How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite

Jul 21, 2022 55m 5s 12 insights Episode Page ↗
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.
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.