How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian)

in order to get hyper growth you have to have organic inbound and viral Word of Mouth you can't pay enough to grow at those raids and have a viable company the biggest thing is an amazing product that people love to use right I mean chat GPT is the most hyper growth product that we've seen in history potentially because people are so excited to use it and it's working in interesting ways and then I think the third thing is really riding the lightning I would call it hyperlife companies go through the stages of growth that would take other companies five years or ten years right they're they're going from 10 to 50 they're going from 50 to 100 they're going from 100 to 200 they're they're jumping and so they really need to kind of keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have seen the next stage of growth because it's going to be here before you know it welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders

and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Carrie Lou Dietrich Carey Lou is a former CMO and has advised the CEOs and CMOS of hyper growth B2B companies like segment Miro onepassword build.com product board Sprout social weights and biases and most notably was head of marketing at atlassian through their IPO in today's episode we cover what hyper growth companies have in common how to make big changes to your growth strategy to unlock new channels of growth why CEOs don't trust CMOS and why most CMOS get fired also why most cpos get fired plus the benefits of waiting a long time to hire you for salesperson bundling strategy and a ton of incredibly insightful career advice a huge thank you to Elena Verna for suggesting Carrie Luke for the podcast and with that I bring you Carrie Lou Dietrich after a short word from our sponsors thank you

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Carrie Lou welcome to the podcast thanks Lenny happy to be here you've had this incredible career you worked at all these incredible companies I'd love to just dissect what you have found to be most important and effective in building a career long term just like broadly and then specifically if you're trying to get to an executive role someday what have you found to be some more important habits behaviors tactics lessons I'll start by saying that everyone has their own calculus about the trade-offs they want to make on pursuing their career and the sacrifices they might need to make versus the other things in their life their family their Hobbies their passions and so I think the executive tract isn't for everyone because there are a lot of trade-offs because I think that some of the most important aspects of getting to the Executive Suite are kind of working harder learning more pushing yourself

taking on more responsibilities and opportunities maybe even in the white space that aren't you know aren't your job or aren't near regular time when I was young in my career I decided I wanted to be a CMO and at the job where I decided I wanted to be the CMO I worked like two hours later than everyone else on the team and I had this thought in my brain that like two hours every day for five years would get me like how many more years of experience than someone else and I could do that when I was young and I didn't have kids and I was willing to make those sacrifices but you look at a lot of the top CMOS and they have sacrificed a lot of things to like read all of the books and like again if I go back to that first job I was a PR manager and we went through a tough phase and we lost a head of product right before the major launch of like a major product so I volunteered to Moonlight in the

product department and run the beta and do release engineering and taking on other responsibilities gave me insights into other apartments that made me more successful early in my career and later on and the same thing happens as you're growing right like if a department head leaves and you can spend extra time doing your own job and being the interim for this other function you can really show the top Executives that you have the appetite and the skill to take on more responsibility so I think learning as much as you can about your expertise working really hard and taking on more responsibilities and having a great attitude and a strategic mind are probably what I think helps people get to the c-suite on kind of the personal level and then I have a whole other set another set of five things that are like what specific ways you need to train

your mind I know there's kind of this like backlash against working really hard that happened for a while but um I'm on the same boat as you have just success will come from working really hard and sometimes that sucks but that's usually how how it goes flows in your life maybe you know you're gonna have a baby here soon congratulations and so maybe you take your foot off um the gas for a little bit but really like there's no shortcuts there's no short coats cuts to knowing a lot like one of the people I admire most is Tomas tongues who was with red point and now started his own VC firm and I was talking to him about his blog and he was like I just wake up like five or six a.m every morning and write three to four Vlogs a week for 10 years damn like that is self-discipline and like insight and drive and so yeah no shortcuts I think you know you look at Denise Pearson or Pearson at um Snowflake and she's worked really hard

to get there so the five things I think you need to do to get to the c-suite

that are like not kind of personal side are you need to think about how your responsibility is tied to revenue like you need to think and talk in the terms of the CEO and the board and that can be tricky when you're junior because you don't have exposure to it but getting a like strong handle on finance and how the finances of the business work and how the revenue of the business works I went on a tour of the Tesla Factory with my daughter's um field trip a couple weeks ago and the guy who was giving us the tour was like so I delivered and stocked all these different parts at the plant and then I would write take a list and after work every night I'd go to each part of the plant and try to figure out what they were working on what the challenges and opportunities were and that's how I moved up and so it's just like understanding how the whole thing works together because if you want to be

in the c-suite it's a job about how the system works so I really encourage tours of Duty between different departments I told you about my tour of beauty and product um I thought CMOS had to do every function so I took a tour of Duty at every function in marketing but really getting a sense for other departments the next thing is the relationships so building really strong relationships with people by doing good work and helping them and then the last thing I think is the quality of the companies you work for so your career and your ability to transcend which is really moving faster than other people to get bigger jobs is fairly dependent on the momentum of your company so I was a leader at Oracle for five years and my team Grew From like five to seven over five years and I was a leader at atlassian for four years and my team Grew From 15 to 100 and and so if you pick the right company with the

right momentum you have a better chance of getting higher level experiences and accelerated career growth and then I guess one little footnote if you pick great companies great people work for those companies and go out and work at other companies and also give you opportunities so I ended up at atlassian kind of in a stroke of good luck because I had worked for J Simons the cro at two company I am the president at two companies before and so the quality of the first company Plum Tree really helped Propel my whole

