How to achieve hypergrowth in your business and career | Carilu Dietrich (Atlassian, Miro, Segment, 1Password)

26:05And I became an advisor of product board because one passwords, CPO, brought it, you know, had it in another company, brought it into one password, rolled it out company wide to get alignment and visibility on the product roadmap. So, hyper growth companies, in order to get hyper growth, you have to have organic inbound and viral word of mouth. You can't pay enough to grow at those rates and have a viable company, especially in this, you know, economic efficiency market. So, has to be an amazing product, has to have some viral activity. So, like, we just talked about Miro or Atlassian, you know, you could have an individual person use it.

26:48And then they say, like, hey, I'm going to present at this meeting with Miro come join me on my board. Or, you know, I've got these confluence pages we've set up as a wiki about these engineering topics. And I want your team to kind of collaborate on them. So, those natural points where your users are selling to other people is way more efficient than having sales people that have to sell to other people. And then I think the third thing is really riding the lightning. I would call it so hyper growth companies go through the stages of growth that would take other companies five years or 10 years, right?

27:27They're going from 10 to 50. They're going from 50 to 100. They're going from 100 to 200. They're jumping. And so, they really need to kind of keep hiring 2X and 3X leaders who have seen the next stage of growth. And then the people inside can be homegrown talent, but it's tricky to keep up. And so, you know, my whole business is based on people who are trying to be homegrown leaders, but the don't know what the next stage of growth looks like. And so, a lot of hyper growth companies hire ahead, hire advisors. You know, leaders need to really think about mentors and friendships of people who know what great looks like at the next scale, because it's going to be here before you know it.

28:09And so, I would say, don't think amazing product, viral movement, and company that can ride the lightning. I imagine founders listening to this that don't have insane virality or huge word of mouth are like, is there no path to being a release successful company? And then I think about companies that did succeed with other channels like say paid or SEO. And so, I guess a question for you is, do you need to grow in this environment, I guess, primarily through word of mouth organic, reality sort of growth engines, or do you still see opportunity for companies to grow other ways, say, paid or SEO or sales eventually?

28:51For sure, all of the things are important. I think what I wanted to say first that as you were talking was that it's easy to look at a company after they've been viral and be like, oh, that's amazing. Like, I would like to start a newsletter. I have it's carryloo .com. Lenny has a newsletter. How can I ever grow like Lenny's virality? But Lenny started with like one blog and then another and the consistency. And like, when I look back at it last year and people would be like, oh, it must have been so easy to go from 100 to 500 million, right? And and it never felt easy. Like, it was a slog to do exactly what you're talking about.

29:26New features, listen to customers. The strong SEO actually SEO was the number one marketing motion that we used. And SEM, we spent probably at 20, you know, between 15 and 25 % of our leads from paid search marketing at the time. You know, now I have a ton of customers that are pretty deep into account -based marketing. You know, getting to virality and getting the hyper growth is not a magic bullet. It's consistency, customer obsession, incremental improvements across all parts of the business. So I think founders just need to like double down on having products that's differentiated and does something that their customers really love.

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31:28Coda .io slash Lenny. Say that you as a company are seeing word of mouth and some virality. And you want to think about accelerating that leaning into word of mouth. Obviously, you want everyone to be like talking about awesome. You are sharing with other friends. Is there anything that you've seen as like a good way to lean into word of mouth and accelerate it? I think there's two or three things. One is really empowering the people in your company to be thought leaders. So early days at Lassian's founders were on all the developer boards. And in fact, I remember we were maybe $150 million or $200 million in Scott Farqua.

32:07The CEO was still participating and like going back and forth in different dev forums when I was like, I don't know, should we elevate your status? Like, should we have evangelists and engineers that do this? And we did, right? I think, you know, and you look one of my clients now as weights and biases, the ML ops company helping lots of different AI companies with their ML models. And they have really thoughtful technical people who know more and write more on the blog and engage with their community. And that creates a word of mouth because they're providing both a product and concepts and learning.

