These are the topics and questions discussed in this live Q&A:
Ramli John (00:04):
[Inaudible] all right. We are live. Hey everybody. Welcome to I was going to call it product lead hour. Cause I had back in my mind, X we're QA with Andrew Caplin. How's it going? Andrew?
Andrew Capland (00:16):
You are a fantastic man call whatever you want. That sounded cool.
Ramli John (00:19):
Yeah. So welcome to product lead hour. And we have an expert today, Andrew. I know some people we have 38 people live right now. I know we had over 350 people sign up. When I told Wes yesterday night, he was like, what the heck? What happened here? So I think there's a lot of people really interested about you know, starting and scaling their, their growth team. If you're, if you're live with us if you can type in the comments where you're at I know I'm from Toronto, Canada, and I knew your, your base out of Boston,
Andrew Capland (00:53):
Just outside of Boston. I'm writing my true home Medford mass in case there's any real Boston homies out there.
Ramli John (01:00):
Then we got some people from Amsterdam. We got Denmark. Ash is from Portland. We got people from somebody from Kenya, from Australia, Brazil, London, UK, Jamie from London, San Francisco. Yeah. Just let us know where you're where you're joining us from today. We'd love to hear who else is here. Nashville, India. So we got like a global community of product led enthusiastic cat UK. Well, thank you for joining us. We want to make sure you get a ton of value out of this. Andrew is pumped to answer some of your questions. I know some of you already submitted your questions before we do Andrew, I'm sorry to do this with you on a spot, but maybe can you introduce yourself a little bit? You know, for people I've already like give him the preamble who you are and their LinkedIn, but like let people know who you are.
Andrew Capland (01:55):
Sure. I'm Andrew, I'm the head of growth at postscript? Actually I should take a step back. Like I'm a growth nerd. I live it, I breathe it. I love it. All types of growth, product led growth, growth, marketing growth, product management. I'm just fascinated by the space. And I've been fortunate to work at some cool companies where I've gotten to work on some neat projects and make a whole bunch of mistakes. So currently I'm the head of growth at postscript, which is an SMS marketing tool for brands on Shopify. We are we're growing fast enables we'll talk more about postscript, but former head of growth at Wistia was there for a long, long time. And was that HubSpot before that? And so currently at postscript, a lot of what I'm focused on is driving product adoption. Like probably many folks that are listening to the Q and a, we are a product led business with a small sales arm as well.
Andrew Capland (02:49):
And so a lot of what I do is focused on driving more product adoption and engagement to ultimately retain and upsell more of our customers as they scale with usage. But in the past, worked all across the funnel from user acquisition, new user onboarding, I've done a whole bunch of pricing optimization work, some retention work as well. And I made a million mistakes. So ask away I'll share the mistakes. I feel like those are more interesting than the, than the wins sometimes. And I should also add that I'm a new dad. So my wife and I had just welcomed our baby boy Cameron to our family about three and a half months ago. So in addition to all those fun things I listed, I'm also extremely tired.
Ramli John (03:30):
Are you are you getting much sleep these days or you're you are? I know some people who have a plan to get a lot of sleep,
Andrew Capland (03:38):
I'm getting a lot of three hour and four hour blocks of sleep.
Ramli John (03:44):
Nice. Not much longer than that. All right. Let's jump into the questions. I know some people, and this is something that I sent out to folks. If we do have a Q and a, if you fill out the question form that we sent before and that we were, we tend to prioritize those first. The question is from Melissa. And she's talking about starting a growth team from scratch. And how do you balance that about the growth versus actually doing and managing, working your normal day-to-day work? Like, do you, how do they balance, like what are you suggesting around the starting and grow team when you still have to do your real job?
Andrew Capland (04:22):
Yeah, I mean, this is how most of the people that I know that got into growth started in this way. It's all shared what I did personally. And then if there's up questions, we can talk about those, but I feel like it starts by taking a growth approach to solving a specific problem. So like, like for me, I'll, I'll share my own personal journey. So I was somebody who was a marketing operations expert. So I knew a lot about marketing ops. I knew a fair amount about demand gen and I started getting into growth by figuring out that I didn't know all the answers, like I didn't know all the right campaigns to run. I didn't know all the ways to improve the conversion rate on the website for the company that I was working at. But I knew that there were people that took a different approach than I did.
Andrew Capland (05:06):
A lot of the approach that I took in the past was, Hey, I went to a conference and I learned, this is the right way to do this. So I'm going to do it this way. And what I learned over time is that there's no right way to do something. And that often what happened behind the scenes was like six iterations on what that person actually did, where five of them failed before they found the one thing that was really successful. And so I took that as an approach to the way that I started my day-to-day work as this person focused on marketing operations and demand gen. And over time I learned that that approach helped me find the right answer. It was more of a system than a body of work. It was a system of trying many things and experimenting and tinkering and iterating to eventually find the right answer more so than intuitively knowing it upfront.
Andrew Capland (05:53):
So I think that's a really good foundation for people that are interested in getting growth is take a growth approach to problem solving in your existing role. And as you start to learn and get some momentum and get some wins, naturally, it makes sense to apply it to other problems. And some of those other problems might be things where you need more resources. And that's kind of where, you know, a growth team can really start to scale from being like a lone Wolf. Basically, you know, somebody who's a lonely growth marketer or growth PM, but you know, somebody who's taking a growth minded approach to their day to day work to somebody who's then starting to scale the growth squad that might eventually turn into a more dedicated team down the road.