career there's so many things I want to double click on there the last piece is the advice I always give people when they're early in their career is to go go find a company that's going to do super well like that one experience is going to transform your entire career having a logo in your resume the People You Meet The Experience you get just financially but that begs the question how do you find that how do you pick how do you pick a company and you're advising today you come you join later where it's a little more obvious okay they're doing great do you have any advice or lessons about how to identify earlier where to go work and how to be lucky and success in in that pick isn't that the billion dollar question uh so I work it's interesting too yeah I worked at atlassian which was phenomenal then I worked for classy which was a company that helped non-profits um raise money I've used that product

um thank you and they were we were acquired by GoFundMe and it was fine but it was no atlassian and then I've spent the next five years trying to figure out how do you pick your next atlassian so my advice would be for people earlier in their careers it's easy to pick the winners if you go work for a big company that's a winner like I would love to work for Tesla or AWS or gosh right this second I would kill for a job at open AI right you know some of the big companies that are successful Salesforce has totally been a career maker to so many top Executives so early in your career working for big name High momentum companies you know I think you you can't like wimp out like you've got to want it and go for it and maybe you like apply year after year and you meet people people and you try for it early in your company later in your career I think you know what you just said taking later stage versus earlier stage gives you a

better view of their momentum I actually have a Post-It note you have it here about what I look for 10 parts of what would evaluate to see just have that Post-It note around I do it's it's one of five Post-it notes on my on my

um board okay I want to hear what the rest are too I have to look at it for advisory right like I can I only take eight to ten clients I'm always full and so it has to be like a phenomenal company so how do I know if it's a phenomenal company here's my list rule of 40 right which is your profitability and your costs together the quality of the investors like are they really top tier investors are they kind of like mid-tier or some you've never heard of investors do a lot of due diligence but you also want to look at their most recent rounds because they could have phenomenal early stage and have slowed down I think like the later the size the like more reliable because they've just made it farther their net promoter score or their customer satisfaction like do people really rapidly love this product or is it like meh their net dollar retention which is how fast is their revenue growing and I I

should have it on my Post-It note but like snowflake was The Benchmark I think they were growing at like 142 I think at one point is 180 is whatever is it 100 yeah that sounds right 180 165 I had like like most you know net dollar retention if you have a customer and you you know they just renew with the same dollar rate it would be 100. so 180 is like almost doubling just a customer so they didn't even need new customers to almost double their business a phenomenal net dollar retention means it's a really strong healthy business I look at the growth rate last year their burn rate are they going to run out of money and then ideally are they like number one in their Market do they have a Forester or a Gartner magic quadrant like people tell you if they're number one and then the last thing is I look at their glass door like is it just a bad place to work and are people unhappy because they don't

actually survive as long as companies where people are happier I love this list you should turn it into a blog post there's another idea for you can you share with the other Post-its are around you even broadly

I can um one says more Yoda less Wonder Woman which basically is like ask better questions the second one ask them backwards too yeah right um You should ask them backwards which is funny because the other Yoda thing I have up is do or do not there is no try backwards I have another one that says hell yes or no like when opportunities come to you and you're like oh should I do this or should I not do this you know you only have so much time in your life and so if it's not like a something that really like excites you and gives you energy it's tough to be at the best at it and so hell yes or no and then the last one is worrying is wasted energy because I think you know we live in this economic pressure cooker and there's a lot of fear and uncertainty but we just need to take that fear and uncertainty and like thank it for giving us urgency and then make the list of like what can we control now and what should we do next

it's actually a perfect segue to my next question and by the way that was amazing I'm glad that I asked about your Post-its uh that's uh that's a whole uh life philosophy right there in Post-its you should do a be real but it looks like on this side these are all the poses okay so the question is

around we're kind of I don't know if we're technically in a recession but maybe we're on the verge of recession the Market's not great and a lot of people are being laid off or have been laid off or worried about being laid off or just graduating college and looking for jobs and I'm curious if you have advice on four people trying to find a job in this market or just generally trying to accelerate their career what is your advice for just how to deal with this environment while also trying to advance your career I'd like to take in two parts one is if you're unemployed and one is you're in a job so if you're unemployed it's tough It's a tough time there's a lot of supply and so I think you just really need endurance and grit and the sticker worrying is wasted energy because you will get another job it's just gonna be a little bit more of a bumpy ride than some other years and the best Executives

I know have had down periods in their careers where they were out of work for a while or they were fired by a CEO who this or that and what they have in common is endurance they're just like back in the ring and so I think it's important to not lose endurance it's also important not to settle on a crappy job or a crappy company each job you have prepares you for the next job and each logo you have prepares you for the next job so you know I spent a lot of my career trying to also Chase waves you know my first job was I in college I was in non-profit and then I wrote a book on the giving programs of the top 50 tech companies and I realized that tech companies had a bunch of money in 1999 and we're giving it away to Charities and I wanted to go into Tech because that's where the like growth and money was and I thought I could give it back to the world and good but I could be inside the bubble and then within

