Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers

Laura Schaffer, VP of Growth at Amplitude and previously a growth leader at Twilio and Rapid, talks with Lenny Rachitsky about career growth by staying close to customers, running experiments and handling their pitfalls, onboarding psychology, and selling to developers. The conversation also covers PLG versus sales-led motions and a few lightning-round picks.

01Key learnings

• Build career momentum beyond your manager by learning your customers deeply and sharing those insights, which makes you a go-to subject matter expert across the company.
• Share customer insights regularly and make them visible; a recurring voice-of-the-customer report can grow into a forum that executives attend and that earns you credibility.
• Expect many ideas to be rejected; treat each refusal as a chance to bring better information, since leaders value insights they cannot gather from their own vantage point.
• Pay attention to the user's psychology during onboarding: adding simple, relevant questions can reduce anxiety and lift conversion, even when it seems like added friction.
• Favor iterative experiments over full redesigns, since most hypotheses fail; ship early, somewhat embarrassing versions to learn quickly and cheaply.
• Validate ideas cheaply first with painted-door tests and mockups before investing in full A/B tests, reducing the failure rate by failing faster.
• Commit to a game plan and hypothesis before running an experiment, and corroborate quantitative results with qualitative feedback to avoid massaging data to fit a story.
• When selling to developers, invest in self-serve experiences and proof-of-concept paths, because developers must verify tools themselves and rarely trust sales or marketing content.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.