Ramli John (06:33):
Great response. And I love a question that just came in. I'm sorry. I like people can actually send an audio question through this app, which is absolutely crazy, but I actually cross it out. But the question that I believe Kevin asked was around why build the growth team in the first place? Like what, what are your thoughts around like, you know, should companies have that at all? Like they're already have marketing, they have already product, like why have a growth team?
Andrew Capland (07:01):
I think it's a totally fair question. I don't think a growth team is the best fit for every kind of company is like the honest answer. But for companies that are high volume that have a self service or product lead arm balancing with a sales team, what tends to happen is you have a body of work that's in between every team. It's like basically, how do you do touchless sales at a software company? E-Commerce at a, at a software company. And that involves like, how do you market it? How do you do the user onboarding? If there's no people involved, how do you convert those people into customers? If they're not having one-to-one conversations with sales and how do you retain, and hopefully upsell those folks for a long, long time. And again, at a company that focuses more on an inside sales model, typically those things are done by people.
Andrew Capland (07:48):
Every problem there's people that are plugged in, but at a product lead org or even like a freemium company, that's just a total self service business. There's a gap. And so growth team is a really good cross-functional crew that fills that gap that focuses on commercialization within your existing audience. And they work really well with marketing and with product. So like marketing's job is to create demand and tell the story in the broader market, gross job is to capitalize on that demand and commercialize it. And then in, in to show value very quickly. And then the core product team thinks about what is the core jobs to be done, that our product solves longterm and how can we add additional value? How do we create new tools to add additional value and improve the existing core value of our product today? And that's kinda how all three of those things work harmoniously.
Ramli John (08:39):
I love how you broke that down to those different, like core responsibilities. I want to take a step back. You, you talked about why, you know, people should have growth teams and sometimes it might not be the best fit, but you were talking about the lone Wolf. It sounds like there's a process like, okay, so you were talking about having this growth mindset in the beginning, but let's say the CEO, small, small team see, I was like, we need a grow team. Like, and where did they go from? Like going from that lone Wolf to actually scaling it up? How does that process look like for, you
Andrew Capland (09:13):
Can go in a few different roads, but I think the road most traveled is, excuse me, you scale from being the lone Wolf, working on one problem with like one KPI and limited resources to having, I call it like a growth squad, but it's usually a lone Wolf working in tandem with some other folks. And it, if you come from a marketing background, this would typically be two engineers and a designer or an engineer and a designer to start. And that's where you can start to just like move faster and to take some bigger swings and to think a little bit less incrementally and more in terms of like what changes or experiments or programs might I create that can unlock new, big opportunities that I wouldn't be able to do without them. And so scaling from there and make sense. And over time, what you'll find is if your, you know, your growth squad will stay focused on what are two problems, one or two KPIs to start, but after a certain amount of time, you'll find that there'll be even more opportunities or hopefully there'll be more opportunities.
Andrew Capland (10:17):
And that's when you can scale from like a small squad to a true cross-functional team. It might make sense to bring in some specialization at that point where you can have you know, a portion of your growth team working on user acquisition, a portion focused on user onboarding or activation, and maybe they come together and jointly work on pricing work if, and when your company decides to take on some of those things. And that's kind of how I've seen them scale. So from the lone Wolf to the squad, to the team and then eventually in my, in my experience, at least at a small or medium-sized company, what you'll find is that a lot of like a lot of your wins and growth come from removing friction highlighting what's valuable to customers and layering in additional segmentation down the road. Like there's not always a system, but those are usually some principles that are core part of how a growth team operates.
Andrew Capland (11:08):
And what you'll find is over time, you'll get a lot of those wins. And so growth will think bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually bump into some areas that make sense to be owned by other teams. So for example, if you were focused on new user onboarding and you focused on new user onboarding for a year and you tried 10 different flows and you optimized it eight different times, and you've segmented down from there, you might feel like there's not that many wins to be had. And you might think, Hey, for us to, to move another five to 15%, we need to, we need to redo the user interface inside of the product. Let's totally redo that. And that's where you might find it makes more sense for you to hand that project over to a team of specialists and act as a consultant. So good things like that happen as you as well. It's just sort of a natural part of the evolution.
Ramli John (11:57):
That totally makes sense here. I like how you broke that down to lone Wolf to squad. That's a really interesting names. There's a follow up question. Did somebody drop into the comments? I feel like, like really flows into this conversation. The question is, can you please break it down in terms of what initiative initiative you were executing in that initial phase for it? You know, before I matured, like what were you focus on? What, you know, what tools were you using those early in those early stages for a really blow blew up into like a larger growth of department then, you know, very early on
Andrew Capland (12:32):
In the early phases of growth, typically you'll be focused on one KPI and it will depend on the company that you're working at, what KPI that should be, because that will, you know, it will depend on their results and the growth model that you put together and all that stuff. But for me in the two times that I've scaled growth. One time I was focused on new user acquisition. So getting more people to try our software and another time I was more focused on new user onboarding. So hyper-focused on those two things let's take user acquisition because I just feel like that's a common one. So during my time at Wistia, we were really focused on getting more free P you know, more installs to try our freemium product. And so a lot of what we did was run AB tests on the website to see if we could identify pages that had a lot of traffic, but a relatively small percentage converting into new accounts and to figure out why and to break through our plateau.