32:44That's one of the HubSpot secrets was all of their like really thoughtful, helpful content, certifications for marketers. So I think, you know, kind of going back to summarize, word of mouth can be driven by thought leadership, which is hiring the right people to like really be deeply engaged as super experts, having a really strong content strategy that's either in communities that already exist, online communities, open source communities. And then third, I would say building your own community. So no one sells your product better than your own happy customers. And if I go way back to the very beginning of my career, I worked on a marketing team where I own DemandGen Just for Net New Prospect and appear on DemandGen Just for existing customer upsell.

33:31And we would have different field events. And the existing customers were like smaller than if we'd invited the prospects and had like more buzz. And the prospect ones were very salesy. Whereas if we brought them together and you had customers talking to each other and prospects listening, everyone had a better time. So you know, at last year, one of our secrets was this amazing user group community, where we just paid for beer and pizza and we facilitate local in city leaders. And people would meet up and talk about our products and talk about development generally and grow their careers and grow their network.

34:06So I think those are the three, the right people, the right content and the right communities. As you were talking, I was reminded I was just chatting with the founder of Gusto about their journey early on. And he said that for the first, I don't know, 200 customers, he sat there with them running payroll, watching how they react to every step of the payroll process and how they feel at every moment. And that was a big part of what helped them build the product that people actually, you know, continue using in love and stick with. And if it wasn't in person, it was on a phone call. And you know, it's like the epitome of doing things don't scale, just like for hundreds of new customers watching them use your product pretty well.

34:43I mean, that's the secret. That's the secret sauce, right? And I've heard some early stage startup advisors say that you should build processes that don't scale first. Because when you're in the super early stage, seed a under 10 million, you've really got to go deep at that stage. And in fact, you know, I see that that's one of the problems the company's experience is they get much bigger when product managers can't meet with customers or they get limited customers or maybe they come only meet with a junior user or not the, or you know, only the administrator and not lots of the users. So that that insight into the like daily struggles and experience of your customers, it's harder to get as you get bigger, I think.

35:29I want to drill into it. Last thing you've brought them up a couple times and you were you were at last scene for a long time. You were there kind of from early days of growth to IPO. And one of the most interesting elements of it last scene and something that comes up a lot in this podcast is product led growth. And at last scene, I think is one of the most classic examples of a product led growth company. And for my understand, you all waited a long time to hire your first salesperson. And so my question is, what did you learn from that experience about when is the right time to start leaning into sales and hiring sales and what are kind of like the trade -offs awaiting longer or doing it earlier?

36:04Atlassian was a super unique company and a super unique point in time because the founders never took outside money except for one late stage financing to kind of buy out some early employees. To give some liquidity. So we never had VCs or private equity that had a voting share that was significant that could overrule the founders. So the founders were going through this experiment that turned out to be really successful where they took all the money they would have spent on a sales org and plowed it into engineering and product. I'm going to pull up a slide here that tells the Atlassian story about the ratio of the sales and marketing to the product and engineering.

36:46Amazing. And by the way, check this out on YouTube if you're listening to this and check out the slide. So this is a representative sample of what we did in Atlassian's history and what ratio still exists today even several years later where we spend way less on sales and marketing. Marketing less than other marketers and also we had almost no sales org or a sales org that was really focused on renewals or now an assisting sales org that's focused more on enterprise but relative to other companies a much smaller, much more efficient sales org. And we took all that money and put it into product.

37:26So here we're spending two times, three times as many dollars in R &D as many other companies that we benchmark against to make a product that really sold itself. It's interesting. So I'm looking into the slide and again if you're listening, you should check because that YouTube, because it's pretty crazy, this slide of just like bar chart of spend in sales and marketing in R &D and Atlassian is like the very lowest amount of spend in sales and marketing in the highest spend in product. And it's interesting that it's from 2020. So it's not even like in the early days. It's like still today basically.

37:59Right. I'm going to close this down and keep telling you a little bit more about it. There's some unique things that people can take now and incorporate. So the real strategy in sales, sales is the most expensive vehicle, right? Expensive people that spend a lot of time. And so what you want to do is try to, you know, the Atlassian model was to sell only to people who were already customers really. Like if several people or a couple groups had purchased, we'd help them with their renewals. And now in kind of the later incarnations of our sales orgs Atlassian, it helps a lot more with like larger enterprise companies who need enterprise deals or does more cross sell and upsell, but doesn't really do prospecting.

