Career frameworks, A/B testing, onboarding tips, selling to engineers

Laura was discussing an experiment at Twilio where adding signup questions unexpectedly increased conversion, challenging assumptions about user friction.

Bad friction is bad, and good friction is good. There's no such thing as it being simple. It's just all friction is bad.

Developers almost never look at your marketing website at all. They go straight to your signup flow.

In this context, "their" and "them" refer to the developers who integrate third-party services into their company's systems.

If your service goes down, that's their responsibility. If the pager wakes up someone because the service they bought from you goes down, that's on them.

Laura is advising her product teams to ship minimal, embarrassing first versions quickly to validate ideas. "The first thing" refers to their earlier experiment of kicking users out of the onboarding flow to test a hypothesis.

If it's not embarrassing, you've gone too far. Got to be embarrassing. The first thing, that was embarrassing.

Laura is discussing rapid experimentation strategy where "the first thing" refers to their embarrassing MVP solution of kicking users out of the onboarding portal to a docs page.

If it's not embarrassing, you've gone too far. Got to be embarrassing. The first thing, that was embarrassing.

Your superpower is in really pulling those insights in and bringing them to life, staying close to the customer. There's not a single leader or executive that isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not be seeing.

Roughly 80% of the times, our hypotheses and the things that we believe will be true are wrong.

The psyche of the user is so, so critical. That's just as important as understanding your product and the broader market you're applying to and all those things.