How to Win podcast with Peep Laja

Lauren Schuman:
I love the equation: conversion equals desire minus friction. I think it's really easy to focus on the friction, but actually focusing in on the desire element is often missed and can be extremely valuable.

Peep Laja:
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler, I don't do emojis. What I do is study Wynter's and B2B stats because I really want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, and how do they win? This week, Lauren Schuman, VP of product growth at Mural. Founded in 2011, Mural was valued at 2 billion after their series C funding in 2021. Before joining Mural, Lauren served as a senior director of product insights and growth at Mailchimp. In this episode, Lauren breaks down how she steered Mural and Mailchimp towards cultivating a growth practice. We discussed finding the right problem to solve, the importance of experimentation and why she hires curious people. Let's get into it. You've said that the most important part of building growth is nailing down your customer, your ICP can. Can you tell me about that?

Lauren Schuman:
I've definitely seen that if you don't have clarity on who your best customers are and who you're going after, it really causes a lot of spin from a marketing, sales, and product perspective. So if you try to be everything for everyone in particular, you'll likely fail just about everyone. I've found that this is especially important for horizontal products, so I've worked at Mailchimp and Mural where there's so many different types of customers and use cases, especially at Mural. I mean the possibilities are essentially endless and so with different types of customers, use cases, segments, industries, you need clarity and you need alignment on the organization so that you are all working in the same direction and both Mailchimp and Mural, we did many iterations of research and analysis to really nail this and it was a huge evolution and I really underestimated at the time just how hard it would be to get people bought into the specific customer profiles. I think people actually have a lot of underlying assumptions and even bias about who those customers should be.

Peep Laja:
You've also written that the hard part is finding the right problem to solve, which is what you worked on both at Mailchimp and Mural.

Lauren Schuman:
Yeah, I think getting the problem and the profiles either at the company level, if you're talking real B2B or in the SMB world, it actually feels like it operates a little bit more like B2C in that it's probably an individual, a founder or one or two person kind of team. So understanding not only characteristics of that person or company, but what are those specific use cases? What are the jobs to be done? How do you really narrow that down and see specific similarities across groups and where they're truly different?
At Mural, a great example of this is we've seen explosive growth since 2020 when the world just all of a sudden tried to figure out how to collaborate in a remote environment. And this meant that users and businesses of all shapes and sizes, they just flocked to Mural to solve an immediate pain point. And with that much inbound demand, the company didn't even really need to sell. It was just literally taking orders at the time. But now we're transitioning into the leveling out of pandemic demand, the shift of the macro-unit economic wins, and now it's becoming more important than ever that we'd be really clear about whose problems we're trying to solve and what those problems are, and then who are we building for? So making really clear decisions around what we are and even more importantly what we're not building and who we're selling to.

Peep Laja:
How did you decide then whom to exclude or what's the strategic trade-offs? How did you come to these decisions?

Lauren Schuman:
Yeah, so there's qualitative and quantitative components. From a modeling perspective, we did like 50 different models. It was a very rigorous quantitative exercise, but then you have to also sort of think about how do you execute on this? Can we own this specific space? And the quantitative modeling basically told us where we win, so how do we actually win and with what specific types of customers? And we gut checked that against what we thought the market opportunity was and just in general what kind of plays we felt like we had in that space. What are other things that we know? For example, is that a type of company that's going to have money to spend right now? If the answer's no, then that doesn't become a priority focus and another does. A good example of this is weighing product design and engineering teams, highly competitive market, but definitely the types of teams that continue to get funding, whereas maybe an HR team or a learning team during more difficult economic times, they're likely to get less funding for technology potentially than a product design and engineering team.

Peep Laja:
Tell me more about building these quant and qual growth models. So how do you do that? Why does these models really tell you? What questions do you answer with those models?

