How I Grew This

Greg Shelly is the VP of Enterprise Digital Marketing at Canadian Tire. Greg is, admittedly, obsessed with attribution and performance, and he cares about organizations needing to understand how their investments are driving customer outcomes. Before joining Canadian Tire, Greg led the business insights and marketing analytics organization at McDonald's and spent eight years at Dell in e-commerce and digital marketing. Being in sales and on the front lines of business lets you truly understand the customer’s perspective. It is a sensible, logical start to a career in digital marketing. People who can hack together data-driven solutions can help companies understand their customers in a concrete way that gives them confidence in their marketing decisions. Pushing your comfort zone in your career is necessary to challenge yourself. After a few years, you will start appreciating those struggles for helping you grow professionally and at a personal level. A loyalty program sets the foundation of digital growth by helping companies collect data to better understand their customers. The customer ceases to be a mystery when you have data to understand them. Without a mobile-first approach, you cannot build a close relationship with your customer on a web browser. Being on someone’s phone means you have created value in their lives, and you have to make efforts to stay installed on their phones. Action-ready, non-siloed data is the key to better digital marketing regardless of the business use case. Having the right people, the right data, and the right tech makes business growth possible through digital marketing. Personalization is about being customer-centric and talking about the things that matter to them.

Carman Wenkoff is the EVP & Chief Information Officer at Dollar General. In this role, Carman has led the company’s digital transformation, implementing technology advancements to enhance the brick-and-mortar retailer’s offerings and elevate the overall customer experience. Throughout Carman’s career—from working in construction to practicing law, founding a tech company and now as the CIO of a major retailer—he has always addressed challenges head-on. In this episode, Carman shares the secrets to successfully leading a company through digital transformation, and explores how staying true to his purpose and focusing on making a difference in people’s lives have been the most important driving factors behind his success.

Patricia Martorana is the Senior Product Manager, Mobile Growth at The New York Times. Over the past four years, Patricia has grown extensively as a Product Manager. She led the cross-functional team in developing The New York Times subscription footprint and designed the customer journey within the news, cooking, and game sections. She previously had worked in marketing and editorial roles at companies such as the New Yorker and ESPN. Let your existing customers - who are friends with non-subscribers - introduce your product to new users. Plan your growth strategy with all forms of media in mind across all platforms. Monitor growth channels regularly to decide what channels are working for you and what channels are not. Use data to drive these decisions forward. When modeling or remodeling your onboarding experiences, prioritize the kinds of behaviors that you want to introduce. Before showing subscribers any push notifications, explicitly ask them for push notification permission immediately after app installation. A subscription plan is about building relationships and nurturing them over time. Your product team must adapt the product according to the dynamic growth of different user personas. Introduce new features to users and help them discover the benefits over time in a calculated manner using data - don’t bombard them with all features at once.

What are some lessons you learn after being with a company for almost a decade? How do you end up changing your life based on the products you build? This, the stories of being acquired by Adidas while maintaining the freedom to innovate and practicing what you preach, are featured in this episode of “How I Grew This” With Robert Schenkenfelder of Runtastic. Listen and subscribe on Apple/Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and YouTube!

What does it take to drive growth responsibly in today’s world of constant notifications? What are the values of the people behind the news & entertainment experiences that we engage in everyday? This, the stories of the power of mentors, and what we can all do to strike a better balance between our connected and offline lives, are told in our second episode of “How I Grew This” With Claus Enevoldsen of Flipboard.

Morgan Brown is the VP of Growth at Shopify and the author of the book “Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success”. Prior to Shopify, Morgan led the product team at Facebook and was the Chief Operating Officer for Inman News - the leading news source for real estate and technology. Given the size of the Shopify brand, they optimize metrics and data analytic processes from a “merchant-first” perspective. This helps guide them toward their mission of making online commerce easier and better for everyone. There's no value in a spiking lead conversion rate if they don’t become customers. Shopify relies on its growth marketing team (which Morgan is the VP of) for user acquisition. They also have a growth product side that focuses on activation signup, activation trials, and success retention. Internally, growth goals are divided into “missions” and mission teams include channel experts, product leaders, data scientists, engineers, and other cross-functional roles. This decentralized split of marketing teams helps these growth pillars move forward without friction as self-contained units. Commerce is no longer a discrete point where you drive customers from point A to point B, but it's really about being where that action is going to take place. Shopify recently partnered with TikTok to take their merchants where their customers are and bring the tools of giants like Instagram closer to their merchants.