Andrew Capland (13:28):
And so we were doing lots of AB testing at the time. It was myself with some software. At that time it was optimized CLI, which is a really good AB testing software. And they have raised their prices to the point where no one I know uses Optimizely anymore, unless they work at like Amazon. So now I use what do I use, shoot VWO is a product that I use today. And so I think that's like a common road where you can start to run AB tests yourself. And you might pull in a designer here and there where you want to totally redo a page or think through a new experience where you need a little, you know, you need a little bit more help that's outside of yourself. Or you can partner with an agency, which there are conversion rate optimization agencies out there where you can get a lot done in a short amount of time and sort of leverage your time a little bit more effectively that way.
Andrew Capland (14:16):
So I think that's like a really good place to start. And then as time goes on, you're able to take on more. So like, I'll give you a real tangible example. When I first started as a lone Wolf at Wistia, I would pick one page a features page. And I would say, how can I get more installs from this page? And I would run 10 tests in a row on that page that were like different copy and different pictures and different videos and sliders of all the features above the fold versus making them have to scroll down the field and all this stuff. And that's where I started. And when I got more engineering help, it changed the way that I thought because they were in my brainstorm when I was brainstorming ideas of, of ideas to try. And then all of a sudden the ideas started getting cool and they'd say, well, what if we made a lightweight version of the product that somebody could interact with and they could play with the product for free, no form or anything like that. But at a certain point, we'll prompt them to save an account. And I was like, yes, we should definitely try that. And that would have been something that I could not have executed as a lone Wolf, but as you scale the team, more opportunities like that open up,
Ramli John (15:26):
That's such a good example with the feature page. One thing that I, that, you know, people might ask and something that I've come across is you're, you're launching experiments on the feature page. What do you do when you bump into other people space? Like, you know, I'm sure marketing might be responsible for that feature page or like product it's like Andrew mal, what the heck are you doing? You're, you're screwing up with, with our page. Like, have you run into situations where like you bumped into another team and how do you deal with a situation?
Andrew Capland (16:00):
Yeah, yeah. You will. Especially if you're doing a good job and you're asking tough questions and I mean to work in growth, it's I think about it as, how do you break through plateaus? You know, things are going well, they're going a certain way. You're getting a certain amount of conversions and whatever the metric is, how do you break through that in a lot of ways, it's doing things differently. And so when I started, I'll share what I did the first time, and then I'll share what I learned and how I've done it better at postscript. But when I started at Wistia, we just started changing stuff. And frankly, it was tense at times, especially with our design team, they were a design led company. Design would initiate a lot of changes in an amazing brand, right? Like I see you laughing, running an amazing brand.
Andrew Capland (16:42):
And here I am, some nerd coming in, ripping out these amazing designs and replacing it with like dead simple stuff to see if it'll convert better. And sometimes it did, but it was it was not in alignment with how the company made decisions. And that was tough, honestly, on me personally. And then I did the same thing inside of the product where I started to get some wins, you know, once we had solved the design issues, started getting some wins on the website. And so I kinda got the green light to start experimenting with the new user onboarding flow. And then I started kind of bumping into our product designers and some of our other PM's. And so that was poor where I just got a bunch of momentum. I got executive level buy in, and I just figured everybody else, not that who cared, but you know what I mean?
Andrew Capland (17:26):
Like I just was trying to go fast and, you know, do my boss proud basically. And so I've taken a totally different approach at postscript, which is before I ever got started, I defined what growth is and what growth works on and what KPIs I'll be focused on and how I execute and how I run lots of experiments and the, that I take to run those experiments and how I prioritize the user and collect qualitative feedback and all of that good stuff. And I include those people in my brainstorms, I ask for their opinions so that when I execute projects, I'm not interrupting what they've done. They're actually a part of my flow from the beginning. And it's just a much better foundation of like trust. What I've learned is like to get alignment. It's just all about being really crystal clear about what you're looking to do and why you're looking to do it, and to be proactive about letting those people know, even if it's like a little uncomfortable and painful in the moment. And that has, that hypothesis has proven to be absolutely true during my time at postscript, I've got amazing partners. I have not felt that I've bumped into those other teams and we've been able to do a lot of great stuff because because of that, so I'd highly recommend that to other people.
Ramli John (18:38):
I laugh because like one of my mantra I got in trouble for us, a break break stuff, and ask for forgiveness later. And I feel like that's like the early, you know, like when you're a lone Wolf, you could feel that way, but you're right. Like you got partner up with the other departments. They also give a ton of great ideas as well. I guess that what you find when you, when you postscript, when you start partnering up with product and marketing and design, they're actually giving you a, a lot of ideas that you can experiment with. Totally. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. I want to shift gears a little bit now and talk about you know, once, once you were talking about wind stair, like, how do you identify, you know, your, let's say you date, you're the CEO or the leadership approved, like, you know, somebody is going to work on growed. You're the lone Wolf, one of your, one of the things that must be top of mind, it's like, I got to find a quick win or else I'm going to be out of the job really soon. Right. So like, how do you identify like that? And I guess a related question is around prioritization. Like, how do you know w you know, what to work on first and first hired? How do I identify quick wins so that I, you know, get, get people people's buy-in
Andrew Capland (19:53):
What's cool. Is that this answer I feel like is how I approached the last question at postscript. So I was saying like, at postscript, before I ever got started, I met with the people that I identified would be my stakeholders, people in product people, and marketing people from the executive team. And I sat with them and I shared, like, I put together a document and then I walked them through here's what growth is, here's how I define it. Here's what I'm going to work on. Here's the KPIs where I think I'm probably going to start. And here's my hypothesis for what I think our system will look like for the next six to nine months. And during those conversations, I made sure to ask them questions. And one of the questions that I would ask would be, what do you think I should work on?
