PLG in Action with Sheila Vashee, CMO of Figma | Next Gen Builders, Ep. 05

Summary

In this episode of Next Gen Builders, Sheila Vashee, CMO at Figma, dives into the intricacies of Product-Led Growth (PLG), an approach that requires organizations to align their entire business model around product-driven initiatives. Drawing from her experience scaling companies like Dropbox, Sheila emphasizes the importance of problem-solving storytelling and customer engagement. She discusses the balancing act between PLG and sales-led approaches, the challenges facing high-growth companies, and her insights into building successful growth frameworks across diverse sectors. Tune in for an eye-opening discussion full of practical advice and inspiring insights.

Highlights

• PLG is not just a strategy; it requires a company-wide culture shift! 🚀
• Sheila stresses the importance of storytelling in marketing and growth. 🎤
• Figma's success is built on a deep understanding of their power users. 📏
• Growth requires clear ownership across the product and marketing funnels. 🔄
• Dropbox's viral mechanics were pivotal in its PLG success story. 🌐

Key Takeaways

• PLG requires a unified company approach for success! 🌟
• Storytelling and understanding customer problems are crucial for effective PLG. 📖
• Enterprise alignment and resource prioritization are key challenges in PLG. 🔑
• Building an 'aha moment' is crucial for growth traction. 🚀
• Balancing PLG and PLS strategies can enhance growth potential. ⚖️

Overview

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is more than just a buzzword; it's a company-wide strategy that can transform businesses when executed correctly. Sheila Vashee highlights that aligning every aspect of a company to center around PLG can drive massive success. It's about making the product the hero, from acquisition to retention, and fostering growth through network effects and virality.

The episode with Sheila Vashee offers a treasure trove of insights, particularly around storytelling. She emphasizes the need to fall in love with the problem rather than the solution, ensuring that the story resonates with the audience and demonstrates genuine understanding of customer needs. This approach is crucial for marketers and growth leaders eager to forge meaningful connections and drive impactful results.

Sheila discusses her journey from banking to CMO and reflects on how PLG strategies evolved in companies like Dropbox and Figma. Emphasizing experimentation and data-driven decisions, she explains how clear ownership in growth frameworks and a balanced approach to PLG and sales strategies can propel businesses forward. Her practical experiences offer invaluable lessons for those navigating the modern landscape of product-driven growth.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 03:00: Introduction to PLG The chapter titled 'Introduction to PLG' emphasizes the necessity of having the whole company aligned with the PLG (Product-Led Growth) model for it to succeed. It highlights that the PLG approach cannot be just a part of the organization but must be integrated into every aspect, including product development, growth strategies, marketing, sales, and support. The alignment across all departments is crucial for the successful implementation of the PLG model.
• 03:00 - 05:00: Sheila Vashee's Career Journey The chapter discusses the career journey of Sheila Vashee, focusing on her experience with product-led growth (PLG). The show, 'NextGen Builders', is aimed at growth and product leaders and explores PLG as a critical strategy for success in Silicon Valley. Despite its common discussion in startups and tech giants, PLG remains challenging to implement effectively. Sheila Vashee shares insights from her career on navigating and mastering PLG to drive growth.
• 05:00 - 07:00: Storytelling and Problem-Solving for Founders This chapter discusses the experience of Sheila Vashi, a notable figure in product-led growth (PLG) marketing. Sheila was one of the early marketing hires at Dropbox and played a crucial role in scaling the company to over a billion dollars in revenue. Currently, she's the Chief Marketing Officer at Figma, a prominent PLG company. Sheila has also held marketing positions at Ethos and Open Door. In this chapter, she shares her original PLG playbook and explains why focusing heavily on the product itself is essential for achieving massive success.
• 07:00 - 10:00: Navigating New Paths and Telling Compelling Stories This chapter discusses the journey of creating trends instead of following them, featuring an interview with Sheila, who began her career in investment banking. Sheila shares her career transition journey to becoming a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and offers advice for others interested in similar career paths.
