How I Grew This (Branch)

The days of unsaturated channels and growth hacking, as we used to know it is over. Our guest today, Bharat Bhatia, dives deep into new strategies and the understanding of the product that has helped him achieve continued growth. Bharat comes from the gaming industry, an industry that he explains has one of the tightest bonds between product and marketing. He shares how he and his team approach that integration through in-app growth channels. In addition, with today’s growth channels like Facebook and Google ads more saturated and restricted, he breaks down how he has approached growth, especially when reaching the tipping point of scaling beyond existing audiences. Hear more about how Junglee Games grew through COVID, how he has managed to take better care of his physical health, and the most important and unexpected lesson he learned at business school, all on this episode of How I grew this.

Travis Trembath, Vice President, Fan Engagement at PGA TOUR, joins us in this episode of How I Grew This podcast. The PGA TOUR is the premier sanctioning and organizing body for men's professional golf, representing the best players in the world. Currently, Travis serves as the voice of the fan for the PGA TOUR and is passionate about building great teams and positively impacting people. Today, Travis shares some insight on the PGA TOUR’s strategy for acquiring and engaging fans, delivering the right content on the right platform for different types of fans, and advice on how to become an engagement, insights, and marketing leader.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada Seghete is joined by Daniel Broukhim, Co-CEO and Co-Founder of FabFitFun. They explore the evolution of FabFitFun, including the company's approach to customer acquisition, influencer marketing, the importance of content creation, and the balance between mobile and web experiences. Daniel is a highly skilled Chief Executive Officer, boasting a remarkable track record in the internet industry. His visionary leadership has propelled his company, FabFitFun, to unprecedented heights, with an astounding membership base of over one million individuals worldwide. Beyond his influential role at FabFitFun, Daniel extends his expertise as an angel investor and philanthropist, actively supporting and guiding a diverse portfolio of companies. Notable among his investments and advisory roles are Cargomatic and MediaLab. For our valued listeners, we are pleased to offer a fantastic 20% discount on the FabFitFun box, featuring an exquisite selection of seasonal items. To avail of this great opportunity, simply apply the coupon code 'HOWIGREWTHIS' during the checkout process. Indulge in an assortment of premium beauty, wellness, fashion, and lifestyle products meticulously curated to elevate your experience.

Grant Ingersoll, Chief Technology Officer of Wikimedia, joined us on the podcast this week to discuss his experience navigating his own career through identity and knowledge equity. He shares the path that led him to his current role and why he chose to take a bet on himself and start his own company. More on Grant’s story, including his beliefs that people’s views of themselves can be blockers for their own personal growth, why he is constantly reinventing himself as a founder, and Wikimedia’s roadmap to make their knowledge base reflect the global community, are shared in this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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 national and global brands across healthcare, luxury, hospitality, and finance industries. Erin suggests diving deep into data because data is how customers talk to you, and it helps guide customer acquisition channels. Think of your company as a “caregiver” to your customers and build fault tolerance and stress testing into your technology. This way, you’re ready when they need you. To make life easy for your customers on mobile, automate recurring actions. Create seamless identity management across devices because privacy is a major concern of the modern customer. Cardless transactions are also a big trend in the financial services industry. Erin explains how it’s okay to change careers but not to burn old bridges because networks will matter during such changes. Have a role model that you identify with but don’t look to them for anything beyond inspiration for your career. You have to steer your path based on what you want to change and who it’s for using your strengths. When executing org-wide changes, Erin suggests building for the customer journey, experiencing what it would look like, and figuring out internal dependencies to navigate. Test your ideas because ideas are only assumptions until they’re proven. Erin’s final advice: A leader asking for the opinion of their team members and sharing credit where it’s due validates the team's skills and helps them feel seen. Invite diverse opinions, be curious to learn, and have the guts to pivot when data doesn’t agree with your decision.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mauricio Monico, Chief Product Officer at Wish, joins Mada Seghete to delve into Mauricio's career journey, the growth and challenges of Wish, and the role of a product manager in the tech industry. Mauricio is a product leader and entrepreneur with over twenty years in the tech industry. Mauricio's professional journey encompasses a rich spectrum of experiences, from his tenure in enterprise product management at Microsoft to his pivotal contributions to consumer growth strategies at Facebook.

The pandemic has certainly brought about many changes to the world - one of them being how companies do business. Since the onset, marketers from various industries have been working to figure out how to stay relevant and continue to appeal to consumers when priorities and advertising systems are constantly evolving. Today’s guest is Jason Wilson, Overstock.com’s Director of Marketing. He shares how he’s led his digital marketing team to success in a time when consumer spending habits have been drastically altered. More on Jason’s story, including how he effectively grew a campaign 44% without having to increase his budget, his take on the four new pillars of digital marketing, and how Overstock.com was uniquely positioned to survive the economic downturn of the pandemic, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Daniel Krauss, Founder and Chief Organizational Plumber of Flix, joins Mada Seghete to unveil the world's leading ground transportation platform growth strategy, future expansion plans, and commitment to sustainability by expanding a battery-powered electric fleet. Daniel Krauss has vast experience in IT, having worked with companies like Marquardt Group, IFS, and Siemens. Before starting FlixBus with his school friend, André Schwämmlein, Daniel worked as a Technical Account Manager at Microsoft for three years, where he gained valuable insights from the corporate world.

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Ajey Gore is on a mission to grow through simplification. As a serial entrepreneur who’s led technology teams for companies like ThoughtWorks, Hopper, and most recently as the CTO of Gojek, he takes a thoughtful approach to bringing balance both in work and in life. As a teenager he printed business cards but, after accidentally blowing up his brother’s computer, he signed up for the closest computer science class and was obsessed ever since. Fast forward to his time at Gojek where he oversaw 30 - 40 million app impressions a day, Ajey reveals that a focus on product market fit and delighting customers is the only north star one can follow. More on Ajey’s story including what it’s like to prioritize new marketplaces when everything seems like green field, the importance of purposeful communication within an organization, and why formal education isn’t necessarily a great prerequisite for a career in technology. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada is joined by Katherine Kelly, VP of Higher Education Marketing at Handshake, to discuss how Handshake leverages mobile growth opportunities in higher education and the job market. Katherine started her career working in higher education and moved over to tech. She was an associate producer at ESPN, an Instructor of Design History, and a Research Assistant at The Victoria and Albert Museum. Katherine was also an Editor, Writer, and Host of her web series, ‘Just the Tips’.

Our next guest Matthew Moore started his career at GE before going back to school for management consulting to grow as a leader. He realized that growth during his time working for the Boston Consulting Group. Matt's journey into driving mobile growth kicked off when he became the first Chief Customer Officer of Yum! Brands where he oversaw Pizza Hut for Europe and UK, and he also launched Pizza Hut Digital Ventures. During his time at YUM Brands, he pivoted the culture towards building digital in-house as most of Pizza Hut's business was online already. After that, he returned to his motherland, Canada, to lead digital for the iconic Canadian brand, Tim Hortons. Under Matthew’s leadership, they have shifted heavily to mobile through various strategies, including mobile ordering, loyalty programs, guest personalization, and more. Loyalty programs have arguably been one of their biggest wins during Matt's time at Tim Hortons. Tim Horton's initially achieved a 30% adoption rate and eventually 50% once the program was fully launched. Hear this and how Matt used to travel 300 days out of the year, his philosophy on why you need to find purpose in your work, and his experience working all over the world on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Hovhannes Avoyan, Founder and CEO of Picsart, joins Mada Seghete to share how his daughter's negative experience led to the creation of Picsart, the platform's growth and unique features, as well as how to use AI to drive more growth for their app or companies. Hovhannes is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor, having founded several successful startups, including Sourcio, Monitis, and CEDIT. His extensive experience encompasses building enterprise software, SaaS web platforms, and consumer mobile products, showcasing his diverse expertise in these domains.