Tech I moved my way to B2B and within B2B I moved my way to SAS and within SAS I've moved my way into like Dev tools like collaboration and now ai like there's this book called The Millionaire Next Door which talks about how the very best antique store makes like one or two percent profit and the very worst oil and gas company makes 35 profit and we know that like some of the worst software companies make 65 profit so like picking your industry will Propel your career and picking the right company will Propel your career and then doing a good job I will prepare your career so I think that's like there's no magic bullet to getting a job but working your network sticking with it and continuing to grow your skills are the three most important things big part of this conclusion is don't feel like your career needs to slow down in this period and and I think if you're in a job like some of my greatest career

growth came in the economic downturns in the 2000s in the 2008 because other people take their foot off the gas and you can put your foot down if you're willing to like learn more pitch yourself into new roles or new responsibilities that no one's covering at your company like when they don't hire tons of people for everything there's lots of open projects where you can raise your hand and grow you just can't be as focused on title and salary right now you're kind of like building up value that you'll be able to monetize on the other end of this recession or

downturn let's segue to chatting about growth and I thought it'd be fun to start with your story of running some very expensive ad campaigns I know the founders are always kind of flirting with this idea of buying a bunch of billboards running TV ads maybe Subway ads and bus ads and you've done a lot of that and you've spent a lot of money doing that and it's particularly non-digital sort of advertising and so I'm curious what you've learned from your experience and approach to the sort of marketing and spend yes I've that hundreds of millions of dollars on it actually I ran awareness Global awareness advertising for Oracle and did all of the airports the front page of the Wall Street Journal on the back page of the economist and take over in the middle of Salesforce in downtown San Francisco and you know we did the Iron Man movie sponsorships and the sports teams and Arena sponsorships um very expensive super expensive and

then an atlassian to a lesser degree you know we spent several million dollars on different awareness campaigns to get chat noticed or to associate jira with the atlassian brand and you know advertising is sexy and super expensive for the benefits right it's a multi-year benefit of awareness people have to see things many times and it has to really resonate with them and so Maya nice to Founders is that the most important thing is the quality of your product you know or they'll spend a ton of money and people still didn't Like Us in a lot of ways because they had poor experiences with the sales people or they didn't like Larry or the product had kind of languished since it had been acquired by the company so your product has to really be fantastic and then also to do good brand advertising it has to be sustained over a long period of time so Oracle had the front page of the Wall Street Journal Backpage of The Economist

this boring advertising template with the red bar but it made it memorable we would do Market tests and two or three or ten times more people would recognize the Oracle brand without the logo because of the consistency versus sap or IBM so you really need to be thoughtful about spending consistently over a longer period of time and a smaller amount on a fewer number of things can be really effective so snowflake for instance has always gotten credit for doing a billboard on 101 and people think they do lots of advertising but for many years it was only the billboard on 101. it was just sustained and strategic so I guess two things that I take away from that is one you can spend a lot of money and if your product's not actually incredible it's not really going to do much and correct me if I'm wrong and then two is sometimes just like one very targeted spend is worth a lot more than just kind of blanketing a bunch of ads

absolutely I was telling you a story that edit Lassie and we did a big advertising campaign on our hipchat product which was head to head with slack and it was an office space spoof with Bill Lundberg but the product had some uptime issues and some feature issues and slack pulled ahead and the advertising wasn't What Would Have Made It Or Break broken the product it's really the product experience and the advertising just amplifies I think you also shared with me you ran the uh this hip chat ad that's maybe my favorite billboard ever and I don't even know why looking back but it made me laugh so hard back in the day it was like this meme of some like I don't know early meme stick figure guy of saying why you no use hipchat looking back I'm like okay I don't know how funny either but I think in the moment that was like a really popular Meme and it really stuck with me well if you think about the best

advertising it's something that has like a little twist of like humor or personality or truth that that sticks in your brain so yes that was successful advertising and kudos to my team because of course I don't write it myself as the head of marketing but yeah I mean and some of my other favorite ads are also others that highlight the customer so New Relic did an advertising campaign around data nerds when data nerds were not like really popular there were still nerds and it you know they had these tattoos that said nerd life and they featured customers on billboards like talking about you know their why with cool data nerds um and some of those campaigns that really stand out have something that's funny unexpected and then like true to the to the product I remember those one of the ads featured are uh or CTO at Airbnb Mike Curtis and everyone was very excited to see his face on the Billboards yeah Salesforce

has done a great job with those over the years too really highlighting the customers

so zooming out a little bit you specialize working with companies that are going through hyper growth and you've worked with companies like Miro segment bill.com which I don't know if people know is just like a massive massive business and also one password and on the topic of one password interestingly I didn't realize how big and how fast one password has been growing and just last week I saw this report from OCTA where they have all this interesting data about which products people are using and they put out this report showing which companies this kind of quadrant of which which products are getting the most new customers and then on a different axis which companies are getting the most uh users per new customer and there's this six companies in this kind of upper quadrant figma Miro snowflake Sentry HubSpot and one password which blew my mind and interestingly you work with two of them

and so all that to say what have you noticed about what is most in common with companies that are going through hyper gold like what is most in common in terms of what has contributed to them being that successful the biggest thing is an amazing product that people love to use right I mean chat GPT is the most hyper growth product that we've seen in history potentially because people are so excited to use it and it's working in interesting ways so you know Miro white boards were the number one most uploaded asset in jira forever because people all get together and they write their ideas on a whiteboard and then they need to like remember it and iterate on it and that that like bringing that concept to life just hit a chord that people wanted to use and when one person uses it another person uses it one password similarly uh I I've been a one password user for more than 10 years we used it at last and it's a

