PRODUCTEA with Leah, Growth & Senior Leadership

Summary Kyle Pursell, the Head of Growth Optimization at Shopify, talks about impactful business strategies for growth. What is the challenge of moving upmarket, and the role of product-led growth in driving this success. And why cross-functional collaboration in growth initiatives is often undervalued. We also talk about the different paths to getting into growth roles and share their favorite po...

Summary In the second conversation with Kieran Flanagan, SVP Marketing at Hubspot we talk about how we see AI really being used in tech and not just being a flashy thing you use once. From Sales, to Marketing to Product. Where are we today and where is all of this going? The conversation explores the role of AI in strategy, the potential for AI-driven social networks, the impact of AI on user inte...

Dennis R. Mortensen is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of LaunchBrightly, which makes money by automating the most annoying things in our work lives (through AI). We talk about why it’s important to own your own data set for competitive advantage and the misconception that successful entrepreneurs should become investors. Dennis refuses to do anything else other than focussing on his startup...

Summary I talked with the amazing Andrew Ettinger from Appen about community-led growth in enterprise sales, the importance of cross-functional understanding, and the transformation of content and community in the sales process.  We are also diving into the impact of AI on the industry and the need for cross-functional understanding and collaboration. Takeaways Cross-functional understanding and c...

Summary Jam.dev created a tool called Jam that helps product managers and engineers communicate and debug bugs more effectively. The company has grown to over 100,000 users and has fixed more than 2 million bugs. They have adopted a unique approach to marketing, prioritizing community building and sharing their journey as builders. The company uses an R&D framework to evaluate and measure the...

Summary Burnout and the pursuit of external validation in tech.  The pressure to constantly achieve and the belief that success will bring happiness and fulfillment is driving some of us into ruin. It almost did with Andy Johns, he was never more successful and unhappier in his life until he his body hit the reset switch. Top companies, top jobs, top titles. Achieve, achieve, achieve. And yet it’s...

Summary Chess.com has grown from being a simple chess service to a thriving 150 million ARR business. The company has focused on making chess accessible to everyone through services around a product that hasn’t changed in centuries. We touch on the challenges of scaling a company and the role of titles and leadership in an organization and how many times Erik wanted to give up in the process. Erik...

Motivation, forming habits, managing time, and why it’s important to know how much you enjoy solving problems with Jason Fried. Jason is really special to me and a 2nd time guest. Whenever we go at it, there are two worlds clashing in the best way possible. We are both never content with traditions and challenge the status quo; we just often disagree on how to challenge them while we agree on the...

Summary The conversation with Mike Weir, former CRO of G2, focused on reducing churn and driving expansion revenue. At G2, they used a churn model with 14 highly correlated variables to identify at-risk customers and prioritize actions for the customer success team. We also discussed the importance of product and marketing in customer education and engagement and how to align sales, customer succe...

Anthony Pierry, partner at FletchPMM, focuses on messaging for early-stage B2B SaaS startups, and he brought a lot of actionable knowledge on how to do it right to the ProducTea. Summary I talk with Anthony about how to focus and narrow down your target audience and how to communicate it through your value proposition. How do we cross the chasm between the early-stage value proposition and the big...

Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com & RB2B, is the CEO who builds in public on LinkedIn and is crushing it by discovering the power of product-led growth as he is doing it. He’s very specific about what works and what doesn’t and how he got started. He explains the power of organic reach through LinkedIn and building a personal brand through social media, particularly LinkedIn, and how importa...

Casey Hill is a Senior Growth Manager at ActiveCampaign, Institutional Consultant, and Founder. More importantly, he’s incredibly actionable and smart on LinkedIn around B2B Email channels, and that’s why I wanted to have him on the podcast. Summary We talk about how to approach Email, how to use it from the ground up to drive meaningful business and how to measure it. How to balance different cha...

