Video feed === Lauren: [00:00:00] I remember we presented to our executive leadership team. We made them watch user videos of people trying to use the editor, and it was probably the most painful exec meeting of my life because we all cringed and like, oh, that should be so much easier to do than it is. Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders. Today we're talking with Lauren Schumann. VP of product growth at Bitly, and former senior Director of Product Growth at MailChimp. In this episode, we discuss how Lauren created PLG as a discipline at MailChimp and turned it into a systematic growth engine, the turnaround story behind a failed product launch and how it led to 183% spike in adoption overnight. And why lagging engagement push her to lead a ground up rebuild of MailChimp's core email editor to improve growth. So here's our conversation with Lauren Schumann. Jeff: All right, Lauren. Good to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on. Lauren: For having me. Jeff: Definitely. I think this one's gonna be a fun one. We got, we got a little background in common. You got a little bit more marketing in you than I think some of the product people we've, we've had [00:01:00] on previously. So. I am excited to nerd out a bit about PLG, but to dive into it, first of all, I think looking at how you got to where you are I know we say this every week, I feel like, but not the typical background. And I really mean it this time because you started more in merchandising in retail, but when you tell a story, it made perfect sense about how you went from like A to Z. But I think on face it's a little, unforeseen. So maybe can you just give us the quick, like, how did you get there from here? I think you're up in Maine, right? So like, I think the saying is like, you can't get there from here. But you can, in this case, I, but yeah, like how did you get from merchandising to growth product that, that doesn't seem like it makes sense, but it does at the same time. Lauren: Yeah, it's, it is definitely an interesting path. I haven't run past anybody else with this exact journey, but Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: to share a little bit more about it. I always think about, I. What is the connective tissue? And the way I [00:02:00] describe it is I kind of just followed the data and the technology. I went to school for marketing business undergrad. Always was interested in retail. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: know how it all worked and that led to early career as a buyer in a department store, and. What people think is not like Rachel and Friends where you just like picking merch and being like, oh, this is great. It's really about running a small business inside of a larger business. You learn to be very financially oriented from the very beginning. So managing what's called an open to buy, which is your p and Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: that's everything from inventory and supply chain to the product you're buying. Really understanding. customers, what they want, pricing, promotion, all of it in one to be successful. when I look back at, you know, sort of why I started there and, and what has carried through on my whole journey is I'm really just interested in human psychology and human behavior. So my favorite class was always consumer behavior. [00:03:00] I still read and study about it all the time. I think if I were to go back to school, that's what I would do is like go into psychology. But I really have followed this along the journey. And I started out as a buyer, the in-store model, brick and mortar was much more popular. Things were starting to all go online. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: e-commerce was really taking off. And I said, well, I need to go there. I need to go and learn. And so I was able to apply my background in buying and merchandising into this new realm of e-commerce. And I think one thing I'm really proud of is I'm never afraid of what's new. I sort of just follow it, go, try, learn, apply what I know and bring it to that. So e-commerce introduced me to the whole new world of. Different kind of data. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: digital analytics where you now could see what everybody's doing online. You have AB testing, really understanding site behavior. And learning technology because how people buy you need to present them the right features and functionality like site search and navigation and [00:04:00] all of these things. But ultimately it's all about driving revenue. And so I really took all of those learnings and then eventually had the opportunity to join a mobile SaaS company as director of merchandising, which seems like a weird role, but ultimately it. Speed to see product where they didn't actually know how to sell online. And so it was there that I had my first taste of product marketing. combined Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: I had the opportunity there to really try on the hat of what is this new thing called product-led growth. And product-led growth became the niche that I've played in for about the past 10 years. combines being super revenue focused really data-driven like my past, and then it kind of combines the marketing product and analytics altogether. And so I've carved out a sort of a niche there. Jeff: Yeah, it's interesting 'cause I feel like, you know, over the time doing this, we've, we've had over 50 episodes at this point talk to hundreds of product leaders in the past, you know, a year or two. The [00:05:00] details of what you describe are different, right? Like, merchandising, e-commerce up through that. But at heart it's the same thing. It's understanding the business, it's understanding the p and l. How do you make money? I went into marketing and I, I have a degree, you know, in marketing originally, and it's because exactly the same thing. I really wanted to understand how humans. Behaved and why humans did things. And it was all about human behavior. And I thought that was, you know, marketing's a great business application of that, but it turns out so is product. But we hear this time and time again is this focus on, I just wanted to solve business problems by understanding users and, and solving, you know, ultimately their problems too and, and making the business money while we did it. And that's seems to be this, the kind of overarching. View of you can, you can speak marketing, you can speak product that can turn into PLG. But in the end, you know, if you bring these characteristics together, being able to understand data and put it all together into a cohesive strategy, you're going to do well in product. And it, it's so cool to always see like the different ways to kind get into the same place. Lauren: I feel like [00:06:00] I'm going way back, but one of the four P's of marketing is product. And Jeff: yeah. Lauren: forget that, like it's rooted in what is the product that you're selling. And so a lot of the skill sets are the same. It's just sort of how you want to apply and Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: it. And I. have enjoyed being sort of the translator where maybe I don't come from like a technical background, but I can learn to speak, software development with engineers. I can learn to speak design, I learn to speak marketing. But I think sometimes what maybe more core product leaders miss is some of the commercialization piece. And so that comes like supernaturally to me. So you're always. Learning different pieces based on your, what comes naturally to, to you. And for me it's just been a little bit more of like traditional product management. Jeff: To your point, you know, marketing's only gonna go so far if, if you don't have a great product, marketing's not gonna do all that much for you. It'll help, but you're still gonna hit a a ceiling. But conversely, you know, I think we've found time and time again, great product without great go to market. [00:07:00] Also, kind of Aspen tos not that high. So it's both. And you know, having a leadership team that can speak both, you know that that's the magic, and that's, that's where it happens. So, you know, I think we can dive in a bit and, you know, you talked about, you went through kind of like merchandising. You went through a mobile SaaS startup and, and how that experience helped, but ultimately it culminated, in a company that I think everyone has heard of and is just so widely known, I, I was a customer for, you know, 10, 15 years probably, and loved the product, but you end up at MailChimp to begin their growth practice, which is wild to think because they were product led before. It was cool, but they just didn't even know to call it that. Lauren: Yeah, MailChimp was really, I'd say my big break. Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: I was living in Atlanta, awesome. Atlanta based company, totally bootstrapped, growing like crazy awesome brand. And our CMO at the time, Tom Klein, I like to thank him gave him the chance to come in on the marketing team and lead what they were calling marketing [00:08:00] optimization, which kind of was this like broad charter of. Hey, we have opportunity to, you know, better serve content in our product experience and in our marketing channels to the right customers at the right time. a lot of my experience sort of in, in merchandising and e-commerce was marketable to him, Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: I understood e-commerce SMBs was a big customer target for MailChimp. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: I joined the team and it was interesting because coming in I realized that actually this. Company had a ton of opportunity to apply some of the frameworks, the data-driven decision making and experimentation of PLG, and they were not doing any of that. And so I, I spent probably my first 90 days just talking to literally like Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: all different teams to get a sense of what the key problems they were trying to solve, then figure out how I was going to educate the company on what PLG was and how to get a chance at actually bringing it to [00:09:00] MailChimp. Jeff: because in your previous company you had entered, again as kind of more marketing merchandising, but you had, I think, transitioned into a bit of a product role, correct. Lauren: That's right. So I have made the move from marketing to product several times. Now I've, the last several roles I've kind of started in product, but in the early days, especially when people really weren't sure about this PLG thing, it was a pretty common path to kind of start in marketing and then move into product. I. Jeff: Right. So you had experience here and , how do you sneak in under the radar to the guise of marketing and, you know, start to infiltrate the product team and, and push more? But like at heart, you have to, if you're only talking about like user acquisition and kinda the superficial, very top of the funnel numbers, there's only so much you're ever gonna impact. But if you can look at you know, , the whole funnel there, that's when you can drive real product like growth. Otherwise, it's just kind of growth, which growth is fine, but you need both. Lauren: Yeah, and that's where it started at MailChimp. And so I had access to sort of the marketing owned channels. Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: homepage email in particular were kind of two channels where I had odd opportunity to experiment. [00:10:00] So Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: you know, I just started by hiring a small, scrappy team of sort of really smart generalists who could do analytics and some of the AB testing and. We're operating like product managers inside of marketing, Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: we started to see what problems really mattered to the company. , and at this time, MailChimp was going from being just a email provider to being more of like a all in one marketing platform for small businesses. And so we were launching a bunch of new features like landing. We weren't getting as much traction as we wanted on adoption. And, Jeff: Mm. Lauren: so I said, okay, well, like, rather than think about this from a, Hey, let's optimize our content, like let's go after a problem that we care about, which is how do we get more people to know about this like landing page feature that we just launched? Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: was really through that like mentality of the right business problem and using sort of smart testing and experimentation. That kind of caught my big break at break at MailChimp. So we looked at the homepage [00:11:00] experience and we realized that in order to log into MailChimp. You actually had to go through the homepage experience, but everybody was getting the same experience, which was like sign up for free. And that made no sense for existing customers because they were already there. They didn't need to sign up. So we actually ran an experiment where we targeted the homepage, add existing customers, and we did like a nice hero message that said, Hey, you know, introducing landing pages and then it deep linked into the product to try it. And as a result of that experiment, we drove, I think it was like 183% increase in landing page usage with existing customers. And you know what's really interesting about that? That's a very merchandise kind of thing, right? Your homepage hero could be your featured item on your e-commerce store. Similar principle applied here but just for what you were offering from your SaaS product. Jeff: Right. But you know, you run into here, right? People think about growth as, oh, you're gonna get us new users and we'll take care of showing them, you know, the, the features we have and all that, and kinda get them to [00:12:00] expand. But I think you talked about earlier, you guys suddenly saw spikes into other feature sets from existing customers that were just off the charts compared to what had been seen before. Because it was starting to use these tactics, like you said , to start to personalize and, and say like, we've accomplished acquisition. The next problem is showing, you know, breadth and, and starting to build, you know, a product experience, albeit a very early stage part of it. Seems like it. I mean, it really drove results. Lauren: Yeah, it really drove results in ultimately what it led. Two was actually, we were focused on the ROM problem. Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: I kind of used the identified problem as a way to get attention and show like what this type of thinking could do. But actually ultimately it led to focusing more on the beginning of the customer experience and activation and onboarding. So it's really interesting that, one thing I really love about product-led growth is it blurs the line across the entire customer journey, right? It doesn't really matter if it's, sales or human touch, [00:13:00] or if it's customer support territory, or if it's product or if it's marketing, like Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: end user. It's. All their experience. Jeff: Right. Lauren: so I think that's one nice thing about sort of sitting at the center of all of it is a lot of it is just translation across teams of, Hey, this is a problem we're trying, here are all the different places, which maybe it sense. Jeff: So some companies are more collaborative than others, but I think in general, when you start to see one department going, Hey, I think we have better ways to do this, Lauren: Mm-hmm. Jeff: that can be really touchy. You know, we'd all like to think we are big enough to, to be open to ideas, but I think sometimes it'd be a little more political than other times. And, and how did you kind of navigate that, right? How did you kind of push it and say, maybe there's other ways we can think about this here. Lauren: Yeah, to work really hard at building cross-functional relationships and build trust. And so when I first did my intros, it was made pretty clear to me that I should go like play in my marketing playground and come back when I have something interesting to Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: [00:14:00] And so part of that was learning what. The problem sets, you know, different teams are solving what are their goals, what matters to them, and trying to relate to that. So instead of like coming in and trying to seem like I'm pushing my agenda or my team, it was like, how can I help you do your job better? That was one thing. And then the other thing was I just needed to get some wins on the board honestly, so that people would be like, oh, okay, this thing works. This actually makes sense. And that's why, you know, picking the experiment around driving feature adoption of a brand new feature. Like we just spent all this time and money launching this and we weren't getting the adoption we wanted. I knew that was the thing that people cared about. I actually didn't think it was the most impactful thing for revenue, but I knew sort of politically that that would get energy and ultimately it. I still remember getting a slack message like two weeks later where someone said, Hey, I'm in a meeting, and the CEO is saying like, Hey, that thing we did over there, like, can't we do more of that in other places? And [00:15:00] I was like, cha-ching. Like, that's my moment. And Jeff: Right. Lauren: because it, it, it gathered interest in a new way of thinking, a new way of, approaching solving some of these problems. I ultimately actually had the opportunity to come in and join the product organization, bring the marketing team I had built with me, and combine with an existing product team and actually tackle the work that they were doing a PLG perspective instead of thinking about it like we had in terms of core product. Jeff: I mean, I, I don't think I could count the number of times you, you know, you come in with the right idea politically, there's not the will to make it happen. Or just hard, right? Like everyone kinda set in their ways and I think people often discount. The value of just go notch, a big win. And I, that's, you know, much easier to say than do just, just go get like a huge triumph and then go, you know, and that'll help. But like, look for where can you get, you know, something that's going to make noise be noticeable. And, you know, maybe tangentially is gonna [00:16:00] further another goal, but like in your case, you had access to the homepage experience. You could drive that, but you could think about it more than just acquisition. It's how can we push people into these other feature sets that, that we've launched but maybe aren't getting the user love that we want. But sometimes you just gotta figure out how to do that. I've gone back and forth and this and, typically, you know, troublemakers end up being the ones who get really far, right? Like, you kind of gotta steer the pot once in a while. And, you know, I guess the corollary, you gotta be okay with the repercussions. Once in a while you're gonna get slapped on the wrist or worse. But when you notch the win, it's really hard to argue with the results when you come back and say like, we did this thing and it worked really well. So maybe it's, ask forgiveness, not permission. And then, the ends kinda justify the means in this case. Lauren: Yeah. And honestly in this, every organization is really different and you really need to understand like how decisions are made, who holds power. You don't wanna come in and bulldoze, get a Jeff: No. Lauren: piss the entire like organization off because you will never be successful. And I've seen that and I've made some mistakes in that area [00:17:00] as I was like trying to figure out the culture and understand. What motivated individual groups and how they work. So I think understanding how teams work is really important. And the other thing I really learned was it's not about necessarily like. Doing it perfectly or precisely in the beginning. 'cause if I had come in and said, you know what? Like, oh, this product adoption thing, this doesn't matter. You guys have it all wrong. Actually we should be focusing on activation. And I had gone and gotten a win under that. People would've been like, yeah, but we don't really care about that right Jeff: Right. Lauren: So there's an incredible amount of. I'd say like emotional intelligence to Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: the dynamics of the organization, what would be a smart way of, helping align to the existing goals. And then you build the trust and you open the conversation such that people start to say, oh, okay, like maybe I can listen to this thing Lauren has to say that's a new way of working or a new area of opportunity. And then those things come a lot easier for you. Jeff: Right. it [00:18:00] definitely is. You don't want just barge in and get what you think is a big win. It's the level of EQ you need to kind of balance. Like how hard do you push, how do you color outside the lines? How do you find the thing that's kind of enough in your purview where you're not stepping on toes too much, but at the same time enough outside where you're gonna make your mark to be able to start to push further. Much, much easier said than done, but you did it. And then started to push into, well, I guess, started to get pulled into product more and more at that point. Which I guess led to other findings that, you know, like we said earlier on, you can't successfully market and drive growth and acquisition and really anything with any semblance of positive, you know, LTV if you don't have great product behind it. And I, it sounds like this kind of led to. Some identification of maybe , the email editor itself needed, a little work and a little dust up. And again, as a user at the time I thought it was great. I'll be honest. Like I, I love that thing. I always thought, but I do remember this kind of like evolution over [00:19:00] about that kind of like 17, 18, 19 time period. And it did, make my experience a lot better as a user. So. Lauren: love hearing that. Yeah, so, so as I mentioned, MailChimp was really focused in on moving to an all in one marketing Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: and we actually didn't have a core email team anymore. So we had gone all in on resourcing these other areas and we kind of were on. Set it and forget it Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: core experience. And so one of the things that I first did when I had an opportunity to take over this product team and like build our first growth practice was start to work backwards from retention and define some of the key parts of the customer journey framework. I love from Reforge, huge fan of their work. , and that was part of it is like thinking about what does it mean to be like a, a positively retained customer? What is your habit moment? What is your activation? Specifically your aha and your setup moment. We had never thought about that. We never defined that. So we went through the exercise of doing that both [00:20:00] qualitatively and quantitatively. And it led to this definition of sending your first campaign and your first seven days to 10 plus people. And that was basically like, Hey, I'm seeing the value. I've been able to, it's not just like a test to myself or my buddy. Like it's a real send. And what does that mean? and what was really powerful is we were able to say for every point increased this activation or aha rate, it was worth x millions of dollars. So like we connected product experience to metric, to money. we worked on that experience, understanding it , from like tearing down the funnels to, to using user research to a bunch of experience for over a year. And we were only making like. Slight progress. Like there were no like massive wins. And it actually was through combining all of those learnings and some user research that we realized we could fix all of these, optimizations of the existing experience. But where people were getting stuck was the core email Jeff: Yeah.[00:21:00] Lauren: And I remember we actually presented to our executive leadership team, we made them watch user videos of people trying to use the editor. And it was , probably the most painful, exact meeting of my life because we all cringed and we're like, oh, that should be so much easier to do than it's, but ultimately, between all of that experimentation, the analysis and the user research, it helped us build the case and we spun up a team. Who worked on totally revamping that editing experience and as you mentioned a much improved part, which Jeff: Yeah, Lauren: ultimately allowed us to move that activation number, which really was just about getting people started and successful, early on in their journey. Jeff: so I gotta ask was, you know, even at that point were their product kinda grown and matured? Were you acquiring users because of this kind of more complete marketing solution, or was it mostly around that kind of core? People came in for email and then they kind of expanded into other use cases , as they maybe grew or adopted? Lauren: They all came in for email Jeff: [00:22:00] Yeah. Lauren: The amount of times that I've seen this play out in companies where it's like. You start to deviate from what you are really good at in your core, and then you fall behind in it because you're pursuing something else. It's a very delicate balance between, you know, how you resource and how you move forward. And that's exactly what we did. And actually what's really interesting is if you look at MailChimp now, ultimately they sold to Intuit for a lot of money and now they're back to email and Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: core focus. So I think that says a lot. Jeff: Well, like at heart, right? You gotta kind of think about what do people come to you for? And it probably doesn't shift all that much over time. You can add on, you know, services and and breadth and stuff. But I do have this kind of theory that I try to stick to as where I. Even here as we're thinking about, you know, how do we look at products we're launching or, or ancillary benefit we kind of add or the way we talk about the product. Or even like, you know, we talked about before we started recording today, we, we had a big launch this morning and when this goes out, you know, that launch will now be a week or two in the past. But [00:23:00] everything we did around that circled around., people at heart think about us as a session replay company and we added, you know, AI to drive signal from that, from for you. And we, , today what we launched is kind of this idea of an AI product manager who can watch sessions and then start to process, , kinda one or two circles out from your session replay to automatically parse that in context of your digital experience you're serving. So again, in context of that, core thing we were watching already for MailChimp. Right? You did email. And that's what brought me in, you know, back when I was a user years ago, is we had a, I'll, I'll be honest, we had a beer and food festival company where we ran beer and cheese festivals basically, and beer and chocolate festivals and beer and barbecue festivals. And it was all local. It was, it was a lot of fun. I'm gonna be honest, that was a, that was a hobby that got way outta control and was totally, I'm super stoked. It did. But we came to MailChimp because we wanted a way to send emails to our users about our events, and we needed a way to communicate that. And then as you guys added more functionality, we saw some of it was really [00:24:00] useful and we used some of it. But at heart, if you didn't have the email, we were gonna probably have to go find something else. And you always gotta kind of keep a eye to like, what are you at Core? What does your user come in for? Or, when I was at a different company, they had kind of backend a PM. They started to add synthetics and rum and network analytics and, and database analytics and all these kind of things. And we started to try and sell all these things at once. And then finally, I remember the day I was so happy. We said, no, these are add-on products. You know, a PM is core and you sell a PM and then you expand. And it, it, our business just took off. It ended up being a, I think at peak of \ 20 some odd billion dollar business. But you gotta stick to that. Like, here's what we do. And then you can kind of work your way out. But you always gotta keep an eye on, you know, how many circles are you going out? And you can't jump like five circles at once or else people go like, why are you doing this thing Lauren: Yeah, and I think this is tricky for every business of how much do you build versus do you integrate Jeff: right? Lauren: what makes sense. [00:25:00] Been dealing with that a Bitly as well, where we're like, Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Lauren: from link management to adding in QR code technology and landing pages and all those compliments. Super well. But then. You know what's next, right? Do you try to compete with existing products or you know that somebody else is already doing something in another part of the workflow, and so you just integrate in the places that they are. Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: that was sort of ultimately what MailChimp was trying to figure out too, is like, where can they uniquely add value because of access to context or access to the email data, where are they just simply trying to build something that already exists in a better way. And I think in the world of ai, this is gonna be even more important, is Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: out, you know, certainly that integration strategy, like how much do versus how much you actually. Jeff: I think even one level beyond that is. Why do you build verse integrate? Because I think it used to be like right now, or, here [00:26:00] backwards in a lot of tool sets, it was, you had to kind of build a bit because there was no great way to interpret other people's data or, or, so yes, you could bring it in, you could ETL, it, you could do all these things, but at heart you were still kind of just a little bit like parsing and a little bit just linking, saying, now go over there to look at this thing. In this world of kind of smarter, more nuanced data combination, you don't need that deep, deep ETL to make everything sync together. You don't need that. You can just bring it in and kind of understand how they relate. Maybe a little bit more nuanced, and, and maybe I'm getting this wrong, but it seems like there's a potential for a world where you can integrate more. You don't need to build that experience, but you can bring the value in of. What someone else built in a lot more holistic way. And, and I'm curious to see like do we end up in a world where a lot more, you know, people are competing to be that kind of central hub without having to build all the nuanced data connections you just kinda integrate in and make it happen. It's, it's, I'm curious to see what [00:27:00] happens around like centricity and things becoming point solutions and stuff like that. Lauren: me too. I actually just wrapped up an AI strategy course also with Reforge, and that was like a big conversation of how you compete, whether you become a closed system or Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: are an open system, and like the open system of course helps you from a distribution perspective. A closed system though would help you protect the data and. If we all get to the point where we have access to the same amount of data, like how do you pick what is ultimately that place? And I think it's super interesting to watch, I mean, with the AI agent market right now, like Jeff: Yeah, Lauren: the incumbent win or does somebody else win? And like why? And it's, I mean, the speed of innovation. I talk about falling data and technology. I don't think any of us can keep up fast enough. I Jeff: no. Lauren: it's something new. I'm certainly trying, and that's like currently where I'm at on my journey is actually like the intersection of , AI and PLG. And how will that change how we think about, you know, what data we have access to, [00:28:00] how we're applying it to the customer experiences. Like I've worked on things like activation and onboarding at just about every company that I've worked in, and you start to recognize patterns and playbooks and things and like you apply, you know, checklists and guided walkthrough like that. Well, that's gonna be the past, right? Like, Jeff: No. Lauren: so much more will be natural language. Truly personalized. I've Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: the soapbox that like, we've not really ever done personalization for the most PO part. We've just done like categorization or contextualization, but I really feel like we're on the precipice of actually doing like real personalization in the future. So it's super interesting to see how all of that combines together. Jeff: Well, one is, and maybe we can jump to this we we're just gonna jump all around structures going out the window. But I guess that's the world we live in, like we said, of smarter data integration and maybe a little bit more ephemeral data structures is like you talked about kind of going from I. PLG and growth into more of a product role. And then you end actually ended up building, you know, the product analytics teams and the [00:29:00] insights groups and, and that kind of thing at MailChimp. But speaking of ai, like that's another world that's going to get upended here because at heart, right? Like maybe you try to talk to as many users as you can and you try to look at analytics and figure out what it means. But when you have , this, you know, world of ai, again, you don't have to pick and choose where your attention goes. It can synthesize from the totality and raise up like, the AI agent did watch every session for you. I did view every path that users took, and I synthesized it into like, here's the problems you need to look at. Not just the ones you found or someone complained about, but like, here's the things you didn't know about too. And you don't need to take the time. So what do we do with that time back and that better insight into maybe real time, like, this problem is happening now, it's going to get worse, but , it's starting now, so it doesn't ever get to the point where it affects. Conversion rates , in a big way or something. I'm curious to see where that goes because that's, I'll be honest, selfishly, that's, that's the problem we're tackling right now. But academically, that's just something I'm super interested in anyway. And what drew me [00:30:00] to the company, you know, a seven years ago at this point. So, Lauren: I feel like speed of learning is just exponential, and that's incredible because ultimately, like, especially from a PLG perspective, it's all about how quickly you can learn, you're gonna have new bottlenecks and, and. Right. So I think a lot about actually go to market, as we were talking about earlier, is like you can build, but can people find, can Jeff: Mm-hmm. Lauren: Do they adopt it? We're still humans at this point on the other end of the adoption. And so I know, I, I know I went dark. I went to like, wait, we're building technology for other humans, but they weren't be humans anymore. So we're building technology for other technology like. Jeff: It should be agents talking to agents and like that's it. We're all gonna live on a beach. It'd be great. Lauren: But in reality, there are things that are nuanced, right? And humans are interesting and they're nuanced and they don't always act in logical ways. And I think it's goes back to human [00:31:00] psychology, right? Jeff: exactly. I. Lauren: having a human who can interpret. all of these insights are and then figure out how to solve them I think is really the important piece. And like it's exciting to know that you would have more information to spot things that maybe you didn't Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: before to make sense. And there's also the, like in aggregate, I think part of what. I've seen that like big companies as you scale is you get a lot of noise in your data too. Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: how to know what's right for a certain subset of customers versus another subset. Jeff: Right. Lauren: it doesn't necessarily tell you what to do, although, hey, there's a lot more that is generative and providing recommendations and stuff. But there is an element certainly of innovation and that I. A part of the experience and then the human led component. I think, you know, we've gone, as someone who's in PLG, it's like, hey, let's automate. How can we build it into the [00:32:00] experience? I think a misnomer is that product led means like, oh, you don't need human touch, you don't need a sales team, et cetera. And like, I actually think that's a really bad look at, you know, what makes sense, like how human interaction. will be even more important in the Jeff: No. Lauren: You already see it right now where you're getting automated LinkedIn messages and automated Slack and everything. You get to the point where like, I don't wanna talk to an automation or robot anymore. Like I want a real human. Right. So it'll be really curious to see there's huge benefit in places where we can be more productive. We can streamline, but I actually imagine that. Human touch and other elements will become even more important. And so what's PG now will be some combination of that, of what? Jeff: I I, I do think one offshoot of, as you're getting at like one offshoot of this AI growth is going to be, sometimes you [00:33:00] can, you can smell like the output and maybe, you know, maybe it's 'cause we're where we are in the adoption curve and, and at some point you'll be completely. Undiscernible, but right now I feel like you can mostly tell like, oh, I'm talking to a robot, or I'm, I'm talking to a human. But we've seen, like, one thing we've been doing is , we've launched like a series of dinners where we go around the country and we, we get together like 20 or 30 product leaders and it's been great 'cause people just. Want to talk and meet and go through things and it's, and we don't bring salespeople, right? It's, it's purely like we're just here to talk about product and, and learn from each other. And it's been so impactful because we've just gone this like one way curve of digital adoption just going up and up and up. And I think there's the backlash. So like, you know, we can have AI that's gonna take, there's some things that to be great for, right? It's gonna help us get through some rote stuff that, that no one likes to do. And I'll be honest, I always joke with my kids, it's great at taking run DMC and Aerosmith and putting them together to get, like, walk this way, the, [00:34:00] you know, the hip hop version. But, it's rare stuff. I feel like that it writes either of those two things by itself in a really amazing way. But it can help you remix. It can help me write the right thing once I have the right idea. And it, it, I think it's gonna help us move faster and be better. But it's not gonna replace humans. Maybe one day I'm gonna be shown to be wrong, but that's, that's where we are now. Lauren: , I think it's being smart, like where to leverage the technology and the data. I Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: really like that's at the end of the day, still the same themes and I'm really excited about, you know, where they're going, all the experimentation that's happening, all of the learnings. It's kind of cool 'cause we're literally all in it together. I can't think of like another like major technology innovation and software recently where we're literally all just trying to figure it out at the same time. Jeff: Yeah, the pieces you laid out though, in this career journey through just one company, I mean, we, we've talked about this entire time, your, your time through basically one company, [00:35:00] MailChimp and coming in, and how do you kind of enter showing value on this kind of top of funnel acquisition and, and growth metrics, right. How do you start to. Work your way through and show and understand, like you said, that your first thing you did is just talk to everybody and understand their problems and where can you aid them in, in those goals And start to, you know, use the things at your disposal like homepage experimentation to drive those goals forward. Ancillary product adoption. How do you use the signing experience to push to features that you guys have launched but maybe aren't growing the way people wanted? That kind of nuance step through then how do you really drive growth through product as a totality? You know, I think that's the stuff that's gonna stay at the heart of it no matter what tools we have at our disposal, that journey is, is core to, to being successful. I think you laid out a great roadmap there for how you do it, you know, successfully. And I'm sure you stepped on one or two toes along the way, but as, as few as possible maybe. Can I say?[00:36:00] Lauren: I, I definitely made plenty of mistakes along the Jeff: Yeah. Lauren: I, I, you know, I take pride in learning from all of them, and every time I join a new company, it's all about, you know, how do you understand the environment, apply those learnings and keep learning. I Jeff: Yeah, Lauren: right now, and, and that's one thing I'll say about myself. I consider myself a lifelong learner. You're Jeff: no. Lauren: you're always growing, and that's a part of what keeps it really interesting. Jeff: Yeah, exactly. I mean, we didn't get to it. Right. But you, you know, we talked earlier about you built the analytics teams and the user experience teams you went on, and how do you do PLG in a company that's much more sales led? At Bitly right now where you are, there's, you know, kind of two competing products that you have to figure out how do you balance these things and figure out who's the right user for which one, and how do you have financial success? Driving these two products, it could at some level compete. I, I'll be honest, we, I feel like we just gotta have you on again at some point sometime soon. 'cause this is a blast. And, and I also, [00:37:00] yeah, we'll have to get together. We'll have to do it again but until we can do that, I guess, if people wanna, you know, follow up with you and have ways they think that could be helpful for you or have questions is LinkedIn the best place to get in touch with you or is there a way you prefer? Lauren: Yeah, LinkedIn is great. I am Jeff: Yeah, Lauren: on the X train, so Jeff: same. I, I think LinkedIn is the great equalizer for all of us, so. Well, it's been a blast having you on. I appreciate you taking the time. I feel like I learned so much just about PLG alone thanks Lord. We'll talk soon.