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 and how his love for teaching makes him a better marketer. Prathamesh discusses various growth hacks he has implemented at Licious and how Branch has helped them with the attribution and channel optimization of these strategies. Prathamesh also stresses how “atomic personalization” helps them with conversion rate optimization. Prathamesh then goes on to share key takeaways from his experience as a co-founder of Infinity Minds, a personal development company for children. In terms of risk-taking, Prathamesh breaks down how he decides which risks to take and how startups can avoid “analysis paralysis” with an execution-first mindset. As Head of Growth at Licious, Prathamesh talks about his biggest challenge during and after a period of hypergrowth amid COVID-19 lockdowns. Prathamesh then finally talks about his leadership style and the power of compounding in business, relationships and health.

Today’s guest is Stuart Jones, the Head of Product at ITV Hub, an on demand streaming service in the UK. Stuart discusses how the pandemic has affected the television industry in many ways, specifically in the lack of available content along with the call for changes to their subscription model. More on Stuart’s story, including his early start as an airplane engineer apprentice, how his experience in various sectors brought him to TV, and his take on changing viewer habits in light of the pandemic are shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

The days of unsaturated channels and growth hacking, as we used to know it is over. Our guest today, Bharat Bhatia, dives deep into new strategies and the understanding of the product that has helped him achieve continued growth. Bharat comes from the gaming industry, an industry that he explains has one of the tightest bonds between product and marketing. He shares how he and his team approach that integration through in-app growth channels. In addition, with today’s growth channels like Facebook and Google ads more saturated and restricted, he breaks down how he has approached growth, especially when reaching the tipping point of scaling beyond existing audiences. Hear more about how Junglee Games grew through COVID, how he has managed to take better care of his physical health, and the most important and unexpected lesson he learned at business school, all on this episode of How I grew this.

The pandemic has certainly brought about many changes to the world - one of them being how companies do business. Since the onset, marketers from various industries have been working to figure out how to stay relevant and continue to appeal to consumers when priorities and advertising systems are constantly evolving. Today’s guest is Jason Wilson, Overstock.com’s Director of Marketing. He shares how he’s led his digital marketing team to success in a time when consumer spending habits have been drastically altered. More on Jason’s story, including how he effectively grew a campaign 44% without having to increase his budget, his take on the four new pillars of digital marketing, and how Overstock.com was uniquely positioned to survive the economic downturn of the pandemic, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Noa Gutterman is the Director of Marketing at VSCO. Before this VSCO, she spent six years in the digital marketing game in various roles. Noa runs VSCO’s marketing function and in the ten months since joining she has hired four team members, built up the entire lifecycle and product marketing functions and refreshed VSCO’s paid acquisition strategy. Noa shares details of an upcoming influencer marketing campaign, targeting the Gen Z generation that she is very excited to see the results of. She breaks down the strategies that can be used to find influencers, the difference between a normal and micro-influencer and what your first step should be if you are also aiming to kick off an influencer marketing campaign. Noa also breaks down VSCO’s approach to re-engaging users. She shares a step-by-step approach from discovering what users like most about the app and what behavior patterns most commonly lead to these revenue generating actions to then how to encourage those behaviors through owned and paid channels. Hear Noa’s advice for her younger self, why she has marketing in her blood, why the VSCO growth team sits within the product function, the one animal that Noa would most like to talk to, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

What does it take to build a leading Peer-to-Peer car-sharing company when the market is exploding with new competitors? How do you continue to drive growth after your company gets acquired? This, the stories of learning from failure, recruiting his first users one by one, and the decisions he made that ensured the product remained a market leader, are in our third episode of “How I Grew This” with Vincent Saint-Martin of OuiCar.

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 focusing on user acquisition AND long-term trust through investing in paid social and other mobile ad channels. They use Facebook as the primary focus of their paid social ads with TikTok as a growing secondary channel. Paid social is becoming a lot more abstract and therefore more creative. Makoto believes paid TikTok ads must be kept fresh, platform-focused, and generated at a higher frequency. The pandemic did affect the travel industry but Hopper still achieved a 110% YoY growth last year and is on track to do over $1B of business this year. They did this by following a diversification strategy based on customer needs and expanded into hotels and car rentals. Hopper’s customer-obsessed culture and self-contained, autonomous teams have helped them grow multiple product arms simultaneously. A weekly catch-up call and an executive team focused on cross-team communication help these siloed teams at Hopper learn from each other’s challenges and successes. Sometimes ads that marketers like don’t appeal to actual customers and may end up performing worse than some simple customer-oriented ads. Over time, Hopper moved to these customer-centric ad creatives which helped them reduce expensive failures and triple their RPM (revenue per 1000 impressions). At Hopper, Makoto focuses on maximizing the overall contribution margin of a cohort and on-target rate to check their ability to drive revenue from specific target purchases or user actions. Because Hopper diversified across three generic categories (hotels, flights, car rentals), their ad targeting still focuses on great creatives and has not changed much since IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5. Interested in joining the Hopper team? Click here to check out their open positions! https://www.hopper.com/careers/

Caitlin Roman brings her collective experiences in consulting at McKinsey and Product at Linkedin & Medium to the world of sports news at The Athletic. Having come up in these subscription powerhouses, Caitlin has a potent combination of high level business strategy experience along with the tactical ability to work side by side with her teams to execute. All of these elements were crucial for a subscription business like the Athletic during a tumultuous 2020 in sports. Caitlin and her team released a number of initiatives during this time including different content formats like short format commentary and breaking news, and pricing strategies to keep users tuning in even when sports weren’t in play. If there’s a word we would use to describe Caitlin it would be resilient! Far before she was leading her team through the bumps of the pandemic, she had two keystone experiences that she shared on the show that shaped her. The first is her passion for media at a young age. Working as a newspaper editor in both high school and college, Caitlin sought out the challenge of the daily deadline for her daily newspaper. She talks about the late nights and stress but attributes this as the reason why she loves working in the trenches with her teams today, drawing similarities to product management. Before Caitlin found her way to Linkedin, she lived and worked in Ethiopia as a part of a Gates Foundation initiative in agriculture. During a solo trip in a gorge in Kenya, she fell and broke her back and had to self-rescue. After this grueling experience she recovered, but Caitlin didn’t only not fly home but continued her work at the time setting up microfinance systems for farmers. To hear more about Caitlin’s amazing story about how she found her way into product in subscription powerhouses, how she thinks about leading her teams, and her adventures in Ethiopia, take a listen to this episode of How I Grew This.

Artificial Intelligence has become a game-changer for businesses and has opened new growth perspectives and possibilities. Today, customer success equals business success, so companies try leveraging AI features to deliver the best-in-class customer experience – for this, they need conversational AI. In this episode of How I Grew This, Miguel Navarro joins Mada Seghete to define conversational AI, discuss how it differs from classic chatbots, and the functional benefits of conversational AI for businesses. Miguel is currently SVP of Business Technology Executive at KeyBank, focusing on conversational AI enterprise delivery. He also has a plethora of experience building and growing mobile apps, voice platforms, chatbots, digital assistance, and more.

Master at building community on the internet, Casey took his passion for user-generated content and built a career on creating sustainable growth strategies for companies like Pinterest, Grubhub, and Airbnb. At Pinterest, he drove an increase in sign-ups from Google by 50%, a tactic today that's still copied by Instagram and LinkedIn. Casey talks how companies can react to coronavirus, the mindset around building growth teams, and shares practical advice on decisions that build fulfilling careers. Hear all this and more on this episode of How I Grew this. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada Seghete is joined by Kristen Banks, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Products at Ultimate Fighting Championship. They dive into the exciting world of fan-centric entertainment brands and explore the various marketing strategies involved in building a loyal fanbase. Kristen offers valuable insights into how to connect with fans, acquire audiences, and develop long-lasting relationships throughout the customer journey and funnel. Whether you're in the sports industry or any other fan-centric industry, this episode is a must-listen for marketers looking to grow and engage with their audiences. Kristen Banks is a data-driven marketing leader with more than fifteen years of experience. Her current position at UFC involves overseeing the digital licensing business, which encompasses the creation, promotion, and forecasting of video games, mobile games, digital objects, and NFTs. Before joining UFC, Kristen held senior positions at Universal Orlando Resort, NBCUniversal Media, and Landers & Partners.

Some people stop after creating their first successful company, but today’s guest, Sachin Bhatia, has created three products and companies that have flourished. Sachin shares how he got his parents' entrepreneurial spirit by selling water and other items as a child. He started his first company, MakeMyTrip, in 2000, and while they had a successful launch due to word of mouth, they weren’t able to keep up with demand. He learned his lesson, on the launch of his second company, TrulyMadly, they had the campaign to allow people to date not based on creed or religion in India which picked up a lot of press and was very successful. He then shares the story of how he and his Co-Founder teamed up again to build Bulbul, a video-based shopping app. More on Sachin’s story, including how his marketing campaign where MakeMyTrip asked for a second chance, his strategy for breaking down his campaigns, and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

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 everything from career choices to the way he manages his team. That story, running a French presidential campaign, the importance of decentralized systems, and his perspective on the future of jobs in mobile, is shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Ben Weiss has built a career with an attention to detail and quality specifically around the mobile customer journey from offline into digital. As an intern at Walgreens in 2007, he pitched the then CEO about creating a mobile app in the first place. Long story short, they listened. Over the course of the next decade, Ben rose the ranks, starting from the bottom as an intern and exiting at the top as the Director of Product Management for Mobile. Today, he oversees the global digital product management teams for mobile at Hyatt. His new mission: Rethink what the hotel experience could look and feel like in this new era of Covid-19. More on Ben’s story including how he’s bridging the gap between physical and digital through employee education, how to build an app for an older demographic, and his observations of digital adoption more broadly. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mariana Kuiken joins Amanda Vandiver to discuss how brands can leverage performance marketing and disruptive marketing trends to grow their businesses. Mariana is currently the Growth Marketing Lead at Zalando, where she works on developing new marketing opportunities through machine learning advertisements, user-automated content and augmented reality. Before that, she held various marketing roles at companies like Delivery Hero and LightInTheBox.

Canva belongs to a small group of products that change how people and brands completely shirt their approach to design. Our guest today, Cameron Adams, is the Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Canva, he shares how the product was built and how it was able to disrupt the design industry. He shares what he learned from building a product that would get massive adoption after working on Google Wave, a project which Google shut down because of low Monthly Active Users. He took the unconventional approach of waiting a long time to release the product, to ensure that it would launch a product that users wouldn’t stay with. They courted the press through the power of storytelling and were able to have a big launch and sustain that growth with smaller bloggers covering the tool. More on Cameron’s story how he came to America and failed to raise the round he’d hoped for, how his other creative endeavors like DJ’ing influence his design and the difference between graphic design and business design on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Branding means more than simply creating a logo and placing some ads. As Jeff Bezos said: "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room". The main question is how to do it successfully. In this episode, Gessica talks about some of the best practices and channels for building your brand. Gessica is a computer scientist with a deep passion for marketing and is currently the CMO at Paired, an app that focuses on building deeper connections with your partner.

Noa Gutterman is the Director of Marketing at VSCO. Before this VSCO, she spent six years in the digital marketing game in various roles. Noa runs VSCO’s marketing function and in the ten months since joining she has hired four team members, built up the entire lifecycle and product marketing functions and refreshed VSCO’s paid acquisition strategy. Noa shares details of an upcoming influencer marketing campaign, targeting the Gen Z generation that she is very excited to see the results of. She breaks down the strategies that can be used to find influencers, the difference between a normal and micro-influencer and what your first step should be if you are also aiming to kick off an influencer marketing campaign. Noa also breaks down VSCO’s approach to re-engaging users. She shares a step-by-step approach from discovering what users like most about the app and what behavior patterns most commonly lead to these revenue generating actions to then how to encourage those behaviors through owned and paid channels. Hear Noa’s advice for her younger self, why she has marketing in her blood, why the VSCO growth team sits within the product function, the one animal that Noa would most like to talk to, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Lee Anne Grant, Chief Growth Officer of Babylist, joins Mada Seghete to discuss the growth and marketing strategy of Babylist, the leading digital destination for growing families. Lee Anne also shares insights on the website's founding, growth, and marketing channels, including their focus on search, social, and affiliates. With an illustrious career spanning multiple consumer companies, Lee Anne brings a wealth of expertise in partnerships, marketing, and driving cross-functional growth. Before Babylist, she was the Chief Business Officer of The Assembly, Head of Business Development and Social Impact at Brandless, and Vice President of Business Development and Sales at POPSUGAR.

How do you achieve growth when the system is full of obstacles? With today’s guest, Lomit Patel, we talk about choosing to take decisive action towards your goals whether that’s in your own career or with your product. From working his way up the ladder to his dream job to having the foresight to push for utilizing AI at a time when it was still very new, Lomit has proved to be a catalyst for immense growth. More on Lomit’s story on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Ben Weiss has built a career with an attention to detail and quality specifically around the mobile customer journey from offline into digital. As an intern at Walgreens in 2007, he pitched the then CEO about creating a mobile app in the first place. Long story short, they listened. Over the course of the next decade, Ben rose the ranks, starting from the bottom as an intern and exiting at the top as the Director of Product Management for Mobile. Today, he oversees the global digital product management teams for mobile at Hyatt. His new mission: Rethink what the hotel experience could look and feel like in this new era of Covid-19. More on Ben’s story including how he’s bridging the gap between physical and digital through employee education, how to build an app for an older demographic, and his observations of digital adoption more broadly. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Daniel Krauss, Founder and Chief Organizational Plumber of Flix, joins Mada Seghete to unveil the world's leading ground transportation platform growth strategy, future expansion plans, and commitment to sustainability by expanding a battery-powered electric fleet. Daniel Krauss has vast experience in IT, having worked with companies like Marquardt Group, IFS, and Siemens. Before starting FlixBus with his school friend, André Schwämmlein, Daniel worked as a Technical Account Manager at Microsoft for three years, where he gained valuable insights from the corporate world.

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 major retailer—he has always addressed challenges head-on. In this episode, Carman shares the secrets to successfully leading a company through digital transformation, and explores how staying true to his purpose and focusing on making a difference in people’s lives have been the most important driving factors behind his success.

Today’s guest, Chetana Deorah, talks about the role of design to drive business outcomes for some of the top companies in the world. Growing up in the hustle and bustle of Mumbai, Chetana’s curiosity and rebelliousness led her to dabble in the life sciences before finding her calling in UX design. She’s taken her success and translated it into not only hockey stick growth for profit-motivated companies but also inspiring the next generation of designers from under-resourced communities in the Bay Area through the Inneract Project. In her own words, the role of a designer is to ask not the what or the how, but the why. In a time where mobile and technology platforms are pushing to A/B test, fail fast, and use analytics to adapt to our new world, Chetana reminds us that oftentimes the sole goal of creating growth may be limiting. She reminds us we must start with why. Hear more about Chetana’s incredible story of how one becomes a design leader, the reason why she believes Netflix stays so adaptable (her answer will stay with you), as well as some of her own questions around what the future looks like in education, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Omar Seyal, Head of Product at Cambly, joins Mada Seghete to dive into the realm of product growth, customer retention, SEO, user behavior, and personal growth in the tech industry. Cambly is an English learning marketplace where students can select tens of thousands of tutors to learn and practice English. Before Cambly, Omar was the Head of Core Product at Pinterest, Co-Founder of Egomotion, and Engineering Manager at Asurion.

Tech professionals, especially those who work in product, are not necessarily the folks who first come to mind when discussing the topic of creativity. However, there is a shifting viewpoint that argues a healthy level of creativity and optimism is essential to these functions due to the responsibility of bringing technological advancements and game-changing content to a global audience. Michael Sippey, Chief Product Officer at Medium, joins the podcast to discuss his ideas regarding the inherent optimism required when creating something to share with the world, whether it’s a new app, a blog article and beyond. More on Michael’s story including his early experience running product at Twitter, the mistake he’s repeatedly made in his career that finally changed his perspective, and why he says product managers should never write an unordered list, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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, how the Allstate app plays into the overall company strategy, Mike’s views on how a company culture built on trust is key to innovation, and what he learned from a failed Allstate experiment with augmented reality, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

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Caitlin Roman brings her collective experiences in consulting at McKinsey and Product at LinkedIn & Medium to the world of sports news at The Athletic. Having come up in these subscription powerhouses, Caitlin has a potent combination of high-level business strategy experience along with the tactical ability to work side by side with her teams to execute. All of these elements were crucial for a subscription business like the Athletic during a tumultuous 2020 in sports. Caitlin and her team released a number of initiatives during this time including different content formats like short format commentary and breaking news, and pricing strategies to keep users tuning in even when sports weren’t in play. If there’s a word we would use to describe Caitlin it would be resilient! Far before she was leading her team through the bumps of the pandemic, she had two keystone experiences that she shared on the show that shaped her. The first is her passion for media at a young age. Working as a newspaper editor in both high school and college, Caitlin sought out the challenge of the daily deadline for her daily newspaper. She talks about the late nights and stress but attributes this as the reason why she loves working in the trenches with her teams today, drawing similarities to product management. Before Caitlin found her way to LinkedIn, she lived and worked in Ethiopia as a part of a Gates Foundation initiative in agriculture. During a solo trip in a gorge in Kenya, she fell and broke her back and had to self-rescue. After this grueling experience she recovered, but Caitlin didn’t only not fly home but continued her work at the time setting up microfinance systems for farmers. To hear more about Caitlin’s amazing story about how she found her way into the product in subscription powerhouses, how she thinks about leading her teams, and her adventures in Ethiopia, take a listen to this episode of How I Grew This.

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 everything from career choices to the way he manages his team. That story, running a French presidential campaign, the importance of decentralized systems, and his perspective on the future of jobs in mobile, is shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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, fishing forecasts, social networking features, and recommendations on fishing gear. Fishing is the most popular hobby in the world… and is huge in the US, Fishbrain’s biggest market. During the pandemic, Fishbrain was a beneficiary of other businesses and sports shutting down and also from becoming the primary online retailer focused on a variety of fishing gear. Riding this wave, Fishbrain has grown to over 13 million users. Lisa led Fishbrain’s marketing expansion beyond their (mostly) paid advertising campaigns. Fishbrain’s social network feature attracts new users and contributes to their user retention. Fishbrain grows through SEO, word of mouth, influencers and even offline marketing (billboards, radio ads, etc) in some southern US states that have a thriving culture of anglers. Sometimes, all that is required to stand out in the market is observing a pattern and disrupting it with a bold design decision. At Clue, a female reproductive health app, Lisa and her team disrupted the ongoing pattern of having a pink-themed female health tracker app. This bold design decision contributed “big time” to their growth. If you are working with influencers, focus on micro-influencers because they are more approachable and have a more dedicated fan base. Nail your product benefits, product positioning, and its messaging. Be rigid about how influencers can use them and how they must not use them. If you are in a newer, less-saturated niche, SEO is a great channel because it’s easier to find content gaps in the niche and fill it with high-quality content. Lisa shares that to increase your premium subscriptions: make your pro membership content truly valuable and meant for the regular, high-frequency user - not just the occasional user. Split testing can be used to avoid making decisions. Sometimes, you just have to believe in your ideas and execute them because non-determinant results of A/B testing can be paralyzing. Lisa also shares management lessons for CMO’s: empathy, honesty, vulnerability, and direct feedback help connect with employees. Sometimes, simply giving your employees a kind ear to vent can do the trick. Consuming leadership content has also helped Lisa in her quest of becoming a great CMO.

Ian Moore is the Head of Subscription Growth at Verizon Media. Before joining Verizon Media in August 2020, he spent five years at The New York Times, where he was the Growth Media Strategy Director. As the son of a first-generation American, Ian’s educational path pointed towards medicine, but that wasn’t where he found his career passion. An Economics professor turned things around. His professor taught him about the power of persuasion. From there, Ian felt inspired to predict human behavior through incentive programs. Ian dives into the concept of codeswitching early in his career and how his mentality has changed as he’s become more confident in his abilities. He reminds us to let the work do the talking. Quality work is going to do the talking. A turning point for Ian’s career is when the CEO of the New York times shared with him some advice he'd never forget (you're going to have to tune in to hear what she said). This interaction and his experience of pioneering subscriptions at the New York Times positioned Ian as an expert in subscription growth. Hear this and how his tenure at the New York Times shaped his view on how to drive subscription growth, how he’s investing in an online company replacing physical optometry appointments, what it’s like to build consumer relationships with legacy products, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This podcast, Kar Paramasivam talks about the growth strategy at Blue Apron, a direct-to-consumer, chef-designed meal kit company. Starting his career as a banker, Kar shifted his focus to startups, where he got his first opportunity to lead a growth team at Shipt. From this point, Kar made his way through companies like Spacious.com (acquired by WeWork), Nutrafol, and CUUP, to his current role as a VP of Growth at Blue Apron. Kar shares some successful campaigns and approaches his team adopted to leverage Blue Apron's app and increase user retention and engagement.

Martijn Lancee is the Senior Manager for Mobile Growth and Business Strategy on LinkedIn, where he has grown as a product leader over the past three years. Before LinkedIn, Martijn spent eight years at Google, where he was responsible for developing and implementing Google's app distribution strategy focused on preloads and pre-installs. Working on mobile growth preloads as a strategy, Martijn advises developers to launch a test with Digital Turbine and ironSource to understand how preloads could work for them. The challenging part is that you have to build that trust in time. Converting desktop and web users to start using your app offers more engagement and monetization. To convert users, you should constantly make effective app banners and let your users know about the benefits of using the app. You need to drive member value when launching a new feature or app. LinkedIn puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the platform is valuable to everyone with a job or looking for a job.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Deepak Nair joins Mada Seghete to discuss how banks can drive digital transformation and innovation strategies and deliver a best-in-class digital experience to customers. Deepak is the Experience Transformation Leader at Citizens Bank and is responsible for managing enterprise transformation journeys that produce exceptional customer experience while reducing operational costs. He has twenty-plus years of experience in digital, marketing, CX, communications, and analytics and has been nominated for being one of the most influential industry contributors by the San Francisco Charter of Digital Analytics Association.

