Dropbox - What You've Learned From Dropbox?

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Nike is moving from a top down sales model to one that's more product led. The team at dropox was once called bound sales, but it moved into the marketing org and started to make it more of a value driven answer for customers. And what we were seeing is that there was a considerable lift in revenue from reps. We're motivated off of having value conversations and kind of what you can call like an alleop, or just like a quick slam dunk question that customers had that we could answer. It's both go to market or design, and really product at its core.

Today’s episode is with Kate Taylor, who recently joined Notion as their Head of Customer Experience. Previously, Kate spent 8 years at Dropbox, leading their SMB revenue and scaled sales operation before leaving in 2020. Prior to that, she started her career as a sales rep at Salesforce.

In today’s conversation, Kate shares a wealth of advice for building out product-led growth and self-serve motions. She shares tons of nuances around going up market, competing with sales and product planning, offering up tactical advice that any founder, product or go-to-market leader can learn from.

Kate also gives us a detailed look at how they approach product prioritization at Notion, including their system of 700 tags and examples of tradeoffs they’ve had to navigate. We also get into pricing and packaging, from specific experiments at Dropbox to why interestingly Notion’s trial isn’t time based.

We also chat about how to handle a wide range of use cases, as well as the “front door” customer experience her team is trying to build. From why customer service shouldn’t be focused on getting customers off the phone faster, to the questions she asks to find more signal in their product feedback, Kate shares some counterintuitive thoughts here.

Finally, we wrap up by talking about her approach to leading teams, including why she hires for curiosity, how she tries to teach her team to ride the ups and downs of startup life, and how working for three very different CEOs — Marc Benioff, Drew Houston and Ivan Zhao — has impacted her own leadership style.

Kate isn’t on Twitter, but you can email us questions directly at review@firstround.com or follow us on Twitter @ twitter.com/firstround and twitter.com/brettberson