Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth

How to scrappily hire for, measure, and unlock growth | Crystal Widjaja, Gojek and Kumu

July 31, 2022

AI Summary

5 min read

Crystal Widjaja, chief product officer at Kumu and former growth leader at Gojek (now GoTo), shares principles for driving consumer growth in high-scale markets like Southeast Asia. She emphasizes scrappy tactics, data-driven experimentation, and focusing on product constraints over untested ideas, drawing from building Gojek's growth from early stages.

Scrappy Tactics and Early Validation

Widjaja advocates "doing things that don't scale" to test ideas quickly, like renting a stadium to onboard 60,000 drivers or using WhatsApp groups for drivers to manually sell subscriptions via vouchers. Wizard of Oz tests—such as overlaying fake onboarding screens or Typeform quizzes—validate user response without engineering. Even with small samples like 30 users, experiments reveal trends; precision improves with more data, but zero data is worse. She stresses testing hypotheses with real customer behavior over assumptions, as consumer sentiments can surprise.

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What you'll learn

1 *(04:45) Crystal's nonstandard career path**
2 *(09:40) Joining early Gojek: signals for startups**
3 *(11:26) Why super apps succeed in Southeast Asia**
4 *(13:22) Scrappy growth tactics that scale**
5 *(17:21) Early experiments and retention proxies**
6 *(27:50) Growth modeling framework: physics and levers**
7 *(36:38) Key growth unlocks across companies**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

You don’t need lots of employees to achieve impressive growth—but you do need a unique approach to hiring and structuring your team, and accurately measuring your growth efforts. Crystal Widjaja has used scrappy tactics to unlock massive success for Gojek (a wildly successful ride-share app in South East Asia) and is currently the Chief Product Officer at Kumu. In this episode, she shares the exact strategies she’s used as a product leader to hack growth, hire the best, and perfect data collection. Join us.

Thank you to our wonderful sponsors for making this episode possible:

• Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

• Flatfile: https://www.flatfile.com/lenny

• Eppo: https://www.geteppo.com/

—Find the full transcript at: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-hire-for-measure-and-unlock—

Where to find Crystal:

• Website: https://www.crissyw.com/

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

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

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Where to find Lenny:

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