corporate and then I and then they have the family plan so I used it at home and then my dad got elderly so I had you know a family that I was the administrator for and then I go into different companies and you know you bring it with you and one of the other companies I advise is product board and I became an advisor of product board because one passwords CPO brought it you know had it in another company brought it into one password rolled it out company wide to get alignment and visibility on the product roadmap so hypergirl companies in order to get hyper growth you have to have organic inbound and viral Word of Mouth you can't pay enough to grow at those raids and have a viable company and especially in this you know economic efficiency market so has to be an amazing product has to have some viral activity so like we just talked about Miro or atlassian you know you could have an individual

person use it and then they say like hey I'm going to present at this meeting with Miro come join me on my board or you know I'm I've got these Confluence Pages we've set up as a Wiki about these engineering topics and I want your team to kind of collaborate on them so those natural points where your users are selling to other people is is way more efficient than having sales people that have to sell to other people and then I think the third thing is really riding the lightning I would call it so hyperwraith companies go through the stages of growth that would take other companies five years or ten years right they're they're going from 10 to 50 they're going to from 50 to 100 they're going from 100 to 200 they're they're jumping and so they really need to kind of keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have seen the next stage of growth and then the people inside can be homegrown talent but it's tricky to keep up and so

you know my whole business is based on people who are trying to be homegrown leaders but the don't know what the next stage of growth looked like and so a lot of hyper growth companies hire ahead higher advisors you know leaders need to really think about mentors and friendships of people who know what Great Looks like at the next scale because it's going to be here before you know it and so I would say those things amazing product viral movement and company that can ride the lightning

imagine Founders listening to this that don't have insane virality or huge Word of Mouth are like is there no path to being a really successful company and then I think about companies that did succeed with other channels like say paid or SEO and so I guess a question for you is do you need to grow in this environment I guess primarily through Word of Mouth organic reality sort of growth engines or do you still see opportunity for companies to grow other ways say paid or SEO uh or sales eventually for sure all of the things are important I think what I wanted to say first as you were talking was that it's easy to look at a company after they've been viral and be like oh that's amazing like I would like to start a newsletter I have it's cariloo.com Lenny has a newsletter how can I ever grow like Lenny's virality but Lenny started with like one blog and then another and the consistency and like when I look

back at atlassian people would be like oh it must have been so easy to go from 100 to 500 million right and and it never felt easy like it was a slog to do exactly what you're talking about new features listen to customers the strong SEO actually SEO is the number one marketing motion that we used and sem we spent probably got 20 you know between 15 and 25 of our leads from Paid search marketing at the time you know now I have a ton of customers that are pretty deep into account based marketing you know getting to virality and getting the hyper growth is not a Magic Bullet it's consistency customer Obsession incremental improvements across all parts of the business so I think Founders just need to like double down on having products that's differentiated and does something that their customers really love and each incremental step is is a step forward this episode is brought to you by Coda

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say that you as a company are seeing word of mouth and some morality and you want to think about accelerating that leaning into Word of Mouth obviously you want everyone to be like talking about how awesome you are sharing with other friends is there anything that you've seen as like a good way to lean in toward a mouth and accelerate it I think there's two or three things one is really empowering the people in your company to be thought leaders so early days atlassian's Founders were on all the developer boards and in fact I remember I mean we were maybe 150 million or 200 million dollars and Scott farqua the CEO was still participating and like going back and forth in different Dev forums when I was like I don't know should we elevate your status like should we have evangelists and Engineers that do this and we did right I think you know and you look one of my clients now is weights and biases the ml Ops company

helping lots of different AI companies with their ml models and they have really thoughtful technical people who know more and write more on the blog and engage with their community and that creates a word of mouth because they're providing both a product and Concepts and learning that's one of the HubSpot Secrets was all of their like really thoughtful helpful content certifications for marketers so I think you know kind of going back to summarize Word of Mouth can be driven by thought leadership which is hiring the right people to like really be deeply engaged as super experts having a really strong content strategy that's either in communities that already exist online communities open source communities and then third I would say building your own community so no one sells your product better than your own happy customers and if I go way back to the very beginning of my career I worked on

a marketing team where I own demand gen just for net New Prospect and a peer-owned demand gen just for existing customer upsell and we would have different field events and the existing customer ones were like smaller than if we'd invited the prospects and had like more buzz and the prospect ones were very salesy whereas if we brought them together and you had customers talking to each other and Prospects listening everyone had a better time so you know atlassian one of our secrets was this amazing User Group Community where we just paid for a beer and a pizza and we facilitate local in-city leaders and people would meet up and talk about our products and talk about development generally and grow their careers and grow their Network so I think those are the three the right people the right content and the right communities as you were talking I was reminded I was just chatting with the founder of Gusto about their journey

early on and he said that for the first I don't know 200 customers he sat there with them running payroll watching how they react to every step of the payroll process and how they feel at every moment and that was a big part of what helped them build the product that people actually you know continue using and love and stick with and if it wasn't in person it was on a phone call and you know it's like the epitome of doing things don't scale just like for hundreds of new customers watching them use your product pretty wild I mean that's the secret that's the secret sauce right and I've heard some early stage startup advisors say that you should build processes that don't scale first because when you're in the super early stage seed a under 10 million you've really got to to go deep at that stage and in fact you know I see that that's one of the problems that companies experience as they get much

bigger when product managers can't meet with customers or they get limited customers or maybe they come only meet with a junior user not the or you know only the administrator and not lots of the users so that that insight into the like daily struggles and experience of your customers it's harder to get as you get bigger I think

