How I Grew This

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mickey Noworyta joins Mada Seghete to share his approach to driving product growth, testing new product features, and the difference between attribution and incrementality. Mickey is the Senior Product Manager at Expedia Group, where he and his team focus on exploring performance marketing ideas. While Mickey is a seasoned Product Manager, he has also worked as a drilling engineer for the oil and gas industry, a researcher, and a data engineer and developer.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Jonathan Reich joins Mada Seghete to discuss how ZEDGE builds innovative marketplaces and games around digital content, the company's growth strategy, and what it takes to set up a winning mindset for your team. With over twenty years of experience in sales, marketing, business development, and financial and commercial operations, Jonathan is a creative and strategic thinker with a tremendous portfolio of scaling hi-tech, telecom, and media ventures.

Artificial Intelligence has become a game-changer for businesses and has opened new growth perspectives and possibilities. Today, customer success equals business success, so companies try leveraging AI features to deliver the best-in-class customer experience – for this, they need conversational AI. In this episode of How I Grew This, Miguel Navarro joins Mada Seghete to define conversational AI, discuss how it differs from classic chatbots, and the functional benefits of conversational AI for businesses. Miguel is currently SVP of Business Technology Executive at KeyBank, focusing on conversational AI enterprise delivery. He also has a plethora of experience building and growing mobile apps, voice platforms, chatbots, digital assistance, and more.

Jean-Sebastien Laverge, the Chief Growth Officer at Tilting Point, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. As a CGO, JS oversees more than forty game titles. Before Tilting Point, he worked for twelve years at Gameloft, where he helped generate significant annual revenues by developing retention and monetization strategies. Tilting Point is a leading award-winning free-to-play games publisher that empowers independent developers to accelerate their growth. It started as a premium game publisher then shifted to the freemium model. The team has now built a new model called progressive publishing. Some of the company's most successful games include Star Trek Timelines, Warhammer: Chaos & Conquest, and SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off. Tilting Point approaches growth in three directions. Firstly, paid growth, which is about user acquisition. Secondly, organic growth includes ASO, distribution platform optimization, IP integration, and marketing buzz. And lastly, monetization growth improves the user's LTV. Some of the most impactful paid channels remain Facebook and Google. When you synchronize the three axes you can unlock maximum growth for your game. According to JS, to engage and bring people back into the game, you can advertise specific offers or push notifications and emails. If you want to start in the gaming industry, you need to be passionate about it, be analytical, and understand data and statistics. If you are a leader in the gaming industry, be transparent and find good talent to help and support you.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Heather Lind joins Mada Seghete to discuss what it takes to become a great product manager and leader, how a mobile app impacts business growth, and how to measure the success of your app and features. Heather is currently the Director of Product, Mobile App at TechStyle Fashion Group, leading the product team for the company’s trendsetting mobile applications. She has been operating in product and technology for eleven years, and her unique career trajectory includes working at every stage of the product life cycle.

Russell Stopford has led digital initiatives across everything from film to sports. He took his passions for the arts as well as his curiosity for emerging technologies and combined them to develop a powerful intersection between storytelling and digital product management. As both an award-winning documentary filmmaker and builder of mobile apps over the past decade, Russell is driven by a pursuit for perfection. As the sports industry transformed into an entertainment opportunity, Russell found himself highly sought after for his knack for weaving together brand stories and the end-user experience for the modern-day consumer. He’s currently producing a film series around the 50th anniversary of Paris Saint-Germain while in parallel working to bring a first of its kind sports app that could revolutionize its category. All this and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

Today we’re joined by Brian Witlin, CEO of Yummly. Brian’s life has been dedicated to building and scaling consumer-focused startups and commercially successful teams over several years. In this episode, Brian shares his experiences of building and scaling Yummly and other companies along with his core message of living a well-rounded life, which is especially useful for founders in the early stages of their career. Yummly is a recipe discovery platform with a mission of helping people become the best version of themselves whilst achieving their goals in the kitchen. In the episode, Brian talks about how Yummly moved from conception to its current state by empowering its consumers and taking risks. In the episode, Brian describes how cooking went from being a way of sustenance to a form of healthy living throughout the pandemic. Brian also talks about the importance of relevant lifecycle messaging and how Yummly leveraged this to shift from an acquisition-focused to a retention-oriented growth strategy. In the episode, Brian shares how user-centered design and design thinking sparked his curiosity and has helped him start several new businesses. He also talks about his passion for helping set other entrepreneurs up for success. Brian also explores why recipe and food hardware startups struggle to attract investors and wind up early. Finally, Brian also shares his advice for startup founders on separating their identity from their work and avoiding burnout.

Ron Schneidermann is the CEO of Alltrails, where he spent the past six years helping grow the company, which is now one of the top five health and fitness apps in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Before joining Alltrails, Ron led growth teams at Yelp and co-founded Liftopia, the global leader of ski lift ticket bookings. Ron shares that the two most important things for any company are momentum and culture. If you lose either of them, they are impossible to rebuild. Have belief in your business model and look at the advantages in context. When you cannot control certain aspects of the funnel, let full-funnel growth (across all stages) be the central driver of your business. If your app is “content-centered,” your data sets hold the power to convert and retain users. First, focus on improving the quality of data you can provide to your audience. Don’t get attached to results because any growth experiment can fail. Instead, focus on learning from successful and failed experiments. Find and monitor feedback loops based on what your users respond to. The key to growth is to keep adapting as your audience adapts because they are the chief driver of your business growth. Re-engagement via push notification may put you at risk of annoying your customers. People may forget that they have the app installed, so it’s always better to focus on outside-the-app strategies such as SEO, personalized content, and reminders via emails to drive re-engagement through deep links into the app. Try not to depend on one platform because it can make a huge dent in your growth charts if the platform changes. Try to own your channels of growth as much as possible. Daily and sometimes even weekly metrics may be distracting. Monthly metrics provide a more accurate view of your audience’s changing consumption habits and are a healthier way to monitor growth. Ron shares that to maintain culture momentum during growth, your company’s senior leadership has to be the culture vanguard and train the rest of the leadership across the org. This becomes easier if people in your organization have a personal connection to your mission and stay longer. Ron’s final advice: be honest with yourself when making important decisions because you will be proud of the practical decisions you make and reactionary paths you avoid after you retire. Having a personal set of core values helps identify opportunities and enjoy the process of executing them.

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In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada is joined by Katherine Kelly, VP of Higher Education Marketing at Handshake, to discuss how Handshake leverages mobile growth opportunities in higher education and the job market. Katherine started her career working in higher education and moved over to tech. She was an associate producer at ESPN, an Instructor of Design History, and a Research Assistant at The Victoria and Albert Museum. Katherine was also an Editor, Writer, and Host of her web series, ‘Just the Tips’.