5 Practical Tips about B2B and Career Growth and Strategy from Elena Verna

Welcome to the latest issue of the Product Management Learning Series - a series of live streaming events and newsletter articles to help you level up your product career! ??

?In our 10th installment, Elena Verna , the Head of Growth at Amplitude joined us. She is also a Growth Advisor to many companies including Krisp, MongoDB, Builder.io, and Maze. She is a Board Member and Former Interim Head of Growth at Netlify. She was formerly CMO at Miro, SVP for Product & Growth at Malwarebytes, and SVP of Growth at SurveyMonkey. Her specialty is standing up product-led growth models for B2B companies.

If you missed the event, you can watch the full event recording here. ?

Below are the main takeaways from the conversation I had with Elena:

Know your starting point and destination goal to sequence your growth motions.?

Elena shared this 3x3 growth motions x levers combo to show how companies can have different growth motions for each growth lever. The strategy is not about which 3x3 square is right for you, but rather which one you should start with and how to sequence them. The most successful companies own all 9 squares as their companies and products scale.?????

Elena went on to share two examples to bring this to life. The first example is Amplitude, which is transitioning from a heavy sales-led motion to be more product-led. Amplitude has a very robust freemium plan to lower the cost of acquisition and barrier to entry. Companies can start using Amplitude completely for free and start seeing value from the product. For Amplitude, most of the acquisition comes from marketing and sales channels, whereas activation and engagement is product-led, it's all self-serve and meant to generate usage and showcase the product value. And finally, monetization is only sales-led, but the company is currently prototyping with different growth motions for the future.??

On the other hand, Elena’s second example, Miro, started with product-led growth and added sales and marketing-led growth on top of it. Miro acquires users by having existing users invite new users to collaborate on whiteboards. It then monetizes through self-serve online channels and retention is fully self-serve through environmental and manufactured triggers applied to users. As Miro started scaling, they started adding marketing-led motions and sales-led motions, to start doing product-led sales and expanding into the enterprise market.??

Read more about the growth motions and levers here. ?

Find Product Market Fit first, then collect the data, and then grow.

It will be a fruitless effort to grow something that has not yet reached Product Market Fit (PMF). You need to first validate the hypothesis that the problem exists in the market and can actually be solved by your product. Elena noted that your PMF can not be determined by your ability to acquire customers alone; true PMF is your ability to retain customers over time and continuously deliver value. Only then can you meaningfully start to think about scaling the product.?

Intuition can only take you so far. Once you’ve found your PMF, don’t jump right into growth mode yet. Think about how to collect data and connect your intuition with what's actually happening to the product to understand the true levers, and hone in on the right decision making to grow these levers to drive product growth.?

Prioritize building loops, not funnels when growing your product.?

Elena discussed the value in thinking about loops instead of funnels for your product. Funnels imply a never-ending model of more: pushing your customers down a chain, with monetization as the last step of the chain. To be able to monetize, more and more needs to be pushed towards the top of the funnel to create the desired monetization outcome. This means more money, more channels, more resources, more tactics to strengthen the top of the funnel for eventual growth towards the bottom. Funnels are leaky buckets.?

Instead, Elena believed that loops, a self-sustaining flywheel that has its outputs reinvested back in as inputs, is a stronger and more lucrative path towards continuous and sustainable growth. Elena finished this thought by saying that “Funnels are fuel. Loops are engines.” Successful growth often leverages funnels to feed loops but prioritizes building loops.

Build a culture to embrace failures to learn fast and close perception vs. reality gaps.

Elena emphasized the importance of failure for an individual and a team to continue to progress and learn. Elena mentioned if you only know how to win, then it might be hard to tell if you are winning because you are getting lucky, or if you truly have a strong foundation for your product. Failures help you bridge the gap between perception and reality in product development and help you refine your hypotheses.??

Having the ability to not only move past failures but also to embrace them is equally as important. Elena went as far to say that she would set a goal for her teams to allow for 50% of initiatives on their roadmap to end in failure. This growth mindset of trying things and being allowed to fail is the key to achieve breakthrough product innovations.

Learn more about the 5 laws of growth from Elena here. ?

Grow your career like a product and focus on acquisition, retention, and monetization.?

Elena discussed thinking of your career as a product and focusing on your career growth in the forms of acquisition, retention, and monetization. From an acquisition perspective, just as we wouldn’t wait for customers to find our product, we shouldn't sit idle for recruiters to reach out to notice us. Try speaking at conferences, posting on LinkedIn, writing a blog, or participating in networking events to increase your reach and personal brand awareness.?

When thinking about retention Elena mentioned to think about your value metric. She invited the audience to reflect on this question: ‘What is your superpower?’ A superpower is something that you're really good at and you absolutely love doing. This superpower should be something that you exercise within the company at all times. The only way to progress in your role is to continuously apply superpowers on a daily or weekly basis and not get distracted. Case in point: as our PM Learning Series guest, Elena’s value metric during our 30 minutes chat was the amount of insights shared to our audience per minute (thank Elena!).

And lastly, when thinking about monetization for our careers think about what you are trying to optimize for. Know your career use case changes over time (and often depending on your life stages), whether you are continuing to progress in a full time position, or branching out to become an entrepreneur or take on advisory roles, make sure your goals guide the direction you take your career. Read more about how to grow your career like a product here .??

Additional gems from Elena:

?? Miro , an online collaborative whiteboard platform, Krisp , a noise canceling software, and Amplitude , for product analytics, are Elena’s favorite products.?

?? Elena shared that her two product role models are Selina Tobaccowala, her manager when she worked at Survey Monkey, and Brian Balfour, the CEO of Reforge.?

?? Elena mentioned that her final piece of advice is to learn from others. She said that you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, innovate on what has already been discovered by reading, scrolling through the internet, and making connections with others.

?? Special kudos to Andrew Altschuler for drafting this article.

Next up,

• August 19: Building High-Performing Teams & Transitioning to People Leadership with Liz Li
• September 9: Applying the Lean Product Process to Build Great Products with Dan Olsen
• September 23: [Special Edition] Breaking into AI Product Management with Marily Nika
• October 7: Use Behavioral Economics to Design Better Products with Kristen Berman
• October 14: Building Subscription Products & Becoming a Thought Leader with Robbie Kellman Baxter
• October 21: Content Creation & Product Community Building with Felix Watson

More sessions to be added later… subscribe to stay tuned!?

Learn more about the Product Management Learning Series and view past recordings here .