Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)

June 18, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Melissa Tan, former head of growth at Dropbox and Webflow who now advises startups like Canva and Miro, shares lessons from scaling growth teams. Drawing from Dropbox's expansion and her work across companies, she emphasizes first principles thinking, clear execution, and integrating growth into company strategy.

Dropbox Growth Lessons

At Dropbox, from 200 employees to IPO scale, success came from hiring first principles thinkers who were humble and collaborative, fostering innovation like high-velocity sales from non-sales hires. Execution mattered in details—early growth experiments failed due to non-user-centric approaches but succeeded when hypothesis-driven. Key misses included late sales investment amid competition, unfocused consumer-to-B2B paths, and treating growth as an afterthought rather than core to product from the start. Tan stresses clarifying GTM early: product-led suits intuitive, viral products (e.g., Dropbox, Miro); sales-led fits custom enterprise needs, with signals like self-serve enterprise users requesting features.

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What you'll learn

1 `* (00:38) **Melissa's Career Transition and Advising Focus**`
2 `* (07:40) **Dropbox Growth Lessons: Hiring, Execution, Focus, GTM Engagement**`
3 `* (12:12) **GTM Framework: PLG vs. Sales Motions**`
4 `* (14:30) **High-Performing Teams: Caring Leadership + Results Orientation**`
5 `* (28:33) **Core Ingredients of High-Performing Teams**`
6 `* (39:42) **Talent Development and Hiring PMs/Growth Roles**`
7 `* (50:26) **Growth Team Pitfalls and "Flying Formation" Integration**`

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

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Melissa Tan is an advisor, investor, and growth expert. She’s worked with fast-growing startups like Dropbox, Canva, Grammarly, and Miro, and for the past 2.5 years has been the Head of Growth at Webflow. There, she led the company's self-service business across Product, Marketing, and Growth, in addition to leading the charge on pricing and packaging. Prior to Webflow, she was Head of Growth for Dropbox’s B2B product, where she played a pivotal role in propelling their growth. In today’s episode, we discuss:

• Attributes of high-performing teams

• Tips for developing talent and seeking a mentor

• How to create a strong culture of ownership

• Frameworks for hiring PM and growth talent

• Common pitfalls companies face when implementing growth strategies

• Lessons from scaling Dropbox

• The DACI framework for increasing team velocity

• How to actually embrace first-principles thinking

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Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-high-performing-teams-melissa

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Where to find Melissa Tan: