Growth.Talent

Growth Insights

Lessons from 247 conversations with growth leaders

Synthesized from 125 hours of podcast interviews across 40 shows in 4 languages. Every article quotes the people who actually built it.

Episode Insightplgonboarding

Kate Syuma on Why Product Quality Kills More PLG than Bad Tactics

Kate Syuma spent six years at Miro scaling from 63 employees to nearly 2,000. Her most contrarian belief? Your growth tactics are useless if your product experience is broken.

Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder

Episode Insightonboardingactivation

Kate Syuma on Why Miro's Best Onboarding Experiment Failed Users Loved

Kate Syuma scaled Miro from no onboarding to 50 million users. The experiments that won Twitter praise often lost on metrics—here's what actually moved the needle.

Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder

Episode Insightplgonboarding

Wes Bush on Why Most SaaS Companies Build Watered-Down Gatorade

ProductLed founder Wes Bush breaks down his 9-component system for building a product-led growth motion that actually converts, including the one exercise that boosted MRR by 20%.

Wes Bush · Founder

Episode Insightb2cretention

Vaibhav Sahgal on Why Growth Teams Should Be Renamed Value Connection

Reddit's former Head of Growth explains why push notifications need a 10% CTR threshold, why your first growth hire should ship in week two, and what Mark Pincus taught him about testing ideas before building them.

Vaibhav Sahgal · VP Consumer Product

Episode Insightaiexperimentation

Marily Nika on Why AI Isn't the Product—The Experience Is

Google's GenAI Product Lead has been building AI products for a decade. Her take: stop treating AI as the solution and start using it to create better experiences.

Marily Nika · Gen AI Product Lead

Episode Insightplgonboarding

Pulkit Agrawal on Why Chameleon Killed Its $25/Month PLG Plan

Chameleon's CEO explains why a $25/month PLG plan nearly killed the company, how a sales-assisted pivot drove 1,000% ARPU growth, and what makes most product tours fail.

Maria Thomas · Chief Product Officer

Episode Insightretentioncommunity

Ron Schneidermann on How AllTrails Accelerated Growth Post-COVID

AllTrails CEO Ron Schneidermann reveals how the outdoor recreation platform leveraged early platform advantages, community building, and product market fit to sustain explosive pandemic growth.

Ron Schneidermann · CEO

Episode Insightfintechb2c

Belén Gavilán: Cómo Tempo Creció de 600K a 3.5M de Usuarios en Chile

La Chief Growth Officer de Tempo revela cómo construyó un modelo de crecimiento que multiplicó por 6 la base de usuarios del neobanco chileno, pasando de marketing digital a orquestar squads multidisciplinarios enfocados en misiones.

Belen Gavilan · Chief Growth Officer

Episode Insightonboardingactivation

Lauryn Isford on Why Your Activation Metric Should Be in the Single Digits

Most teams pick activation metrics that are too easy to hit. Lauryn Isford explains why single-digit activation rates correlate with long-term retention, and how Airtable's team drove 20% activation growth by rethinking onboarding.

Lauryn Isford · Head of Growth

Episode Insightplgb2b

Leah Tharin on Why Your Salespeople Are Killing Your PLG Motion

Most PLG companies past $5M have sales teams. The problem isn't salespeople—it's how you pay them. Leah Tharin breaks down the incentive traps killing self-serve revenue and what to do instead.

Leah Tharin · PLG Advisor

Episode Insightexperimentationonboarding

Laura Schaffer on Why Adding Friction to Your Signup Flow Boosted Conversion 5%

Laura Schaffer ran a guerrilla A/B test at Twilio that broke every assumption about developer signups—and discovered that "bad friction is bad and good friction is good."

Laura Schaffer · VP of Growth

Guest Profileplgfreemium

Wes Bush on Why Your Free Model Is Probably Watered-Down Gatorade

The founder who helped 324 SaaS companies generate over $1 billion in sales argues that the next decade won't be won by those who build the best products—but by those with the sharpest go-to-market motion.

Wes Bush · Founder

Guest Profileplgb2b

Victoria Colombato: Cómo construir growth cuando nadie sabe qué es growth

Cuando Victoria Colombato entró a Mural, su instrucción fue "haz que esto crezca". Su primer cuarto no lo pasó corriendo experimentos, sino reduciendo un mar de métricas a solo tres números.

Victoria Colombato · Head of Growth

Guest Profileb2cretention

Vaibhav Sahgal on Value Connection, Not Growth Hacking

The Reddit VP thinks growth teams have a branding problem. They don't create value—they connect it. And that distinction explains everything from when to hire to why push notifications need a 10% CTR minimum.

Vaibhav Sahgal · VP Consumer Product

Guest Profileb2bproduct-market-fit

Todd Olson on Finding—and Keeping—Product-Market Fit

The Pendo founder argues that reaching product-market fit is just the beginning—most companies make a critical mistake the moment they think they've found it.

