- Jan 2021
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I think when we look at kind of the rise of product led growth, there’s a question that really is born and it’s like, what’s the role of the sales team? Is the sales team really necessary? And I also asked Sam and then realized it was probably quite rude. So how do you think about this? And how does sales teams prove their worth and their value in a world of product led growth and self-serve?
Product-led vs. Sales-led seems to be a general challenge that is surfacing in the software market.
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And so being really careful about how you’re designing and experiment and taking a product driven approach with failure being an okay outcome, I think that was essential for us.
Failure comes with humility ... it should not be a sign of a weakness (e.g., lack of plan or experience). Instead, it's an attitude of "let's try & see" which is having an open mind and understand the value of learning through attempts. It's more about what is learned from the failure.
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The idea was let’s try to contact companies that don’t have any Dropbox usage and see if we can bring them onto the platform.
Interesting request that I think I would've tried to shoot down rather than appease ...because I believe it's hard to do a good job in something you don't truly believe in.
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And then in terms of the project, Dropbox had an interesting inflection point where we started hiring professional managers, if you will. So senior executives that would come in with ideas and the folks that had been there internally for a while, like every two years, we’d revisit projects that we knew didn’t work two years ago, but we may come back and try it again because an exec had an idea that they wanted to pursue.
Somewhat similar to being in a big company where new stakeholders get added as the product gets more traction and support behind it.
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I think the customer layer on top is really what makes prioritizing easy.
This is the distinction between a startup vs. established business (that has solved the distribution problem). It is easy to get customer feedback, so we can be more customer-oriented (within a vision, of course) to rapidly achieve "fit" for our target customers.
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Early days, it was very important that I actually did real work. I started as an individual contributor and made my way up through Dropbox and that was founded on doing work. So I was actually in support queues, I was actually responding to leads.
This is important to understand the whole system ... the goal of product is to reach success within a market. If you don't understand how your product reaches or gets traction within a market, then you're at risk of a "build it & they'll come" mindset (which always fails).
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thinking about combining products, sales and support into one role.
This is also something I've been thinking about where in a Product-led orientation where the proof of interest (and qualification as a potential customer) we try to help and encourage them to use ....and only when they use and, more importantly, achieve value on their own ... then we approach to see if we can offer more if they buy.
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So I think with Dropbox specifically, and I’d say also at Notion now, we’re really looking at what the customer feedback is telling us to drive towards. So Notion has an amazing, what we call a tagging database, where all the conversations that come in, we tag them and have a very robust way of organizing that customer feedback. And that helps us drive our roadmap. So mixed in with customer feedback and a little bit of intuition, helps us determine what type of problems you should be solving that are going to really make the most impact for us long term.
This is where I've felt the same way and the value of integrating support into the product as opposed to making the users go outside the product (e.g., support portal).
Make it easy to get feedback - whether it's an idea or problem the user using our product runs into.
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And so I ended up starting there in support early days, I started up through their like support and engineer or in sales, which we were just starting sales at the time. Kate Taylor: So I ended up moving into channel and then eventually product where I found a really good fit and really grew my career trying to figure out how do we monetize customer conversations within a self-serve focused company. And that’s what I did. And just recently left and joined Notion. I think the opportunity there for me was really looking at how do we build out the front door experience, thinking about combining products, sales and support into one role.
Her career journey is interesting:
- No experience - starts in Sales & Support
- Moved in to Sales (Channel)
- Then into Product
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