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Lessons learned from leading Growth at Postman and Dropbox

Phil Vander Broek's headshotPhil Vander Broek
  • October 12, 2022
  • 11 min read

The role of a growth executive

Phil:

Phil

You're Head of Growth at Postman and you report to the CEO as a part of the executive leadership team. That's a pretty unique role for a growth leader. How do you define that role?

Jesse:

Jesse

It is unique. I see my role as somewhat similar to a general manager. I’m ultimately responsible for self-serve revenue of the business. I report on the self-serve business to both the rest of the executive team and the board.

I think of Growth as a horizontal. Growth is asking: how do we help users discover value up the value chain of the product and realize more of the value of the product in a way that leads to them becoming happy, retained paying users.

I have a team that's made up of cross-functional people that are working across the user journey to help users realize value in a way that leads to increasing self-serve revenue. We do this in partnership with the entire organization, but especially the Product organization.

Phil:

Phil

And how is the growth team set up relative to the product team?

Jesse:

Jesse

I think of growth as a horizontal. Growth is asking: how do we help users discover value up the value chain of the product and realize more of the value of the product in a way that leads to them becoming happy, retained paying users.

Whereas the product organization's highest-level goal is the number of retained active users on the product. And I think of them as much more vertical in that they are looking at specific feature areas, maintaining those feature areas, continuing to iterate and expand on them, as well as expanding to new features or products in a way that expands the base of users who want to come and become active, retained users on the product.

Phil:

Phil

How is the growth team set up relative to Sales and Marketing?

Jesse:

Jesse

We have a fairly clear delineation there because we have an enterprise product tier that is only available to be sold through Sales. We partner with them at times to align on customer segments both for how we're communicating with them, but also to define certain areas where Growth can help nudge customers towards sales. Otherwise, we can run fairly independently because of that separation.

Postman is lucky to have a massive community that loves the product and a strong brand affiliation that goes along with that.

And the marketing organization at Postman is actually mostly focused on brand. We have a marketing operations arm, but we don't have a traditional marketing organization that you would see doing work on landing pages or paid spend or anything like that.

Phil:

Phil

That’s unique. Where is that traditional Marketing work owned in Postman?

Jesse:

Jesse

Postman is lucky to have a massive community that loves the product and a strong brand affiliation that goes along with that. And that’s what drives our really large organic acquisition funnel for us. That being said, the Growth organization is starting to explore some acquisition techniques but it's probably going to be more around referral mechanisms and viral behavior for driving new user growth.

The three different types of Growth teams

Phil:

Phil

Before Postman you were Head of Growth at Dropbox and you're currently an angel investor and advisor to companies. From these experiences, how have you seen growth set up in other companies?

The right answer is very much driven by what the company needs, who the leaders actually are, and what the go-to-market motion the company has.

Jesse:

Jesse

One of the most typical ways I see Growth set up is inside the Product organization. So there will be a head of product and the growth org is one area within that. Often they're either responsible for revenue or possibly some leading indicator metrics or sales leads, depending on the type of go-to-market motion. And they are leveraging design and engineering resources in the same way as the entire product organization.

Another setup that I've seen is combining all the go-to-market functions into a revenue organization. This could be either under a CRO or I've even seen it sit under a sales leader. Often this is for much more sales-driven companies. In this set up the growth team is focused on driving product-qualified leads or iteration in service of the sales or Marketing team. In this way, it looks a little bit like a classic marketing org in some ways.

The third setup is seeing growth completely inside a Marketing organization. This is where you’ll see a focus on classic acquisition efforts, but with a heavy slant toward experimentation.

Phil:

Phil

How should a company think about deciding which setup is best for them?

Jesse:

Jesse

The right answer is very much driven by what the company needs, who the leaders actually are, and what the go-to-market motion the company has.

Phil:

Phil

Let’s dig into each. Can you give some more details about growth within a product org?

Jesse:

Jesse

In this case, the team is going to be a product growth organization that is working on activation efforts or other in-product experimentation that helps users realize value with the product.

You get this really clean communication loop where the Growth org knows what's coming and can be a really helpful go-to-market arm for new features.

In this set up you've got that experimentation sitting really close with the Product organization that is going out and launching new features to the customer base. So you get this really clean communication loop where the Growth org knows what's coming and can be a really helpful go-to-market arm for new features or can also start to implement a go-to-market motion ahead of the actual roadmap. And on the flip side, the Growth team can take the feedback that they're hearing and feed it right back into the Product organization.

