Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers | Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude)

March 9, 2023

AI Summary

5 min read

Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude, shares frameworks from her time at Twilio and elsewhere for advancing careers, running experiments, and building growth motions, emphasizing customer insights and user psychology.

Career Growth Principles

Schaffer advises against relying solely on excelling within a current role and manager's advocacy, as it limits opportunities. Instead, stay close to customers to gather insights executives lack due to their distance from users, then share them proactively—via reports, sessions, or proposals tied to North Star metrics. At Bandwidth, she spotted repeated sales questions and proposed a self-serve e-commerce flow, shifting roles. At Twilio, early voice-of-customer digests led to quarterly sessions attended by CEO Jeff Lawson, building her brand and enabling a successful pitch for a growth team during annual planning. Frame proposals supportively, start sharing insights immediately without permission if low-risk, and ungate expertise like customer knowledge or communication skills to open doors across teams.

Continue reading the full summary in the app — free to try.

Read Full Summary →

Free • No credit card required

Listen to Audio Summary Open in App

What you'll learn

1 **[04:21] Intro and new role at Amplitude**
2 **[06:11] Career growth framework: Stay close to customers**
3 **[20:21] Signup flow experiment: Good friction boosts conversion**
4 **[25:50] Onboarding psyche: Hide scary steps (phone number "pill in hotdog")**
5 **[34:26] Experimentation best practices: Embrace 80% fail rate**
6 **[54:44] Big wins like Quick Deploy for non-devs**
7 **[59:05] Shifting sales-led (Amplitude) to PLG: Start with customer problems**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Brought to you by Public—Invest in stocks, treasuries, crypto, and more | Eppo—Run reliable, impactful experiments | Writer—Generative AI for the enterprise

—

Laura Schaffer is the brand-new VP of Growth at Amplitude. Prior to this role, she spent over 10 years leading product management and growth teams at Twilio, Bandwidth, and Rapid. In today’s episode, we talk about the role of experimentation and data in growth, and Laura shares stories of big wins from her time leading growth teams. She explains how customer insights helped her uplevel her career and how she (surprisingly) thinks about qualitative versus quantitative data. We wrap up our conversation by discussing where the best ideas come from and what you need to know if you’re selling to developers.

Find the full transcript here: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/career-frameworks-ab-testing-counterintuitive

Where to find Laura Schaffer:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauraschaffer/

Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

Referenced:

• Elena Verna on Lenny’s Podcast: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/elena-verna-on-how-b2b-growth-is-changing-product-led-growth-product-led-sales-why-you-should-go-freemium-not-trial-what-features-to-make-free-and-much-more/

• Bandwidth: https://www.bandwidth.com/

• Twilio: https://ahoy.twilio.com/

• Jeff Lawson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffiel/

• The Surprising Power of Online Experiments: https://hbr.org/2017/09/the-surprising-power-of-online-experiments

• Reforge: https://www.reforge.com/

• Online Experimentation at Microsoft: https://ai.stanford.edu/~ronnyk/ExPThinkWee