Melissa Tan
Melissa Tan is an advisor, investor, and growth expert. She’s worked with fast-growing startups like Dropbox, Canva, Grammarly, and Miro, and for the past 2.5 years has been the Head of Growth at Webflow. There, she led the company's self-service business across Product, Marketing, and Growth, in addition to leading the charge on pricing and packaging. Prior to Webflow, she was Head of Growth for Dropbox’s B2B product, where she played a pivotal role in propelling their growth.
Career Skills
Mentorship is most effective when built organically through specific advice requests rather than formal titles.
"Never ask someone to be your mentor... the more it can be organic where you talk to somebody, you have actual advice that you want... reach out when you actually have a problem. People that want to he..."
Growth Skills
Product-led growth loops require a low-friction onboarding experience and inherent virality to scale without human intervention.
"The signal is that is a good motion for you is if the product is really intuitive to onboard onto. There's a low learning curve so you don't need a human to onboard the user. Also, if there's a viral..."
Defining your value metric and pricing structure early prevents the massive operational complexity of migrating legacy users later.
"Thinking about your pricing from the start is important... what is the value metric? And then they've already have massive scale and then they're rethinking their pricing. That's actually quite a big..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Adding a preparation call to the presentation stage allows you to test how a candidate receives and incorporates feedback in a real-world scenario.
"I always have a presentation component to the interview process that checks for prepared thinking communication. And I recommend a prep call between the two of us before that presentation. And I actua..."
Conducting live problem-solving on the company's actual product during the initial screen quickly identifies candidates with strong critical thinking skills.
"Usually hiring manager screen, and I actually do the live problem solving at this screen. I actually think it weeds out the most people... I sometimes would say, 'Hey, do you have your laptop? Can you..."
Effective onboarding focuses on defining clear 90-day success metrics and engineering early 'wins' to build the new hire's internal credibility.
"How do I ramp them up as quickly as possible... make sure it's clear what success looks like in their first 90 days? And then how do I help them secure early wins essentially? So I often will suggest,..."
High-performing teams balance a strict results-orientation with a collaborative, 'team-first' environment to prevent internal competition.
"The type of culture I try to set for the team is one around being really results oriented... Also, a team that's very team first and collaborative... The third thing is really this ownership mentality..."
Leadership Skills
Difficult performance conversations are most effective when you explicitly state your positive intent and belief in the person's potential.
"I actually pulled them aside and I said, 'Hey, we need to move a lot faster. This is where we need to get to by X. We're a growth team. We need to prove wins out early.'... I think in that conversatio..."
The DACI framework clarifies accountability and prevents decision-making bottlenecks in cross-functional projects.
"A DACI is a framework to think about the different roles on the team on a project or an area. So D stands for Driver... A is Accountable... C is Contributor... And I is informed. And so it's a nice si..."
A 'flying formation' document defines clear boundaries and operating rhythms between growth, marketing, and product teams.
"We created a flying formation when we were first starting the growth team at Webflow... product growth is accountable for all the metrics downstream of signups. Growth marketing is accountable for sig..."
Product Management Skills
Effective goal setting involves deconstructing a lagging North Star metric into actionable leading indicators for individual teams.
"The North Star is ARR, Annual Recurring Revenue. And then you break it down into the levers that drive ARR, the leading indicator, so that could be activation rates, the number of customers you bring..."
Sales & GTM Skills
Hiring high-potential non-experts for early sales roles can foster innovation and build deep user empathy that benefits other departments later.
"We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. There are a lot of disadvantages to that, but I do think it led to a ton of innovation. That's how we got ou..."