Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
00:11:21 · Amol Avasare
[00:11:21] S1: I would say they're not fully wrong. We're very, very lucky to have the best models in the world. We're very lucky to have products like Claude Code and Cowork. It certainly makes life a lot easier. Having said that, I would say this is the hardest job I've had in my life, and that's having been a founder, having been an investment banker and other things like that, it's tough. And if I look at what do we do as a growth team here, I think ultimately it's the same categories of things that you would think about at a normal company. So we care about acquisition, how are we getting more people in the door, the intent of the people coming through the door. We care about activation, the signup flow, funneling people to the right products, making them successful. We care about things like monetization, free-to-paid conversion, pricing and packaging, all of that stuff that the categories of work is the same. I think then probably the big differences is I would say that roughly 70% of what I spend my time on is what we internally refer to as success disasters. And that is where things have gone so well that other things are breaking now. And I think anyone who's worked at companies that have gone through rapid growth, you think like Facebook, or Uber, or DoorDash early on, they understand this viscerally where scaling this much just brings a lot of challenges. So if you think about each of those categories on acquisition, on activation, on monetization, there's just a ton of firefighting jumping from one urgent thing to another. And it's often extremely painful. And it's funny because you look at all the charts, all the charts are green, fully up onto the right, and everyone's just like, it can be quite tough emotionally still. And so you need to step back and just realize we're very lucky to have these problems. But that's 70% of my time, I'd say, is just these firefighting of success disasters. And I think the 30% remaining is just much more standard bread and butter growth work where it's more proactive. So you think about, okay, if we have limited resources, we have many different products, which of the products do we want to put some juice behind? What does our long-term pricing and packaging look like, especially given that the technology's changing a lot and behavior and engagement trends are shifting.
00:13:35 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And then things like we have a lot of new products coming up like, okay, you ship Cowork, now what? When is the right time that we should lean in as a growth team to start optimizing the core adoption funnel for Cowork? So it's probably 70% just crazy firefighting, 30%, more bread and butter stuff. [00:13:53] S0: Okay. I'm going to dig into a lot of that stuff. One of the cleverest growth moves you all made recently was this idea of importing memory from ChatGPT where you just made it really easy and jumped on this trend of people getting really excited about Anthropic. Is there anything you could share about the behind the scenes story of that feature? [00:14:11] S1: We're just thinking about what can we do to improve the cold start problem and improve the new user experience. I think that activation is a really big challenge in AI. And so that's one example of something that we shipped that was very specific to a moment in time. But ultimately that you zoom out, it's like, okay, how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude understand who they are and understand how Claude can help them and get them to the right place?
00:14:11 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:14:11] S1: We're just thinking about what can we do to improve the cold start problem and improve the new user experience. I think that activation is a really big challenge in AI. And so that's one example of something that we shipped that was very specific to a moment in time. But ultimately that you zoom out, it's like, okay, how do you really make it easier for people who are signing up to have Claude understand who they are and understand how Claude can help them and get them to the right place? [00:14:43] S0: I want to follow that thread, activation. That's something that comes up a ton when I talk to people leading, driving growth on AI products. It's just there are so much stuff trying to get your attention these days for people to get to a place where they, okay, wow, this is really going to be something I want to keep using. It proves to be really hard. And it's also just unreliable sometimes, it's not going to be magical. It's AI, it's non-deterministic. I guess, one, is just how important is focusing on activation, getting people to that aha moment with AI products? And two, what are some things you've learned about how to do that well with Claude or AI in general?
00:15:19 · Amol Avasare
[00:15:19] S1: Yeah, it's a good question. I think that activation, it's critical and defining that as early activation, call it day zero, day one product experience. I think that historically anyone who's been in growth or been in product understands that that's usually one of the highest levers that you have to actually even increase longer term retention. And I think that the importance of that has just gotten exponentially higher. Now, zooming out, I feel like one of the biggest problems in the industry is capability overhang where the models are just getting better so quickly. And the real challenge is on the product side of how do we start to diffuse those benefits to people where even internally, there's new models coming internally and you're sitting there, you're so busy. And when a new model's available, you need to really carve out time to be like, "What can this do? How do I need to update my priors?" And if you think about more broadly for most people, you may have a model that is like, you may have AGI or some model that can do all sorts of crazy things, but if people's instinct is to come there and be like, "Hey, what's the weather in SF?" Then they're not going to get the most out of the product. And so I think that it's tough because the model capabilities are rising so much. So if I think about, okay, back when we had, I don't know, I want to say Opus 4, there's a series of things the model can do at that point, and Opus 4.5 unlocked a whole bunch of new things. You think about, okay, we sit there, we've got this new model, Opus 4. The time to then go and run a bunch of tests, figure out, okay, there's the capabilities from this new model, what are the right on ramps to guide people to those features? You run tests, you get the learnings, you then ship a new flow. By then, you may already have the next model, which unlocks newer capabilities that makes all these learnings irrelevant. So it's actually just a really difficult problem to stay on top of. I think that many of the same things, same old trends in growth and activation remain, I think, accurate where to me it's like ultimately some of the highest leverages from finding the right product or the right feature for the right user.
00:17:32 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
And I think that one learning, seeing this time and time again across companies, actually the right friction helps and adding more friction usually works if you do it the right way. I think that's something I've consistently seen that we've seen here as well. So to me, I think it's really being able to identify what are the characteristics of a user that allows you to then recommend them to the right feature or product and not being shy about adding friction to do that, I think is probably the single biggest thing that's important here. [00:18:05] S0: When I asked Ben Mann, one of the co-founders, former podcast guest, what to ask you about, and this is what he highlighted, is your experience, especially at Mercury redoing onboarding and making it magical. And basically he's in the same place as you of just how important it is for people to understand what the AI tool is capable of to help people decide to use it and stick with it. Is there an example of something you changed in onboarding that helped significantly improve activation? [00:18:33] S1: Yeah, it's a great question. And I like that it brings up Mercury. I talk about their product a lot. So worked on the growth team at Mercury, I think it's a fantastic product. It's something many people use, and the reason they use it is because the better banking experience than its- [00:18:47] S0: Yeah, I'm a very happy customer just to put that out there. I love it. [00:18:50] S1: It's a great product. Highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it.
00:18:50 · Amol Avasare, Lenny Rachitsky
[00:18:50] S1: It's a great product. Highly recommend it. They have personal banking. Everyone should go and use it. [00:18:54] S0: Right. They just launched that.