This week on Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Sheila Vashee, Chief Marketing Officer at Figma, the widespread design and collaboration platform whose mission is to “make design accessible for everyone.” Sheila shares how she pioneered product-led growth (PLG) at Dropbox to scale the team to 80+ and $1B in revenue, advice for marketing teams hoping to evolve their own PLG efforts, and why she believes the tension between PLG & PLS is solvable within any enterprise.
This week on Next Gen Builders, Francois is joined by Sheila Vashee, Chief Marketing Officer at Figma, the widespread design and collaboration platform whose mission is to “make design accessible for everyone.”
Sheila shares how she pioneered product-led growth (PLG) at Dropbox to scale the team to 80+ and $1B in revenue, advice for marketing teams hoping to evolve their own PLG efforts, and why she believes the tension between PLG & PLS is solvable within any enterprise.
There are plenty of insights from throughout Sheila’s career that she shares with Francois including: falling in love with the problem, understanding your audience deeply, and continuously testing hypotheses to drive growth. She stresses the importance of building a data-driven organization and the necessity of clear segmentation and resource allocation when implementing PLG.
Ultimately, Sheila’s message is clear as she tells the audience to stay curious, continually seek knowledge from others in the industry, and always prioritize understanding and addressing customer needs. This episode is filled with valuable advice for anyone looking to elevate their career in product-led growth, marketing, and data-driven decision-making.
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Guest Bio
Sheila Vashee is the Chief Marketing Officer at Figma, overseeing the GTM + Product Support teams. Prior to joining Figma, Sheila served as CMO at Ethos, a VP of Marketing and Growth at Opendoor, and was the second marketing hire at Dropbox. Sheila is also an advisor at Basis Set Ventures, an early stage investing firm. She started her career as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley and holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and a BA from Stanford in Economics.
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Guest Quote
“The whole company has to be centered around PLG for it to be successful. It has to be how product, growth, marketing, sales, and support are built.” – Sheila Vashee
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Time Stamps
*(02:00) Sheila's career journey
*(02:59) Standing out as a founder
*(04:28) How to tell a good story
*(07:25) What is PLG?
*(10:29) Dropbox and how Sheila pioneered PLG
*(17:52) Sheila's Oh Sh*t moment
*(21:59) Can PLG work with enterprise?
*(26:20) What Sheila would do differently in her journey
*(28:37) Exploring PLG dynamics across different companies
*(31:07) Why you need to be data-driven
*(32:22) Structuring a successful growth organization
*(38:07) Sheila's advice for aspiring marketers
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Links
0:00:00.1 Sheila Vashee: For PLG, the entire company has to be aligned around that model for it to work. You can't have a PLG motion that exists within a different type of company, it has to be how product is built, it has to be how growth is built, marketing is built, sales is built, support is built, the whole company has to be centered around PLG for it to be successful.
[music]
0:00:31.6 Francois Ajenstat: This is Next Gen Builders, the show for growth and product leaders of tomorrow. And today, we're cracking the code on PLG, product-led growth. It's the secret recipe for many of Silicon Valley's success stories. So forget what you think you know because we're taking you back to the beginning. PLG is tossed around startups and tech giants, but it's really hard to get it right, and that's why today we're talking with Sheila Vashee who used PLG before it was a trendy term. As the second marketing hire at Dropbox, Sheila helped scale the company to over a billion dollar in revenue, and she's now the Chief Marketing Officer at Figma, a PLG darling. She's held marketing roles at Ethos and Opendoor. Sheila will share her OG PLG playbook and why betting big on product is the key to reaching billion dollar heights. So grab your pen because this episode isn't about following trends, it's about creating them. Welcome, Sheila.
0:01:36.3 Sheila Vashee: Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
0:01:39.1 Francois Ajenstat: Well, we're so glad you're here. Now, before we start talking about PLG, let's start talking about you and your career. You started in investment banking. How do you go from that to being CMO, and what's your advice for anybody going on that journey?
0:01:55.2 Sheila Vashee: Great, great question. Yeah, so I started off in investment banking, you're right. It was investment banking at Morgan Stanley in Silicon Valley. So working really closely with tech companies, really all throughout their journey. So after investment banking, a few jobs after I also did a short stint in venture, and so have a lot of experience working with founders, both at the very early stages and through the growth process and up until IPO. And so, my advice on that journey is really understanding, I think that what investment banking gave me was a really deep understanding of finance and business that you can apply to really any job, and I'm very appreciative of that. It also just gave me the visibility across a range of amazing companies, which I learned from. So, it was a great place to start.