Tomas Warden joins us today from Telstra, where he has spent the past thirteen years in various roles. Currently, he is the Principal of Digital Engagement and Experience, responsible for driving the E2E digital experience strategy across Telstra's digital sales and service channels. Telstra is Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company. In this episode, Tomas shares insights from his career, mobile growth strategies, and how his team drives growth through the company's app.

On this episode Archie Abrams, Senior Director of Product Management, shares how he thinks about balancing supply and demand at Lyft, even as markets have been forever changed by COVID-19. Before this, he was the 10th employee at udemy. Over the course of his 7.5 years there he helped to scale Udemy from no revenue to hundreds of millions in revenue and over 600 employees. More on Archie’s story, including how perceived value plays into the psychology of your user, why it’s important to utilize the behaviors of your best customers, and why you should reevaluate immediately killing unsuccessful strategies, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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 need to move to something where she could better measure the impact of her work and joined an early stage startup in New York City. Her entry into Product Management and Marketing teams at that start up eventually led to her becoming the Head of Growth at the Google Store, in charge of distinguishing the various Google Store and hardware brands. She then went on to build Slack’s Digital Marketing and Performance Marketing function globally driving user acquisition, retention, and monetization across SMB and Enterprise customers. Amidst her current work as a growth advisor, Holly is a co-founder of Ceilingbreakers.us, a coaching platform that is rethinking the way tech leadership looks by creating a direct line to top executive coaches for specifically people of color, women, immigrants, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented groups. Hear more about where Holly believes growth sits within a company, advice to those building their own multi-touch attribution systems, and her advice for her younger self on this episode of How I Grew This. App she can’t live without: Apple Podcast App Animal she would talk to if she could: Cats App she uses that others wouldn’t expect: Chinese apps

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 learned that many people had to choose between paying to charge their phones or eating that day. In those instances, he learned that truly understanding the user was critically important for achieving immense growth to hundreds of millions of users which he achieved at Practo. He also took a much more thorough approach than most when it came to tracking. At one point Varun stopping all marketing activities to make sure the entire site and product tracked all the way to billing. Once they did that they realized why users were bouncing and were able to get $2 net revenue for every dollar spent, which made the CFO their biggest advocate. More on Varun’s story including how he helped drive growth for a new category, his thoughts on Apple’s decision on IDFA, and how the marketing world has completely evolved from TV to direct response. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

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, how the Allstate app plays into the overall company strategy, Mike’s views on how a company culture built on trust is key to innovation, and what he learned from a failed Allstate experiment with augmented reality, are featured on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

Ben Okkenga is the Senior Product Manager at RTL2, a TV network from Germany. Ben has spent the last ten years building growth in various departments. Currently, he is responsible for RTL2 projects and products, like the gaming website, mobile apps, and Smart TV applications. In this episode of How I Grew This, Ben talks about how to attract, engage, and retain users on your app, the product that brought RTL2 Connect the Smart TV Award, and how to succeed as a product manager.

Surendra Bashani, Senior Director of Product Management at Best Buy, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. Surendra describes his role at Best Buy, where he focuses on various programs to see how customers behave and improve their customer experience. To measure the success of the programs, the team checks the metrics from adoption to increase engagement. They also measure customer feedback through CSAT surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS, and store associates’ feedback and experiences. Growing a business depends on the company, the product's life cycle, and the problems you can solve. There are two parts to grow, marketing and creating value for customers. Furthermore, Surendra talks about the impact of mobile technology on business growth. Three main elements drive the adoption of AR and VR. Firstly, the speed and power of hardware and AI on smartphones. Secondly, faster data. Thirdly, customers' interest in the metaverse and emerging gaming experience. Finally, Surendra gives valuable advice for people who want to become successful product managers and leaders. If you also want to become a top product leader, listen to this episode of How I Grew This podcast.

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 companies such as the New Yorker and ESPN. Let your existing customers - who are friends with non-subscribers - introduce your product to new users. Plan your growth strategy with all forms of media in mind across all platforms. Monitor growth channels regularly to decide what channels are working for you and what channels are not. Use data to drive these decisions forward. When modeling or remodeling your onboarding experiences, prioritize the kinds of behaviors that you want to introduce. Before showing subscribers any push notifications, explicitly ask them for push notification permission immediately after app installation. A subscription plan is about building relationships and nurturing them over time. Your product team must adapt the product according to the dynamic growth of different user personas. Introduce new features to users and help them discover the benefits over time in a calculated manner using data - don’t bombard them with all features at once.

Diego Dzodan, the co-founder and CEO of Facily, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. Before starting Facily, Diego worked for Facebook and Instagram as the VP of Latam. He spent ten years at SAP, where he focused on driving growth across countries by strengthening relationships with customers while working with them to innovate and deliver business value. Facily is the leading social commerce marketplace in Brazil. It operates in nine Brazilian cities and has over 12,000 pick-up points. Faci.ly focuses on lower-income segments of the market and tries to offer the best possible prices to its consumers. To achieve that, Facily connects the consumer and the producer and helps with logistics. Facily also asks their customers to form groups to buy at better prices. One of the main priorities Faci.ly has is getting the operations on track to continue to scale and increase the efficiency under which it can deliver orders. The company wants to expand in all major cities across Brazil and test in Mexico and Colombia. Working in the corporate world results in gaining many valuable insights and lessons when starting a business. You encounter all the positive and negative aspects of the business world. It becomes easier to think big when you have seen big companies perform well and you learn how to plan for the long-term. But one of the main lessons that exceed the corporate world is learning to stay close to details and build something different from what the market offers. Leaving a good job and starting a business requires you to be prepared from many angles. First, take your finances into account. Second, having your family's support is crucial. Third, you need to be emotionally ready to take that step.

Emre Ertan is the Chief Product Officer at Getir. Emre has previously directed growth at Slice Technologies and Zum. He also co-founded not one but two companies, Mobito and Soru. Get people to share their referral links on social media, specifically mass social media avenues like timelines posts and groups. The more people share about your product, the higher the chances of their posts being featured (or “going viral”) on Facebook. This strategy takes time, requires an experimental mindset, and may require significant investments. Focus on nailing your product and service for your customers. If your product and customer service are not flawless, your viral marketing efforts can backfire on your brand. Try enabling local businesses even if you are not in a niche with a hyperlocal model. Local businesses can provide faster turnaround times and more personalized service to your customer. Have a “lighthouse customer” (similar to your ICP) who provides a base. From here, you can create a framework for services, products, and experiences for the rest of your customers. Start your business by thinking comprehensively about the problem you will solve. If you want to start a company, the problem you will solve must be a common issue for a broad audience. If the problem you want to solve is already being solved by another company, you can join forces and solve it as a part of a team.

Some get to join a company that redefines an industry once in their life. Sheila has done it twice. As Dropbox’s first marketing hire, she led the transition from a consumer-facing product to one with an enterprise focus. Now at Opendoor, she is redefining a 100+ year-old industry and revolutionizing the way real estate is bought and sold. This, stories of doubling market share for Opendoor in 3 months, and how brands should approach marketing and caring for customers during a pandemic, are featured in our podcast episode with Sheila Vashee of Opendoor. Listen and subscribe on Apple/Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and YouTube!

