Lenny's Podcast · Mar 9Career frameworks, A/B testing, onboarding tips, selling to engineers | Laura Schaffer (Amplitude)
Laura's customer reports showed onboarding was harder than leadership believed, leading to a growth team in 2015. Four signup questions lifted signups about 5%, a docs-first flow hid the phone number step and converted better, and Quick Deploy produced tens of millions in pipeline.
Tips
- Add signup questions that reassure users instead of assuming all friction hurts▶ 23:00The questions alone, with no personalization, improved signup conversion by about 5 percent.
- Design onboarding around the user's psyche at each stage▶ 24:35Twilio's step-by-step onboarding converted only modestly until the team addressed the fear behind the first step.
- Bury the scary step inside a familiar experience, like a pill in a hot dog▶ 32:30The MVP converted better even with no easy return button to the console.
- Validate ideas with cheap methods before running full A/B tests▶ 39:40Twilio's MVP kicked users out of the portal into a docs page, and it cheaply validated the hypothesis before the real build.
- Ship iteratively and expect most ideas to fail▶ 34:30She cites an article on Microsoft's experimentation platform and Netflix showing 80 plus percent of ideas fail.
- Give growth teams a year-long horizon with low, medium and high bets▶ 52:54One Twilio project generated tens of millions of dollars in pipeline, though it took time to validate.
- Build a path for non-developer signups to try your product without code▶ 54:43The feature produced tens of millions of dollars in pipeline.
- Invest in self-serve for developer products because developers must prove it themselves▶ 1:09:00A Fang company built a POC and ran in production for months without talking to sales, and a big retailer's engineers signed up with personal emails to avoid sales.
- Share customer insights across the company to grow your career and create new roles▶ 9:20It led to the creation of Twilio's growth engineering and growth product team, and earlier at Bandwidth to a new e-commerce manager role.