38:46Net new prospecting is a really expensive way to get new customers. And so you know, we see different trends coming now with companies because almost no one can do pure product led grows because your investors want to see accelerated grow. And most people believe that adding an SDR or adding an AE will add a like predictable amount of revenue. And so it's difficult because product led grows and and sales have to co co exist. But the whole transition in marketing that's happening to account based marketing and intent based signals is trying to do some of what we were doing in Atlassian only to engage sales people with customers that are actually likely to buy.

39:30And if you look at other hyper growth companies, air table, mural, both of those I know from the inside have had strategies where the sales people really only engage after some threshold has been hit of number of users that have already been paying for the product on their credit card. But sometimes at the high number like 20, 40 people at an account have to be engaged before a salesperson engages. Based on that, what is it you recommend to founders these days that maybe your product led and just like self service for me, me oriented, you can take this experience and be like wait as long as you can to hire your first salesperson or is there just kind of I know it's a very specific to the situation, but what kind of advice do you generally give?

40:12You and I are both like sans the Lena who was just on your podcast earlier this month. You know, product led grows depend so much on your product and your your buying market. Right, there's some buying markets there less likely to use salespeople and you need to go in from the beginning. HR might be one, right? Whereas a lot of the hyper growth companies in the dev tool space can use product led growth because developers both hate failed people and really love to research themselves. So you see like, Versel, you know, taking off because people engage and kind of self sell. So I would recommend that people get closer to their customers and read the signals.

40:59Like, if your product is good enough, the people can get time to value in a couple of days. Instead of weeks or months, you can have a product led growth motion. If your product needs to be put in context and customized and assisted, you know, sales teams sometimes are expensive services, arms to cover over product issues and help customers buy it until it's fixed. Or if you're in a market where your buyer just really doesn't buy online with research in a demo, then then you need to have sale people. But I would say try not to hire too fast and too far ahead in sales and inside sales because it seems like it's going to add revenue.

41:40But it actually is a huge cost and a huge drain on the business. If the product isn't getting that kind of resonance. I just had a conversation with a founder of retool for this series that I'm working on and he said he basically found the same thing you found where they thought it could be product led experience where you're building internal tools using their product. But it turned out nobody really understood how to do it themselves and it took a lot of handholding to make it work. And so they became sales that from the beginning, even though it feels like a tool that would be has a lot of potential to be product led and self -service.

42:11I think the other hybrid I'm starting to see is people who turn their SDR sales development reps into kind of sales engineers, researchers. So instead of having a salesperson who's like, would you like to have a meeting with another salesperson? The first touch for customers that are maybe like kicking the tires or trying a product led growth is a person who can help guide them on the the path. And I like this hybrid nature because basically it extends product led growth but helps people in this case where you're talking where the product itself isn't so intuitive that you can get all the way to the buying by itself.

42:51It also sounds more fun to talk to sales engineer than a salesperson. I know I always wanted to be a sales engineer. I was a salesperson and I was I crushed on the sales engineering team who knew everything and could draw all the architectures. Oh wow, I didn't know that. A couple more questions around this stuff. So you worked a lot of different companies and you kind of come in and help them figure out ways to grow faster, unlock growth opportunities. What do you find often gets most in the way of making big changes to the way they approach growth and approach different growth channels? And maybe on the flip side, what do you find is most essential to making big changes at a company around how they think about growth?

43:29I mean the big growth levers are pretty consistent across companies. You know, you start with one product and you have a different a couple choices on how the go -to -market works. Product -led growth are sales assisted. You get a little bit bigger and you add an incremental product or you start to add new segments. You're going to focus on a vertical like finance or or you're going to go global or you're going to add new sales channels like a partner channel. And what I've seen with the big growth levers is that it can't ever be an individual department's goal without being across company strategy goal if it's really going to make a difference.

44:07So for instance, I mean, you've talked about it in your newsletter and on your podcast, but growth isn't just like a person in the engineering team that like hacks by themselves. It really has to be funded and thoughtfully constructed so that there's the right content and experience and product features and virality features once with someone's a customer to continue to drive growth. And similarly, lots of companies right now are trying to move up market because the economy has created so much pressure and SMB that they're going to try to move to enterprise or they're trying not to sell as much just to tech companies because tech companies are under pressure and so they want to move to different parts.