I want to drill uh into it last thing you've brought them up a couple times and you were you were that lasting for a long time you were there kind of from early days of growth to IPO and one of the most interesting elements of atlass scene and something that comes up a lot on this podcast is product LED growth and the last thing I think is one of the most classic examples of a product LED Growth Company and from what I understand you know you all waited a long time to hire your first salesperson and so my question is what did you learn from that experience about when is the right time to start leading into sales and hiring sales and what are kind of like the trade-offs of waiting longer or doing it earlier atlassian was a super unique company in a super unique point in time because the founders never took outside money except for one late stage financing to kind of um buy out some early employees to give

them liquidity so we never had VCS or private Equity that had a voting share that was significant that could overrule the founders so the founders were going through this experiment that turned out to be really successful where they took all the money they would have spent on a sales org and plowed it into engineering and product I'm going to pull up a slide here that tells the atlassian story about the ratio of the sales and marketing to that to the product and Engineering amazing and by the way uh check this out on YouTube if you're listening to this and check out this slide so this is a representative sample of of what we did in atlassian's history and what ratio still exists today even several years later where we spend way less on sales and marketing marketing spent less than other marketers and also we had almost no sales org or a sales org that was really focused on renewals or now you know an assisting sales org

that's focused more on Enterprise but relative to other companies a much smaller much more efficient sales org and we took all that money and put it into product and so here we're spending two times three times as many dollars in r d as many other companies that we Benchmark against to make a product that really sold itself it's interesting so I'm looking at the slide and again if you're listening you should check this out on YouTube because it's pretty crazy this slide of just like bar chart of spend in sales and marketing and r d and elastin is like the very lowest amount of spend in sales and marketing and the highest spend in product and it's interesting that it's from 2020 so it's not even like in the early days it's like still today basically right I'm gonna close this down and keep telling you a little bit more about it there's some unique things that people can take now and incorporate

so the real strategy in sales sales is the most expensive vehicle right expensive people that spend a lot of time and so what you want to do is try to you know this the atlassian model was to sell only to people who are already customers really like if several people or a couple groups had purchased we'd help them with their renewals and now in kind of the the later incarnations of our sales orgs at atlassian it helps a lot more with like larger Enterprise companies who need Enterprise deals or does more cross-sell and upsell but doesn't really do prospecting net new prospecting is a really expensive way to to get new customers and so you know we see different Trends coming now with companies because almost no one can do pure product-led growth because your investors want to see accelerated growth and most people believe that adding an SDR or adding an AAE will add a like predictable amount of Revenue and so

it's difficult because product LED growth and and sales have to coexist but the whole transition in marketing that's happening to account based marketing and intent-based signals is trying to do some of what we were doing in atlassian only to engage sales people with customers that are actually likely to buy and if you look at other hyper growth companies airtable Miro both of those I know from the inside have had strategy G's where the sales people really only engage after some threshold has been hit of number of users that have already been paying for the product on their credit card but sometimes at the high number like 20 40 people at an account have to be engaged before a sales person engages based on that what

is it your recommend to Founders these days that maybe are product LED and just like self-service for immedi oriented you kind of take this experience and be like wait as long as you can to hire your first sales person or is there just kind of I know it's very specific to the situation but what kind of advice do you generally give you and I are both like Sands of Elena um who was just on your podcast earlier this month you know product LED growth depends so much on your product and your your buying market right there's some buying markets that are less likely to use sales people and you need to go in from the beginning HR might be one right whereas a lot of the hyper growth companies in the dev tool space can use product LED growth because developers both hate sales people and really love to research themselves so you see like versel you know taking off because people engage and and kind of self self

sell so I would recommend that people I get closer to their customers and read the signals like if your product is good enough that people can get time to value in a couple of days instead of weeks or months you can have a product-led growth motion if your product needs to be put in context and customized and assisted you know sales teams sometimes are expensive Services arms to cover over product issues and help customers buy it until it's fixed or if you're in a market where your buyer just really doesn't buy online with research in a demo then then you need to to have sales people but I would say try not to hire too fast and too far ahead in sales and inside sales because it seems like it's going to add Revenue but it actually is a huge cost and a huge drain on the business if the product isn't getting that kind of resonance I just had a conversation with the founder of retool for this series

that I'm working on and he said he basically found the same thing you found where they thought it could be product experience variants where you're building internal tools using their product but it turned out nobody really understood how to do it themselves and it took a lot of hand-holding to make it work and so they became sales LED from the beginning even though it feels like a tool that would be has a lot of potential to be product LED and self-service I think the other hybrid I'm starting to see is people who turn their SDR sales development reps into kind of sales Engineers researchers so instead of having a sales person who's like would you like to have a meeting with another salesperson the first touch for customers that are maybe like kicking the tires or trying a product-led growth is a person who can help guide them on the the path and I like this hybrid nature because basically it extends product-led growth

but helps people in this case where you're talking where the product itself isn't so intuitive that you can get all the way to the the buying by itself it also sounds more fun to talk to sales engineer than a sales person I know I always wanted to be a sales engineer I was a salesperson and I was I crashed on the sales engineering team who knew everything and could draw all the architectures oh wow I didn't know that