• 10:00 - 12:30: Defining Product-Led Growth (PLG) The chapter titled 'Defining Product-Led Growth (PLG)' begins with the speaker discussing their experience in investment banking with Morgan Stanley in Silicon Valley. They emphasise their close work with tech companies throughout their development stages—from the initial stages to growth and eventually IPO. The speaker reflects on how their investment banking background provided them with a profound understanding of finance and business, which is crucial in working with founders and companies on the journey through growth stages.
• 12:30 - 23:00: PLG in Action: Dropbox Case Study The transcript discusses the benefits of working in various companies and how this experience provides visibility and learning opportunities. It mentions the importance of founders breaking through in the market, particularly focusing on what distinguishes successful individuals in gaining investment or achieving market success.
• 23:00 - 31:00: Challenges and Learnings from Dropbox The chapter 'Challenges and Learnings from Dropbox' focuses on insights from a founder's perspective, emphasizing the importance of solving problems for people and being able to convincingly communicate the value of this solution. It underscores that, regardless of the size of the organization, success relies on addressing a need and effectively articulating the significance of the solution provided.
• 31:00 - 39:00: The Role of PLG in Enterprise The chapter 'The Role of PLG in Enterprise' emphasizes the importance of storytelling in engaging customers. The key point is that the narrative should focus on the customer's needs and problems rather than showcasing the company’s greatness. It underscores the principle of 'falling in love with the problem, not the solution,' highlighting the need for businesses to deeply understand and articulate the problems they are addressing for their clients.
• 39:00 - 47:00: Insights on Growth and Resource Allocation The chapter discusses the challenges of paving a new path in an innovative journey, particularly focusing on 'Product-Led Growth' (PLG). It emphasizes the difficulty of effectively storytelling to make people understand the desired outcomes and believe in the possibilities of success. The narrative is centered on the struggle to break through skepticism and convey the potential and feasibility of new ventures.
• 47:00 - 52:00: PLG in Modern Companies: Figma and OpenDoor The chapter emphasizes the importance of deeply understanding your target customer and the problems they face. It suggests that credibility comes from a deep understanding of these problems, which in turn assures the audience that you are capable of solving them.
• 52:00 - 59:00: Data-Driven Growth Strategies The chapter emphasizes the significance of distribution in marketing strategies. It draws an analogy with selling apples, suggesting that it's more effective to sell in locations where there's demand, similar to how content should be distributed to places where the target audience is present. The key takeaway is that both the message and its distribution are crucial for successful storytelling and reaching the audience effectively.
• 59:00 - 62:00: Structuring a Successful Growth Organization This chapter discusses how to structure a successful growth organization, emphasizing the importance of having a differentiated breakthrough message. It highlights the need for understanding how others are solving a problem and how your solution stands out. The chapter also underscores the importance of conveying this in a compelling manner, ensuring that people recognize the problem you aim to solve as genuine and significant.
• 62:00 - 66:00: The Evolution of Growth Functions in Companies The chapter titled 'The Evolution of Growth Functions in Companies' delves into the process of developing growth strategies that resonate with audiences. It emphasizes the importance of recognizing a need or problem that people care about, understanding the audience's core interests, and communicating solutions at opportune moments. The narrative should be distinct enough to cut through the noise of competing messages. The transcript highlights the significance of crafting a story that aligns with the company's mission while also differentiating itself in the marketplace.
• 66:00 - 71:00: Final Advice for Aspiring Growth Leaders The chapter provides final advice for aspiring growth leaders, focusing on the tactics to successfully drive projects or initiatives within a company. It highlights the importance of understanding the concerns and interests of the audience, choosing the right timing for communication, and ensuring the idea is memorable. These steps are essential for selling ideas effectively within an organization.