0:02:45.0 Francois Ajenstat: Now, have you seen anything that founders do that really helps them break through and get their ideas out and either be to get investment or to drive success in the market?
0:02:56.5 Sheila Vashee: The one thing that sets people apart and makes them, from a founder perspective, really effective is the ability to, number one, solve a problem for people, because at the end of the day, you have to fix something for someone for them to care about what you're doing. And number two, be able to tell a great story about it. So, why is it that this thing that you're building, whether it's a two-person company or a multi-thousand person organization that's going public, why is it that you solve a problem for them? The story that you tell, and that story is so important, it needs to be about them, not about you and why you're great, because at the end of the day, people don't care, they want you to fix something for them. And so I found that that storytelling is absolutely critical at every stage of the journey, and again, it's a story about customers.
0:03:52.2 Francois Ajenstat: I always like to say, "You gotta fall in love with the problem, not with the solution, and really landing that problem."
0:04:00.1 Sheila Vashee: Very well said. Yeah.
0:04:01.4 Francois Ajenstat: How do you... When you're building something new, and we're gonna transition soon to PLG, but when you're building something new and you're setting a new path that nobody else has really encountered before, what is the good way of telling that story that gets people to understand the outcomes you're trying to drive? Or, really, it's a really hard problem, how do you break through and make people believe that it's possible?
0:04:28.9 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. Look, I think whenever you're telling a good story, a few things matter. Number one, you have to deeply, deeply understand who you're talking to and what they care about and what those problems are. Just like you said, fall in love with the problem. You have to be credible in that you understand what that problem is, then people will believe that you know enough to be able to solve it. That's the first thing, really, really deeply understand your target customer and what they care about. The second thing is, you have to reach them where they are. With telling a story, what you say is important, how and where you say it, which is the distribution part is equally important. If you're trying to sell apples, standing in a place where people are hungry is gonna be far more effective than standing in a place where no one is thinking about eating food, right? Same thing goes with distributing content and distributing those stories, you have to go to where people are, the places that they spend time, where they're seeking answers to these questions.
0:05:33.6 Sheila Vashee: And the last thing is having a really differentiated breakthrough message, so you have to know how are other people solving that problem and how is your thing better than their thing, and be able to tell that in a really compelling way? And all of this is predicated on the fact that, or the assumption that people believe that the problem that you're saying is a real thing, so you have to also make sure that that is really clear, that might be called category creation, or the establishing of this thing that people need. And so, you first need to have that, people have to recognize it's a problem, and then you have to hit those three points, really understanding what they care about, making sure you're telling them when they're open to receiving it, and ensuring that your message is differentiated from everything else and can break through.
0:06:23.1 Francois Ajenstat: Do you see a difference between creating these stories, between where the story is, the company versus the story is, your project or in the initiative you wanna drive inside of another company?
0:06:36.0 Sheila Vashee: That's such a great question. I think that, those same tactics, those three steps that I outlined, can apply within a company when you're trying to sell your idea. It's actually an effective mechanism to get any idea across. Even if I'm trying to convince you of something, I have to know what you care about, I have to make sure I'm telling you in a place where you're open to receiving it, and I have to make sure that my answer is gonna stick. Even if you're trying to sell a project internally, that's still the formula that works.
0:07:06.1 Francois Ajenstat: That makes sense. Let's go back now, back in time. You start at Dropbox, smaller company at the time, and you have to go and create this thing called PLG. First off, for anybody on the call, can you just define what PLG is and why it matters?
0:07:27.6 Sheila Vashee: So PLG stands for product-led growth, as you mentioned earlier, and fundamentally, it's a model where every part of the funnel or every part of the user journey, whether it's user acquisition, to expansion, to conversion or retention, all of that is primarily driven through the product. And there might be teams or places where it's augmented with other activities, but the primary funnel mechanics happen through the product. And the benefits of a model like this are, number one, it creates a ton of cost leverage because normally you would have to spend a lot of money. Let's say top-of-funnel user acquisition can, for many companies, it's one of the biggest expenses on their P&L. And so, it reduces the dependence on paying for users or paying for even things like retention, 'cause you can do it through product mechanics.