Lauren Schuman:
Bit differently to the ideal customer profile. One of the things that at every new company that I've joined working on product led growth in particular, is to build out this quant and qual growth models to really understand how your business grows. And sometimes I think you take for granted that everybody's aligned on how the business grows. I challenge everybody to go out and actually ask a bunch of leaders in your company how the company grows and see if you get different answers. And I found that you often do.
And so one, this provides really alignment in the company, but more importantly, especially the quantitative version of the model, it has really helped me to assess impact, to understand where to select specific focus areas. So an example of this is that Mailchimp, everyone in the company felt like we needed to focus on feature usage and that we were launching all these new features in the product. And that was the key to really just driving retention. Though we didn't even say retention, we just said like "get more feature adoption." And it became super clear that after we did this financial modeling, this growth modeling, we actually really needed to focus on activation and that we found that for every, I'll just say X percent in activation, that was worth a million dollars in revenue. That was really powerful for prioritization, it was powerful leadership and really a motivating narrative for the team.

Peep Laja:
Taking raw data, turning it into a growth model can really help you understand the trends in your business. At Mural, Lauren was lucky enough to have a large data set to draw from to inform her quantitative modeling. However, almost all small brands are going to do much better if they focus on qualitative data. Interestingly, the same exact thing applies for B2B companies going after mid-market and large enterprises. The quant volumes are just going to be too low to get sufficient insight.
Not so with qualitative. The insights that drive our product and marketing decisions at Wynter overwhelmingly come from qualitative data, from messaging to channel selection to business strategy. It's the qualitative data that fuels our aha moments. Where do we get the qualitative data from? Well, a) doing sales demos, running message tests and live chat. We're big on live chat and have been since day one on live chat, you start to see trends and patterns. What are the issues that keep coming up again and again and the insights start to pile on and it becomes like an understanding. You can use this understanding to do small scale modeling and examine your business trends. Here's Attentive's Brian Long on how he used insights to explore his business trends on a previous episode of How to Win.

Brian Long:
I talked earlier about the importance of understanding that customer problem and that problem is also constantly changing. And what happens is companies build a product for a problem, they have the solution to the problem, but then the problem changes and they don't change their solution. And then a couple of, years later, the problem's totally different, the solution doesn't work anymore or this versions of the solution that are much better for it and then the buyer goes by the new thing. So you got to talk to customers, you got to talk to hear feedback from survey, know where their head's at, what they're feeling. You got to really have your finger on the pulse of what it's like to be your buyer and you got to be keeping really close track on how the problem is changing and changing your solution.

Peep Laja:
You also mentioned that in 2020, growth blew up. Everybody went remote, everybody needed remote collaboration, but Mural was not the only game in town that jumped at this opportunity. So how do you think about finding defensible differentiation?

Lauren Schuman:
I think you can't just compete on product features. I think we're all learning that it's pretty easy to copy the majority of that piece. And so finding something or some things that are truly defensible and differentiated is really key. So at Mailchimp for example, it was all about the brand and Mailchimp's brand was just beloved by its community. And so by creating that connection to the brand that really stood out from the competition, they also invested in their service partner community. So really partnering with folks that work in agencies and things like that as being advocates of the product and the brand.
For Mural in particular that you're asking about, it was not just about being another whiteboard. There's so many solutions on the market for digital whiteboards and that's great because there's obviously recognition that that's a very useful solution. But with Mural, we've really been differentiating on this idea that it's not just where you collaborate, but how you collaborate and teaching more of the methodology. So we actually acquired a company called LUMA Institute within the past year, and LUMA specializes on all of the methodologies and trainings and learnings. And so as part of that, really trying to bring the intelligence, the collaborative intelligence piece to market with the actual solution of the tool itself.

Peep Laja:
I guess everybody asks you, so how are you different from Miro? So how have you guys figured out how you differentiating from your, I guess, biggest competitor?

Lauren Schuman:
Yeah, I think one of the key areas that Mural has really excelled at is solving for the enterprise. So Miro's done a fantastic job with PLG, building from the ground up and capturing SNB and individuals and taking that approach. I think Mural has taken the opposite approach, which is to be sales led from the beginning and really capturing a large part of many major and strategic enterprise customers and spreading virality and growth through that. One key way that we've really excelled in the enterprise, especially in certain industries, FinServe, FinTech government is being really good and differentiated in our security and privacy features and functionality and working on things like FedRAMP certification and all the stuff that you really need to meet the needs of a large enterprise as it pertains to permissioning and compliance really. So that's been an area in particular that I think we've done quite well.