PLG in Action with Sheila Vashee, CMO of Figma | Next Gen Builders, Ep. 05 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 you know for plg the entire company has to be aligned around that model for it to work you can't have like a plg motion that exists within a different type of company it has to be how product is built it has to be how growth is built marketing is built sales is built support is built the whole company has to be centered around plg for it to be successful [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 this is NextGen Builders the show for growth and product leaders of tomorrow and today we're cracking the code on plg product Le growth it's the secret recipe for many of silicon Valley's success stories so forget what you think you know because we're taking you back to the beginning plg is tossed around startups and Tech Giants but it's really hard to get it right and that's why today we're talking talking with Sheila
• 01:00 - 01:30 vashi who used plg before it was a trendy term as the second marketing hire at Dropbox Sheila helped scale the company to over a billion dollar in revenue and she's now the chief marketing officer at figma a plg darling she's held marketing roles at ethos and Open Door Sheila will share her OG plg Playbook and why betting big on product is the key to reaching billion doll Heights so grab your pen because this
• 01:30 - 02:00 episode isn't about following Trends it's about creating them welcome Sheila thank you so much for having me I'm excited to be here well we're so glad you're here now before we talk start talking about plg let's start talking about you and and your career you started in Investment Banking like how do you go from that to being CMO and like what's your advice for anybody going on that Journey great great question yeah so I started off in Investment Banking you're right it was investment banking at
• 02:00 - 02:30 Morgan Stanley in Silicon Valley so working really closely with tech companies really all throughout their Journey so uh after Investment Banking a few jobs after I also did a short stin inventure and so have a lot of experience working with Founders both at the very earliest stages and through kind of the growth process and up until IPO and so um you know my advice on that that journey is really understanding I think that what invest in banking gave me was a really deep understanding of finance and business that you can apply
• 02:30 - 03:00 to really any job and I'm very appreciative of that it also just gave me you know the visibility across a range of amazing companies um which I learned from so it was a great place to start now have you seen anything that Founders do that really helps them break through and get their ideas out and either be to get investment or to drive success in the market the the one thing that sets people apart and and makes
• 03:00 - 03:30 them from a Founder perspective really effective is the ability to number one solve a problem for people because like at the end of the day you have to fix something for someone for them to care about what you're doing and number two be able to tell a great story about it so why is it that this thing that you're building whether it's you know a two-person company or a multi- thousand you know person organization that's going public why is it that you solve
• 03:30 - 04:00 problem for them uh the the story that you tell and that story is so important it needs to be about them not about you and why you're great because at the end of the day people don't care they want they want you to fix something for them and so I found that that storytelling is absolutely critical at every stage of the journey and again it's a story about about customers I always like to say you got to follow in love with the problem not with the solution and really Landing that problem yeah um how do you you know
• 04:00 - 04:30 when you're building something new and we're going to transition soon to plg but when you're building something new and you're you're setting a new new path that nobody else has really encountered before you know what is the what is the good way of telling that story that gets people to understand you know the outcomes you're trying to drive or really like it's a really hard problem how do you break through and make people believe that it's possible yeah um look
• 04:30 - 05:00 I think whenever you're telling a good story like a few things matter number one like you have to deeply deeply understand who you're talking to and what they care about and and what those problems are just just like you said like fall in love with a problem you have to be credible and that you understand what that problem is then people will believe that you know enough to be able to solve it so that's the first thing like really really deeply understand your Target customer and what they care about the second thing is you
• 05:00 - 05:30 have to reach them where they are so you know with telling a story what you say is important how and where you say it which is the distribution part is equally important so you know if you're trying to sell apples you know standing in a place where like people are hungry is going to be far more effective than standing in a place where like no one is thinking about eating food right so same thing goes with Distributing content and distributing those stories you have to go to where people are the places that
• 05:30 - 06:00 they spend time where they're seeking answers to these questions and the last thing is having a really differentiated breakthrough message so you have to know how are other people solving that problem and how is your thing better than their thing and be able to tell that in a really compelling way and all of this is predicated on the the fact that um or the assumption that people believe that the problem that you're saying is a real thing so you have to also make sure that that is really clear right that might be called like category
