Laura Schaffer
Laura Schaffer is the brand-new VP of Growth at Amplitude. Prior to this role, she spent over 10 years leading product management and growth teams at Twilio, Bandwidth, and Rapid. She explains how customer insights helped her uplevel her career and how she (surprisingly) thinks about qualitative versus quantitative data. We wrap up our conversation by discussing where the best ideas come from and what you need to know if you’re selling to developers.
Career Skills
Relying solely on a manager's advocacy for promotion is risky; you must proactively build your own internal brand and trajectory.
"The problem with it is that you're limited to what your manager's ability is to advocate for you, to promote you. And you're also limited by the explicit trajectory of your role at that company and wh..."
Growth Skills
Improve onboarding conversion by embedding intimidating but necessary steps inside familiar, 'safe' experiences.
"The analogy I have for this is pilling a hot dog. So if anyone's got a dog or an animal you have to feed a pill to, it's like you can't just feed the pill to the animal, it's never going to happen. Bu..."
Leadership Skills
Effective decision-making in growth requires balancing hard data with qualitative insights to move faster than statistical significance allows.
"I will definitely think that I would be described as someone who's going more by their gut when looking at date end results... I'm very comfortable and very common in using qualitative responses and t..."
Because most product hypotheses fail, iterative experimentation is essential to avoid investing in the wrong solutions.
"Roughly 80% of the times, ORs in the time are hypotheses and the things that we believe will be true... The closer you get to something that you go bear your head in the sand or go into an attic and b..."
Marketing Skills
For technical audiences, the product experience and documentation serve as the primary messaging and value proposition.
"Developers, almost two, one, do not look at your marketing website at all. They go straight to your signup flow... They're the IKEA buyers who when IKEA package comes, they're not opening up the instr..."
Product Management Skills
Growth goals should be framed as a range (low, medium, high) over longer timeframes to account for the lumpy nature of experimental success.
"Commit to something that you can do over the course of a year and low, medium, high is always helpful in that space... It deviates from this notion of like, here's the single number that we're going t..."
Transitioning to Product-Led Growth requires a fundamental reset to understand the unique problems of the self-serve user.
"When you're doing PLG and we're shifting from sales to PLG, we need to reset. We need to recognize that, again, this is sales, sales via the product. What does a good sales rep do when they're engagin..."
Adding 'good friction' in the form of targeted questions can increase conversion by reassuring users they are in the right place.
"We just asked for forgiveness and put these questions into the silent flow and ran as Navy test with a small group... I'm not kidding, an improved conversion. There's no personalization, nothing past..."
Distributing customer insights internally establishes you as a subject matter expert and builds trust with leadership.
"I just started sharing a voice of the customer report. I started sharing my insights, started writing down and just sharing them. It became with digest and eventually people were like, 'Hey, can you s..."