Peep Laja:
At the time of recording this chat, I see your website says "make it a Mural, not just a whiteboard." Is that like a Loom is doing? I send a Loom trying to make it a thing.

Lauren Schuman:
Yeah, I think we're doing a lot of copy testing, which I'm sure you would appreciate as part of the work that you do. So we've been experimenting with a bunch of different headlines and messages. I think we're definitely in the point of evolution on how we really find that right positioning of is it about specifically synchronous collaboration? Is it any type of collaboration which could be async or synchronous? Is the mural just the place where you're collaborating or is it so much more? Especially as we're integrating LUMA and still figuring out exactly how that all comes together inside our product and even through the services we sell. What does it mean to be a mural? It could be way beyond what we're thinking today as just like a canvas for brainstorming or retros or ideation and things like that. So long story short, experimenting.

Peep Laja:
Every space with money has incumbents. You have a chance you need to differentiate from them, not just by features. Successful marketing is not about the things marketers are most likely to feature. One or two extra features. A slightly better price. Free trial. You'd support. Money back guarantee. 4.9 G2 rating. None of these attributes are story worthy. Marketing is a game of attention. Just getting noticed and considered is the hardest part. And this is where a lot of challenger brands go wrong. Not only aren't buyers going to tell themselves a story about these things, but they're certainly not going to think it's remarkable enough to share with others. You can't out Amazon, Amazon. You can't succeed if you try to tell the incumbent story better than they can. We're conditioned to follow the leader. The natural instinct is to figure out what's working for the competition and then try to outdo it, incremental improvement, a little cheaper, a little faster.
If someone managed to get big in a category, that means they're telling a story that's working. In order to grow, you can't tell the same story to the same people even if you tell it louder or with more emojis or TikTok videos. Instead, you need to tell a different story, one that appeals to underserved communities, one that is not your average blend, compromised story of get more revenue, save time, or we also have these features. Challenger brands cannot take this safe somewhere in the middle road with their messaging. Political campaigners know this well. All lesser known candidates start from the edges. They first appeal to those who are incensed and focused on care deeply about only one issue. They get radical before the election to activate their likely voter base. And then after the election they moved to the center where you can get more done.
Obama did. He started out that the extremes then moved way towards the center after getting elected. Trump also started the extremes, but stayed there even after the elections ending in a disaster. Challenger brands benefit from being extremists in their storytelling. You get noticed and rallied behind by key buyers, but being in the middle with the product, so customers in the middle coming in from word of mouth also find it suitable. Signs of a meh story: nobody disagrees with it. Nobody challenges you on it. Nobody feels compelled to share the story with their friend or post a slack about it. The good challenger story takes risks, brings controversy. Being boring will not make you grow. Challenger brands would be wise to go aggressively to the edges and tell a story that no one else can tell.
For a product led tool, onboarding is really important. How are you guys tackling that?

Lauren Schuman:
At every company I've worked for in this capacity, the first thing I've realized is that it's really easy to underestimate the importance of onboarding and activation, but they're so important to not only getting customers and companies started, but super tied to monetization and long-term retention. And I think the thing that people don't really talk about it enough is that they're actually really hard to nail. I think it's really easy for anyone to do a tear down and say, "oh, this is crappy, this is hard to do," or just create this easy guide. But building great and easy onboarding is actually quite difficult and I think there's a lot of reasons behind that. I think really understanding who you're providing onboarding for. So going back to my first point about ideal customer profile and really understanding the needs and the types of customers. I know one mistake that we've made is trying to be everything to everyone in terms of one size fits all onboarding.
So doing a much better job with personalization or just really even contextualization I would say at that point in time is key. And then there's so many great ideas from companies out there and I think it's tempting to try to copy, "oh, this worked really well with this company." And I mean the amount of times that I see executives pull onboarding from a comparative company or like, "this must be great because this company is great." And knowing that I've worked at some of those great companies and what appears to maybe be great isn't necessarily great. So doing the due diligence for yourself to understand what your customers really want and need and just do so much experimentation to figure out and research where the problems exist, how you can help guide. At Mural in particular, we worked on onboarding for the past year and we realized a couple of things.
One, we actually needed to revisit our definitions of activation. So we originally were thinking about it at a user level and that was great, but we were missing the relationship of teams and companies. And so we actually recently created a workspace level definition instead of just a member level definition. So for example, the member level definition was like have a collaborative session in your first seven days, but that was just one person. And in order to have a collaborative session, you need to divide someone else. You need to create content. And really the aha of the product is that multi-person, a team experiencing the value together. And the other thing we realized is that we needed to focus on aspects outside of just how personalizing based on your team and role or how to use the tool. It's very easy to fall into the, let's just remove friction. I love the equation conversion equals desire minus friction. I think it's really easy to focus on the friction, but actually focusing in on the desire element is often missed and can be extremely valuable in working on onboarding.