Lynn Blashford, CMO of White Castle, has risen the ranks during her 10 years at the company. White Castle, known for pioneering the fast food industry, turns 100 years old in 2021 and operates with a long term vision which runs counter to today’s hypergrowth and short-term gains environment. Maybe unsurprisingly, this mindset has allowed them to weather the storm of 2020 both by taking care of their employees as well as how they’ve strategically diversified the business. White Castle was one of the first non-pizza companies to roll out online ordering and was the first fast food chain to adopt the vegan Impossible Slyder in the nation. Beyond just the bottom line, Lynn spoke about how the private nature of the company allows them to take care of their people and the communities they serve. One of the beautiful stories she shares is how healthcare workers could eat for free when the pandemic lockdowns began. Hear more about how White Castle has adapted to the many challenges of 2020, Lynn’s advice for her younger self, and of course, Lynn’s behind-the-scenes story of how the film “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” came to be, all on this episode of How I grew this.

Grant Ingersoll, Chief Technology Officer of Wikimedia, joined us on the podcast this week to discuss his experience navigating his own career through identity and knowledge equity. He shares the path that led him to his current role and why he chose to take a bet on himself and start his own company. More on Grant’s story, including his beliefs that people’s views of themselves can be blockers for their own personal growth, why he is constantly reinventing himself as a founder, and Wikimedia’s roadmap to make their knowledge base reflect the global community, are shared in this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

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 get the return you’re looking for, especially when scaling. He adjusted his approach to play the long game and focus on important but not urgent growth methods. As he says in the interview, once something becomes urgent, it’s too late. He built out a multi-year roadmap that would allow continued growth through different channels. That experience also helped him when RentoMojo had to make dramatic shifts when COVID happened. They decided to implement a subscription pause, which reduced churn by 35% and played a significant role in helping the business continue to thrive even during the lockdown. Hear more on Dharmesh’s story, including how culture was the most critical driver of growth at Amazon, how he became the odd one out in his family and didn’t work on the family business, his time management, and so much more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, and more.

What does it take to build a leading Peer-to-Peer car-sharing company when the market is exploding with new competitors? How do you continue to drive growth after your company gets acquired? This, the stories of learning from failure, recruiting his first users one by one, and the decisions he made that ensured the product remained a market leader, are in our third episode of “How I Grew This” with Vincent Saint-Martin of OuiCar.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mickey Noworyta joins Mada Seghete to share his approach to driving product growth, testing new product features, and the difference between attribution and incrementality. Mickey is the Senior Product Manager at Expedia Group, where he and his team focus on exploring performance marketing ideas. While Mickey is a seasoned Product Manager, he has also worked as a drilling engineer for the oil and gas industry, a researcher, and a data engineer and developer.

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 those projects have had on the lives of their customers. Ashish believes that the impact their campaigns leave and the value they contribute to their customers’ lives provide a much greater high for marketers. Ashish opens up about his outdoor sales experience working for his family in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and how that contributed to his growth story. Finally, Ashish also shares potent advice for new startups who often get distracted by the hypergrowth of other startups in a race to achieve “unicorn” status.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the healthcare industry to its limits, but it also led to new opportunities in terms of accelerating digital transformation. In this episode, we discuss the growth of digital transformation in healthcare with Tracey Weber, SVP of Digital Products, UX and Operations at CVS Health. Tracey joins us with over twenty-five years of experience in leadership roles across multiple consumer industries and extensive digital operations. Before joining CVS Health, Tracey was the General Manager of Marketplace and Digital Ecosystems at IBM, the President and COO of Gilt Group, and held several other leadership positions at companies like CitiBank, Travelocity, and Barnes & Noble. Today, Tracey shares some of the newest trends companies adopt to fulfill the rising consumer expectations for digital healthcare experiences.

Andy Rebhun is someone you just get excited to talk to. He’s an extrovert with opinions and vision. He is an accomplished Marketing Executive, who has delivered first-to-market products and profitable growth for billion-dollar brands across Fortune 50 companies like the McDonalds Corporation and Ford Motor Company. He is currently Vice President of Digital at El Pollo Loco, where he is responsible for CRM, E-Commerce, off premise delivery, loyalty program, and social media. Andy holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wisconsin Madison and an MBA from Kellogg School of Management. In this episode, Andy dives into (1) how he got tapped to manage marketing for an 800+ restaurant market before 30 yrs old, (2) how he took the McDonald’s app from 0 to 5M users, (3) how he navigated COVID to triple digital sales at El Pollo Loco, (4) along the lessons he learned along the way.

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 stages of their career. Yummly is a recipe discovery platform with a mission of helping people become the best version of themselves whilst achieving their goals in the kitchen. In the episode, Brian talks about how Yummly moved from conception to its current state by empowering its consumers and taking risks. In the episode, Brian describes how cooking went from being a way of sustenance to a form of healthy living throughout the pandemic. Brian also talks about the importance of relevant lifecycle messaging and how Yummly leveraged this to shift from an acquisition-focused to a retention-oriented growth strategy. In the episode, Brian shares how user-centered design and design thinking sparked his curiosity and has helped him start several new businesses. He also talks about his passion for helping set other entrepreneurs up for success. Brian also explores why recipe and food hardware startups struggle to attract investors and wind up early. Finally, Brian also shares his advice for startup founders on separating their identity from their work and avoiding burnout.

When it comes to your career, taking the road less traveled will often serve you well. Knowing exactly what you’re passionate about, what you’re naturally good at and what you want to accomplish on your career path are essential components needed to live a life of intent. Today’s guest is Ana Guillen, the Senior Director of Marketing at TuneIn. She has been intentional about growing her career ever since her first job working at a local music store at 13 years old and utilizes this intent in all aspects of both her personal and professional life. Take a listen to hear more about Ana’s experience working for one of the industry’s leading record labels, her strategy for crafting intentional marketing campaigns that engage valuable lifetime users, and how she finally learned to trust her instincts. Hear all these stories and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Farhad Massoudi, Founder and CEO of Tubi, joins Mada Seghete. They cover the success journey of Tubi, a free streaming service disrupting the industry, and its growth hack strategies involving content, viewership, and advertising. Farhad shares his journey as an entrepreneur and his approach to leveraging the power of AI in media distribution. Tubi is the leading free, premium, on-demand video streaming app. With its expansive library of films and shows, Farhad has successfully bridged the gap between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, building strong partnerships with top studios and using proprietary technology to personalize the viewing experience. Before Tubi, he was the Founder and CEO of AdRise, the largest provider of video-on-demand applications on connected devices.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Lee Anne Grant, Chief Growth Officer of Babylist, joins Mada Seghete to discuss the growth and marketing strategy of Babylist, the leading digital destination for growing families. Lee Anne also shares insights on the website's founding, growth, and marketing channels, including their focus on search, social, and affiliates. With an illustrious career spanning multiple consumer companies, Lee Anne brings a wealth of expertise in partnerships, marketing, and driving cross-functional growth. Before Babylist, she was the Chief Business Officer of The Assembly, Head of Business Development and Social Impact at Brandless, and Vice President of Business Development and Sales at POPSUGAR.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Deepak Nair joins Mada Seghete to discuss how banks can drive digital transformation and innovation strategies and deliver a best-in-class digital experience to customers. Deepak is the Experience Transformation Leader at Citizens Bank and is responsible for managing enterprise transformation journeys that produce exceptional customer experience while reducing operational costs. He has twenty-plus years of experience in digital, marketing, CX, communications, and analytics and has been nominated for being one of the most influential industry contributors by the San Francisco Charter of Digital Analytics Association.