0:08:34.5 Sheila Vashee: But usually with PLG, there are often other elements at play, so you might have viral mechanics in the user acquisition loop, which is what Dropbox had, or you have network effects from within the product, so like sharing mechanisms or something else that are fundamental to the product, the way the product works, but also create value as you grow the model, because more people on the platform then delivers more value to everyone else. And there are many companies or many businesses that offer those type of network effects. Social media is a great example. Collaboration products is another. And so, usually you have one of those at play as well. And then the last thing I'll say is, for PLG, the entire company has to be aligned around that model for it to work. You can't have a PLG motion that exists within a different type of company, it has to be how product is built, it has to be how growth is built, marketing is built, sales is built, support is built, the whole company has to be centered around PLG for it to be successful. But that's how I would define it.
0:09:50.9 Francois Ajenstat: Got it. So, now we go back in time, you started this company called Dropbox, which was not as well known as it was today, but you didn't have all of that knowledge then. How did that journey even begin? Was that an idea that you brought in? Nobody knew what PLG really was, how do you get started on that?
0:10:11.6 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. For Dropbox and for many companies, it was... Look, Drew and Arash, the founders of Dropbox are incredible, and they built... And a lot of the very, very early team, like the first 10 people, 10, 12 people, built a lot of those viral mechanics into the very, very early versions of the product. Even before there were people thinking about other functions or what to say or how to put it in different places, it was just fundamentally how the product work. And the very first, the very start, going back to what we started this conversation saying, Dropbox solved the problem for people, very, very fundamental problem, people couldn't get their stuff to different places. And at the end of the day, that has to work. And in fact, the early slogan, the early tagline for the company was "It just worked." "It just works." Sorry. Because there were other companies out there, but the product didn't work.
0:11:17.1 Sheila Vashee: And so if you can't rely on a service to ensure that you can access your stuff in the cloud or wherever, it's not useful. And so, they just got that right. It was a very, very dependable, reliable product, and people just loved it. And so, that was the fundamental thing, that was what the company was started on. I think from there, there are a lot of really early product decisions, like the driving virality through referrals, which were genius in getting that viral mechanic in place. So, what the team did, which we later then, and I joined a few years later, we really layered on through programs and other things, but what really worked was driving viral growth by offering people an incentive, and the incentive was space because that's what people cared about at the time, offering people an incentive to invite their friends. And it just took off like wildfire, because it was, number one, people loved the product, but number two, that incentive was something people really cared about. And so, that drove viral user acquisition, and then there were the network effects that I talked about, that helped drive activity on the platform.
0:12:42.4 Sheila Vashee: So, the more you shared with people at work, with your friends, the more valuable Dropbox became for you. And so, that then encouraged ongoing activity and growth. And then from there, people brought Dropbox into their company because it was something that was so useful for them in their personal lives for photos or personal projects or other things, they wanted something that easy at work, and a lot of the enterprise-focused companies didn't have at the time, usability wasn't as top of mind as it is today. And so, today we're calling it PLG. Back then, we called it the consumerization of IT. Whereas, IT organizations were faced with people, end users coming and saying, "I want Dropbox, I want this product, so you have to figure out how to make it okay for me to use at the company." And that was a whole separate path that we had where we had to add in security and controls and the things that organizations needed, but it was because users loved it so much, they wanted to bring it into their organization.
0:13:52.4 Francois Ajenstat: How did you guys discover some of those aha moments? You guys clearly got some key triggers that told you that this activity drove engagement. What were some of those key moments that helped you figure out that's what it is? Was it lots of trial and error? Did you guys have that insight?
0:14:13.9 Sheila Vashee: We had some hypotheses that we tested. Looking at the way people were using Dropbox, we saw that if you shared a folder or if you shared a file, you immediately saw the value sooner. We saw that if you saved a work file, and by work files, we had a definition of the type of files that might qualify for that, then you are going to get more value and probably, eventually need a business seat. And so, we had some hypotheses and it was kind of close observation, and we were able to get a sense for what are the early actions that drive value, and then focus on incentivizing and highlighting those actions in the onboarding.
0:15:02.6 Francois Ajenstat: And did you guys have a primary focus? Was it acquisition, sign-ups, monetization, retention? Where do you start really on this journey?