44:48But the biggest issue is when that's not, sometimes the marketers get blamed or sales gets blamed like we don't have enough leaves. But really it's a company strategy problem where the company hasn't decided, hey, we're going to all move in this direction. And if we're going to sell the enterprise, marketing's going to bring in leaves, products are going to have a roadmap and some meaningful features to enterprise. The customer research is going to start thinking about them. We're going to hire some customer support people who know how enterprises work. We're going to hire some salespeople who sell differently to enterprises than the SMB.

45:20But the big growth levers are strategy problems, not individual departmental problems. And what do you find needs to happen for that to change? Is that like CEO needs to be like, here's what we're doing. Everyone get on board or or some else? I think it can come either way in the C -suite, right? Like sometimes when I'm supporting junior marketers, so my job, I advise hyper growth CEOs and CMOs of companies like 30 million to 500 million. Often if I'm advising like a 30 to 100 million dollar company, it's the more junior marketer with the CEOs who's often a first -time founder who doesn't necessarily know if the marketers better not, it hasn't done run marketing before.

46:02It doesn't know if they should trust what the marketers say. So often the marketer is saying like, hey, we're having problems because you know, the company's not delivering on this promise you want us to sell. And sometimes the CEO doesn't know if they can trust it. That judgment. And so in that case, someone like me who's an advisor comes in and it's like, is right, it's not a marketing problem. It's company strategy problem. Let's have an offsite and build some OKRs where we all go after enterprise and we win it together. You'll see a bigger companies or when a new CMO comes in with more senior or seasoned, they'll have the social capital to push back into the executive suite or a new head of engineering who will say, look, I know you want to move ahead faster, but we actually have to catch up on this technical debt.

46:48And they'll push back and get that strategic space that they need. So it can either come from the CEO or it can come from the C suite really coming together just to solve those problems instead of kind of like pushing them under the rug. You touched on this nuance that a lot of times there's not a lot of trust between the marketing head and the CEO. And I'm curious what you find helps build that trust. There's a couple of things that are really critical for senior marketers. And I actually have a blog coming up based on a podcast I've recorded about why CMOs mostly get fired. And the issues are generally one that the CEO, CMO, is it focused enough on the revenue?

47:31So some CMOs get focused more on kind of like the pipeline or the awareness and the CEO doesn't feel like they really have a partner in driving the revenue or they don't feel like the CMO really has a handle on what will drive the revenue. So marketing's tough because it's a big spend category. And lots of the spend doesn't convert in quarter. Some of it doesn't convert in year, right? Like advertising campaigns, some take multiple quarters. So it's really important for CMOs to have a handle on the metrics, a solid prediction of like what will what growth levers they can use and to be able to talk in the terms of the CEO and the board.

48:11And I think that that's the biggest gap that I generally see. And then of course there's a whole bunch of table stakes stuff. Like they have to be running their business well. They have to be a good leader that people want to work for. They have to hire a great team that elevates them and the company. They have to be thoughtful and strategic about the market space that the company's in. They're not just like working the levers and the factory. They're thinking like what new markets should we enter? What new growth areas should we employ? Like we just talked about what new companies should we acquire?

48:47You know, they also need to be thinking ahead. And I think being good on metrics, good on strategy, and good on on market helps CMOs spar with CEOs in a way that builds trust. It's interesting that you say that blog post you titled most I see most CMOs get fired. And it connects with something Casey Winners noted that most CPOs also get fired. Chief product officers. And they just like I forget the quote, but it's something like the most you can hope for as a couple swings at the bat before you get fired as a CPO. Why do you think this is so common for these kind of chief C suite roles to start up to not work out?

49:26They're incredibly hard jobs, right? The chief product officer and the chief marketing officer are both strategy jobs with difficult to measure results because some of them are direct and some of them are indirect. And I think both of them get swept up when a company is not performing well to write like if company is not performing well, you can kind of swap out the head of product. And the next one will be more strategic and deliver faster. And in fact, you know, I worked in one of the roles. The CFO was really after my chief product officer and ultimately got him fired because he wanted to move everything offshore and developed faster and he didn't want to replat for him and he didn't want to deal with the technical debt.