• 06:00 - 06:30 creation or like the establishing of you know this thing that people need and so you know you first need to have that like people have to recognize it's a problem and then you have to hit those three points really understanding what they care about making sure you're telling them when they're open to receiving it and ensuring that your message is differentiated from everything else and can break through do you see a difference between you know creating these stories you know between where the story is the company versus the story is you know your
• 06:30 - 07:00 project or the initiative you want to drive inside of another company that's such a great question like that that those same tactics like those three steps that I outlined can apply within a company when you're trying to sell your idea it's actually an effective mechanism to get any idea across right so even if I'm trying to convince you of something I have to know what you care about I have to make sure I'm telling you in a place where you're open to receiving it and I have to make sure that my answer is going to stick right so even if you're trying to sell a
• 07:00 - 07:30 project internally that's still the formula that works that makes sense so let's go back now back in time you start a Dropbox smaller company at the time and you have to go and create this thing called plg first off for anybody on on the call like can you just Define what plg is and why it matters so plg stands for product let growth grow as as you mentioned earlier
• 07:30 - 08:00 and fundamentally it's a model where every part of the funnel or every part of the you user Journey whether it's user acquisition to expansion to conversion or retention all of that is primarily driven through the product and you know there might be teams or places where it's augmented with other activities but the the primary funnel mechanics happen
• 08:00 - 08:30 through the product and the benefits of a model like this are you know number one it creates a ton of cost leverage because normally you would have to spend a lot of money let's say like top of funnel user acquisition can you know for many companies is like one of the biggest expenses on their on their U p&l and so like it reduces the dependence on you know paying for kind of users or paying for or even things like retention
• 08:30 - 09:00 because you can do it through product mechanics but usually with plg there are often other elements at play so you might have kind of viral mechanics in the user acquisition Loop which is what kind of Dropbox had or you have Network effects from within the product so like sharing mechanisms or something else that are fundamental to the product the way the product works but also create value you as you grow the model because
• 09:00 - 09:30 the more people on the platform then delivers more value to everyone else and you know there there are many companies or many businesses that you know offer those type of mechan network effects like social media is a great example um collaboration products is another and so um usually you have one of those at play as well and then the last thing I'll say is you know for plg the entire company has to be aligned around that model for it to work you
• 09:30 - 10:00 can't have like a plg motion that exists within a different type of company it has to be how product is built it has to be how growth is built marketing is built sales is built support is built the whole company has to be centered around plg for it to be successful but but that's how I would Define it got it so now we go back in time you started this company called Dropbox which was not as well known as it was today um but you didn't have all of that knowledge
• 10:00 - 10:30 then like how did that Journey even begin was was that an idea that you brought in uh nobody knew what plg really was like how do you get started on that yeah yeah so for Dropbox and you know for many companies it was I mean look like Drew and Arash the founders of Dropbox are incredible and like they built and and a lot of the very very early team like the first 10 people like 10 12 people built a lot of those viral mechanics
• 10:30 - 11:00 into the very very early versions of the product I mean even before there were people thinking about like you know other functions or or what to say or how to put it in different places like it was just fundamentally how the product worked and you know the very first the very start like going back to what we started this conversation saying like Dropbox solved the problem for people like very very fundamental problem like people couldn't get their stuff to different places and like at the end of the day that has to work and in fact the
• 11:00 - 11:30 early slogan like the early like tagline for the company was it just worked it just works sorry because there were other companies out there but the pro like the the product didn't work and so if you can't rely on a service to ensure that you know you can access into your you know access your stuff you know in the cloud or or wherever like it's not useful and so they just got that right
• 11:30 - 12:00 so PE so it was a very very dep you know Dependable reliable product and people just loved it and so that was the fundamental thing like that was what the company was started on I think from there there are a lot of really early product decisions like the um driving virality through referrals which were genius in getting like that Viral mechanic in place so you know what the
• 12:00 - 12:30 team did which which we later then you know and I joined a little you know a few years later we really like layered on through programs and other things but but what really worked was driving viral growth by offering people an incentive and the incentive was space because that's what people cared about at the time offering people an incentive to invite their friends and it just took off like wildfire because it was number one people loved the product but number two that incentive was something people really cared about and so that drove