As people's reliance on technology grows every year, many travelers believe a positive digital experience is the number one criterion when choosing an airline. So airlines try to meet the latest technological demands to remain competitive and grow their business. To better understand the most recent digital trends in the airline industry, we invited Kevin Bowling, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Hawaiian Airlines. Leading the digital experience technology team, Kevin is responsible for mission-critical customer-facing products, including HawaiianAirlines.com and iOS and Android apps. Today, Kevin shares Hawaiian Airlines' approach to digital innovation to better engage and retain different types of travelers.

When it comes to your career, taking the road less traveled will often serve you well. Knowing exactly what you’re passionate about, what you’re naturally good at and what you want to accomplish on your career path are essential components needed to live a life of intent. Today’s guest is Ana Guillen, the Senior Director of Marketing at TuneIn. She has been intentional about growing her career ever since her first job working at a local music store at 13 years old and utilizes this intent in all aspects of both her personal and professional life. Take a listen to hear more about Ana’s experience working for one of the industry’s leading record labels, her strategy for crafting intentional marketing campaigns that engage valuable lifetime users, and how she finally learned to trust her instincts. Hear all these stories and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Leslie Saltzman joins Mada Seghete to discuss digital and data-driven strategies to drive business development and patient experience in the healthcare industry. Leslie is the Chief Medical Officer at Ovia Health and a physician leader with expertise in devising and implementing data-driven strategies to improve clinical outcomes, reduce healthcare costs, and identify target patients. She received her D.O. from the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and her MBA from NYU Stern School of Business.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mariana Kuiken joins Amanda Vandiver to discuss how brands can leverage performance marketing and disruptive marketing trends to grow their businesses. Mariana is currently the Growth Marketing Lead at Zalando, where she works on developing new marketing opportunities through machine learning advertisements, user-automated content and augmented reality. Before that, she held various marketing roles at companies like Delivery Hero and LightInTheBox.

Growth and product are a completely different beast when you sell physical products and not software. Despite those challenges, our next guest Ramneek Khurana has grown Lenskart to help India’s vision problem. Ramneek went to Georgia Tech and expected to go to a major consulting firm, but he took some advice that led him into physical products as he started his career at Michelin Tires. Since Michelin was the top tire brand, Ramneek made very marginal improvements and eventually got bored and wanted to solve a bigger problem. That led him to co-found Lenskart, an optical eyewear chain that produces over 300,000 glasses a month. They saw the large gap in the Indian market for a convenient, stylish eyeglass brand that also helped tackle the millions of Indians who weren’t able to get glasses. Unlike almost every other eyeglass manufacturer, Lenskart focused on mobile and digital from the very beginning, making it easier for customers and allowed them to scale quickly. Some of their best growth campaigns came out of COVID. They received tons of videos from customers to showcase they could still help people get eyeglasses even during lockdown and turned it into a massively successful TV campaign. Hear stories like this, how they won the award for Best Mobile Innovation at Branch’s 2020 Mobile Growth Awards, how Ramneek manages his time as the company grows and changes, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

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 those projects have had on the lives of their customers. Ashish believes that the impact their campaigns leave and the value they contribute to their customers’ lives provide a much greater high for marketers. Ashish opens up about his outdoor sales experience working for his family in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and how that contributed to his growth story. Finally, Ashish also shares potent advice for new startups who often get distracted by the hypergrowth of other startups in a race to achieve “unicorn” status.

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, fishing forecasts, social networking features, and recommendations on fishing gear. Fishing is the most popular hobby in the world… and is huge in the US, Fishbrain’s biggest market. During the pandemic, Fishbrain was a beneficiary of other businesses and sports shutting down and also from becoming the primary online retailer focused on a variety of fishing gear. Riding this wave, Fishbrain has grown to over 13 million users. Lisa led Fishbrain’s marketing expansion beyond their (mostly) paid advertising campaigns. Fishbrain’s social network feature attracts new users and contributes to their user retention. Fishbrain grows through SEO, word of mouth, influencers and even offline marketing (billboards, radio ads, etc) in some southern US states that have a thriving culture of anglers. Sometimes, all that is required to stand out in the market is observing a pattern and disrupting it with a bold design decision. At Clue, a female reproductive health app, Lisa and her team disrupted the ongoing pattern of having a pink-themed female health tracker app. This bold design decision contributed “big time” to their growth. If you are working with influencers, focus on micro-influencers because they are more approachable and have a more dedicated fan base. Nail your product benefits, product positioning, and its messaging. Be rigid about how influencers can use them and how they must not use them. If you are in a newer, less-saturated niche, SEO is a great channel because it’s easier to find content gaps in the niche and fill it with high-quality content. Lisa shares that to increase your premium subscriptions: make your pro membership content truly valuable and meant for the regular, high-frequency user - not just the occasional user. Split testing can be used to avoid making decisions. Sometimes, you just have to believe in your ideas and execute them because non-determinant results of A/B testing can be paralyzing. Lisa also shares management lessons for CMO’s: empathy, honesty, vulnerability, and direct feedback help connect with employees. Sometimes, simply giving your employees a kind ear to vent can do the trick. Consuming leadership content has also helped Lisa in her quest of becoming a great CMO.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Akio Bandle joins Mada Seghete to discuss ZipRecruiter's growth journey, the company's experience with user acquisition for mobile apps, transitioning to remote work and getting into product management. Akio is currently the Product Lead at ZipRecruiter. Before joining the company, he worked in various organizations, from small startups to large enterprises. Akio is an experienced product manager, product advisor, and marketing analyst.

Branding means more than simply creating a logo and placing some ads. As Jeff Bezos said: "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room". The main question is how to do it successfully. In this episode, Gessica talks about some of the best practices and channels for building your brand. Gessica is a computer scientist with a deep passion for marketing and is currently the CMO at Paired, an app that focuses on building deeper connections with your partner.

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 major retailer—he has always addressed challenges head-on. In this episode, Carman shares the secrets to successfully leading a company through digital transformation, and explores how staying true to his purpose and focusing on making a difference in people’s lives have been the most important driving factors behind his success.

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 people gain a sense of community and can sometimes act as a welcome distraction, which is why mobile gaming metrics have been going through the roof during the pandemic. She also believes in taking a challenging campaign and iterating through to make it work. She fondly recalls a campaign where she challenged assumptions about women playing sports and eventually succeeded after multiple iterations. Furthermore, Jayne firmly believes in the idea of “you only fail when you quit” and also emphasizes the importance of working together through failure in order to achieve success as a team. Jayne thinks that, especially after IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5, gaming companies should focus on overall user lifecycle metrics. She favors choosing the right time to transition them across the lifecycle instead of using interruption marketing. Jayne’s team management philosophy revolves around giving due credit and providing genuine encouragement regularly. Jayne advises younger folks in gaming to reach out to mentors with whom they identify personally and ask them for specific advice while also encouraging senior mentors in the industry to share their knowledge freely.