50:10And the CFO was sure that that it was the CPO's fault. And then they got rid of the CPO and the CFO tried his plan and then it didn't work. And then you bring someone in who's like, like I had the right way. So you know, both of them were tough jobs and they require a high bar of excellence, a high connection of trust. And then I think just endurance to keep going and find the next role where you're really a fit and the company really has momentum. And it also reminds me of just talking to I think it was Canva where their first engineering hire is now their CTO still and the first marketing hire is their CMO still.

50:45So does work out on occasion. It works out on occasion. And in fact, I've been playing around with a 10 part series about those CMOs in the CMO world because there's about 10 to 15 CMOs who have started when it's really small and grown all the way. And they're the ones we really want to learn from. And I know a lot of them and really admire their work and have learned so much. You should absolutely do that. That sounds very cool. You talked about how you work with companies from 30 million to 500 million. What is it the about that stage that's unique? And what happens like after 500 million and what's the difference before say 30 million?

51:21I know it's not like an exact number, but how do you think about that? Yeah, it's not an exact number. My bottom number is because there's this early stage of product market fit where the founder and the company are trying to figure out who their real ideal customer profile is. And Canva is settled with them consistently. So I've worked for some early stage startups where we've tried lots of different things, but they're not repeatable. Like you can't scale it. It's like this product works for this. It's product works for this too. And it works for this. But those are all kind of unique cases studies.

51:56And so I like and my skill is in helping people scale. And so if they've already found product market fit and they've gotten some funding or their bootstrapped but have enough funding to really be trying to build out marketing and a marketing team, that's when I know what each stage looks like. So I know what 30 million dollar great teams look like and 50 million and 100 million and 150 million, 200 million. My ride at Atlassian was from about 100 to 500.

52:31And then the company, I know what that all looks like. And then beyond that, there's public company consultants. I think more that do kind of more specific things. I more help the CMO and CEO structure for the next stage of growth because they're going through it so fast they haven't hired someone yet who's already seen. Got it. One very new one's question I want to ask you is about bundling. So there's hipchat and slack kind of eight -throw lunch. None is certainly through bundling but just like they're slack. And then slack kind of, I don't know if it's true but it feels like Microsoft teams is eating their lunch with bundling.

53:09And I'm curious, what do you think of bundling as a strategy to win long -term? And also how do you compete again, say a Microsoft that maybe one day bundle your product for free and you might be in big trouble? I think it's two separate questions. So let me take them separately. The first is what do I think about bundling? So small and medium -sized companies will go from being a single product company to a multi -product company in order to progress because you need a diversified, financial model because you need to be able to sell new products into your customer base who should already be friendly to you if they like your products.

53:47And because you need to really expand your total addressable market to get to be a billion dollar or two billion dollar company. But I believe in bundling as a growth strategy. Specifically for product -led growth companies, bundling is not a great land strategy. So at Atlassian we had a number of products and experimented with different bundled lands. And it really slowed down the product -led growth motion. So we ended up going back to land with a single product, high velocity, single person uses it quickly, starts to get value, and then come in with with other things. So from that perspective, product -led growth, bundling is not very effective.

54:28Bundling for a sales -led motion is pretty effective when you're at the right stage of growth. And then as far as a question of competing against Microsoft, there's these two parts of the philosophies. A best of breed and an all -in -one. An Oracle was an all -in -one, and Microsoft is an all -in -one. You can buy all the things and your CFL can get a discount by spending a whole bunch of money on a bunch of things. But in the all -in -one, some of the pieces aren't as good as the best of breed. And so Slack for a long time was the best of breed. People were willing to pay more because they thought it was markedly better than the other instant messaging options.

55:07But you know, their shifts between best of breed and all -in -one in economic wins. So right now, CFOs are putting the squeeze. It's like really that much better than Microsoft. If the Microsoft one is free with all of our other purchases, it's tough. It's tough to go head -to -head with a powerful, big investing, all -in -one competitor. The only way to win is to be the best. And have a product that's so much better that it's worth the extra money. Interesting. So essentially in a tough environment, bundling is really, really, and then this other interesting point about NPLG, you want to stay focused on one specific pain point.