• 12:30 - 13:00 kind of viral user acquisition and then there were the network effects that that I talked about that helped you know Drive um activity on the platform so the more you shared with people at work with your friends the more valuable Dropbox became for you and so that then like incouraged ongoing activity and growth and then from there people brought Dropbox into their company because it
• 13:00 - 13:30 was something that was so useful for them in their personal lives for photos or personal projects or other things they wanted something that easy at work and a lot of the Enterprise focused you know companies didn't have at the time like usability wasn't as top of Mind as it is today and so you know today we're calling it B plg back then we called it the consumerization of it right whereas like it organization were faced with people
• 13:30 - 14:00 end users coming and saying I want Dropbox I want this product so you have to figure out how to make it okay for me to use at the company and um and that was a whole separate path that we had where we had to add in you know security and controls and the things that organizations needed but it was because users loved it so much they wanted to bring it into their organization how did you guys discover some of those aha moments like what like you guys clearly got some key triggers that told you that this activity drove
• 14:00 - 14:30 engagement what what were like what were some of those key moments that help you like figure it out that's what it is was it lots of trial and error did you guys have that Insight like I mean we had some hypotheses that we tested so you know looking at kind of the way people were using Dropbox we saw that if you shared a folder or if you shared a file like you immediately saw the value sooner we saw that if you saved a work
• 14:30 - 15:00 file and by work files you know we had a definition of the type of files I might qualify for that um then you know you are going to get more value and probably like eventually need a business seat and so you know it was we we had some hypotheses and it was kind of close observation and we were able to get a sense for like what are the early actions that drive value and then focus on incentivizing and highlighting those actions in the
• 15:00 - 15:30 onboarding um and did you guys have a a primary focus was it acquisition signups monetization retention like where did you where do you start really on on this journey yeah so look every company is different from that standpoint I think Dropbox did not have a top of funnel problem there was so much interest and because it was you know a plg freemium product like top of funnel acquisition especially of you know consumer users or basic users um what wasn't an issue so
• 15:30 - 16:00 we didn't invest a ton of money in like traffic or signups we did spend a lot of time in a couple places number one kind of understanding those early indicators of value and making sure that within the product we incentivizing the right behaviors and then we spent a lot of time on how do we convince Enterprise buyers that Dropbox is a product that is suited you know suitable for for business and took a lot of
• 16:00 - 16:30 effort it's fascinating I know myself as a early Dropbox user I went through that whole journey and you guys just nailed it but I think it started with the product just works and and I was able to get that value uh tell me a little bit in terms of you know one of the interesting things about Dropbox is you had a consumerization play that drove the business play what if you're a business only product you know is there a way of
• 16:30 - 17:00 creating that virality or what's your advice on you know what how to approach that problem yeah it's a great question I I think um you know plg is now like a just far better understood and accepted pathway right like you know for consumer or business products I think in many ways it's almost an expectation and so there are many examples and I would actually say figma is a great great example of kind of that motion you know
• 17:00 - 17:30 figma has a gigantic Enterprise base and um and there are ways to tap into that virality and that kind of the network effects around sharing you know with more like business use cases and so um it's it's absolutely possible um now as you're you're going through this journey you guys are creating something that really wasn't invented before you guys were part of the early pioneer years in that Journey
• 17:30 - 18:00 uh I'm sure you've encountered one of these you know oh moment where things aren't going the way you expected or your hypothesis fails miserably we all go through that when we build uh can you describe like one of those experiences and how do you guys overcome it oh man I've had so many of those like I I feel like just like I've got an embarrassment of riches to choose from of like things that I've done wrong or oh moments I'll I'll talk about one that I alluded
• 18:00 - 18:30 to earlier which is entering into kind of Enterprise at Dropbox which was not a simple thing number one because it was a new motion so like bringing a consumer product into like a a larger organization just wasn't done at the time like you know you typically had two products that was the era when people had two phones they had their work phone and their their home pH their personal phone right and you didn't take call you had to try to
• 18:30 - 19:00 figure out which phone you were getting your information on it's like that was the world we were in so the separation of work and personal was you know something that people were striving for and we were saying no let's actually bring it all together and not only that let's bring it together into a cloud platform where all of your stuff can mingle yeah so we were basically just like in the very early days I mean we were just kind of like laughed out of the room uh I remember things like oh