0:15:12.7 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. Look, every company is different from that standpoint. I think DropBox did not have a top-of-funnel problem. There was so much interest, and because it was a PLG freemium product, top-of-funnel acquisition, especially of consumer users or basic users wasn't an issue. We didn't invest a ton of money in traffic or sign-ups. We did spend a lot of time in a couple of places, number one, understanding those early indicators of value and making sure that within the product we're incentivizing the right behaviors, and then we spent a lot of time on how do we convince enterprise buyers that Dropbox is a product that is suitable for business? And that took a lot of effort.
0:16:01.6 Francois Ajenstat: It's fascinating. I know myself as a early Dropbox user, I went through that whole journey and you guys just nailed it. But I think it started with the product just works, and I was able to get that value. Tell me a little bit in terms of, one of the interesting things about Dropbox is you had a consumerization play that drove the business play. What if you're a business-only product, is there a way of creating that virality or what's your advice on how to approach that problem?
0:16:37.1 Sheila Vashee: Yeah, it's a great question. I think, PLG is now a just far better understood and accepted pathway, for consumer or business products. I think in many ways, it's almost an expectation. And so, there are many examples, and I would actually say Figma is a great example of that motion. Figma has a gigantic enterprise base. And there are ways to tap into that virality and that, the network effects around sharing with more business use cases. And so, it's absolutely possible.
0:17:21.8 Francois Ajenstat: Now, as you're going through this journey, you guys are creating something that really wasn't invented before, you guys were part of the early pioneers in that journey, I'm sure you've encountered one of these "Oh shit" moment where things aren't going the way you expected, or your hypothesis fails miserably. [chuckle] We all go through that when we build. Can you describe one of those experiences and how do you guys overcome it?
0:17:48.0 Sheila Vashee: Oh man, I've had so many of those. I feel like [laughter] I just, I've got an embarrassment of riches to choose from of things that I've done wrong or "Oh shit" moments. I'll talk about one that I alluded to earlier, which is entering into enterprise at Dropbox, which was not a simple thing. Number one, because it was a new motion, so bringing a consumer product into a larger organization just wasn't done at the time. You typically had two products, that was the era when people had two phones, they had their work phone and their home phone, their personal phone, and you didn't take call, you had to try to figure out which phone you were getting your information on, and it's like, that was the world we were in. The separation of work and personal was something that people were striving for. And we were saying, "No, let's actually bring it all together. And not only that, let's bring it together into a cloud platform where all of your stuff can mingle." [laughter] Yeah. We were basically just... In the very early days, we were just laughed out of the room. I remember things like, "Oh, Dropbox is a toy product. How can we have this in our company?"
0:19:04.8 Sheila Vashee: And the demand... We would have at, say, NBC or one of these big companies, there would be thousands of users who wanted to use Dropbox at work, and we were sitting there with IT saying, "What do you need us to build? You tell us. Your users are telling you and us that they wanna use Dropbox at work. What do we need to do to make that possible?" And so, there were multiple things we had to do, it was a whole set of controls we needed to build, security features, we had to build more admin tools on the product side. On the marketing side, we had to put in a massive effort to change the perception of Dropbox, and we did campaigns around being business ready, we built out programs for decision-makers and IT, we re-oriented our sales team to be more focused and bring in a list of contacts to these organizations that we could develop relationships with, and so it was a cross-team, cross-company effort to not only change the product, but change the perception that Dropbox was ready for enterprise. And so, the "Oh shit" moment was, "Oh no, oh shit, we're not ready," and we had to make ourselves ready.
[chuckle]
0:20:31.1 Francois Ajenstat: That happens so often, especially when you're early. But you said actually something really important, which goes back to what you said at the beginning, is falling in love with the problem. Where in this case, as you evolve the product you're building, the problem was the enterprise IT buyer who had a different set of concerns. And so you said, "Let's sit down with them, let's understand their problem and solve it." And that customer obsession, I think, is so important.
0:21:00.1 Sheila Vashee: It's so important. It really is. It's like you have to talk to hundreds and thousands of people to understand what is it that they actually care about, and you have to deeply feel it before you can work to resolve it.
0:21:13.1 Francois Ajenstat: Now, you brought up the other big word, the big E word, enterprise.
0:21:17.6 Sheila Vashee: Uh-oh. Oh, okay. I was like, "What is the other word that I said?" Did I say another bad word?
[laughter]
0:21:23.7 Francois Ajenstat: No, we've edited that one out. Don't worry.
0:21:25.1 Sheila Vashee: Okay, okay. You can bleep me, that's fine. It'll make it more interesting.