Andrew Capland (20:36):
And I took notes. Like I treated it with intent. And so from those ideas, from those questions, I got a ton of ideas when I was brand spanking new. Like it was my first month. I had no idea what to work on just yet. I knew roughly where I thought I should focus, but I didn't know what might move the needle. And that's how I got a lot of amazing ideas. And I run the Sean Ellis ice framework to prioritize like to a T I find it works exceptionally well. So essentially what I do is I've got, I do it in Google. I do a Google sheet where I keep a running list of all the ideas that come in, and then I rank them in terms of impact, how confident I am that the idea will succeed and the amount of effort involved. And so I try to get at least 20 in that list before I even like really dig into it, but to prioritize the quick wins, I look for things that'll have a high impact, relatively a high confidence and low effort involved.
Andrew Capland (21:29):
Those are your quick wins. And I take that. And basically what I do is I like to do a few quick wins, like a couple of quick wins each week, as you're developing your longer term strategy, hypothesis direction. So that you can feel like you're making some momentum and getting those quick wins. Like you can't get those fast enough, but you also don't want to get into this place where you only do small incremental projects because in the long-term that will hurt and prevent you from getting more help to do the big things.
Ramli John (21:58):
That makes a lot of sense. I love how you really broke it down. That the way that you're talking about quick wins, I know we've been talking about tactical, you know, very minute growth experiments. I had a question earlier that, that about growth itself, whether it's just about optimizing experience or CRO, or is there like a bigger picture around growth where like, you're maybe taking bigger picture around, like how you optimize something. Do you have any thoughts on that? On like the balancing between, you know, tying to improve the user onboarding, which is very like into my new details versus like, trying to think bigger picture and maybe experimenting with maybe like the Vic something much bigger, like the experience overall.
Andrew Capland (22:41):
Yeah. So what was the question? How do I balance, or how do you think about balancing the two?
Ramli John (22:48):
Yeah. Like, do you, do you zoom in zoom out? Like, what are your thoughts around like experimenting with, you know, some like very zoomed in experiment, like a CRO X or more like you know, thinking about growth in terms of a larger picture.
Andrew Capland (23:01):
Yeah. So both are super important. Both should be in the roadmap in the way that I think about it is again. So we talked about prioritization, I try to prioritize the first column is like impact. And so I prioritize based on impact first, but when I think about the roadmap, I try to do a mix of projects that have a mix of how much effort is involved. And so usually the, usually the more like tweaky optimization website, or like even in app, like optimizations, changing colors and copy and images and pictures and page layouts, like usually those are like the, the little things in terms of effort involved. And then as you start to think about things, I have a much larger effort making new tools. Like that's like something that our team is kicking around right now is how do we get more top of funnel users?
Andrew Capland (23:49):
Like maybe we should just make some new free tools with that will play really well with our existing product, for the full, like, for those sole purpose of funneling more people into our existing tool. And like, that's something that we're evaluating. I talked a little bit about at Wistia, we did a project where you could actually interact with a version of our tool on the website, things like that. They all come from the same process from, from my perspective, which is you identify KPI that you want to focus on. You gather across functional crew of people that have a different perspective on this thing. And then you just do a Greenlight brainstorm. There are no bad ideas for a half an hour. And the outcome, the output of that if you've got good creative people will be ideas that run the gamut from optimizations to programs, to new tools. And that, that's kind of how I go about servicing those ideas rather than put all the pressure on like, well, I need to check off the box and like do this one thing. I just try to do it based on what will be the most impactful for the business and trying to get really creative people to be a part of that.
Ramli John (24:52):
I really, really loved that. Like they got, you're trying to pull everybody in and you know, that it's a mixture of different ideas in that mix, whether that's short term experiments, like what that question was about or long-term stuff. I think you're starting to get to that already. I want to like keep going at that. There was a related question around your weekly cadence around growth. Are there anything that you do like on a weekly basis? And I'm sure there is like a, you know, looking at Sharla's book hacking growth, but like, what does your weekly cadence look like once you have, we do have those ideas, like how do you make sure that they're executed and who do you meet with like, what, what are some of the things that you're doing on a weekly basis as a growth head of growth?
Andrew Capland (25:30):
So on, so on a monthly basis, or I guess on a quarterly basis set high level direction and pick one or two KPIs to focus on from that quarterly basis to try to put together a loose three month roadmap, like things change obviously, but at least directionally accurate. And that's where I'll do a lot of the Greenlight brainstorming and trying to use that to fuel the roadmap so that on a weekly basis I find it's helpful to have basically two, two main meetings throughout the week. In addition to like the monthly planning stuff the teams I've worked on always work on a sprint cycle. So Mondays are usually sprint planning where you open up for us, it's Trello for other teams that might be other areas, but we open up Trello. We talk about either the programs, projects, or experiments we're getting ready to run.