• 19:00 - 19:30 Dropbox is a toy product like how can we have this in our company and and you know the the demand like we would have like at you know say NBC or you know one of these big companies there would be like thousands of users who wanted to use dropbox at work and we were sitting there with it saying what do you need us to build like you tell us your users are telling you and us that they want to use dropbox at work how like what do we need to do to make that possible and so there
• 19:30 - 20:00 were multiple things we had to do so like a whole you know set of controls we needed to build security um features we had to build like more admin tools on the product side on the marketing side we had to put in a massive effort to change the perception of Dropbox and we did campaigns around um you know being business ready we built Out programs for decision makers and it um we reoriented our sales team to be
• 20:00 - 20:30 more focused and bring in kind of um a list of contacts of these organizations that we could develop relationships with and so it was a cross team cross compan effort to kind of kind of not only changed the product but changed the perception that Dropbox was ready for Enterprise and so the oh moment was oh no like oh we're not ready and we had to make ourselves ready
• 20:30 - 21:00 that happens so often especially when you're early but you said actually something really important which goes back to what you said at the beginning is falling in love with the problem where in this case as you've evolved the the product you're building the problem was the Enterprise it buyer who had a different set of concerns and so you said like let's let's sit down with them let's understand the problem and solve it yeah and that customer exception I think is so so important it's so important it it really is it's
• 21:00 - 21:30 like you have to talk to hundreds and thousands of people to understand like what is it that they actually care about and you have to deeply feel it before you can work to resolve it uh now you brought up the other big word the big ew Enterprise okay I was like what is the other word that I say did I say another bad word no we've edited that one out don't worry okay okay you can bleep me that's fine it'll make it more interesting
• 21:30 - 22:00 what did she say the biggie exactly bleep it it'll be it'll add some mystery to this well I bring up the big ew uh Enterprise because I think that in many organizations there's this tension between plg and PLS product L sales or even sales Le and can those two worlds actually live together or like because it always it feels like it creates tension yeah it does it does I think
• 22:00 - 22:30 they can live together you have to be really thoughtful and careful about segmentation first of all so like how do you really clearly Define you know from a customer perspective like how you're targeting these you know two audiences differently and are can can you be very clear about that and then also about resource allocation right because what's always going to happen and and I I've seen this so many times at companies is you have kind kind of you have one team and you
• 22:30 - 23:00 have the option of like building something custom for like an NBC who says like hey build this feature for me and I'll give you like I'll sign this multi-million dollar contract it's like impossible to say no to that but like the opportunity cost of that time for the team is building something for an SMB audience which might be like a five you know 50 million person you know kind of um segment and like features that'll
• 23:00 - 23:30 have broader appeal and so it's like how do you trade off and those are decisions that we always got stuck in like how do we how do we think about like you know where should we be putting time like this multi-million dollar contract or these like possibly multi-million dollars in revenue from this audience that is like harder to see and so it it was always you know a discussion and we'd have to we were trying to balance both and it's not easy I mean that that's definitely one of the
• 23:30 - 24:00 hard challenges of building especially building something new where you don't NE have the momentum yet and so you're you're making bets you're making risks and exactly you hope you you make a good bet exactly yeah and it's good to have multiple bets too because then you can look across and say okay I've made five bets one of them will pan out let probability wise one of them will pan out but you do need to be opinionated uh and you have to have a perspective of what you want and like you said the resource the prioritization of efforts I think
• 24:00 - 24:30 come come together yeah absolutely I think the other thing too is you know you were you're were saying you know is it startups versus Enterprise I think actually one of the interesting things about plg is it doesn't have to be an or it can be an end because some Enterprise customers do start through a plg motion self-service and that's your entry point and startup people moved in different companies so they could actually bring you in somewhere else too that's true I think that you know what's really
• 24:30 - 25:00 interesting you're absolutely right like plg can work with Enterprise you're faced with a challenge though of getting in front of the decision maker so if you have you know a group of end users or a small team that loves using your product if you're trying to build on that if you have the expansion motion and you want to get into more teams a challenge you often face is how do I get in front of the decision maker whether it's the business leader whether it's it
• 25:00 - 25:30 and that that's always a challenge and you need a champion really in the organization to help steer you through yeah I used to call that we used to have a land and expand motion classic plg term right there correct we didn't know what plg was back then it was land in expand classic land in expand but the beautiful thing of it is that you actually were able to demonstrate value faster and so when you did go to the