55:49What is it that Atlassian tried to do that they tried to pitch like all your product planning products in one suite? Is that kind of what you're trying to do? Well, Mira was the issue tracking. And then we also had Confluence, which was a wiki page. So let's say there was a business bundle that could have been HIP -Chat, Confluence, and Gira. Or there were developer combinations that could have been Gira, Bitbucket, and maybe Confluence too for an engineering team. Basically, if you have to evaluate multiple products to purchase something, it's not a fast and easy online self -service buy. Because you're like, oh, do I need all three products?

56:33Can I break them apart? Do they all work? Are each of them best of breed? Whereas if this looks good, I've tried it out. I'm ready to go. That can happen in seven days, whereas if you add in multiple products, it takes more days and just leads to fewer conversions. That makes absolute sense. I could have seen someone thinking the complete opposite and then now realizing I see, I see why this isn't working. You should always test it. I mean, the secret to product leg growth is, can you test it? And so we tested everything. We tried bundles. We didn't try bundles. We tried different things in the bundles.

57:09We tried different days. Data -led insights are better than anything any pundits would stay on a podcast. Amazing. Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? The number one book is a life book called The Doubtaging, the Stephen Mitchell Translation. And The Doubtaging is a philosophy about the flow of life. And I love it. I've carried the pocket guide with me for 25 years. The second one is Business Focus. Never Split the Difference, which is a great book about negotiating written by a former CIA hostage negotiator, which also helps me with negotiations at work and with my children.

57:56So that's a great book. I actually, I've been trying to read that book on audio and I'm, what's like something you've taken away from me because the stories are so interesting. And I'm always like, what should I actually do in my day -to -day life? What's like stuck with you? It's kind of the obvious thing that I wasn't good at. It's that you just really want to put yourself so deeply in the shoes of the other person that you can see you're out what makes the win for both of you. Right? Basically, he says like, you can't win the negotiation by strong arming what you want. You really get to get to a win -win, which is probably every negotiation book ever, but he texturizes it.

58:31So much. So I just felt like I was really able to, and he actually has, in my last office, we moved last year. I actually had the Clifnotes of his book printed out and posted on my wall, because he had a series of questions to help you get deeper and deeper into the mindset behind people. And connected, but not connected, the book, how to win friends and influence people. That's like the 1932 bestseller is basically that. Like people don't want to hear about you. They want you to be thinking about them. And then you can make friends with them, or you can negotiate with them, or you can get your hostage back.

59:07I read how to win friends and influence people when I was very young. And specifically that chapter is about there's no better sound in the world than to someone than their name. Terry Lou. It's true. Thank you. He said it correctly. Okay. Moving on. Favorite recent movie or TV show? My favorite movie is everything everywhere all at once. It's basically a sci -fi about all the different ways your life could turn out if you made different choices. And it was really a mind -bender that made me think about all the different ways tiny decisions to change my life. But then also an appreciation for the life that you have, you know, at the end, not, it doesn't ruin the story, but she has this love of what she has, even though it's not as good or as different as some of the other options.

59:57I love it. So I bought this poster. I don't think you can see it on the back, but it says gratitude. Oh yeah. Turns what we have into enough. Oh, very Buddhist. I like it. Read the down teaching. Not a post it, but art. Another teaching from Terry Lou. I think this needs to be a second newsletter of yours. Life advice. Which is funny. I've been thinking about that one. It would be called the Dow of HyperGrow. Oh my god. I love that. And actually, I was thinking about doing it and taking actual clips from the Dow teaching and doing like textural analysis about how it applies to our life. I've been thinking about this actual podcast for a while.

1:00:37So I used to want to do that. I mean, blog, the Dow of Puritan, because basically parenting you like try to control and like fix all the things you didn't do right in life, but actually it's the act of like providing freedom that lets them go out and explore and then come back to your way of being. So I don't know. I like the Dow teaching. I love it. I see so many opportunities. You got to stop what you're doing. Just write all these things. I know, but I love the HyperGrow customers clients. All right. Next question. What is a favorite interview question that you like to ask? So this is a little heavy, but it actually is my favorite.