Today’s digital climate requires a focus on healthier long-term gains as opposed to easy-short term wins. But where does one start? Fabien shares how a keen act of listening and parsing of the data can inform where to take your digital product next to drive growth. At SmartNews he’s tripled the monthly active usership from when he started. Beyond this, Fabien shares how his feminism has defined everything from career choices to the way he manages his team. That story, running a French presidential campaign, the importance of decentralized systems, and his perspective on the future of jobs in mobile, is shared on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Sylvain Gauchet is the Senior Manager, Growth Product and Mobile Marketing at Babbel, an internationally successful language learning app with millions of active subscribers and the #1 innovative education company in the world. At Babbel, Sylvain focuses on areas such as growth, early product adoption, and monetization. Before Babbel. he co-founded Apptamin, a creative agency that works with brands to produce creative video ad campaigns and app store content. Product-led growth is not just about helping customers solve their problems but also about the company’s bottom line. Balancing friction with positive signals and enough rewards throughout the onboarding process is crucial to customer retention, as it ultimately affects the bottom line. Improve this process by understanding the voice of your customer and by experiencing onboarding flows of other apps you admire. Emails and push notifications customized to your category are important ways to manage the customer lifecycle and bring them back when drop-offs are detected. Humans are thick-skinned and crafty. A life-defining pandemic didn’t change our capacity to communicate. We found a way out by finding new and better ways to communicate. If customers adapt like this, then product teams must also adapt in an appropriate direction for their category. In Google UAC, launch all ad groups at once. Don’t wait for an ad group to perform well and then tweak others before their release. Google favors your initial campaigns, compares all the new campaigns against them, and reduces the reach of newly-launched ad campaigns. You don’t have to be talking to an expert to be mentored by them. Listen to their podcasts, videos, and other resources - learning from them passively is also a great way to be mentored by experts. Keep exchanging knowledge with people you meet and implement what you learn. You might make mistakes, but you will also learn from them.

While he might not say it himself, our next guest Varun Dubey was able to have an extremely successful career leading the marketing for some of the fastest growing tech companies in India because of two things: being empathetic and analytical. In the early days of his career writing for “Digit” Magazine, he learned that many people only had a few hours of energy to use a day. Later at Qualcomm, he learned that many people had to choose between paying to charge their phones or eating that day. In those instances, he learned that truly understanding the user was critically important for achieving immense growth to hundreds of millions of users which he achieved at Practo. He also took a much more thorough approach than most when it came to tracking. At one point Varun stopping all marketing activities to make sure the entire site and product tracked all the way to billing. Once they did that they realized why users were bouncing and were able to get $2 net revenue for every dollar spent, which made the CFO their biggest advocate. More on Varun’s story including how he helped drive growth for a new category, his thoughts on Apple’s decision on IDFA, and how the marketing world has completely evolved from TV to direct response. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere you find your podcasts.

Erin McFarland is the Managing Director, Marketing Channels Strategy, and Personalization at JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the U.S. She is responsible for the optimization of JPMorgan’s industry-leading digital assets and marketing channels that deliver communication to more than seventy million customers. She has spent the last twenty years creating customer-first marketing strategies for national and global brands across healthcare, luxury, hospitality, and finance industries. Erin suggests diving deep into data because data is how customers talk to you, and it helps guide customer acquisition channels. Think of your company as a “caregiver” to your customers and build fault tolerance and stress testing into your technology. This way, you’re ready when they need you. To make life easy for your customers on mobile, automate recurring actions. Create seamless identity management across devices because privacy is a major concern of the modern customer. Cardless transactions are also a big trend in the financial services industry. Erin explains how it’s okay to change careers but not to burn old bridges because networks will matter during such changes. Have a role model that you identify with but don’t look to them for anything beyond inspiration for your career. You have to steer your path based on what you want to change and who it’s for using your strengths. When executing org-wide changes, Erin suggests building for the customer journey, experiencing what it would look like, and figuring out internal dependencies to navigate. Test your ideas because ideas are only assumptions until they’re proven. Erin’s final advice: A leader asking for the opinion of their team members and sharing credit where it’s due validates the team's skills and helps them feel seen. Invite diverse opinions, be curious to learn, and have the guts to pivot when data doesn’t agree with your decision.