a couple more questions around this stuff so you've worked a lot of different companies and you kind of come in and help them figure out ways to grow faster unlock growth opportunities what do you find often gets most in the way of making big changes to the way they approach growth and approach different growth channels and maybe on the flip side what do you find is most essential to making big changes at a company around how they think about group I mean the big growth levers are pretty consistent across companies you know you start with one product and you have a different a couple choices on how the go to market Works product LED girls or sales assisted you get a little bit bigger and you add an incremental product or you'll start to add new segments you're going to focus on a vertical like Finance or or you're going to go Global or you're gonna add new sales channels like a partner Channel

and what I've seen with the big growth levers is that it can't ever be an individual Department's goal without being a cross-company strategy goal if it's really going to make a difference so for instance I mean you've talked about it in your newsletter and on your podcast but growth isn't just like a person in the engineering team that like hacks by themselves it really has to be funded and thoughtfully constructed so that there's the right content and experience and product features and virality features once someone's a customer to continue to drive growth and similarly lots of companies right now are trying to move up Market because the economy has created so much pressure and SMB that you know they're going to try to move to Enterprise or they've they're trying not to sell as much just to tech companies because tech companies are under pressure and so they want to move to different parts but the biggest issue

is when that's not it sometimes the marketers get blamed or sales gets blamed like we don't have enough leads but really it's a company strategy problem where the company hasn't decided hey we're going to all move in this direction and if we're going to sell the Enterprise marketing is going to bring in leads products going to have a road map and some meaningful features to Enterprise customer research is going to start thinking about them we're going to hire some customer support people who know how Enterprises work you know we're going to hire some sales people and sell differently to Enterprises than SMB with the big growth letter levers are strategy problems not individual departmental problems and what do you find needs to happen for that to change is that like Co needs to be like here's what we're doing everyone get on board or or something else Tom either way in the c-suite right like

sometimes when I'm supporting Junior marketers so so my job I advise hyper growth CEOs and CMOS of companies like 30 million to 500 million often if I'm advising like a 30 to 100 million dollar company at the more Junior marketer with the CEO who's often a first-time founder who doesn't necessarily know if the marketer's good or not hasn't done run marketing before doesn't know if they should trust what the marketers say so often the marketer is saying like Hey we're having problems because you know the company's not delivering on this promise you want us to sell and sometimes the CEO doesn't know if they can trust it that a judgment and so in that case someone like me who's an advisor comes in and it's like is right it's not a marketing problem it's company strategy problem let's have an off-site and build some okrs where we all go after Enterprise and we win it together you'll see at bigger companies

or or when a new CMO comes in with more senior or seasoned they'll have the social capital to push back into the Executive Suite or a new head of engineering will say look I know you want to move ahead faster but we actually have to catch up on this technical debt and they'll push back and get get that strategic space that they need so it can either come from the CEO or it can come from the c-suite really coming together just to solve those problems instead of kind of like pushing them under the rug

you touched on this Nuance that a lot of times there's not a lot of trust between the marketing head and the CEO and I'm curious what you find helps build that trust there's a couple things that are really critical for senior marketers and I actually have a Blog coming up and based on a podcast I've recorded about why CMOS mostly get fired and the issues are generally one that the CEO CMO isn't focused enough on the revenue so some CMOS get focused more on kind of like the pipeline or the awareness and the CEO doesn't feel like they really have a partner in driving the revenue or they don't feel like the CMO really has a handle on what will drive the revenue so marketing's tough because it's a big spend category and lots of the spend doesn't convert in quarter some of it doesn't convert in a year right like advertising campaigns some take multiple quarters so it's really important for CMOS to have a handle on the metrics a

solid prediction of like what will what growth levers they can use and to be able to talk in the terms of the CEO and the board and I think that that's the biggest Gap that I generally see and then of course there's a whole bunch of table stake stuff like that you have to be running their business well they're you know they have to be a good leader that people want to work for they have to hire a great team that elevates them and the company they have to be like thoughtful and strategic about the Market space that the company's in you know they're not just like working the levers in the factory they're thinking like what new markets should we enter what new growth areas should we employ like we just talked about what new companies should we acquire you know they also need to be thinking ahead and I think being good on metrics good on strategy and good on on Market helps CMOS spar with CEOs in a way that builds Trust

it's interesting that you say that blog post you titled most I see mostimos get fired and it connects with something Casey winners noted that most cpos also get fired Chief product officers that they just like I forget the quote but it's something like the most you can hope for is a couple swings at the bat before you get fired as a CPO why do you think these are this is so common for these kind of Chief c-suite roles uh to startups to uh not work out they're incredibly hard jobs right the chief product officer and the chief marketing officer are both strategy jobs with difficult to measure results because some of them are direct and some of them are indirect and I think both of them get swept up when a company is not performing well two right like if companies not performing well you can kind of swap out the head of product and the next one will be more strategic and deliver faster and in fact you know I've

worked in one of the roles the CFO was really after my chief product officer and ultimately got him fired because he wanted to move everything offshore and developed faster and he didn't want to re-platform and he didn't want to deal with the technical debt and the CFO was sure that that it was the cpo's fault and then they got rid of the CPO and the CFO tried his plan and it didn't work and then you bring someone in who's like no like I had the right place so you know both of them were tough jobs and they require a high bar of Excellence a high connection of trust and then I think just endurance to keep going and find the next role where you're really a fit and the company really has momentum it also reminds me of just talking to I think it was canva where their first engineering hire is now their CTO still and the first marketing hire is their CMOS still so it does work out on occasion it works out on occasion and in

