Philippe Gamache  0:00  
What's up guys, welcome to the humans of martech podcast. His name is Jon Taylor. My name is Phil Gamache. Our mission is to future proof the humans behind the tech so you can have a successful and happy career in marketing

Philippe Gamache  0:25  
What's up everyone. Today we have the pleasure of sitting down with Josh Kim growth marketing lead at notion. Josh started his career in strategic planning and analysis before moving to growth Product Management. He was the second growth pm hire at inflection and employment screening startup where he worked on their conversion optimization team. He then moved over to marketing operations at Credit Karma and later became the first hire on their growth and engagement team where he own implementation and testing focusing on monthly active users. Josh then spent three years at Spotify, where he held different growth marketing roles owning different products from consumer, the creator and finally marketplace. And most recently, he's moved over to notion first focusing on growth lifecycle and product marketing. And recently leading the growth marketing team Josh also advises startups within the First Round Capital portfolio as an expert in residence. Josh, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate it.

Josh Kim  1:20  
Yeah, totally. What an intro. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here and talk all things Martech. 

Philippe Gamache  1:26  
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Jon Taylor  2:09  
Yeah, Josh, thanks so much for joining us, you know, I want to just jump right into the growth marketing stuff. As a bit of a growth marketer myself, I'm looking at your resume and think, wow, you've worked with some really cool companies like Spotify and now notion which is a product that both Phil and I know and love. I think for lots of us in the growth marketing and product marketing mindset. We see this as a bit of a dream namebrand companies that walked the walk a product led growth, what lessons can you share us about working from these companies that people like myself can transfer to our day jobs?

Josh Kim  2:44  
Yeah, totally. Well, thank you. And, you know, I feel really fortunate to have had the chance to work at some really great brands, really cool companies, and also products that I really love and use in my day to day, still listen to Spotify every day, notion very much runs my life as you can ask my wife. And so yeah, I feel really grateful for those experiences. I'd say that, if I look back on my career, particularly the last three companies I've been at, each one has sort of imparted a very specific lesson about growth and brand and marketing and how those sort of culminate into how companies, businesses and brands grow. So if I go all the way back to Credit Karma, you know, as mentioned, credit, karma was where I first sort of dove into marketing chops, and really got the chance to work with some of the best growth people I've worked with in mountain to date. And this is where I would say I really, really honed and developed my growth chops, learn how to market a brand and a product. But also do it in a fun way. It was some personality. at Spotify, I got the chance to get a masterclass on how brand and Grace loops can work together and really meld together to drive business growth at scale. I think the perfect example of this is the you know, yearly holiday campaign that is near and dear to our hearts, Spotify raps. I got to work on that from both the consumer and creator lens during my time there, which really helped me to understand how you not only think about, you know, building your super flashy brand campaign, but also how you built the system underneath it and the foundation underneath it. That's big data and insights to drive growth at scale. And then a notion really excited to be here. I lead the growth marketing team right now and it's just I feel really fortunate to work with a world class group of practitioners across marketing, growth, Product Engineering, data science, design, etc. All you know, working on our mission and making tool making ubiquitous And I think looking back, you know, the common thread I draw is working on products and brands that really strike a chord with their consumers. So some Credit Karma, you know, at the end of the day Credit Karma is like a credit score financial products. But they were able to make their branding really, really resonate with, with our consumers and with our customer base. And, you know, it made it feel really approachable, friendly, and create a lot of brand affinity with their base, which was really interesting. Spotify is brand is revered globally. And it's because of the way that they respect the artists, the craft and the listening experience. And that notion is just sort of insane how passionate people are about a productivity tool. And I think that that's a testament to the team's ability to really craft and hone a voice that really resonates with a ton of people, a lot of communities, and just your average user.

Jon Taylor  5:58  
Yeah, so cool. It's such a cool origin story and experience that you've shared with us. You know, you've been in the growth game for some time, I'm sure you remember, back in the day, when growth hacking was all the rage. And yeah, marketers were trying to inject themselves into the growth into growth loops and try to get, you know, more users into the system. And from those early days, I think that a lot of the folks in growth really became attuned to data. And using that in terms of their testing. However, as time has gone on, I feel like product growth and growth, marketing has really matured to become the multidisciplinary, in fact, working very closely with product teams. So do you kind of agree with the evolution of that product growth angle, so becoming multidisciplinary, having people on multiple teams having growth be a bit of a team sport? And then on top of that, as a follow up comment, assuming you say yes to that is, what do you think makes for a growth? Great growth team?