Frank Hulsebosch is the Head of Digital Marketing Europe at Banco Santander. Before this role, he spent two years as a digital marketing manager in the Benelux region of Europe, also at Banco Santander. Frank was responsible for driving for Banco Santander’s Benelux region’s digital transformation, launching a new mobile home banking app, new digital onboarding journeys, and CRO programs to optimize online channels. He then moved on to lead the digital marketing strategy and performance of Santander’s Consumer Finance unit in Europe. Frank shares an honest account of his transition from a media agency to leading the Santander Benelux region’s digital transformation. He mentions that he oversold himself during the hiring process, which did enable him to get the role but led to a lot more stress further down the road as he struggled with a lack of experience in the world of mobile banking. Frank provides career advice for aspiring growth leaders: “do more.” Frank found himself completing his assigned tasks during his first internship and then always searching for more work to do. This approach significantly increased his rate of learning over that of his peers, accelerating his career. Hear more career advice along with why you should never give up when starting something new, the reason why other people don’t want you to succeed, the impact of COVID-19 on the mobile banking industry, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

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 momentum and culture. If you lose either of them, they are impossible to rebuild. Have belief in your business model and look at the advantages in context. When you cannot control certain aspects of the funnel, let full-funnel growth (across all stages) be the central driver of your business. If your app is “content-centered,” your data sets hold the power to convert and retain users. First, focus on improving the quality of data you can provide to your audience. Don’t get attached to results because any growth experiment can fail. Instead, focus on learning from successful and failed experiments. Find and monitor feedback loops based on what your users respond to. The key to growth is to keep adapting as your audience adapts because they are the chief driver of your business growth. Re-engagement via push notification may put you at risk of annoying your customers. People may forget that they have the app installed, so it’s always better to focus on outside-the-app strategies such as SEO, personalized content, and reminders via emails to drive re-engagement through deep links into the app. Try not to depend on one platform because it can make a huge dent in your growth charts if the platform changes. Try to own your channels of growth as much as possible. Daily and sometimes even weekly metrics may be distracting. Monthly metrics provide a more accurate view of your audience’s changing consumption habits and are a healthier way to monitor growth. Ron shares that to maintain culture momentum during growth, your company’s senior leadership has to be the culture vanguard and train the rest of the leadership across the org. This becomes easier if people in your organization have a personal connection to your mission and stay longer. Ron’s final advice: be honest with yourself when making important decisions because you will be proud of the practical decisions you make and reactionary paths you avoid after you retire. Having a personal set of core values helps identify opportunities and enjoy the process of executing them.

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 processes from a “merchant-first” perspective. This helps guide them toward their mission of making online commerce easier and better for everyone. There's no value in a spiking lead conversion rate if they don’t become customers. Shopify relies on its growth marketing team (which Morgan is the VP of) for user acquisition. They also have a growth product side that focuses on activation signup, activation trials, and success retention. Internally, growth goals are divided into “missions” and mission teams include channel experts, product leaders, data scientists, engineers, and other cross-functional roles. This decentralized split of marketing teams helps these growth pillars move forward without friction as self-contained units. Commerce is no longer a discrete point where you drive customers from point A to point B, but it's really about being where that action is going to take place. Shopify recently partnered with TikTok to take their merchants where their customers are and bring the tools of giants like Instagram closer to their merchants.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Akio Bandle joins Mada Seghete to discuss ZipRecruiter's growth journey, the company's experience with user acquisition for mobile apps, transitioning to remote work and getting into product management. Akio is currently the Product Lead at ZipRecruiter. Before joining the company, he worked in various organizations, from small startups to large enterprises. Akio is an experienced product manager, product advisor, and marketing analyst.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Ariel Wengroff, VP of Marketing and Communications at Ledger, joins Mada Seghete to share thoughts on the intersection of blockchain, security, and marketing. They share how Ledger revolutionizes the digital asset security landscape, strategies for digital success, and the future of blockchain technology. In her role at Ledger, Ariel leads global marketing and communications, focusing on educating and culturally integrating people into the world of digital asset security. She is also the Founder of Culture's Last Stand, a strategic partner to businesses and individuals, putting the consumer at the center of their practice. Before that, Ariel was the Co-Founder and Chief Content and Community Officer at arfa and worked at VICE Media, where she was an Executive Producer of the Emmy nominated VICELAND show WOMAN with Gloria Steinem.

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Today’s guest is Stuart Jones, the Head of Product at ITV Hub, an on demand streaming service in the UK. Stuart discusses how the pandemic has affected the television industry in many ways, specifically in the lack of available content along with the call for changes to their subscription model. More on Stuart’s story, including his early start as an airplane engineer apprentice, how his experience in various sectors brought him to TV, and his take on changing viewer habits in light of the pandemic are shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

As product leaders, you might be looking at road maps for 1-3 years from now, but our next guest is someone who seeks a challenge that takes a decade to solve. Loni Stark is the Senior Director of Strategy and Product at Adobe; fittingly, she works for Adobe; she is both a technical product leader and a creative artist with hobbies like a painting. She was inspired by her mother, who was the only woman in her job and pursued engineering, eventually landing at Stanford, where she focused on product management. At Stanford and in her early work, she learned how many critical components there are to a product's success, like the right partners, vendors, timing, and market need. She discusses the bittersweet challenge of solving long term problems, and she dives into how switching to the cloud was one of those challenges for Adobe and how they came out successfully. More on Loni's story, including how she made fake product one-pagers to get advice from other product managers, how she's trying to make enterprise onboarding as easy as consumer products, and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

Ben Okkenga is the Senior Product Manager at RTL2, a TV network from Germany. Ben has spent the last ten years building growth in various departments. Currently, he is responsible for RTL2 projects and products, like the gaming website, mobile apps, and Smart TV applications. In this episode of How I Grew This, Ben talks about how to attract, engage, and retain users on your app, the product that brought RTL2 Connect the Smart TV Award, and how to succeed as a product manager.

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 Coast Operations & Marketing) and at NFL (as their Director of Product for Fantasy Football). Disruption in any market starts with passionate founders who see opportunities to scale in all domains and are not limited by a particular mode or channel of growth. Don’t think that you need to build a mobile app because “everyone else is doing it”. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to use your resources to add value to your customers’ lives and grab a huge chunk of the market in the process. Even with a great product-market fit, your team is the most crucial aspect of building a mobile app. A collaborative culture among people who love to work together allows for that facilitation across different departments and different channels and is crucial to make growth happen. You should identify opportunity areas and really go after them. Even if you don’t know something - you will make mistakes and learn from them. It’s important to have candid conversations to get better with each decision. Follow a detailed diagnosis process within your team to learn from your mistakes as well as projects that were fully or partially successful. Sometimes, the best ideas come from taking something your customers already love and making it even better. One great way to turn such commonplace ideas into massive growth opportunities is to combine a few popular features that customers are experiencing in your app or your competitors. Also, look at enhancing key features to add something new to the app. Successful pivots in tough times like the pandemic require nimbleness and agility in executing a response to the new situation. At sweetgreen, they found this opportunity via shifting operations to donations to frontline medical workers in need. They repurposed and adapted their existing processes to respond to this opportunity. Personalization allows you to get close to the customers. At sweetgreen, Daniel thinks about personalization from the perspective of the customer. This way, personalizing a service goes far beyond small changes that give customers some control over the product you create for them. It means letting them care about the product in a way that grants them ownership of the product resulting from the service, including full customization of chosen ingredients.

Russell Stopford has led digital initiatives across everything from film to sports. He took his passions for the arts as well as his curiosity for emerging technologies and combined them to develop a powerful intersection between storytelling and digital product management. As both an award-winning documentary filmmaker and builder of mobile apps over the past decade, Russell is driven by a pursuit for perfection. As the sports industry transformed into an entertainment opportunity, Russell found himself highly sought after for his knack for weaving together brand stories and the end-user experience for the modern-day consumer. He’s currently producing a film series around the 50th anniversary of Paris Saint-Germain while in parallel working to bring a first of its kind sports app that could revolutionize its category. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This.