fact I've been playing around with a 10 part series about those CMOS and the CMO world because there's there's about 10 to 15 CMOS who have started when it's really small and grown all the way and they're the ones we really want to learn from and I know a lot of them and really admire their work and have learned so much you should absolutely do that that sounds very cool you talked about how you work with companies from 30 million to 500 million what is it about that stage that's unique and what happens like after 500 million and what's the difference before say 30 million I know it's not like an exact number but how do you think about that it's not an exact number my bottom number is because there's this early stage of product Market fit where the founder and the company are trying to figure out who their real ideal customer profile is and can they sell to them consistently so I've worked for

some early stage startups where we've tried lots of different things but they're not repeatable like you can't scale it it's like this product works for this this product works for this too and it works for this but those are all kind of unique cases studies and so I like and my skill is in helping people scale and so if they've already found product Market fit and they've gotten some funding or you know they're bootstrapped but have like enough funding to to really be trying to build out Marketing in a marketing team that's when I know what each stage looks like so I know what 30 million dollar great teams look like and 50 million and 100 million and 150 million 200 million my right atlassian was from about 100 to 500 and then over 500 you know the the act of going public being an early stage public company I know what that all looks like and then you know beyond that there's public company

Consultants I think more that do kind of more specific things I more help the CE CMO and CEO structure for the next stage of growth because they're going through it so fast they haven't hired someone yet who's already seen got it one very nuanced question I want to ask you is about bundling

so there's hipchat and slack kind of ate their lunch not necessarily through bundling but just like their slack and then slack kind of I don't know if it's true but it feels like Microsoft teams is eating their lunch with bundling and I'm curious what do you think of bundling as a strategy to win long term and also how do you compete against say a Microsoft that maybe one day bundle your product for free and you might be in big trouble I think it's two separate questions so let me take them separately the first is what do I think about bundling so small and medium-sized companies will go from being a single Product Company to a multi-product company in order to progress because you need a diversified financial model because you need to be able to sell new products into your customer base who should already be friendly to you if they like your products and because you need to really expand your total addressable Market to

get to be a billion dollar to a billion dollar company well I I believe in bundling as a growth strategy specifically for product-led growth companies bundling is not a great land strategy so at atlassian we had a number of products and experimented with different bundled glands and it really slowed down the product-led growth motion so we ended up going back to land with a single product High Velocity single person uses it quickly starts to get value and then come in with with with other things so from that perspective product like growth bundling is not very effective bundling for a sales lead motion is pretty effective when you're at the right stage of growth and then as far as the question of competing against Microsoft you know there's these two parts of the philosophies a best of breed and an all-in-one an oracle was an all-in-one and Microsoft is an all-in-one you can buy all the things and your CFL can get

a discount by spending a whole bunch of money on a bunch of things but in the all-in-one some of the pieces aren't as good as the best of breed and so slack for a long time was the best of breed people were willing to pay more because they thought it was markedly better than the other instant messaging options but you know there's shifts between best of breed and all-in-one in economic wins so right now CFOs are putting the squeeze it's slack of really that much better than Microsoft if the Microsoft one is free with all of our other purchases it's tough it's tough to go head to head with a powerful big investing all-in-one competitor the only way to win is to be the best and I have a product that's so much better that it's worth the extra money interesting so essentially in a tough environment bundling is really really is most effective almost and then this other interesting point about nplg you want to stay focused on

one specific pain Point what is it that atlassian tried to do that they tried to pitch like all your product planning products in one Suite is that gonna well Mira was the um issue tracking and then we also had Confluence which was the Wiki page so let's say there was a business bundle that could have been hip chat Confluence and jira or there were developer combinations that could have been jira bitbucket and and maybe Confluence too for an engineering team basically if you have to evaluate multiple products to purchase something it's not a fast and easy online self-service Buy because you you're like oh do I need all three products can I break them apart do they all work are each of them best of read whereas if you're like I need issue tracking I'm gonna buy jira this looks good I've tried it out I'm ready to go that can happen in seven days whereas if you add in multiple products it takes

more days and just leads to fewer conversions that makes absolute sense I could have seen someone thinking the complete opposite and then now realizing oh see I see why this isn't working you should always test it right I mean like the secret to product like growth is can you test it and so you know we tested everything we tried bundles we didn't try bundles we tried different things in the bundles we tried different days data-led insights are better than anything any pundit would say on a podcast

um amazing well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready I'm ready okay what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people the number one book is a life book called The Dao tejing the Stephen Mitchell translation and the doubt teaching is a philosophy about the flow of life and I love it I've carried the pocket guide with me for 25 years the second one is business focused never split the difference which is a great book about negotiating written by a former CIA hostage negotiator which also helped me with negotiations at work and with my children so that's a great book I actually I've been trying to read that book on audio and I'm what what's like something you've taken away from me because the stories are so interesting and uh I'm always like what should I actually do in my day-to-day life what like stuck with you it's kind of the obvious thing that I

wasn't good at it's that you just really want to put yourself so deeply in the shoes of the other person that you can figure out what makes a win for both of you right basically he says like you can't win the negotiation by strong arming what you want you really get to get to a win-win which is probably a negotiation book every ever but he texturizes it so much so I just felt like I was really able to and and he actually has in my last office we moved last year I actually had the cliff notes of his book printed out and posted on my wall because he had a series of questions to help you get deeper and deeper into the mindset behind people and and connected but not connected the um book How to Win Friends and Influence People that's like the 1932 bestseller is basically that like people don't want to hear about you they want you to be thinking about them and then you can make friends with them or you can