Peep Laja:
I totally agree with what Lauren's saying here. Desire or motivation is way more powerful than friction. If people want something, they're ready to deal with considerable friction. That's why working on your offers and value proposition is going to deliver 10x more results than reducing friction. Aim to increase user motivation first. The research is overwhelming that the best way to get somebody to do something is to make them want to do it.

Lauren Schuman:
So what this means right now for us is thinking about different types of roles that are onboarding and different motivations. So for example, if I'm the first person who signs up from Mural, we call you a workspace creator. So you're creating the very first workspace. Your motivation's pretty high, you chose the product, you're setting up a workspace, you're probably creating content and inviting someone. But if I'm the person who's being invited, we'll call you the participant. I may be just like, "hey, why did Peep invited me to this thing? Okay, I'm here but my intentions are different, my role's different, my motivation's different." So how do we provide an experience that onboards you to what you need to do to participate, but then ultimately turn you into somebody who understands that Mural could be used for your own specific use cases and you become a content creator.

Peep Laja:
So how do you facilitate that?

Lauren Schuman:
Yeah, we're in the process of running a whole bunch of experiments. The most recent one was interesting. We did a painted door test, which I love because you don't really build anything and you test the concept and don't invest a bunch until you understand if there's demand.
So we did this idea that in a lot of collaborative sessions you might have someone who plays the role of facilitator, so they're kind of the person that's created the content, organizing the session and inviting people in. And for them, we hear a lot through research that it's really clunky if they have people who can't figure out how to participate or it's hard for them to join and participate. And so what we've done is the experiment was all about facilitator triggered onboarding. So actually allowing the facilitator themselves to say, "hey, I'm inviting these participants. I want to trigger onboarding for these folks so I make sure that when they show up to my session, they know how to add a sticky note or how to add content or something like that."
And so the painted door test was basically just seeing what facilitators want that feature, is that something that they would do? And we found that there was demand for it. It wasn't like overwhelmingly astounding. Yes, every facilitator would be interested, but it was definitely enough for us to continue down a next variation of what does that look like in terms of that onboarding? Is it customized? Is it just our out of the box onboarding? That type of thing.

Peep Laja:
If you aren't familiar with a painted or 'fake' door test, here's Shubhi Nigam, senior product manager at Carta, to explain.

Shubhi Nigam:
It's essentially this thing where you're fake creating your product. It's that you can do it as a website, you can do it as a deck, you can do it as a PR doc, and then you show it to a bunch of people and you see if they want to sign up for it or they want to buy it and you pretend that it exists. As a startup founder, I used to do that a lot in terms of just understanding which direction we should move on. So we would literally create a Facebook ad and just have it lead to a website and you have a wait list on the website and just based on the demand on that, the number of people will sign up on the wait list. That was a really good signal for us for whether we should build one thing or the other. And it's pretty cheap to do it.

Peep Laja:
At Mailchimp, you had to build a growth practice and a growth team from the ground up. What have you learned about that?