• 25:30 - 26:00 executive buyer you had now a number of proof points of value and Impact versus you know the classic play of you know the hypothetical yeah uh value you might deliver I think actually supports more of the sales motion than I would have thought that's very true that having those proof points of did you know 5,000 people in your organization are using drop box and they've done XYZ like you know don't you want to deliver that value in other places like that's way uh more effective sales pitch
• 26:00 - 26:30 so now let's go uh we're I keep going back in time but now let if you could reflect back and you had a time machine uh what would you have done differently in your journey that you think would have either had more impact for the business or would have enabled you to drive results faster I think that couple things we drawbox had so much early success on growth that we didn't
• 26:30 - 27:00 build a lot of the kind of infrastructure around growth until much later and I think we just waited too long so like how do you understand you know you know those questions around like what's driving value what's the payback across different channels like investing early and things like SEO and even you know paid channels that eventually will give you kind of more uh distribution and predictability in your acquisition
• 27:00 - 27:30 funnel making sure that you really understand like the user journey and how can you deliver personalized content you know either within the product or outside through email to you know create a clear upsell path like all of that came later we just waited too long and I wish that we had invested in that early and you know same thing on the path to Enterprise like that all happened but you know had we started 6 or 12 months earlier we just would have been able to grow
• 27:30 - 28:00 faster were there uh were they naysayers in that Journey that prevented some of that success from happening or you know just saw the world differently and how do you break through to them yeah I wouldn't say naysayers as such because I think it you know it's hard to say it's not a good idea to invest in these growth areas or like this new segment it was more you know it was a question of resource allocation again and prior ization and you know do you work on
• 28:00 - 28:30 the important but not urgent thing one of the classic challenges yeah always so now you're over at figma uh which is an incredible story an incredible product uh and self such an important need um is PG different for a product in a company like figma than what you've seen from others yeah the core mechanics are the same here um
• 28:30 - 29:00 you know same kind of initial user interest like same Ravid rabid love for the product I would say growth happens more through like those Network effects on sharing than like by referrals we don't have the same referral programs and and things like that and um you know the the big difference really for figma is that like figma has targeted more of a power user like that power use case
• 29:00 - 29:30 from day one like it is a powerful product you know it's not like a you know something that just it's not like easy to dabble in like you're serious if you come to figma and um and I think like that then allowed Enterprise expansion to be baked in in a in a different way uh because it was just kind of more inherent in the way people use the product interesting and and then you worked at open door as well uh which I
• 29:30 - 30:00 don't think of it as a plg company but maybe I have that wrong how are those differences there yeah I wouldn't call it a plg company per se but I mean it absolutely was a consumer company and so we looked at the funnel in the same way we just had to you know we had to pay for acquisition more than we did when it was like kind of the we had more viral growth that changed though I think as
• 30:00 - 30:30 you know people became more aware especially like we had a market kind of motion at open door so we would go and kind of take over a market and you know we saw over time as there was more awareness of what we were doing like the the mechanics and the mix shifted a little bit in terms of you know acquisition and we saw you know much more organic growth and um viral growth through neighborhoods actually like people would say oh my neighbor did this and so that's how they they learned about Open Door and we leaned into that
• 30:30 - 31:00 quite a bit and so I would say like initially it the product Leed growth or you know neighborhood growth or however you want to frame it it took a little while to kick off but once there was like a a some basic level awareness uh it it grew kind of more organically and through Word of Mouth yeah so there's still some of that social effect that happened abut yeah
• 31:00 - 31:30 yeah yeah you know you bring up uh user Journeys customer Journeys data you know in different ways how does data play a role in there and you know is are is everybody data driven do you have to be data driven to be plg le how do you approach that I think you have to be I I I think you do and I think that that is kind of for marketing organizations that's really the big shift as you lean into a
• 31:30 - 32:00 plg motion is like you have to just deeply and and and product right marketing product like really all teams that touch kind of the user the the acquisition and like onboarding funnel it's like you've got to just understand every detail of where users are coming from what actions they're taking how they're performing what's working what's not working and everyone has to understand it so I think it's it's just kind of a
• 32:00 - 32:30 critical part of building a team around plg is having everyone be data driven building a team around growth you know data is a a foundational element but how how do you structure uh a successful growth organization and you know how does it span between product marketing sales and all the various functions yeah great question I would say what has worked for me across
• 32:30 - 33:00 business and consu B2B and b2c companies so whether it's Dropbox or it's open door or you know ethos or figma or any of these companies what has worked to me for me is just really really clear ownership across the funnel so uh and it's generally split you know first you know you'll have kind of your self serve funnel and then there's a piece of it that breaks off for like the S the sales L motion and so even though it's coming from the same funnel like you'll treat
• 33:00 - 33:30 leads differently if you qualify them as like being a better fit for sales and generally in this mode it's less kind of like outbound sales more sales more of like a sales assist motion and then within that core funnel you want to have product you want to have marketing you want to have engineering of course and you want to have kind of like data science and you need to clearly like kind of uh give ownership over different stages to different teams that's that's
• 33:30 - 34:00 what I've seen work really well so marketing might you know own all the way up to site conversion or onboarding or you know something like that and then from there product will own activation and you know um ongoing engagement or retention you can decide like at some point like churn is probably like a group of people or you multiple teams owning and then you know even within that how you think about like life cycle and ongoing you know programs to drive engagement like might be joint ownership
• 34:00 - 34:30 but you have to just really clearly Define that and you have metrics for every stage that you watch like a hawk and you're constantly running experiments and the mandate to the team is 15% Improvement quarter over quarter on these metrics and you just run experiments until you're blue in the face and that's how I've seen this work that's amazing uh and and clearly when there's shared ownership of metrics you know conflicts arise around that um
• 34:30 - 35:00 is there do you have a trick on how to break through some of those conflicts yeah I mean it's it's tough you're right there there's always conflicts that arise like oh like this lead wasn't a good lead oh you're not working my leads oh like that's like the classic sales and marketing conflict you've got like other sales and product like what the the quality of this traffic is not good that's why they're not converting that's why they're so you know that exactly the one I got my activation went down cuz you Juiced up bad signups because you
• 35:00 - 35:30 Juiced up like top of funnel it's like why are you spending money on these bad signups yeah it's like every every organization has those exact same conflicts the the best you can do is just have paired metrics that that's what again I've seen work so if you give uh a marketing team a signups goal or maybe it's like some you know early activation metric or whatever it is then like paired with that has to be like some kind of quality metric like what kind of indic do you have that this is like high quality leads just like you
• 35:30 - 36:00 know you might have like for the handoff you know in the sales Le motion um you know some kind of like quality metric or qualification that says this is a high quality lead like mql um SQL kind of handoff so like you you have to have the same thing on the self-service side and you have to just watch both and yes there will be conflicts hopefully you can build enough Rapport and Goodwill across the team that people can work through it together because these teams need each other they need each other to
• 36:00 - 36:30 be successful like even if one team owns a metric marketing is not going to be successful without product product is not going to be successful without like the data team H is not gonna be so it's like there has to be like enough Good Will between these teams that they can work together yeah it is it is truly the definition of one team you have to be hand inand uh now plg has created the emergence of the growth function and I think different companies have growth
• 36:30 - 37:00 marketing and growth product uh what's your take on this evolution is it good is it bad somewhere in between I I I don't I just think it's what we've been doing you just have more data right like what what is like the purpose of like a sales and marketing team like either you're building the product or you're growing and selling the product it's really just
• 37:00 - 37:30 you just have two jobs at a company you build the thing or you sell the thing and so growth is what was marketing before is what was sales before you know product is in there in both it's like you can't change the way a company Works you're still selling a thing and so I think this is an evolution and the difference is that we have more data and we have more surfaces and we can be really analytical about how we look across all of them you know 5050 60 years ago the saying was like 50% of my
• 37:30 - 38:00 marketing is working I just don't know which half and it was accepted like I can't imagine that being accepted now you know 50 years ago you just put an ad in a newspaper and that was it and people walked into your store I think now we have a million surfaces we're trying to optimize constantly which is why data is so important but the the fundamental mechanics are the same you're selling something and we're all trying to drive right
• 38:00 - 38:30 exactly uh if you had one piece of advice for somebody starting on this journey what would you say get really curious ask ask a lot of questions meet with a lot of companies or people who have done similar things think you want to gather as much information and data as possible so you can start with you know a sense of where to focus fantastic well Sheila it's been a pleasure having you on this podcast you truly are a nextg builder you are an
• 38:30 - 39:00 innovator and I'm so excited for you and your journey uh and so thank you all for listening to nextg builders and look out for our next episode whever you get your podcast and don't forget to subscribe