How I Grew This

Ben Okkenga is the Senior Product Manager at RTL2, a TV network from Germany. Ben has spent the last ten years building growth in various departments. Currently, he is responsible for RTL2 projects and products, like the gaming website, mobile apps, and Smart TV applications. In this episode of How I Grew This, Ben talks about how to attract, engage, and retain users on your app, the product that brought RTL2 Connect the Smart TV Award, and how to succeed as a product manager.

Yoann Pavy is a growth marketing leader, passionate about disruptive businesses, growth marketing, and culture. He is the CMO of Nude, a UK-based FinTech app that helps first-time buyers save for their deposits faster. Yoann and his team are working on designing growth features within the app that would be useful to the end user and bring more first-time buyers. As a result, they have developed three growth features. One is called ‘Team Up’, where couples or friends can view each other's lifetime ISA balance, see their time-until-you-buy combined, and get double the government bonus. Another one is the ‘Nude Giveaway’, which is a lottery-type feature, and the third one is ‘Gift Time’, a new unique feature on the market that allows a customer to share a payment link to their friends and family to contribute to their Nude Lifetime ISA. Yoann also talks about what paid channels they use, how to create a balanced mix of social advertising, some of his career ups and downs, and bits of advice for mobile marketing enthusiasts.

Tomas Warden joins us today from Telstra, where he has spent the past thirteen years in various roles. Currently, he is the Principal of Digital Engagement and Experience, responsible for driving the E2E digital experience strategy across Telstra's digital sales and service channels. Telstra is Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company. In this episode, Tomas shares insights from his career, mobile growth strategies, and how his team drives growth through the company's app.

Branding means more than simply creating a logo and placing some ads. As Jeff Bezos said: "Your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room". The main question is how to do it successfully. In this episode, Gessica talks about some of the best practices and channels for building your brand. Gessica is a computer scientist with a deep passion for marketing and is currently the CMO at Paired, an app that focuses on building deeper connections with your partner.

Lisa Kennelly has been the CMO at Fishbrain for over three years and oversees marketing operations, strategy, and vision. Since the fall of 2020, Lisa has been responsible for growing and managing Fishbrain’s eCommerce marketplace. Outside of Fishbrain, Lisa is an advisor and mentor of multiple early-stage founders and startups. Fishbrain is a mobile app and online platform with map-based tools, fishing forecasts, social networking features, and recommendations on fishing gear. Fishing is the most popular hobby in the world… and is huge in the US, Fishbrain’s biggest market. During the pandemic, Fishbrain was a beneficiary of other businesses and sports shutting down and also from becoming the primary online retailer focused on a variety of fishing gear. Riding this wave, Fishbrain has grown to over 13 million users. Lisa led Fishbrain’s marketing expansion beyond their (mostly) paid advertising campaigns. Fishbrain’s social network feature attracts new users and contributes to their user retention. Fishbrain grows through SEO, word of mouth, influencers and even offline marketing (billboards, radio ads, etc) in some southern US states that have a thriving culture of anglers. Sometimes, all that is required to stand out in the market is observing a pattern and disrupting it with a bold design decision. At Clue, a female reproductive health app, Lisa and her team disrupted the ongoing pattern of having a pink-themed female health tracker app. This bold design decision contributed “big time” to their growth. If you are working with influencers, focus on micro-influencers because they are more approachable and have a more dedicated fan base. Nail your product benefits, product positioning, and its messaging. Be rigid about how influencers can use them and how they must not use them. If you are in a newer, less-saturated niche, SEO is a great channel because it’s easier to find content gaps in the niche and fill it with high-quality content. Lisa shares that to increase your premium subscriptions: make your pro membership content truly valuable and meant for the regular, high-frequency user - not just the occasional user. Split testing can be used to avoid making decisions. Sometimes, you just have to believe in your ideas and execute them because non-determinant results of A/B testing can be paralyzing. Lisa also shares management lessons for CMO’s: empathy, honesty, vulnerability, and direct feedback help connect with employees. Sometimes, simply giving your employees a kind ear to vent can do the trick. Consuming leadership content has also helped Lisa in her quest of becoming a great CMO.