Andrew Capland (26:16):
We make sure that we identify who needs to collaborate with who, if there's any unknowns that we need to surface and make sure the engineers have what they need specked out so that they can kind of run with a full head of steam. So I find that to be incredibly helpful. And then Fridays, I like to do something that is super dorky, but I love it. And I can't imagine not doing it, which is a, I call it FullStory Fridays, which is basically that you open up full stories, the tool that I like, but you open up a tool where you can watch people interact with whatever you just built, project experiment, new page program app. It doesn't matter, but watch as many people interact with it as you can,uyou will come away from that session with amazing ideas and things that will instantly add value to the product and to the thing that you're working on. So I like to do those two things,udepending on what we got going on, we might also have a separate session where we surface some learnings or maybe share results of an experiment or something interesting that somebody on the team learns. And sometimes that's, async sometimes we'll have a separate meeting for that.
Ramli John (27:23):
I remember seeing LinkedIn posts about FullStory Fridays from you from Wistia. Is that, is that correct? Like, was that from you where like you're talking about FullStory Friday.
Andrew Capland (27:34):
Yeah. Yeah. We kind of just stumbled into it. Like, one of the things that I've learned is that there's no better way to figure out what to do than by watching people do or not do what, like, if you're focused on getting someone to a certain point inside of your product, there's no better way to figure out what to do to get more people there than to watch people, try to get there and get stuck and get distracted and rage, click on something that isn't clickable and get stuck on some stupid page that they should have no business being in, in their first session. Like there's just no substitute for that. It's so valuable. And then on the website side, you can obviously do the exact same thing. Watch people interact with the site, right. You know, you can also run surveys and ask them why they got stuck and things like that.
Andrew Capland (28:20):
But sometimes in a FullStory Friday, we'd also do like usertesting.com sessions where if we were doing, let's say a new version of the pricing page, we'd fire up 10 people who were our ICP going through our pricing page and sharing their thoughts with some prompts. And we'd listened to that and we'd adjust the design and things. So I'm just a big fan of getting as close to the user as you possibly can. And FullStory is a tool that for whatever reason, it was just fun to call it full story Friday, we'd all grab lunch. Somebody would take notes, we'd watch 20 sessions in half hour, 40 minutes. And it was always a high energy team activity.
Ramli John (28:55):
That's really funny who is who, who are in those meetings? Like you have, you, you got the product team, like I'm curious, like they're just in a room or a zoom meeting, just having lunch and, and watching this.
Andrew Capland (29:07):
Yeah. It's funny doing it virtually your computer will hum. You know, like it's working in overdrive, but but yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. So for us, we'd do it for the growth team. It'd be myself, a designer and an engineer. And maybe just someone else who was interested in what we had going on. Sometimes a PM would join a if it was a web a product project. And it's something that I've seen other teams adopt as well. I'm not sure why more people don't. I mean, there's other versions of full story, right? Like I think VWO even has a lightweight version of it. And there's other tools like Hotjar and crazy, you know, th th the tool matter, but some way to get feedback from real people who are saw someone ask ICP, who are your ideal customer profile, interacting with your tool and getting lost, getting stuck, getting confused. Cause that's friction. And, and that's finding ways to remove friction is like a great tool in your tool belt for improving conversion.
Ramli John (30:00):
It's so good. I love that. That's like a gold mine on its own. Do you follow up with that? Like let's say, yeah, you find something stuck. Do you do any other like user research stuff or like user interviews already stopped more like the product team or the product marketing team's job to do, do like those user audience interviews, race.
Andrew Capland (30:23):
Yeah. I mean, it's super valuable. I've been fortunate to work at companies where they've had someone on the product team who's focused on that and that person's a great collaborator for me. I think finding ways that you can learn more about people is just a huge advantage. And so if you don't have access to someone who's focused on user research, I like to run a couple of surveys. So like one, if you're focused on improving conversion rates on your website, I think an easy thing to do is to say like, Hey, thanks for stopping by. Would you mind sharing the one thing that's stopping you from creating a free account, free trial demo, whatever it is today, and most people will ignore that pop-up but you'll get real answers and the answers will be good. And for every answer you get, you can assume like 300 other people thought the exact same thing.
Andrew Capland (31:10):
They just didn't want to write into your pop-up which is fine. He only did that for like a week or two. You don't have to have a pop-up on your site for long. But that's a great way to get those insights. And then the same thing when someone signs up for your product. So like if they sign up for your product for the first time, add an additional question to your form that says, Hey, thanks for signing up for the tool. We are so pumped that you're here. Would you mind sharing the main reason you installed an account today? And then they'll tell you here's what I'm looking to do with your product. And if you collect enough of those, you'll realize that everybody who signs up for your product fits hopefully into like five different lanes, and then you can customize their journey to help whichever lane you want to prioritize. And that will help with segmentation. So all different ways of like getting user inputs, but all super helpful in their own ways.
Ramli John (31:56):
That's so good. That's so true. I that's such a goldmine in terms of like, you know, really optimizing the, the new user experience and just asking them, what is, why did you sign up like that? You can really customize the whole experience based on that great insight. I want to loop back around mistakes. You talked about mistakes that you made. One of them was just doing stuff and like launching them. There was an earlier question around what are some other mistakes that you, you know, if somebody is thinking about starting a growth job or starting a growth team, what are some mistakes that you've made personally that you can tell them to avoid?