1:01:13It's how many people have you fired and tell me about each of the experiences. The reason I ask this question is because generally I'm managing teams of managers and generally I need people who have managed many people for a longer period of time, or even if they're junior managers. How long and how many people they've managed is indicated by how many people they fired. Because if you've never fired anyone, then you haven't managed very many people for very long, unfortunately. And firing people is the hardest part of a leader's career. So how they talk about it, their compassion and their need to drive the business and the circumstances.

1:01:53Was it layoffs? How did that work? Did you have to performance manage someone out? How did it work? Did you just have to restructure the team? Because of business goals, how did it work? It gives you a lot of insight into their experience and their humanity in a way that they're not prepared for. So you really get the real story. And get a sense for what they would be like as a leader under a lot of pressure and difficult situations. I've never heard that one before and I love it. Reminds me of an episode with Matt Meshari where we talk about how to lay people off really successfully. And Ellie.

1:02:25Hard. Yeah. Next question. What's a favorite product that you've recently discovered that you love? So I follow my favorite products to the companies that I advise. I love one password. I've got my 85 year old grandfather and all my family and friends set up on it. I love the cross platform nature. I love Miro and whiteboards. I joined product board because of this cross company alignment and views into what's coming up on the roadmap, which is really the most important thing for the company momentum as we talked about having a great product and a great product strategy. And then I'm I'm dabbling in all the AI things.

1:03:05I want to be like excellent in AI visualization and art. I'm experimenting with mid -journey but still kind of flailing. I've hired my 13 year old as a strategic advisor. And yeah, I'd love to work for open AI and chat GPT. It's it's really interesting. What's something relatively minor that you've changed in the way a product is built or just a company operates that has led to tremendous impact on their ability to execute? On the product side, one of the concepts that I really like is the Amazon concept around writing the press release at the beginning of a product ideation. So one of the issues between marketing and product is the product will work so hard on something and there'll be lots of different features.

1:03:51But it will really be a theme that the marketing team can talk about. And then someone hands it to marketing and says like make this marketable. And we said like well, it's like kind of one of my mentors have this comment. It's a bag of door knobs. Click. What do I do with this bag of door knobs? Well, once in my bag of door knobs, they want you know to buy the door and like the concept. So I like this idea of writing a press release. Like start with it and in mind and then negotiate like is this good enough like will this really resonate or is this really what we're trying to build or is this really the outcome we're trying to get with the product.

1:04:25So I've heard about Amazon. We experimented with it at Classy. I haven't done it at MassScale, but I love the concept. Final question. Any or a meditator we've talked a little bit about your Buddhist nature? What's one tip for people that have been trying to meditate and just can't make it happen? What's your one tip for helping people meditate more often? So I'm a cheater because I was groomed to meditate. I don't remember how early, but I remember that the first meditations my mom had me listen to you was like a rainbow butterfly as I fell asleep when I was like in kindergarten. So I've been meditating my whole life with mixed success and the real secret is just that there's no right way, that there's no wrong way that it's just making the time to be present and breathe and sense and each year now.

1:05:13And so I use guided meditations mostly because I'm not the best at quieting my own mind. So I use some free meditations. I use Tara Brock, who's a great meditator who has a short and long concept of meditations. And I like this old one called meditation oasis, which actually isn't in publishing anymore, but it's still a podcast and I read this into all there's over and over. So stick with it is the secret to meditation and just any benefits you get from being present in meditation, hopefully carry over to be being present in life. My whole body just relaxes. You're talking through all that. So you have a skill.

1:05:56Carole, this was amazing. We learned how to grow products, how to live better lives, how to become more mindful. Two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to learn more, reach out or and or how can listeners be useful to you. Follow me on LinkedIn or I have a new blog, carrylu .com on substack, thanks to Lenny for the inspiration. And I still have one more advisory slot open and I'd love to work with more AI companies. I just joined weights and biases in the ML ops space. But if you know of other great scale up AI companies, I'd love to help junior marketing executives or first time founders see what the next stage of growth looks like and get there.

1:06:39Amazing. And again, if they are interested in that, how do they reach out to you? On LinkedIn or through carrylu .com. Amazing. Thank you again so much for making time and for being here. Thanks for having me, Lenny. Bye everyone. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast .com. See you in the next episode.