How I Grew This Branch

Andrew Brinkman, the VP of Product at Bonusly, joins Mada Seghete in this episode of How I Grew This. Andrew has over fourteen years of experience building product teams that drive outcomes from Sling TV, Hudl, PenLink, and IBM. He has a proven track record of building and leading high-performing products that customers love.

In this episode, Mada and Andrew discuss how to validate customer desirability, leveraging existing organic demand to drive expansion, and how to build a company culture that inspires more dialogue, collaboration, and transparency.

Jayne Peressini is the Senior Director, Mobile Marketing and Growth @ Electronic Arts (EA). Her team manages user acquisition, retargeting, and user retention across the multiple genres of games that EA produces. Jayne’s interest in gaming dates back to the pre-iPhone era when her Dad purchased her a console on which she became hooked to playing games.

Jayne believes that mobile gaming helps people gain a sense of community and can sometimes act as a welcome distraction, which is why mobile gaming metrics have been going through the roof during the pandemic.

She also believes in taking a challenging campaign and iterating through to make it work. She fondly recalls a campaign where she challenged assumptions about women playing sports and eventually succeeded after multiple iterations.

Furthermore, Jayne firmly believes in the idea of “you only fail when you quit” and also emphasizes the importance of working together through failure in order to achieve success as a team.

Jayne thinks that, especially after IDFA deprecation in iOS 14.5, gaming companies should focus on overall user lifecycle metrics. She favors choosing the right time to transition them across the lifecycle instead of using interruption marketing.

Jayne’s team management philosophy revolves around giving due credit and providing genuine encouragement regularly. Jayne advises younger folks in gaming to reach out to mentors with whom they identify personally and ask them for specific advice while also encouraging senior mentors in the industry to share their knowledge freely.

Our guest on this episode of How I Grew This, Dan Bishop, is currently the Senior Vice President of Global Mobile and Digital Marketing at Citi. Most people that build a career in startups stay in the startup world and most who go to Fortune 500 brands stay in that world. Dan has built a career traversing through both. He got his start seeing innovations that would change the world years later, first at JumpTV creating Online TV deals before Netflix and then at UStream seeing the early days of live streaming. Being at companies that were years ahead of the rest of the world showed him what true innovation looked like and how to find the sweet spot of timing to build, launch and grow digital products.

He shares his story of how he made it to Citibank and how most other large brands still have a Web 1.0 marketing tech stack in 2020. Beyond marketing software, Dan shares one of the most critical components is finding people who truly understand what innovation takes and how he finds them.

More on Dan’s story including his time working with Jason Calcanis, the product he launched at TurboTax being able to scan and file taxes back in 2010 and how COVID-19 has changed the financial industry on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Growth and product are a completely different beast when you sell physical products and not software. Despite those challenges, our next guest Ramneek Khurana has grown Lenskart to help India’s vision problem.

Ramneek went to Georgia Tech and expected to go to a major consulting firm, but he took some advice that led him into physical products as he started his career at Michelin Tires. Since Michelin was the top tire brand, Ramneek made very marginal improvements and eventually got bored and wanted to solve a bigger problem. That led him to co-found Lenskart, an optical eyewear chain that produces over 300,000 glasses a month. They saw the large gap in the Indian market for a convenient, stylish eyeglass brand that also helped tackle the millions of Indians who weren’t able to get glasses.

Unlike almost every other eyeglass manufacturer, Lenskart focused on mobile and digital from the very beginning, making it easier for customers and allowed them to scale quickly. Some of their best growth campaigns came out of COVID. They received tons of videos from customers to showcase they could still help people get eyeglasses even during lockdown and turned it into a massively successful TV campaign. Hear stories like this, how they won the award for Best Mobile Innovation at Branch’s 2020 Mobile Growth Awards, how Ramneek manages his time as the company grows and changes, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.

On this episode Archie Abrams, Senior Director of Product Management, shares how he thinks about balancing supply and demand at Lyft, even as markets have been forever changed by COVID-19. Before this, he was the 10th employee at udemy. Over the course of his 7.5 years there he helped to scale Udemy from no revenue to hundreds of millions in revenue and over 600 employees.

More on Archie’s story, including how perceived value plays into the psychology of your user, why it’s important to utilize the behaviors of your best customers, and why you should reevaluate immediately killing unsuccessful strategies, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher and more.

Noa Gutterman is the Director of Marketing at VSCO. Before this VSCO, she spent six years in the digital marketing game in various roles.

Noa runs VSCO’s marketing function and in the ten months since joining she has hired four team members, built up the entire lifecycle and product marketing functions and refreshed VSCO’s paid acquisition strategy.

Noa shares details of an upcoming influencer marketing campaign, targeting the Gen Z generation that she is very excited to see the results of. She breaks down the strategies that can be used to find influencers, the difference between a normal and micro-influencer and what your first step should be if you are also aiming to kick off an influencer marketing campaign.

Noa also breaks down VSCO’s approach to re-engaging users. She shares a step-by-step approach from discovering what users like most about the app and what behavior patterns most commonly lead to these revenue generating actions to then how to encourage those behaviors through owned and paid channels.

Hear Noa’s advice for her younger self, why she has marketing in her blood, why the VSCO growth team sits within the product function, the one animal that Noa would most like to talk to, and more on this episode of How I Grew This.