Crystal W
You don’t need lots of employees to achieve impressive growth—but you do need a unique approach to hiring and structuring your team, and accurately measuring your growth efforts. Crystal Widjaja has used scrappy tactics to unlock massive success for Gojek (a wildly successful ride-share app in South East Asia) and is currently the Chief Product Officer at Kumu.
Growth Skills
Growth strategy must be rooted in the 'physics' of the specific market, product, and existing user behaviors.
"Step one, you have constraints. Similar to our sandbox example of everything in the world that's orange versus everything in a construction site, you have to think about the physics of the current mar..."
High-performing free consumer products should aim for a 60% week-one retention benchmark.
"If it's a free product, 60%. It has to be at least 60%. If it's a free product, we go over a week. If it's a paid product, I usually look at that more as maybe 20 to 30%."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Use experiment design case studies to evaluate a candidate's analytical rigor and research process.
"I actually look for that first principle bias. So I'll give people case studies of here's what we see, how do you know that this is true? And then I have them set up an experiment design. I want to se..."
Prioritize statistical literacy and first-principles thinking over years of experience when hiring for growth roles.
"I would hire someone who is willing to take intro to statistics course. And it doesn't matter if they've had the experience to go wild or not. I think it really is, can they focus on the right opportu..."
Leadership Skills
Small sample sizes (as low as 30) are sufficient to identify directional trends and validate early hypotheses.
"Even if you have a sample size of 30, the data you get back, generally, does not change but its precision will. So mathematically speaking, you're going to get the same level of trends, but the precis..."
Marketing Skills
Bridge the gap for novel products by using visual metaphors and copy that align with familiar mental models.
"If your product does something that's not super familiar, you have to tie it to something that is. So I talked about using drivers to sell GoPay. Before that, one thing that we did was to actually tak..."
Intentional friction, such as detailed questionnaires, can effectively filter for high-intent community members.
"we almost create this artificial friction to help differentiate how deeply a user wants something or needs something. And if the user doesn't fill out that questionnaire, maybe they're actually lookin..."
Product Management Skills
Use manual 'Wizard of Oz' testing to validate product value propositions before investing in engineering resources.
"It's really this Wizard of Oz experience. We don't have to build anything. I coordinated with a bunch of interns and we were able to validate some of the value prop and conversion rates that we would..."