Lauryn Isford
Head of Growth at Airtable
Lauryn Isford was Head of Growth at Airtable and previously led growth initiatives at Facebook/Meta, specializing in onboarding optimization and activation strategy.
Dimension Profile
Key Themes
Episode Summary
Lauryn Isford dives deep into onboarding as the most undervalued growth lever, sharing how she led a redesign of Airtable's onboarding that drove a 20% lift in activation. She offers a contrarian perspective on experimentation culture, arguing growth teams should use A/B tests primarily for risk mitigation rather than as a default practice, and shares tactical advice on defining activation metrics.
Leadership Principles
- → Onboarding is the single biggest undervalued growth lever for self-serve products
- → Experiment when you need to, not by default — see it primarily as risk mitigation
- → A lower activation rate threshold with higher retention correlation is better than a high-percentage vanity metric
Notable Quotes
"An activation rate that falls in a lower percentage range, maybe for most companies five to 15%, is better than one that falls in a higher percentage range because it means that there's likely much higher correlation with long-term retention."
— On how to properly define an activation metric
"The investments we made in onboarding over about a six to eight month period together drove a 20% lift in activation rate for Airtable."
— Quantifying the impact of Airtable's onboarding redesign
"There's generally two reasons why a growth team wants to experiment: to understand metric impact precisely, and risk mitigation. Sometimes you don't need either."
— Her contrarian take on why growth teams over-index on A/B testing
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