negotiate with them or you can get your hostage back I read uh how to win friends and influence people when I was very young and uh specifically that chapter is about there's no better sound in the world that than uh to someone than their name Carrie Lou it's true thank you he said it correctly okay moving on favorite recent movie or TV show my favorite movie is everything everywhere all at once it's basically a Sci-Fi about all the different ways your life could turn out if you made different choices and it was really a mind Bender that made me think about all the different ways tiny decisions to change my life but then also an appreciation for the life that you have you know at the end not it doesn't ruin the story but she has this love of what she has even though it's not as good or as different as some of the other options I love it so I bought I bought this poster I don't think you can see it on

the bath but it says gratitude oh yeah turns what we have into enough oh very Buddhist I like it read the damn teaching uh not a Post-It but art another another uh teaching from Carrie loop I think this needs to be a second newsletter of your life advice uh which is funny I've been thinking about that one it would be called the Dao of hyper growth oh my God I love that and actually I was thinking about doing it and taking actual clips from the daote ching and doing like textual analysis about how it applies to our life I've been thinking about this actual podcast for a while because I used to want to do the I mean Blog the Dao of Parenthood because basically parenting you like try to control and like fix all the things you didn't do right in your life but actually it's the act of like providing Freedom that lets them go out and explore and then come back to your way of being so I don't know I like the Dow

teaching I love it I see so many opportunities you got to stop what you're doing just write all these things I know but I love the hyper growth customers clients all right next question what is a favorite interview question that you like to ask so this is a little heavy but it actually is my favorite it's how many people have you fired and tell me about each of the experiences so the reason I asked this question is because generally I'm managing teams of managers and generally I need people who have managed many people for a longer period of time or even if they're Junior managers how long and how many people they've managed is indicated by how many people they fired because if you've never fired anyone then you haven't managed very many people for very long unfortunately and firing people is the hardest part of a Leader's career so how they talk about it like you know their compassion and like their need to like

Drive the business and like the circumstances like was it layoffs how how did that work did you have to Performance manage someone out how did it work did you just have to restructure the team because of business goals how did it work gives you a lot of insight into their experience and their Humanity in a way that they're not prepared for so you really get the real story um and get a sense for what they would be like as a leader under a lot of pressure and difficult situations I've never heard that one before and I love it reminds me of a episode with Matt mashari where we talk about how to lay people off really successfully yeah it's hard yeah next question what's a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love so I follow my favorite products to the companies that I advise I love one password I've got my 85 year old grandfather and all of my family and friends set up on it I love the

cross-platform nature I love Miro and white boards I joined product board because of this cross company alignment and like views into what's coming up on the roadmap which is really the most important thing for the company momentum as we talked about having like a great product and a great product strategy and then I'm I'm dabbling in all the AI things I want to be like excellent in AI visualization and art I'm experimenting with mid-journey but still kind of flailing I've hired my 13 year old as the most strategic advisor and um yeah I'd love to work for openai and chat GPT it's it's really interesting what's something relatively minor that you've changed in the way a product is built or just a company operates that has led to tremendous impact on their ability to execute on the product side one of the concepts that I really like is the Amazon concept around writing the press release at the beginning of a

product ideation so one of the issues between marketing and product is the product will work so hard on something and there'll be lots of different features but it won't really be a theme that the marketing team can talk about and then someone hands it to marketing and says like make this marketable then we said like well is it it's like kind of one of my mentors had this comment it's a bag of doorknobs quick what do I do with this bag of doorknobs no one wants to buy a bag of doorknobs they want you know to buy the door and like the concept so I like this idea of writing a press release like it starts with the end in mind and then negotiate like is this good enough like will this really resonate or is this really what we're trying to build or is this really the outcome we're trying to get with products so I've heard about Amazon do it we experimented with it at Classy I haven't done it at Mass scale

but I love the concept final question I know your meditator we've talked a little bit about your Buddhist nature what's one tip for people that have been trying to meditate and just can't make it happen what's your one tip for helping people meditate more often so I'm a cheater because I was groomed to meditate I don't remember how early but I remember that the first meditations my mom had me listen to was like a rainbow butterfly as I fell asleep when I was like in kindergarten so I've been meditating my whole life with mixed success and the real secret is just that there's no right way that there's no wrong way that it's just making the time to be present and breathe and sense and being here now and so I use guided meditations mostly because I'm not the best at quieting my own mind so I like I'm Thrifty so I use some free meditations I use tarabrock who's a great meditator who has short and long

kind of concept meditations and I like this old one called meditation Oasis which actually isn't in publishing anymore but it's still a podcast and I re-listen to all there's over and over so stick with it is the secret to meditation and just any benefits you get from being present in meditation hopefully carry over to be being present in life my whole body just relaxes you're talking through all that so you have a skill Carrie Lou this was amazing we learned how to grow products how to live better lives how to become more mindful two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to learn more reach out or and or how can listeners be useful to you follow me on LinkedIn or I have a new blog cariloo.com on substack thanks to Lenny for the inspiration and uh you know I still have one more advisory slot open and I'd love to work with more AI companies I just joined weights and

biases in the ml op space but if you know of other great scale up AI companies I'd love to help Junior Marketing Executives or first-time Founders see you at the next stage of growth looks like and and get there amazing and again if they are interested in that how do they reach out to you on LinkedIn or through cariloo.com amazing Carrie thank you again so much for making time and for being here thanks for having me Lenny bye everyone bye thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode