How I Grew This: Real Stories of Digital Growth

Greg Shelly is the VP of Enterprise Digital Marketing at Canadian Tire. Greg is, admittedly, obsessed with attribution and performance, and he cares about organizations needing to understand how their investments are driving customer outcomes. Before joining Canadian Tire, Greg led the business insights and marketing analytics organization at McDonald's and spent eight years at Dell in e-commerce...

Carman Wenkoff is the EVP & Chief Information Officer at Dollar General. In this role, Carman has led the company’s digital transformation, implementing technology advancements to enhance the brick-and-mortar retailer’s offerings and elevate the overall customer experience. Throughout Carman’s career—from working in construction to practicing law, founding a tech company and now as the CIO of a ma...

Patricia Martorana is the Senior Product Manager, Mobile Growth at The New York Times. Over the past four years, Patricia has grown extensively as a Product Manager. She led the cross-functional team in developing The New York Times subscription footprint and designed the customer journey within the news, cooking, and game sections. She previously had worked in marketing and editorial roles at com...

What are some lessons you learn after being with a company for almost a decade? How do you end up changing your life based on the products you build? This, the stories of being acquired by Adidas while maintaining the freedom to innovate and practicing what you preach, are featured in this episode of “How I Grew This” With Robert Schenkenfelder of Runtastic. Listen and subscribe on Apple/Google Po...

What does it take to drive growth responsibly in today’s world of constant notifications? What are the values of the people behind the news & entertainment experiences that we engage in everyday? This, the stories of the power of mentors, and what we can all do to strike a better balance between our connected and offline lives, are told in our second episode of “How I Grew This” With Claus Enevold...

Morgan Brown is the VP of Growth at Shopify and the author of the book “Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success”. Prior to Shopify, Morgan led the product team at Facebook and was the Chief Operating Officer for Inman News - the leading news source for real estate and technology. Given the size of the Shopify brand, they optimize metrics and data analytic proce...

Today’s digital climate requires a focus on healthier long-term gains as opposed to easy-short term wins. But where does one start? Fabien shares how a keen act of listening and parsing of the data can inform where to take your digital product next to drive growth. At SmartNews he’s tripled the monthly active usership from when he started. Beyond this, Fabien shares how his feminism has defined ev...

Sylvain Gauchet is the Senior Manager, Growth Product and Mobile Marketing at Babbel, an internationally successful language learning app with millions of active subscribers and the #1 innovative education company in the world. At Babbel, Sylvain focuses on areas such as growth, early product adoption, and monetization. Before Babbel. he co-founded Apptamin, a creative agency that works with brand...

While he might not say it himself, our next guest Varun Dubey was able to have an extremely successful career leading the marketing for some of the fastest growing tech companies in India because of two things: being empathetic and analytical. In the early days of his career writing for “Digit” Magazine, he learned that many people only had a few hours of energy to use a day. Later at Qualcomm, he...

Erin McFarland is the Managing Director, Marketing Channels Strategy, and Personalization at JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. She is responsible for the optimization of JPMorgan’s industry-leading digital assets and marketing channels that deliver communication to more than seventy million customers. She has spent the last twenty years creating customer-first marketing strategies for n...

During a time of crisis, it’s crucial for companies to focus on maintaining and driving growth. It’s, however, equally as important to continue to find ways to strategically add value to your customers. Mike Antognoli shares with us how he’s led the mobile product team at Allstate during the pandemic, in an industry whose customers typically have more of a hands-off approach. More on that story, h...

Kristina had never imagined working for a bank but when the opportunity came along to innovate the mobile experience for N26 she took it. Coming from a background in fashion e-commerce, Kristina asked, "How could we transform the learnings about mobile UX from e-commerce and apply them to the financial world to make everything less painful?" This and stories of why you shouldn’t build what your cu...

Daniel Shlossman is the SVP, DIgital + Growth @ sweetgreen. He leads marketing, product, and digital channels. In his three years at sweetgreen, Daniel has been focused on enabling customer growth through channel expansion and improvement, including the launch of sweetgreen’s off-premise business, via Outpost and delivery. Daniel’s incredible background includes roles at Uber (as Head of West Coas...

Ron Schneidermann is the CEO of Alltrails, where he spent the past six years helping grow the company, which is now one of the top five health and fitness apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Before joining Alltrails, Ron led growth teams at Yelp and co-founded Liftopia, the global leader of ski lift ticket bookings. Ron shares that the two most important things for any company are m...

Holly Chen is an award-winning marketing and growth advisor who credits her inner rebelliousness and overall questioning of conventional thinking for leading her into a career in Growth. And she’s been a standout from the beginning. In Beijing, Holly was one of the few Chinese nationals majoring in Italian in the entire country. After taking on her first role at the United Nations, she felt the ne...

Lisa Kennelly has been the CMO at Fishbrain for over three years and oversees marketing operations, strategy, and vision. Since the fall of 2020, Lisa has been responsible for growing and managing Fishbrain’s eCommerce marketplace. Outside of Fishbrain, Lisa is an advisor and mentor of multiple early-stage founders and startups. Fishbrain is a mobile app and online platform with map-based tools, f...

How does a woman go from teacher to running Kids and Family content at Netflix? What happened along the way to lead Michelle, a pre-med student in college to a career building the experiences for the companies we know and love. That and stories of failed experiments, taking an unconventional path to product management and why empathy is your most powerful tool are featured with Michelle Parsons of...

Today’s guest, Nicole West, isn’t afraid of raising her hand and taking a risk, especially when it’s a project no one has ever done before. She’s built a reputation over her 14-year career at Chipotle in taking those tough jobs and turning them into big opportunities. For instance, in 2013, the then CMO asked Nicole if she would start up the new Ecommerce division of the marketing team. Pushing fe...

So much of learning how to drive meaningful growth is finding unsaturated and ripe growth channels and relentless focus on the actual end-user. This is our next guest's philosophy, Dharmesh Gandhi, the Senior Vice President and Head of Product at RentoMojo. Dharmesh shares how early in his career at Amazon, he learned how you could easily spot what seems like a popular growth option and not always...

EPISODE SUMMARY: Makoto Rheault-Kihara leads user acquisition at Hopper, one of the fastest-growing travel apps with over 60 million in sales to date. Makoto was previously the Director of Marketing at Cruisehub, an OTA aiming to modernize the cruise industry and lead search engine marketing at Busbud, a bus travel booking platform in 80 countries. Hopper differentiates its paid social strategy by...

Today we’re joined by Brian Witlin, CEO of Yummly. Brian’s life has been dedicated to building and scaling consumer-focused startups and commercially successful teams over several years. In this episode, Brian shares his experiences of building and scaling Yummly and other companies along with his core message of living a well-rounded life, which is especially useful for founders in the early stag...

Jayne Peressini is the Senior Director, Mobile Marketing and Growth @ Electronic Arts (EA). Her team manages user acquisition, retargeting, and user retention across the multiple genres of games that EA produces. Jayne’s interest in gaming dates back to the pre-iPhone era when her Dad purchased her a console on which she became hooked to playing games. Jayne believes that mobile gaming helps peopl...

Today we’re joined by Sue Cho, who has been the Head of Lifecycle Marketing at Calm for three years. For over a decade, Sue has focused on all their engagement, retention, and conversion. In this episode, Sue talks about everything from career advice, her current work at Calm, her vision for the team, and her badass dog Lizzy. Sue starts by telling us about her radical decision to move to the moun...

Today we’re joined by Prathamesh Dembla, the Head of Growth at Licious. Prior to Licious, Prathamesh was Head of Digital Marketing at Milk Basket. In this episode, Prathamesh talks about the positive effects of both lockdowns, working from home and one key skill that has benefited reliable professionals during these challenging times. He also shares what has helped him develop his business acumen...

Ashish Bajaj is the Head of Marketing at MediBuddy, which joined forces with DocsApp in 2020 to become India’s largest digital healthcare platform. Previously, he held roles as the Head of Media and Brand Alliance at Ola and as a Channel Marketing Manager with Microsoft. In this episode, Ashish fondly shares warm anecdotes from his current and past work experience to highlight the positive impact...