And beyond the reporting structure, I think that what enables this is alignment on KPIs across the product organization, including growth, so that there's less chance of tension between what growth is trying to do and what the Product organization's working on. Here the tradeoff is going to be that it takes more work to align these efforts with the sales team.

Phil:

Phil

And how about growth in a revenue organization?

Jesse:

Jesse

It's, in some ways, the reverse of the previous setup. Now the tighter loop is going be with the sales organization. The con of being inside product is there's a higher chance that you've got a silo.

The failure mode when you have Growth in the Revenue org is sometimes it can turn into an engineering service organization for a Sales leader. This can be pretty disempowering for the people trying to run Growth.

With Growth sitting in the revenue organization, Growth is more likely to be incorporating feedback from what they are hearing from Sales. Salespeople are the very front line of hearing feedback from customers and what's working and what's not. They know the exact messaging and value propositions that land with users and having the Growth organization within that revenue org can make sure that they're applying those learnings and putting them into all of their growth motions as well.

The failure mode that I've seen when you have a Growth org in the revenue org is sometimes it can turn into an engineering service organization for a sales leader. This can be pretty disempowering for the people trying to run growth, where it becomes a bit thrashy and you're being told, no, we need this landing page and you've got go fire up some specific experiment for this one customer that we're trying to land today. And you don't get the time and space to do the kind of exploratory experimentation to actually learn, which I think is more ideal for growth orgs.

Phil:

Phil

And growth in a marketing org?

Jesse:

Jesse

I think that this really only makes sense when the growth organization is either focused primarily on experimentation to drive top-line acquisition or is pretty sales driven. At times this is actually just a rebrand of a classic marketing organization that has more focus on experimentation.

The ideal here is you get all the great parts of the marketing org, great messaging, paid spend, these types of things, connected with things that are happening deeper into the product.

The con is there might be some tension about working on the core product. And if the growth team is learning, it might be harder to get the learnings back into the product organization. And you might see KPIs less aligned between the marketing org and core product org. The classic tension in this setup is “who owns onboarding”.

Growth strategy at Postman

Phil:

Phil

Let's talk a little bit about your experience leading growth at Postman. What are the metrics or goals the growth team is responsible for at Postman?

Jesse:

Jesse

At the highest level, the growth team at Postman is responsible for long-term self-serve ARR.

My cross-functional partners and I started by looking at our current successful self-serve customers. What features had they adopted? What did their journey look like before they became happy paying customers?

I always like to overly emphasize the long-term aspect because I think it is important to recognize as a team — and to broadcast to the rest of the company — that ultimately there might be times when we choose to trade off not hitting our target in quarter in order to best set the company up to continue to grow in the long term.

And therefore would we never do something that hurts the business in some foundational sense, which can sometimes be a concern when a growth organization is introduced into a company.

Phil:

Phil

How do you and your team create a strategy to drive that long-term self-serve ARR number?

Jesse:

Jesse

My cross-functional partners and I started by looking at our current successful self-serve customers. What features had they adopted? What did their journey look like before they became happy paying customers?

The goal of the strategy is: how might we actually find a way to drive exponential revenue growth?

We then look at all those steps users have taken, both in terms of the data and also looking at the product experience, to help us start to identify broad areas of opportunity. When then outline where we want to focus and where we will ignore, which becomes a big part of the strategy.

The goal of the strategy is: how might we actually find a way to drive exponential revenue growth? In the long run, companies want to maintain or increase growth rates. That means that the actual amount of ARR you need to add every quarter in order to maintain those rates continues to increase.

Phil:

Phil

What's your approach to getting to that exponential growth strategy?

Jesse:

Jesse

Well now that we have this broad set of areas where we want to focus, we go back to the user journey. We take this and put it back together to determine what we see as our primary growth loop. We need to see that these areas will work together to drive more growth than they would individually. This then gives us confidence to set up cross-functional teams that are directed at each of those areas because we know they will together drive that exponential growth.

Phil:

Phil

How do you handle opportunities that exist across stages, like how different acquisition strategies might lead to different activation opportunities?

One of the first principles that I set up when joining Postman was for teams to think beyond the specific surface areas. I've found that if you tell teams “I want you iterating on these specific surface areas” then you're going to limit the ideas.

Jesse:

Jesse

This is a great question because I think once you get into the work within Growth teams, things start to get blurry.

One of the first principles that I set up when joining Postman was for teams to think beyond the specific surface areas. I've found that if you tell teams “I want you iterating on these specific surface areas” then you're going to limit the ideas. There might be a broader idea that cross-cuts or even removes one of those surface areas.