Andrew Capland (32:33):
Yeah, I think for me, one of the biggest mistakes I made was not with scoping projects to the resources I had available in what, like, to just be a little bit clear. I had been, I thought the way to grow our growth team, the first time I went about it was just to do great work, to get a bunch of wins. And it would be an easy sell to my executive team because look what I'm doing on my own. Just imagine if I had more help was what I thought and what ended up happening is because I didn't really have help. It limited what I could execute. And so I could do a lot of small incremental changes, but when you do small incremental changes, you get small incremental results. And so that doesn't excite your executive team and that doesn't exactly make it an easy case to get more resources.
Andrew Capland (33:19):
And so what happens is you think, Hey, everybody knows, I'm just doing this little quick win stuff until I can get more help. But what ends up happening is when you're not around, they say, we don't want to give this person more resources. They're just doing all this little things. It's not moving the needle. And so you can get stuck. I kind of jokingly refer to this as like the resource hamster wheel, where he just running on this hamster wheel, doing small projects as he can't get more help. And you can't do big work because you don't have the help and you can't get the results. It's not a good place to be. And so one of my biggest mistakes there, and so what I would recommend doing to avoid that is making sure when you're creating your roadmap, that you're really servicing the big opportunities that you can't execute, share them with your boss, whoever it is, that growth reports up to share it with them and make sure you don't just share like, Hey, this is a cool thing.
Andrew Capland (34:09):
Imagine if we could do it, but create a project plan as if you were going to do it, Hey, look at this amazing project. I know we can't resource it now, but I thought through the opportunity, and here's what I think we can have happened for the business. If we execute this, here's the results that I think we can achieve. And then it becomes a much different conversation. We'll, they'll go, wow, I'm really interested in that. How can we make that happen? And then you can start to have the resource conversation because they're excited about it. And you'll be way more likely to be successful there. So that's like one of the easy things. We talked a lot about alignment. And so I sort of shared like my mistake before was not really aligning with people. That would be my stakeholders. Even though you would think it's so common sense, but just because I worked cross-functionally I worked in the middle of all these teams. I thought they just all knew. I thought they just understood what growth was and what I'd be working on, but making sure to document and over-communicate, that has also been a huge help.
Ramli John (35:07):
So good. You're totally right. I think documentation is such an important thing. It's a great way for other people to get excited on what you're doing and what the growth team is doing. I want to shift gears and talk about personal development. How, how do you think about yourself developing yourself as a growth leader, but also how do you think about, you know, how, how do you make sure that you, that your team if, once you have employees working for you or like in the whole organization is personally developing themselves in terms of growth specifically around like how growth and, and that gets moving so fast. Like, what are your thoughts wrong? How you're leveling up your, your own, both hard and soft skills as a leader.
Andrew Capland (35:48):
Yeah. Such a good question. There's a million different answers, but I think they all kind of STEM from having intent, if that makes sense. So like, I think that there's always opportunities to learn no matter what you're working on and who you're working with. It's just a matter of looking for them. I know it's kind of a soft answer, but it's, it's like the honest truth and how I think about it. And so for me throughout my journey, like when I was in the lone Wolf phase, I was hyper focused on just learning all the tactics. I want to learn all the tactics. I wanna learn all the tools. I want to figure out how to do this stuff. And then over time, what I realized is that the tactics and tools didn't matter as much because I had other people's help and that finding ways to improve my communication and my documentation and my ability to like project manage really, really well and run an efficient meeting, became a lot more useful.
Andrew Capland (36:37):
And then over time it was it's been more focused on problem solving and some people management stuff has been you know, kind of some of the other skills that I've been working on and managing up and finding ways to communicate both to your peers and the people you might be working on a team with, but also up at the executive level and for non for, you know, for non product and marketing folks who might work in totally other areas of the org to keep them involved and all that. So those are all areas that I think about as an ongoing basis. And I think it really just depends where you're at in your journey. You know, what school, you know, what skills you want to work on. I think that there, I think no matter what level you're at, you will continue to get better.
Andrew Capland (37:19):
If you get really good at planning out projects, like before you start getting really, really clear on what success looks like, what your approach is and why you're taking that approach and what you'll, what you'll learn based on no matter what happens, if the project wins, what you learn from that, even if it doesn't, if it doesn't work out what you'll learn from that. And I just think that that goes a long way in building trust over time. And that's something that you can do at any level at any day. But I think learning systems like that and frameworks that help you to solve many problems tend to be more helpful in my opinion, than just going hard on like the latest tech or the latest tools, or like, you know, the next most popular blog post talks about some, some strategy. And you're like, well, I gotta do that now. That stuff in my opinion, kind of comes and goes, but the frameworks on how to find the right answer are, are invaluable. So that's how I think about it. And then working with folks, I try to, I try to let them share with me what they're looking to do. And I look for opportunities for ancillary skills that I think that will help them on the way that they might not be thinking about.
Ramli John (38:26):
Yeah. I was just nodding my head, I think. Yeah, you totally nailed the thing. There are easy to chase the, what a site called, like the shiny new object right here. Like it's more important too. You're talking about full story, full story of Friday, and like learning about your users. Those are really, really critical information that you need to be thinking about learning our own frameworks about learning and thinking about frameworks. I'm not sure if you have any good examples. There's a question that, that is in the chat around. Do you have any good examples of growth playbooks that you've seen online or any examples that you've seen where like there, there here's a framework around some of this stuff you're talking about growth that you, that you can share to the folks?