[laughter]
0:21:30.0 Francois Ajenstat: "What did she say?" "The big E."
0:21:31.9 Sheila Vashee: Exactly. Bleep it. It'll be...
[laughter]
0:21:35.3 Sheila Vashee: It'll add some mystery to this.
[chuckle]
0:21:38.3 Francois Ajenstat: Well, I bring up the big E word, enterprise, because I think that in many organizations, there's this tension between PLG and PLS, product-led sales, or even sales-led. And can those two worlds actually live together? Or... 'Cause it always, it feels like it creates tension.
0:21:57.5 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. It does. It does. I think they can live together, you have to be really thoughtful and careful about segmentation, first of all. How do you really clearly define, from a customer perspective, how you're targeting these two audiences differently, and can you be very clear about that? And then also about resource allocation. 'Cause what's always gonna happen, and I've seen this so many times at companies, is you have one team and you have the option of building something custom for like an NBC who says, "Hey, build this feature for me and I'll give you... I'll sign this multi-million dollar contract," it's impossible to say no to that. But the opportunity cost of that time for the team is building something for an SMB audience, which might be a 50 million person segment, and features that'll have broader appeal. And so it's like, how do you trade off? And those are decisions that we always got stuck in, how do we think about where should we be putting time, this multi-million dollar contract or these possibly multi-million dollars in revenue from this audience that is harder to see? And so, it was always a discussion and we'd have to... We were trying to balance both, and it's not easy.
0:23:29.0 Francois Ajenstat: That's definitely one of the hard challenges of building, especially building something new where you don't necessarily have the momentum yet, and so you're making bets, you're making risks and...
0:23:39.2 Sheila Vashee: Exactly.
0:23:40.2 Francois Ajenstat: You hope you make a good bet.
0:23:41.5 Sheila Vashee: Exactly. Yeah. And it's good to have multiple bets too, because then you can look across and say, "Okay, I've made five bets. One of them will pan out." Probability-wise, one of them will pan out.
0:23:53.2 Francois Ajenstat: But you do need to be opinionated...
0:23:56.1 Sheila Vashee: Yes.
0:23:56.9 Francois Ajenstat: And you have to have a perspective of what you want. And like you said, the resourcing, the prioritization of efforts, I think, could come together.
0:24:03.4 Sheila Vashee: Yeah, absolutely.
0:24:04.9 Francois Ajenstat: I think the other thing too, is you were saying, is it startups versus enterprise? I think actually one of the interesting things about PLG is it doesn't have to be an "or," it can be an "and." Because some enterprise customers do start through a PLG motion self-service, and that's your entry point, and startup, people move in different companies, so they could actually bring you in somewhere else too.
0:24:28.3 Sheila Vashee: That's true. I think that, what's really interesting, you're absolutely right, PLG can work with enterprise. You're faced with a challenge though of getting in front of the decision-maker. So, if you have a group of end users or a small team that loves using your product, if you're trying to build on that, if you have the expansion motion and you wanna get into more teams, a challenge you often face is, "How do I get in front of the decision-maker, whether it's the business leader, whether it's IT?" And that's always a challenge, and you need a champion, really, in the organization to help steer you through.
0:25:10.7 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, I used to call that... We used to have that land and expand motion. And...
0:25:15.1 Sheila Vashee: Yep. Classic PLG term right there.
0:25:17.3 Francois Ajenstat: Correct.
[laughter]
0:25:18.8 Francois Ajenstat: We didn't know what PLG was back then, it was land and expand.
0:25:21.4 Sheila Vashee: Classic land and expand.
0:25:23.6 Francois Ajenstat: But the beautiful thing of it is that you actually were able to demonstrate value faster, and so when you did go to the executive buyer, you had now a number of proof points of value and impact, versus the classic play of the hypothetical value might deliver, I think, actually supports more of the sales motion than I would have thought.
0:25:45.7 Sheila Vashee: That's very true, that, having those proof points of, "Did you know 5000 people in your organization are using Dropbox and they've done X, Y, Z. Don't you wanna deliver that value in other places?" That's a way more effective sales pitch.
0:26:04.7 Francois Ajenstat: Let's go... I keep going back in time, but now, if you could reflect back and you had a time machine...
0:26:09.7 Sheila Vashee: Sure.
0:26:11.7 Francois Ajenstat: What would you have done differently in your journey that you think would have either had more impact for the business or would have enabled you to drive results faster?