I see it as my responsibility to find when there are things that crosscut that no one's thinking about and layering those into our strategy to make sure we do them. I also expect each of the teams to find things that might help the other team if it’s the best thing for them to do for their particular metric.

Phil:

Phil

This is great. Do you have an example?

Jesse:

Jesse

Yea. For Postman, the main kind of unit of information is stored in something we call a collection. You can do a bunch of different things with it: you can use it as an individual user, but once you get into a team workspace the collection is where you'll have an API defined and you can have tests written against it, you can have documentation, it's all kind in this collection. The collection is this powerful thing that eventually should get shared with other users.

One of our team members realized it would make sense that if I'm already at an organization, even if I'm not yet even on a team when typing in a URL I should be able to discover that there are collections available somewhere at my company.

We easily could have said that expansion should be focused on the surface areas that drive inviting other people or sharing, but if we had done that then we may have never realized this opportunity.

This is something that not only will help with this single user's experience but will also drive expansion because it will help to draw people to the teams.

It turns out that for teams initially activating, we essentially need the same mechanism: if we can just get people to find a piece of a collection that helps them get started, it helps everything within the product.

So this work is a win for multiple teams. It actually cross-cuts across all teams. We easily could have said that expansion should be focused on the surface areas that drive inviting other people or sharing, but if we had done that then we may have never realized this opportunity.

Growth team structure at Postman

Phil:

Phil

How do you structure the growth team?

Jesse:

Jesse

The funnel is where we start figuring out how we're going to have teams up against particular KPIs. And it doesn't necessarily mean there's one-to-one, for example at Postman, we recently expanded the activation area to have one team for single-user activation and another for team activation because we recognized there was enough opportunity.

They're also responsible for deeply understanding their core metrics and being able to look across the business. So if they see their metric unexpectedly go down or unexpectedly go up, they should be able to answer why.

For each of these teams, it looks pretty similar to a lot of cross-functional Product teams in that there's a Growth product manager, a designer, and a group of engineers. We also have a dedicated product analyst for each one of these teams.

We see each of these teams as being like small business units for their KPI. So not only are they responsible for putting together a roadmap of experiments that they believe will improve their KPI, but they're also responsible for deeply understanding their core metrics and being able to look across the business. So if they see their metric unexpectedly go down or unexpectedly go up, they should be able to answer why after some amount of investigation.

They have that responsibility like a true business owner.

Phil:

Phil

This idea of being a business owner is unique to Growth PM. What else do you look for in hiring growth PMs?

Jesse:

Jesse

Most of the time, I find that a growth product manager is going to look pretty similar to a regular product manager. They're going to have solid product intuition, general leadership qualities for inspiring a cross-functional set of people, and managing through influence to get the team moving towards a goal. Really good communication.

The one area that I look for them to really spike is analytics. The person needs to be extremely comfortable with metrics and able to quickly get insights from data.

And then the other really key piece is this idea of them being a business owner. If they haven’t explicitly had to do this previously, then I listen for examples of demonstrating a sense of ownership when they talk about their work.

The future of PLG

Phil:

Phil

What do you see changing as product-led growth continues to become a more common product and business strategy?

Jesse:

Jesse

Product-led growth introduces the chance to disrupt everything in the GTM and product tooling stack. This has also created changes to roles and responsibilities within a company as well. This change is very clearly affecting the heads of product, heads of marketing, and heads of sales.

Product-led growth introduces the chance to disrupt everything in the GTM and product tooling stack.

One change I've been seeing is in the role of a CMO and marketing, in general. I’ve heard of companies who are hiring CMOs whose entire role is just focused on brand and not the traditional marketing qualified leads or a revenue number. Instead, the lead or revenue ownership is moving elsewhere.

Another change you’re starting to see is CROs that have teams under them that are both sales and product growth, and maybe even some parts of marketing. They're responsible for revenue and have all the levers for changing the pricing and packaging, doing the product-led experimentation, choosing when to drive users to self-serve, when to apply human touch. They have all of these motions underneath them and everything to drive the revenue number and be completely separate from Product. In this model, product owns an active user number.

The other new model that I've seen and heard about quite a bit is a head of product who also owns a revenue number or product-qualified lead number. This person's going to have a product org and a growth org and ultimately their goal is just to be driving that long-term revenue for the company. I think this model is still really early days but I believe Canva is an example of this and they are clearly doing something right.

Phil:

Phil

Alright, thanks so much for chatting Jesse!

Jesse:

Jesse

Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, Phil!


You can connect with Jesse on Twitter and LinkedIn.