I was applying for Head of Growth and VP Product roles. This is a presentation I prepared for one of those roles which resulted in an offer from a public, $100M+ revenue company. I talk more about how I approached these interviews and some lessons learned.

This was the official prompt I was given for this interview presentation. One thing to remember, as an interviewee what the team is really trying to understand is can you do the job at their company.

You can see ways I added to their prompt in order to better answer that question. For example, in the Growth Tenets section, I added tenets and examples that addressed problems I knew they had.

Do your homework to understand what their biggest challenges are that they are hoping you can solve, and go beyond the prompt to tailor your presentation to show how you will help solve them.

Adding these tenets allowed me to speak directly to the frameworks and philosophies I would use to address the real challenges at the company I was interviewing.

They later became the focus of Q&A because they were hitting on the sweet spot they cared about.

Part of the key was keeping them at the framework and philosophy level vs. the specifics (which I couldn't speak to since I didn't know the specifics).

People (customers AND employees) often make assumptions about what will happen. Customers often say things like, "If you made it easy for me to do Y, I would do X." We, as growth folks, are at risk of doing the same "If I make it easy to do Y, they will do X." These are hypotheses. But we often fold them in as facts. In other words, we let untested hypotheses become facts we build upon.

This is unhealthy because, as I mentioned in the previous slide, 80%+ of those turn out to be wrong. And those odds make for bad investments.

The solution is to get things in front of customers to get answers to validate or invalidate those hypotheses. In the example here, I surface images of Twilio's CodeExchange: the version on the left would have taken 5 months to build. The version on the right took about 1 month. It unlocked a good deal of direction and allowed us to move in the right direction.

When asked to showcase an initiative, choose wisely. Here are a couple of tips:

1. Choose projects/ initiatives you've done in the past that most closely align with the kinds of things you'd do at the new company.

2. If you don't have that, focus on projects that employ the frameworks/ philosophies that would be most critical at the new company.

3. If you're not sure -- ASK! Give your panel (or hiring manager) options and the things you'd review with each. Relevancy is so important to converting anyone - including converting a panel to want to "buy" you. :)

The next few slides frame the opportunity I was showcasing. I always start describing initiatives by first highlighting the target profile/person/segment. I use this to both set up the narrative and also to showcase another important tenet for Growth, which is at the root of every successful initiative is a clear customer target/segment.

Our big question with this initiative was - is this a viable target market for us?

Within that question, we had two core hypotheses about what would unlock value for the customer segment (Sample Code and Serverless).

We decided to do one at a time, using the failure/success of the first to indicate the viability of the second. Given that, we chose the one that would be easiest to ship - the Sample Code hypothesis.

One of our big lessons was the name for this feature - CodeExchange.

We thought for this to be successful, we'd need a ton of code samples to cover all the possibilities. The way we'd scale that is by allowing any developer to contribute samples - an "exchange."

However, it turned out we just needed broad basic templates vs. exacts, and there was no need for the exchange part. So we ended with a name that didn't fit the core value of the feature - templates.

If you are going through a similar interview exercise, my top three tips are:

Tip 1: Step away from the prompt they gave you. Ask yourself, what frameworks/philosophies are most critical to resolving the problems at the company I'm applying to? Write these down, they are the anchors for your presentation/project. You still need to address the prompt but don't hesitate to add things to get these across.

Tip 2: You need to convert your panel like you convert users. That means knowing their biggest problems/pain points and addressing those. Do your research so you know which project aligns best. And if you're not sure, give the hiring manager options.

Tip 3: Include something you didn't do right the first time/something you learned (slide 24). Guaranteed, someone will ask if you don't, and we all know nothing is done perfectly. Proactively surfacing turns this into a strength ("I learn from my mistakes and constantly get better") vs. a weakness.

Good luck with your interviewing. I hope this helps!

Laura Schaffer

This is the presentation I prepared for an interview that resulted in an offer for a Vice President (VP) role at a $100M public company.

Interview presentation for VP of product/growth role

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