Caitlin Roman brings her collective experiences in consulting at McKinsey and Product at LinkedIn & Medium to the world of sports news at The Athletic. Having come up in these subscription powerhouses, Caitlin has a potent combination of high-level business strategy experience along with the tactical ability to work side by side with her teams to execute. All of these elements were crucial for a subscription business like the Athletic during a tumultuous 2020 in sports. Caitlin and her team released a number of initiatives during this time including different content formats like short format commentary and breaking news, and pricing strategies to keep users tuning in even when sports weren’t in play. If there’s a word we would use to describe Caitlin it would be resilient! Far before she was leading her team through the bumps of the pandemic, she had two keystone experiences that she shared on the show that shaped her. The first is her passion for media at a young age. Working as a newspaper editor in both high school and college, Caitlin sought out the challenge of the daily deadline for her daily newspaper. She talks about the late nights and stress but attributes this as the reason why she loves working in the trenches with her teams today, drawing similarities to product management. Before Caitlin found her way to LinkedIn, she lived and worked in Ethiopia as a part of a Gates Foundation initiative in agriculture. During a solo trip in a gorge in Kenya, she fell and broke her back and had to self-rescue. After this grueling experience she recovered, but Caitlin didn’t only not fly home but continued her work at the time setting up microfinance systems for farmers. To hear more about Caitlin’s amazing story about how she found her way into the product in subscription powerhouses, how she thinks about leading her teams, and her adventures in Ethiopia, take a listen to this episode of How I Grew This.

As marketers, we all hope that our efforts will transform a brand and have it become the talk of the town. Our next guest, Brandon Rhoten, has been able to do just this at several of the brands he has transformed. Brandon has worked at Wendy's, Papa John's and Potbelly and although his approach has differed with each challenge the results have been the same: transformational change. We learn that a company looking to adapt and evolve doesn’t need to hop on the hottest trend; it needs to isolate its market problem and find a solution that aligns with its brand’s positioning. In the case of Papa John's, it was moving their advertising to digital channels from traditional ones. For Wendy's, it was reasserting its voice with clever and funny ads on social platforms like Twitter to engage with a younger audience. In this episode, Brandon shares exactly how he approached evolving the marketing strategies at each of these companies to adapt to the times and ultimately get incredible results. Hear this and how they hired comedians for Wendy's Twitter account, why PotBelly hired former professional football player Peyton Manning and why Brandon studies the financial news as much as anything else, all on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This podcast, Kar Paramasivam talks about the growth strategy at Blue Apron, a direct-to-consumer, chef-designed meal kit company. Starting his career as a banker, Kar shifted his focus to startups, where he got his first opportunity to lead a growth team at Shipt. From this point, Kar made his way through companies like Spacious.com (acquired by WeWork), Nutrafol, and CUUP, to his current role as a VP of Growth at Blue Apron. Kar shares some successful campaigns and approaches his team adopted to leverage Blue Apron's app and increase user retention and engagement.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the healthcare industry to its limits, but it also led to new opportunities in terms of accelerating digital transformation. In this episode, we discuss the growth of digital transformation in healthcare with Tracey Weber, SVP of Digital Products, UX and Operations at CVS Health. Tracey joins us with over twenty-five years of experience in leadership roles across multiple consumer industries and extensive digital operations. Before joining CVS Health, Tracey was the General Manager of Marketplace and Digital Ecosystems at IBM, the President and COO of Gilt Group, and held several other leadership positions at companies like CitiBank, Travelocity, and Barnes & Noble. Today, Tracey shares some of the newest trends companies adopt to fulfill the rising consumer expectations for digital healthcare experiences.

Today we talk with someone who has seen the very beginnings of mobile and has helped some of the world’s biggest brands learn how to adapt and innovate by going mobile. Our guest is Matt Hudson. From the early days of mobile at just twenty-one, he helped Rock Fish build their mobile app and strategy, and he’s gone on to the same for Sam’s Club, Charles Schwab, and now Belk. Matt shares several campaigns that drove an incredible amount of growth, like the “App Attack” campaign. To drive downloads to the app, they had stores compete to see who could drive the most downloads, and they ended up driving 1.5 million total downloads through that campaign. Hear this and how Matt was featured in the Washington Post by proposing to his wife via Words With Friends, how he got started in mobile, and why he believes there’s still so much opportunity for growth and more all on this episode of How I Grew This.