Ep 16 - Unlocking Product-Driven Growth with Akshay Rathod, Sabrina Scandar, and Paul Ghio

To a lot of startups, growth is just ads and emails—tactics that occur outside of a company’s digital products. But your product can also become one of the biggest drivers of acquisition, engagement, and retention if you’re utilizing it in the right way.

In order to dive deeper, we assembled a panel of Product-Driven Growth experts to speak about how you can unlock Growth by using your digital product as a driver. We discuss reframing your growth targets in the pandemic, the steps you need to take before hiring your growth team, product features that drive growth, and retention wins. All this and more! 

Here’s What We Discussed: 

• [04:12] The first steps when building out a growth team – Growth is not just ‘doing marketing better,’ it is understanding your market-value proposition.
• [08:22] Our panel shares how they gauge product-market fit in order to start growing.
• [11:24] Which metrics growth teams can use in order to understand and define retention and user behavior.
• [13:47] The best methods to measure incrementality of growth driven through your product.
• [16:33] Growing in a global downturn – How to reframe your focus and goals in a pandemic.
• [23:01] From SEO, machine learning, and curation to SMS alerts; Our panel shares the #1 product feature that has driven growth. 
• [28:53] Tip: Pick up the phone and speak to your clients to get insight into their experience with your product. 
• [30:41] How to strike a balance between building a creative-driven product growth and achieving growth metrics. 
• [35:05] Using documentation in order to define team mission and responsibilities.  
• [37:40] Our panel shares their biggest retention wins and setbacks 
• [46:39] How to clearly define the value and purview of your team to the rest of the company

About Our Speakers 

Akshay Rathod, Founder of Usonia – Akshay is a self-titled nerd who spends his days obsessing over growth systems. In 2018, Akshay founded USONIA, his full-stack growth consultancy. In the years since, companies like Nike, AngelList, Goop, Dia & Co and Buffy have partnered with USONIA and seen the benefits of their data-driven, customer-obsessed and hypothesis-first growth process. Akshay serves as a Growth Advisor to Primary Venture Partners, providing go-to-market growth advice and guidance to the portfolio’s founders.

Sabrina Scandar, Director of Product at Better.com – Sabrina is Director of Product for the Growth Team at Better.com. Previously, she was a Lead Product Manager at Skillshare, where she worked on the core Experience team and then helped to build out the company’s first Growth team. She has 10+ years of Product Management experience in both consumer and B2B web.

Paul Ghio, VP Product at Shutterstock – Paul is a marketplace product leader at the convergence of craft, growth, and distribution. As the Director of Product at Yelp, he enjoys learning about the complexities of new markets, systems, strategies, and tactics. Before joining Yelp, Paul was the VP of Product at Creative Market, a marketplace for designers and creatives, overseeing a team of 17 across product management, analytics, research, and design, which increased Creative Market’s user base by 2077%.

About Our Moderator

Anish Shah is the CEO & Founder of executive search agency Bring Ruckus. Anish has worked in-house in Growth roles at Snapfish and Getable. He started Bring Ruckus as a Growth consultancy 11 years ago working with 40+ clients, then re-focused his firm on executive recruiting for Growth leaders.

 

Quotes

“The way that I've always thought about [growth] is it's the process of defining, measuring, and improving what really matters to the growth metric, whatever that happens to be, for that company.” – Paul Ghio

 

“When you're starting a growth team at a company, it's really important that you don't start it too early. You need product-market fit before you can really do growth properly. Otherwise, you haven't figured out what your best growth levers are and what exactly the value that you're selling is.” – Sabrina Scandar

 

“The key misconception is that growth is just doing marketing better. But it's not. It's about delivering value to users. So it's about building product value, getting users to experience and understand that product value is as quickly as possible, and then making sure that they understand it over and over again.”  – Sabrina Scandar 

 

“It's really helpful and really necessary to understand product-market fit throughout the life cycle of the company or the journey of a product.” – Paul Ghio 

 

“Talking to people is so important. Spending an entire day, just talking to customers will reap so many rewards.” – Akshay Rathod

 

“Core product teams are focused on creating the things that users derive value from. Growth product teams are focused on getting users to experience that value and understand that value as quickly and as often as possible.” – Sabrina Scandar 

 

“I think growth product people are troublemakers. We're sitting nestled between marketing, distribution, sales, and the core product. Depending on the business, you're in everyone's business. So it is a very complicated thing and it can get messy, but I think it speaks to the intersectionality of this growth mindset; you have to be holistic.” – Akshay Rathod

 

ABOUT RUCKUS

We are growth leaders who recruit your game changers. Visit https://bringruckus.com and connect on LinkedIn. Subscribe and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, Spotify Google Podcasts, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts!  

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