Laura Schaffer
Head of Growth at Amplitude
Laura Schaffer is Head of Growth at Amplitude, previously VP of Product and Growth at Rapid and Head of Growth at Twilio where she built the growth engineering team from scratch.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Laura Schaffer shares her career growth framework of proactively surfacing customer insights to create your own opportunities, drawing on her experience building the growth team at Twilio from scratch. She offers contrarian advice on experimentation, arguing teams should sometimes just ship rather than A/B test everything, and explains how she grew her career by staying closer to customers than anyone else.
Leadership Principles
- → Carve your own path rather than waiting for one to be given to you
- → Your superpower is staying close to the customer and surfacing insights executives can't see
- → Sometimes you should just ship it rather than running an experiment
Notable Quotes
"We just asked for forgiveness and put these questions into the signup flow and ran as an A/B test with a small group... an improved conversion by like 5%, just improved signups."
— Describing a bold experiment at Twilio that unexpectedly improved conversion
"Your executive team and executive teams at companies are often very sharp, but the nature of their day-to-day just does not link them with customers."
— Explaining why staying close to customers is the most powerful career growth strategy
"There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing."
— Advising on how to build influence by sharing customer insights upward
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