Andrew Capland (39:08):
Yeah. I mean the two biggest frameworks, I guess I lean on are, or playbooks, whatever you'd like to call them. I mean, I follow, I follow, I grew up in like the Brian Balfour school of growth. And so I have found his general like philosophy on how to run experimentation from like data collection, to ideation, to project planning, to analysis and iterating. I sort of follow that general growth playbook, I guess you would say. But the other, I talked a lot about prioritization, which I think at anybody in any job can get better at prioritization and it will generally be something that's like helpful to you as you advance your career. And then in terms of like specifically within growth projects, I don't know if this counts as a framework, but outside of all the tactics and all of that stuff, I have found the most helpful and straightforward way to approach many growth problems are to think about how I can remove friction as the general first step, how I can figure out what's most valuable to the user and highlight that in creative ways. That's the second step. And then the third step being, how do I add on additional segments to treat these people so that I can celebrate success on their terms? Not on my terms. And so I found that to be a general like principle that I can apply to many different problems that that seems to scale really well.
Ramli John (40:30):
So good. Yeah. You're just, I'm glad that we're recording right now so that people can watch this again. W somebody was asking, what was the second point again, there was three steps that you mentioned.
Andrew Capland (40:43):
Hopefully it was the last thing. So I talked about when I optimize for many growth projects, I start by identifying friction. The second thing would be to identify what's most valuable to your ideal customer and find ways to highlight that value and deliver that value in creative ways is the second point. And then the third point would be layering on segmentation. And I guess, just to clarify, like, what I mean is a lot of product led companies are hyper-focused on activation. How do I get more people the first time? And they use our product to a certain milestone. And I think that you should make that milestone something that's valuable for the user. Like you should figure out what, like, why is the user signing up for this, like for our product to begin with, and then how do I show them that as fast as possible? And that might mean removing distractions out of the, that might mean highlighting it different at a different point in the onboarding flow for a new user versus an existing user, or it might even mean some like website work where you can start to prime people on some of the value that there'll be receiving before they even sign into the product. They're all creative ways of doing that, but it's all about delivering value to the user.
Ramli John (41:54):
Yeah, totally, totally agree. And it's funny, I'm going to put a plug for your side, delivering volume that CEO does all about delivering value. You're right. Like, I think that's something so important, especially for, for product led business. That's already live. A related question to that is around companies are not live yet. Like for example, there was a question earlier about messa that AI, but we had somebody Timothy asked question about, you know, they haven't launched a product yet. They're creating a list of people who are under sitting. It should, you know, what, if you, first of all, what would you do if you, would you be hired as a head of growth for a company that hasn't launched yet? And secondly, if you were, let's say like, you randomly accepted that job, what would you focus on if, especially if they're prelaunch like DAS and there isn't anything for people, any value for people to experience yet?
Andrew Capland (42:46):
Yeah. Yeah. I probably wouldn't be hired at that phase. But I mean, the way I just have more experience when there's a little bit of scale and then optimizing for that scale, but I mean, there's a whole bunch you can do. If you were hired into this position, obviously there's a lot of building demands. Like there's a ton of work on the marketing side and product marketing side, especially at a pre-launch company. They think is incredibly important. I know that's not like super growthy, but that's, it's like growth is, there's nothing to grow if there's no demand for it. And people don't understand what the product is. So getting that stuff in place is like a core foundational piece. And look like, I mean, you're laughing around me, but a lot of times, if you're ahead of growth at an early stage company, some days you might be the head of marketing some days you might be the head of product, but like that's, that's part of the deal that, you know, you gotta have gotta have those skills or resources that you can lean on to fill in the gaps.
Andrew Capland (43:40):
And then the other things that you can do to really scale are to set up systems for feedback. Obviously a super early stage. You're not going to have a funnel. There's not going to be a ton of conversion data to look at, but make sure you have a way to get feedback qualitatively. So either you could use a tool where you can watch people interact with the product, you could do real user sessions, like user interviews with people that would be your target customer and maybe record those. So you can kind of learn about what they're you know, what their jobs to be done are and how they might think about your product and the questions that they'd have, you know, their information would be invaluable. And then you can also make sure that you build in systems to help you scale.
Andrew Capland (44:22):
Like maybe you want to build in a virality component to your product. Maybe you have a free version of your product, and you want to have a power by your name, with a link back to your website as like a tenant of how you build a product from day one that will help you to get scale. Or maybe there's like a referral program that you built from day one that might help you to build scale. So there's things that you can do to set the right momentum I guess even from day one, even though it's early stage pre-launch.
Ramli John (44:52):
Yeah. Great, great advice. Great tips. I was just about like the early you're you're, right? Sometimes you're a marketer sometimes here, our products, events, or UX in certain stages. And I want to shift gears and talk about, you know doing growth in a sales slide versus product led one. And just from your experience, when you were HubSpot, they were very sales hybrid focus and Wistia's on the other end where they're very product led. I don't know, even if they have salespeople right now, and I'm sure it's the same for Wistia right now, question around, you know, somebody asked what, how is growth different in the both of them? And how did you, you know, what are some similarities differences? And then what would you suggest to companies that are going from a sales start to a product? Like what are, what are some things the growth teams should be thinking about?
