mocks to quickly invalidate hypotheses and reduce the overall failure rate of more resource-intensive experiments.

8. Adjust Experiment Confidence Levels

Consider using lower confidence intervals (e.g., below 95%) for experiments in non-critical areas to significantly increase the number of experiments run annually, leading to a net positive impact over time, especially given the high failure rate of individual hypotheses.

9. Corroborate Risky Experiment Results

When accepting lower confidence intervals in experiments, always harden your validation by corroborating quantitative data with strong qualitative feedback to confirm the underlying hypothesis and reduce the risk of false positives.

10. Set Long-Term Growth Expectations

Educate stakeholders that growth team success cannot be measured on short weekly or monthly timelines due to the inherent high experiment failure rate; instead, commit to annual goals to foster a healthier, more effective environment for true metric movement.

11. Avoid Data Manipulation for Progress

Resist the pressure to make data fit a desired outcome or massage results to show progress, as this leads to vanity metrics and undermines the true purpose of experimentation, which is to validate opportunities and learn.

12. Understand User Psyche in Onboarding

Recognize that ‘good friction’ can improve conversion by addressing user anxieties and providing comfort, such as asking relevant questions in a signup flow to reassure users they are in the right place and capable of using the product.

13. Bury Unpleasant Steps

Embed intimidating or unfamiliar steps (the ‘pill’) within a more comfortable and familiar context (the ‘hot dog’) to reduce user anxiety and improve conversion in self-serve experiences, rather than presenting them as the first step.

14. Create Self-Serve Demos for Non-Developers

Develop ‘create your own demo’ experiences or low-code options for non-developer users to build confidence and excitement, especially when targeting buyers who may find traditional developer tools intimidating but still need to experience the product.

15. Anchor PLG in Customer Problems

When shifting to Product-Led Growth (PLG), do not start by chopping up existing sales-led products; instead, reset and deeply understand the unique problems and psyche of self-serve users to build an experience tailored to their specific needs.

16. Invest in Developer Self-Serve

Recognize that developers are a unique audience who avoid sales and must prove product efficacy to themselves due to high stakes; therefore, heavily invest in robust self-serve experiences to enable their proof-of-concept building and adoption.