Lauren Schuman:
I started out in marketing when I joined Mailchimp, and it was a role that didn't have a team. It had sort of an ambiguous charter around what we were calling, I think it was marketing optimization. And the whole beginning of the journey was figuring out, well, what problems were we actually really trying to solve as an organization? What are the gaps? And that led me to a really specific gap, which was one actually just building a practice of experimentation in the company first, and then two, actually building out a product-led growth practice. The company was actually really PLG without intentionally being PLG for lack of better words. And so what I learned was one, to really lean into what you already have. So when I mean what you already have, it's like access to the resources you have or maybe the surface areas that people are willing to give up or allow you to experiment with and worry less about what the precise or perfect approach is and go with where you have sort of tailwinds.
So in that example, rather than try to just go all in and say, "okay, we need to build this product led growth practice and here's exactly how we do it," I had opportunity to hire some folks in marketing and use the website and email for experimentation. And I really tailored our work to what I thought would be really high visibility and get leadership's attention so that we could build the business case. And honestly, it happened faster than I actually anticipated. Within less than a year time period, we were able to drive some really big impact. So it's all about working with what you have to build the case that makes it really easy to say, "yeah, this is a thing I want to do." And so then what it ended up happening was I actually took my team that was in marketing and moved over and combined with an existing product team that had been really failing at their mission, because they were taking a very traditional product approach instead of a growth approach.
So that team was responsible for the project was revamp the dashboard, which is absolutely the wrong way to think about what we actually were trying to accomplish, which is continuous onboarding. How do you continuously help somebody understand what you can do in Mailchimp? What are the different features? How do you level up your marketing efforts inside Mailchimp? And so it was like the perfect spot to say, "here's a problem set, let's try doing this a different way." And if we try doing this a different way, I guarantee you we'll actually have much more measurable outcomes and focus.

Peep Laja:
For Lauren, combining teams was a fresh way of approaching the problems facing her product team. Building a team with a diverse range of perspectives is critical when creating a growth team. The beauty of a growth team is that it sits horizontally across all aspects of the business. With its diverse range of perspectives and backgrounds propelling the business forward. Good growth teams are data driven, but also have the creativity and imagination to think beyond rigid team structures. Having completely siloed teams makes it difficult to promote a growth approach. Here's Chris Out, former founder and managing partner at RockBoost to explain why.

Chris Out:
The silo problem. This is why companies can't be agile and can't be fast. We call it the broken growth system. I think everybody recognize the system where there is a product team who comes up with a nice product, then they give it to marketing to get some leads and then sales has to convert those leads. This is a broken system because they're not working together and if it goes wrong, it's always a fault of the other party. They're siloed, they're not customer-centric. So what did Facebook do in 2008? They started with a new growth system, building multidisciplinary growth teams, putting people together to make sure that they work on one goal to really drive impact.

Peep Laja:
You told me that a key aspect of hiring and cultivating a growth team is cultivating curiosity. Can you tell me more about that?

Lauren Schuman:
I think I look for curiosity when I interview, and then I definitely try to encourage that as part of our team culture. And so it would be a really good debate to say, "do we think curiosity is innate or if it's something that can be learned?" I think it's probably a little bit of both. So during the interview process, I look for people who want to know why they've asked those questions, and you can often tell through somebody's explanation of a specific project whether they really actually care about the outcome or how interested they were in the problems that they were solving just by the types of questions that they were specifically asking.
And then once as a team, from a culture perspective, one, we really try to just write that into our charter as a team. Like we are curious by nature. And what does that mean? It means asking a lot of good questions. It means challenging the status quo. And really the biggest way that I do this is honestly to lead by example. I'm insatiably curious. I ask so many questions. I love to dig into data and research myself, and I actively try to encourage and praise those that demonstrate that on a regular basis and subtly like, "wow, that's an awesome question. I can't wait to learn more," and find ways as a team to see that as a really positive part of the work that we do.

Peep Laja:
So how does Lauren cultivate a growth practice in her teams? One, she makes data informed decisions.

Lauren Schuman:
The quantitative modeling basically told us where we win, so how do we actually win and with what specific types of customers.

Peep Laja:
Two, she sees and understands the importance of activation.

Lauren Schuman:
They're so important to not only getting customers and companies started, but super tied to monetization and long-term retention.

Peep Laja:
Three, she tests and experiments consistently.

Lauren Schuman:
Just do so much experimentation to figure out and research where the problems exist, how you can help guide.

Peep Laja:
One last takeaway from Lauren:

Lauren Schuman:
Really lean into what you already have. Access to the resources you have or maybe the surface areas that people are willing to give up or allow you to experiment with and worry less about what the precise or perfect approach is and go with where you have sort of tailwinds.

Peep Laja:
And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips on how to win, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.