Julie Zhuo, Co-Founder @ Sundial, Author of THE MAKING OF A MANAGER, ex-VP Design @ FB Summary Intuition and hiring is an uncomfortable topic. We should be rational, have reasons for why we choose to work with someone or not. When should we trust our gut feeling? When is it time to step back and say, no. I go with the hard facts? In the end it’s all about building an honest relationship as a leade...

Summary Jamie Gier, - CMO at DexCare and former Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft - and I talk about the importance of understanding the customer and the challenges of marketing in regulated industries. We also touch on the process of learning marketing, the concept of account-based marketing in B2B, and how to connect it to revenue through ROI cases for our customers. The conversation co...

Summary Peter Walker, Head of Data Insights at Carta discusses with me various aspects of startup funding and investment. We explore the value of small angel investments, the obscurity of startup funding letters, the selectivity of startup advisors, and the potential of angel investments as marketing assets. We also touch on the excitement for the future of startups, the impact of accelerators and...

Why is ruthless focus the most important skill in B2B, and why is it so hard to get right?  As the CEO of a banking service that focuses on the impact of cashflow mismanagement on small businesses, he knows what it means when people only focus on what’s fun to them in a business and the price they pay for that. We talked about the decision to seek VC funding and how he built resilience and dealt w...

Jeff Gothelf, one of the most critical voices around OKRs and being outcome-driven, sat down with me for an hour-long amazing conversation: We touch on why using OKRS is useless if you can’t admit when you are wrong and be open to feedback from your teams. How do you set outcome-driven goals for exploratory research and the role of humility in organizational success? Why shipping something does no...

Summary Melissa Kwan, CEO of eWebinar and serial bootstrapper, discusses the challenges and benefits of bootstrapping a business versus seeking venture capital funding. She is the poster child for urging founders to focus on real customer feedback and paying customers without loading up on VC problems.  We discuss the importance of understanding the customer, personal goals and ambitions, the chal...

Chris Tottman and Richard Blundell joined me for a fantastic conversation about how they think from their own operators’ perspective when it comes to investing in successful businesses and their people. Why you should not talk to investors who never went through the personal pain of failing and why it most of the time comes down to the basics of running a successful business: Being obsessed with c...

A Journey I’m in the middle of as well: How to transition from senior leadership to taking care of yourself to the moment where you enter again. Casey Winters, ex-CPO Eventbrite, walks through the entire journey and how he thinks about our current markets; our technology is drastically changing while the new distribution channels have not developed yet. Why he is waiting before making high-convict...

John Cutler is the best systems thinker I know. Whenever we talk, there’s a beautiful meta-analysis around systems happening. Why do we work the way we do? Why can we not figure out how to run businesses efficiently if we do it so often? Why do inexperienced, brilliant people constantly get into trouble, and how do they get out of it? Individual vs. team habits How much of our decisions is gut vs....

Jason Fried, Co-founder and CEO of 37signals (Basecamp with a valuation of 100 billion, no really ;D), is one of the most positive, successful, forward-looking people that I got to know. He doesn’t care about retros and dwelling on the past and constantly pulls forward without looking too much at what others might think. This amazing episode ended up being a look into the mind of a successful cont...

Adam Fishman and I elaborate on how we look at the inevitable yearly planning exercises from an operative and leadership perspective. How to do a rolling planning instead of doing the depressing exercise of wasting everyone’s time for a month at the end of each year: Managing risks and the human component in planning The typical mistakes you should avoid What to do if you don’t agree with a compan...

Andrew Davies, CMO at Paddle, on the latest learnings on monetization and pricing. A topic that is still underserved because almost no one has good, conclusive data about it. Paddle does, and Andrew is sharing a lot of actionable advice on: - Willingness to pay - Changing monetization often - How to not incentivize anyone the wrong way One of my favorite episodes to date! Timestamps: 06:20 Insight...

This episode gave me a lot of peace of mind. Intercom is dealing with the exact same problems that we all have when building around and with AI. Estimations are impossible and things that are feeling impossible are possible the day after. Brian sat together with me to talk about it all including Intercom’s coming-of-age story and how they look at customer service through this new distorting lense...