0:26:21.9 Sheila Vashee: I think that, a couple of things. Dropbox had so much early success on growth that we didn't build a lot of the infrastructure around growth until much later, and I think we just waited too long. So, how do you understand those questions around what's driving value, what's the payback across different channels, investing early and things like SEO, and even pay channels that eventually will give you more distribution and predictability in your acquisition funnel, making sure that you really understand the user journey and how can you deliver personalized content, either within the product or outside through email to create a clear upsell path? All of that came later, we just waited too long. And I wish that we had invested in that early. And same thing on the path, the enterprise, that all happened, but had we started six or 12 months earlier, we just would have been able to grow faster.
0:27:34.0 Francois Ajenstat: Were they naysayers in the journey that prevented some of that success from happening, or just saw the world differently, and how do you break through to them?
0:27:42.9 Sheila Vashee: Yeah, I won't say naysayers as such, 'cause I think it's hard to say it's not a good idea to invest in these growth areas or this new segment, it was more, it was a question of resource allocation again and prioritization, and do you work on the important but not urgent thing?
0:28:09.3 Francois Ajenstat: One of the classic challenges.
0:28:11.2 Sheila Vashee: Yeah, always.
0:28:13.6 Francois Ajenstat: So now you're over at Figma, which is an incredible story, an incredible product, and solves such an important need. Is PLG different for a product in a company like Figma than what you've seen from others?
0:28:27.5 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. The core mechanics are the same here, same initial user interest, same rabid love for the product. I would say growth happens more through those network effects and sharing than by referrals, we don't have the same referral programs and things like that. And the big difference really for Figma is that Figma has targeted more of a power user, that power use case from day one. It is a powerful product. It's not something that just... It's not easy to dabble in, you're serious if you come to Figma. And I think that then allowed enterprise expansion to be baked in in a different way, because it was just more inherent in the way people use the product.
0:29:26.8 Francois Ajenstat: Interesting. And then you worked at Opendoor as well, which I don't think of it as a PLG company but maybe I have that wrong. How are those differences there?
0:29:37.6 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. I wouldn't call it a PLG company per se, but it absolutely was a consumer company. And so, we looked at the funnel in the same way, we just had to... We had to pay for acquisition more than we did when it was, that, we had more viral growth. That changed though, I think, as people became more aware, especially we had a market motion at Opendoor, so we would go and take over a market, and we saw over time, as there was more awareness of what we were doing, the mechanics and the mix shifted a little bit in terms of acquisition, and we saw much more organic growth and viral growth through neighborhoods actually, people would say, "Oh, my neighbor did this," and so that's how they learned about Opendoor, and we leaned into that quite a bit. And so, I would say, initially, the product-led growth or neighborhood growth or however you wanna frame it, it took a little while to kick off, but once there was some basic level awareness, it grew more organically and through word of mouth.
0:30:54.7 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, so there's still some of that social effect that happened there as the others.
0:30:57.3 Sheila Vashee: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
0:31:01.8 Francois Ajenstat: You bring up user journeys, customer journeys, data, in different ways. How does data play a role in there? And is everybody data-driven? Do you have to be data-driven to be a PLG-led? How do you approach that?
0:31:20.5 Sheila Vashee: I think you have to be. I think you do. And I think that that is, for marketing organizations, that's really the big shift as you lean into a PLG motion, is you have to just deeply... And product, marketing product, really all teams that touch the user, the acquisition and onboarding funnel, it's like you've got to just understand every detail of where users are coming from, what actions they're taking, how they're performing, what's working, what's not working, and everyone has to understand it. I think it's just a critical part of building a team around PLG is having everyone be data-driven.
0:32:09.3 Francois Ajenstat: Building a team around growth. Data is a foundational element, but how do you structure a successful growth organization and how does that span between product, marketing, sales, and all the various functions?
0:32:24.4 Sheila Vashee: Yeah, great question. I would say what has worked for me across business and B2B and B2C companies, so whether it's Dropbox or it's Opendoor or Ethos or Figma or any of these companies, what has worked for me is just really, really clear ownership across the funnel. And it's generally split. First, you'll have your self-serve funnel, and then there's a piece of it that breaks off or the sales-led motion. And so even though it's coming from the same funnel, you'll treat leads differently if you qualify them as being a better fit for sales, and generally in this mode, it's less like outbound sales, more sales, more of like a sales assist motion. And then within that core funnel, you wanna have product, you wanna have marketing, you wanna have engineering, of course, and you wanna have data science, and you need to clearly give ownership over different stages, two different teams. That's what I've seen work really well.