Andrew Capland (45:42):
Yeah. I mean, most of my experiences working on the more product led side. So my understanding is that more of a, in a sales motion, I think a growth leader is often connecting dots, connecting systems, enriching people in contacts and company information with more information and doing lots of backend targeting and pixel enrichment and all kinds of cool stuff. I don't have a ton of experience in that arena. I feel like the person that comes to my mind is like the most impressive is is [inaudible] G I forget exactly how you pronounce his last name, but he is incredibly talented. He was head of growth at drift and he was working with gorgeous who postscript also works with and a few other companies, I feel like this is really in his wheelhouse and it's, it's like really cool, fascinating stuff that my mind can't even wrap my head around.
Andrew Capland (46:36):
Like I remember he gave a presentation where he talked about when when a hot prospect had a demo call, he would use some backend API to figure out where a local coffee shop was. And then he would integrate with door dash and it would send the person a cough so that when they jumped on the demo call, the rep would say, Oh, by the way, how is your coffee? Like crazy stuff like that, that my brain can't even wrap my head around. And and so that kind of stuff is cool. And then more at a product led org. So both Wistia and postscript are product first, like self-service first businesses with small sales teams that work with a small number of customers, but our highest value customers. That's exactly how we did it at Wistia is how we're doing it at postscript.
Andrew Capland (47:23):
And so a big part of the job is thinking about what, what leads should you route to sales and what should just go through a one to many service or a one to many like onboarding and, and user flow. And the challenge is always that no matter what the sales team says, send us more leads. We'll sell more if we get more leads. But if you're in a growth position, probably your part of your job will be to figure it out. Where are the incremental leads coming, or where are the incremental sales coming from? Cause you could send all of the leads to sales and get 300 new customers. You could send half the leads to sales and get 300 customers. And so it doesn't really matter where the customers are coming from. You just want to find ways where you're getting the most amount of customers for the least amount of effort, and that takes some tinkering.
Andrew Capland (48:09):
And then again, the job will be to optimize for that scale. So getting as many people into, once you figure out the self, you know, where you draw the line between sales and self service, making sure that you get as many people as possible into that self service arm. And then also integrating that experience with sales down the road so that even though people might be on a relatively small monthly plan today, their business might be growing quickly. It would make sense to have some behavioral triggers or maybe they want to upgrade your product to a enterprise level. And they need to talk with a sales rep to do that upgrade. And so thinking through different ways that you can truly create a product qualified lead system as well, somebody that probably growth folks will be thinking about in that area.
Ramli John (48:50):
So good. That's good. Good way to think about that. How you're approaching this. I want to get to the last question and it's all set in by channel. She asks regardless of success, what would it be? One of the most important lessons you learned that you'd want others to know what starting and scaling a growth team? Yeah. So if you had one or two advice to people listening in right now about starting and scaling the growth theme, what would be that, that one lesson you'd want them to take?
Andrew Capland (49:22):
I got to give to man go for it. It's just how it's going to work. One. I would say frameworks over tactics find a system to find the right answer. It's way more valuable than knowing one answer or one tool or one tactic invest in systems, find mentors that can teach you problem solving systems incredibly helpful for growth and every possession. So I would say that, and then I would say like the main growth answer and growth team answer is that most people have never worked with a person or a team who's focused on growth. And so if you don't go out of your way to describe to them, here's what growth is. Here's how we work. Here's the values and principles for our team. They're going to assume something that is completely different than what you've got in your mind. And you start off misaligned and misalignment leads to lack of trust bumping heads and all kinds of bad stuff. So my biggest piece of advice, there would be a line document, your approach, document, all of those things that I've talked about and find ways to proactively share that with people and to go really slow with it so that you can be aligned from one and they will be a supporter and an advocate and someone that helps you be more successful and not a speed bump to your success.
Ramli John (50:35):
So good. That's a good way, the good way to end this, but you do, you know, if people are looking for more resources, you do have something coming up very soon. Can you, can you share a little bit about what you're, you've been working on that somebody who's in growth or thinking about doing growth might find useful?
Andrew Capland (50:53):
Yeah, absolutely. So I've got, in addition to my full-time gig a mentoring coaching business that I run called delivering value, delivering value.co named for the exact reasons that we've talked about today. And I have learned that the questions that y'all were asking today are the same questions that so many people have when they start cross-functional growth roles at early stage companies. And so I'm creating a, I wrote a blog post that shared how to approach the first 90 days. And I've been blown away at the reception and the feedback that I've gotten on that. And I've turned that into an online course that will be made for heads of growth, growth, marketers, growth PMs that are starting a new role and want to start out fast and build a strong personal brand and kick along the way. So that'll be launching in March, it's on my site, delivering value.co and hopefully I'll be able to help a lot of folks starting new roles.
Ramli John (51:45):
Well, that's it. I just dropped the link stair one, delivering that CEO second, that, that three year old, the 90 days, you know, you hired your hardest set of goals. What do you do for the first 90 days here with that for growth hackers.com and your weightless for the course? Well, I think that's it. Thank you so much, Andrew. I really do appreciate and respect your time for everybody listening in. If you're still here. Thank you. And let's say thanks to Andrew and his newborn, I think is Cameron right? Did they get that name right? Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I just think that, so Ashley's saying thank you. Yeah, so yeah, some people are just saying it's amazing. Thank you everybody for showing up. We will be sending out the recording to this very soon and other people saying amazing insights from Jamie. Awesome. You've got a clap. Anybody else? Yeah, I think that's it. Thank you. Have a great rest of your afternoon, evening morning, wherever you're calling from. Thank you so much, Dr. Guy, Sue.