Todd Olson · Founder & CEO

Guest Profileb2cretention

Tati Gracia: quando o cupido vira analista de comportamento

A executiva que casou milhares de brasileiros antes do Tinder existir não confia em fórmulas de crescimento — ela aposta que entender fobia social vale mais que qualquer dashboard de métricas.

Tati Gracia · Diretora de Growth

Guest Profilepaid-acquisitiononboarding

Sandy Diao on Why Being Data-Driven Can Kill Your Growth

Most growth teams fail because they're too data-driven. Sandy Diao believes the best growth hypotheses start with customer stories, not benchmarks—and she has the conversion disasters to prove it.

Sandy Diao · Director of Growth

Guest Profileb2cteam-building

Naomi Gleit on Clarity, Canonical Docs, and Disagreeable Givers

Employee number 29 didn't get lucky. She showed up at the office 10 times, volunteered for PM work unpaid, and built a 19-year career on refusing to quit.

Naomi Gleit · Head of Product

Guest Profileb2cretention

The Anti-Data Playbook: What Growth Leaders at Meta, Twitter, and Instacart Know About When to Ignore the Numbers

The operators who scaled Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Instacart share a surprising confession: their best growth wins came from strategic shifts, not A/B tests—and every time they trusted their gut alone, they failed.

Multiple · Co-founder

Guest Profileaiproduct-management

Marily Nika on Why AI Is Not the Product (The Experience Is)

Before generative AI was cool, Marily Nika was building machine learning into video games. Now she's teaching growth teams that personalization matters more than the model—and that experimentation beats data volume every time.

Marily Nika · Gen AI Product Lead

Guest Profileplgb2b

Maria Thomas on Product-Led Growth: Why Buffer Prioritizes Product Experience

The Chief Product Officer at Buffer reveals why the self-serve model isn't a magic formula, and how running out of money forced her team to rebuild their entire go-to-market strategy around what customers actually needed.

Maria Thomas · Chief Product Officer

Guest Profileplgb2b

Leah Tharin on Why Product-Led Growth Isn't About Products Selling Themselves

The PLG advisor who survived two hypergrowth companies believes your product doesn't sell itself—and that's not just okay, it's strategic. Here's why commoditized markets demand free trials and how Flash demos evolved into trackable conversion machines.

Leah Tharin · PLG Advisor

Guest Profileplgonboarding

Lauryn Isford on Why Activation Rates Should Be Lower (Not Higher)

Most growth leaders chase high activation rates. Lauryn Isford, who rebuilt Airtable's onboarding and drove a 20% lift, argues the opposite: lower is often better, experiments are expensive, and tooltips are mostly dead weight.

Lauryn Isford · Head of Growth

Guest Profileplgexperimentation

Laura Schaffer on Misattribution, Self-Serve Pricing, and Career Growth

Laura Schaffer added questions to Twilio's signup flow expecting disaster. Instead, conversion improved 5%. The lesson: sometimes friction creates clarity—and executives are further from customers than they think.

Laura Schaffer · VP of Growth

Guest Profileb2bai

Kieran Flanagan on Why Growth Teams Will Disappear and AI Will Own GTM

The HubSpot CMO predicts growth teams will vanish—replaced by AI innovation pods that collapse product-led and sales-led motion into a single, agent-driven experience.

Kieran Flanagan · CMO

Guest Profileb2cpaid-acquisition

Ketty Slonimsky on Building Unfair Advantages in Red Ocean Markets

Most growth leaders chase uncrowded markets. Ketty Slonimsky does the opposite: she hunts red oceans where competitors already make $100 million, then outbuilds them with unfair advantages most startups will never have.

Ketty Slonimsky · Chief Growth Officer

Guest Profileplgonboarding

Kate Syuma on Why Big Bets Don't Work at Scale

The former Head of Growth Design at Miro spent six years learning that what users love on Twitter can tank your metrics, big redesigns cost more than they're worth, and asking one extra question might 3x your revenue.

Kate Syuma · Growth Advisor & Founder

Guest Profileb2cretention

Gina Gotthilf on Building Growth Without Budget at Duolingo

The former VP of Marketing & Growth at Duolingo would rather have no budget than unlimited resources—a forcing function that separates real growth from expensive theater.

Gina Gotthilf · Co-founder & CMO

Guest Profileplgproduct

Georgia Vidler on Why Simplicity Is the Hardest Product Metric to Measure

The former head of product at Canva thinks most product teams add too many buttons. She spent years making sure hers didn't become the bloated tools they set out to replace.

Georgia Vidler · Former Head of Product

Guest Profilefintechb2c

Belen Gavilan: construir hábitos antes que adquirir usuarios

Crecer de 600.000 a 3,5 millones de usuarios no fue un problema de canales. Fue un problema de hábitos, propuesta de valor imperfecta y timing cultural.

Belen Gavilan · Chief Growth Officer

Deep Divegrowth-leadershiponboarding

The Onboarding Playbook 8 Growth Leaders Actually Run

What top VPs of Growth do in their first quarter at a new company