Phil Carter
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think ultimately what you're looking for is, can this person break down a problem into its component parts? And can they think rigorously and quantitatively about what the optimal solution is? There are ways of designing questions that get at that without putting a huge burden on the applicant.
Yeah, absolutely right. Well, and then beyond the assignment, there are a couple other things I like to do. One is I really like to ask people, what are one or two other growth teams that you really admire at other companies? And the reason I like to ask that question is, number one, it shows whether or not the person is truly passionate about this discipline.
And Harry, we were talking earlier about how the idea of a modern growth team or at least a modern product-led growth team is a relatively new idea within the last 10 to 15 years, which means that the best people in this field tend to be very passionate about it.
They spend a lot of their time reading Lenny's newsletter or listening to podcasts like yours or doing their own research to really hone their craft. And so if they can't name at least one or two other companies,
that they really look up to and say like, hey, so-and-so leader or this PM who I know through this network, I just think the way they think about growth problems and the creativity they bring to thinking outside the box about how to grow their business is really inspiring. That's a telltale sign that somebody really gets it and is really excited about the field. That's number one.
And then the second thing I like to ask, which maybe is more obvious is just, Give me an example or two of a non-obvious experiment you ran. One that performed really well, but maybe in a way that wasn't expected, and what you learned from it, and then how you reprioritized your roadmap on the basis of what you learned.
And then the second... And this one's harder because not everybody has a great example for this. But the second one is, tell me about an A-B test that completely failed, where your hypothesis was proven completely wrong, but in a way you didn't expect... that actually then led to a huge win.
Because oftentimes, and this was true at Quizlet and other companies I've worked at, it's true with the clients I work with now. Oftentimes, the biggest wins come right on the heels of a failed A-B test. That's not what I was expecting to see. But based on what I am seeing now, I've learned something new about the customer. So now let's go run a second A-B test on the basis of that learning.
And then suddenly, you unlock a new opportunity.
Yeah, I think there are a couple archetypes of mistakes that I've seen focusing too much on the outputs and not the inputs. So if you work backwards, the metrics that a VC cares about or that the CEO cares about are things like ARR, MRR, subscribers, average revenue per user, or ARPU. But those are the outputs.
The inputs upstream of that are things like signup rate, activation rate, cost per install, cost per trial, trial start rate, trial conversion rate, install to subscriber conversion rate. Those are the upstream metrics that are ultimately driving those outputs. And so as a growth leader, part of your job is to connect the dots between, okay, here's the company's strategy.
That strategy needs to drive this amount of output in these key output metrics like ARR and subscribers. As the growth leader, I need to explain that to my team. And then I need to connect the dots between the individual initiatives and the metrics those initiatives are driving, which are the input metrics and those outputs.
And then as the individual PM or marketer responsible for those initiatives, I need to be all over understanding, okay, what are these input metrics? Which ones are the ones that matter most for my company? What does our current performance look like? What is our baseline performance over the last 12 months?
And then ideally, if I can benchmark that against other companies in my same category or in my same country, which metrics are we over or underperforming on? That's the science part of it. The art part of it is understanding that every product is a little different.
So benchmarks are really only a jumping off point because I need to understand the user psychology and the dynamics of my product and business model that are influencing why my metrics might look different than benchmarks.
But then with that holistic picture in mind, figuring out which of these metrics am I going to focus on that has the most upside potential to ultimately get to the output that my CEO and my board cares about.
And the growth leader sort of sits between those two camps and make sure that the work that the team is focused on is driving the metrics with the most leverage, the input metrics with the most leverage to ultimately yield those outcomes.
Well, to me, this is part of what's so fun about being a growth leader, or even being an individual growth PM or marketer is you get to go all the way down to ground level and understand, hey, when I look at our conversion funnel, this is a hypothetical example, but we're doing really well in terms of our signup and activation rates.
We're getting users to understand our core value promise, but we're just not getting enough of them to start trials. Or maybe we're getting them into trials, but not enough of them are converting into subscribers.
So figuring out where the bottleneck is and then going five-wise deep on why are we experiencing a bottleneck there and figuring out how to address it is just a really fun part of being in the trenches on a growth team, solving how to accelerate growth.
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