0:33:32.9 Sheila Vashee: So, marketing might own all the way up to site conversion or onboarding or something like that, and then from there, product will own activation and ongoing engagement or retention, you can decide, at some point, like churn is probably a group of people or multiple teams owning. And then even within that, how you think about lifecycle and ongoing programs to drive engagement, might be joint ownership, but you have to just really clearly define that, and you have metrics for every stage that you watch like a hawk, and you're constantly running experiments. And the mandate to the team is 15% improvement quarter over quarter on these metrics, and you just run experiments until you're blue in the face. And that's how I've seen this work.
0:34:20.6 Francois Ajenstat: That's amazing. And clearly, when there's shared ownership of metrics, conflicts arise around that, do you have a trick on how to break through some of those conflicts?
0:34:35.7 Sheila Vashee: Yes. I mean, it's tough. You're right, there's always conflicts that arise like, "Oh, this lead wasn't a good lead. Oh, you're not working my leads. OH... " That's the classic sales and marketing conflict, you've got other sales and product, "The quality of this traffic is not good, that's why they're not converting. That's why they're... " So...
0:34:56.5 Francois Ajenstat: That was exactly the one I got. My activation went down 'cause you juiced up bad signups.
0:35:01.1 Sheila Vashee: Yeah. Because you juiced up top-of-funnel, and it's like, "Why are you spending money on these bad signups?" It's like every...
0:35:06.8 Francois Ajenstat: All the time.
0:35:07.0 Sheila Vashee: Every organization has those exact same conflicts. The best you can do is just have paired metrics, that's what, again, I've seen work. So if you gave a marketing team a signups goal, or maybe it's some early activation metric or whatever it is, then paired with that has to be some kind of quality metric, like, "What kind of indication do you have that this is high quality leads?" Just like you might have for the hand-off in the sales-led motion, some kind of quality metric or qualification that says this is a high quality lead, an MQL, SQL kind of hand-off. So, you have to have the same thing on self-serve setting, you have to just watch both. And yes, there will be conflicts, hopefully you can build enough rapport and goodwill across the team that people can work through it together because these teams need each other, they need each other to be successful. Even if one team owns a metric, marketing is not gonna be successful without product. Product is not gonna be successful without the data team. Engineering is not going to be... So it's like, there has to be enough goodwill between these teams that they can work together.
0:36:16.8 Francois Ajenstat: Yeah, it is truly the definition of one team, you have to be hand-in-hand. Now, PLG has created the emergence of the growth function, and I think different companies have growth marketing and growth product. What's your take on this evolution? Is it good, is it bad, somewhere between?
0:36:42.0 Sheila Vashee: I just think it's what we've been doing, you just have more data. What is the purpose of a sales and marketing team? Either you're building the product or you're growing and selling the product. It's really just, you just have two jobs at a company, you build the thing or you sell the thing. And so, growth is what was marketing before, is what was sales before, product is there in both. It's like, you can't change the way a company works, so you're still selling a thing. And so, I think this is an evolution, and the difference is that we have more data and we have more services, and we can be really analytical about how we look across all of them. 50, 60 years ago, the saying was, "50% of marketing is working, I just don't know which half," and it was accepted. I can't imagine that being accepted now. 50 years ago, you just put an ad in a newspaper and that was it, and people walked into your store. I think now we have a million services we're trying to optimize constantly, which is why data is so important, but the fundamental mechanics are the same, you're selling something.
0:37:56.5 Francois Ajenstat: And we're all trying to drive growth.
0:37:58.4 Sheila Vashee: Right, exactly.
0:38:01.4 Francois Ajenstat: If you had one piece of advice for somebody starting on this journey, what would you say?
0:38:08.2 Sheila Vashee: Get really curious, ask a lot of questions, meet with a lot of companies or people who have done similar things, you wanna gather as much information and data as possible, so that you can start with a sense of where to focus.
0:38:24.9 Francois Ajenstat: Fantastic. Well, Sheila, it's been a pleasure having you on this podcast. You truly are a next gen builder, you are an innovator, and I'm so excited for you in your journey. And so, thank you all for listening to Next Gen Builders, and look out for our next episode wherever you get your podcast, and don't forget to subscribe.
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