Josh Kim  6:58  
Yeah. First of all, 100%, I can tell you remember, the day is when you know, growth, hacking was the hottest term, all the books, blog posts, and, you know, tips and tricks on Twitter that are coming out. I remember that well. And I would put myself in the camp of people who, you know, feel a little bit of cringe nowadays, when we hear that. I think that comes from a place of like, you know, I think a lot of growth, people will now feel that you can't really hack growth, like, yes, there's things you can do to like, make, you know, metrics swing, or like, get juices or like, you know, things make things by quickly. But it comes from a place of having really solid foundations and thinking in first principles. And that's why, you know, when I hear the term I'm like, Yes, but there's like something deeper underneath that, that we need to unpack. I definitely think though, that the essence of that period of like being obsessed with growth hacking, and startups and founders really trying to like, you know, crack that strategy to find and scale that next growth hack, like that's been captured in how growth is practiced today. I think it's captured really in the foundation being around data, and how do you leverage data? How do you measure things? How do you extract insights in a way that's scalable, and lends itself to strong execution, and this really like rinse and repeat cycle of experimenting, measuring ideating. And moving quickly. And so now, I would see that most growth teams that are successful, are when they're very multidisciplinary. For example, a setup that I've always pushed for, and this goes back to my time at credit, karma is when we think about a pod, typically on engineering, you'll have a PM, group of engineers, usually, data scientists, design, etc. And the whole idea of setting up pause in that structure is so that you're getting everyone who has a decision making like is part of that decision making process to be in the same room to be part of the same conversations. And what I found is that actually adding a growth marketer or growth person to the mix, can set that team up to for even more success and to move even faster, and to have even more impact. And so that was really popular Credit Karma. I actually trialed it myself for the first time at Spotify, where I stood like, in Jepson, myself into a pod. And because it was so successful is something that I brought with me today. And so now I instill that in a lot of the growth teams that I set up now, where I say like, Hey, we should build this around like a common theme, common area, but also make sure all relevant functions and parties are there and are represented. And I would say that's been extremely success. whole notion where we now have, you know, a growth market are represented in most programs now. And then to your second question, I think what makes a really strong effective breath team, I would boil it down to really three areas. And I would say, the first is a shared Northstar. Second is really clear roles and responsibilities. And the third is adhering to really strong fundamentals. So for the first area, a strong Northstar, this is really usually takes the form of like a key metric, or primary metric, that the entire org, the entire team can lean on as this is what we're trying to achieve. And the reason this is so important, is because when teams are executing, it's extremely easy to get lost in the hundreds, if not 1000s, of test options or variants or strategies that you could be building. And so having that very, very clear goal, or Northstar helps bring clarity and focus to the conversations where you can come kind of ideate and you know, converse about all these things. But the day, you have to prioritize, and you have to be ruthless about it. And having that defined, Northstar is the best way to approach those conversations, roles and responsibilities. I think when you're in a disciplinary function, like growth, having really clear swim lanes across a team really helps to bring focus and allows everyone to be extremely effective by letting them lean on their strengths and what they do best. But also helping them to lean on their weaknesses where others might be able to fill those gaps. And then lastly, fundamentals, you know, all those classic growth terms and sort of principles, but moving quickly done is better than perfect. And something I really like to stress by teams is test hygiene, to make sure that when we're thinking about experiment design, we're going back to the fundamentals, ensuring that, you know, things were set up properly, that were being thoughtful about what we're testing for and what we're measuring. And then making sure we're executing well after that.

Philippe Gamache  12:16  
Very cool. Josh, you mentioned clear roles and responsibilities. I'm curious your take on what is the ideal role and responsibility for the growth marketer on that pod? And how did you define that first, when you implemented yourself in that pot at Spotify, and talk to us about that story?

Josh Kim  12:37  
Yeah. So I think it will always come down to an assessment of what the team current layout is, and like where they spike or in where they need more support. That married with same assessment of the growth marketer? Like is it someone who spikes on paid ads or spikes on, you know, data and analytics, or can assist with email or lifecycle channel? And does that pair well with the team that that person is being paired with? And so that kind of comes first, right? You say like, okay, here are the teams here are the people that could be embedded? How do we match me in a way that's going to lead us up to the best results? And so for me, I would say that at that point, I would spiking high on data analytics, on lifecycle email engagement channels, and experiment design. And so when I was working with that team, I made it a point to say like, Okay, I'm going to work like hand in hand with this data engineer, if you'd have done this in the past, and I feel comfortable getting into the weeds of like, how we build pipelines, how we make sure that we have really strong test hygiene and experiment design, how we're going to be, you know, ensuring that we build quickly, but also in a way that's comprehensive and actually, you know, future proofed, if that turned out to be the best setup. You know, I was working in super closely with this person working in spreads. But then I could also put my sort of like email hat on and assist from that lens of saying, okay, I can test this really quickly. And then like, I can, like, help you with HTML, whatever it might be. So that while we do have clear swim lanes, we're also passing things off to each other in a way that makes it really efficient in a way then sport versus an individual one. Yeah,

Philippe Gamache  14:32  
makes a ton of sense. The there's a bit of art to the matchmaking and like figuring out where folks are spiking because I feel like as a manager, you might have a perception of where a certain individual is spiking, but they themselves might like they're spiking in one area, but maybe they've spent too much time in that area in the past and they're actually hungrier for for something else. So I feel like there's really is an art to that but I'm curious on On the testing side, you can call back whatever experience it is, like, CK Spotify, or, or notion but like, I'm sure there's a wealth of memorable experiments that you've gotten a chance to be a part of. I'd love to hear maybe some of the successes, but also really curious about not the failures. But like, maybe you have some of the surprising outcomes like you guys thought this was going to kill but actually found or there was like a surprising outcome. They're curious. Yeah,

Josh Kim  15:27  
those are always the most fun ones, right? We integrated a startup that had built this music marketplace for musicians were sort of like a Fiverr, or Upwork. If you needed a track, mastered or even produced, you could go out and find somebody to do it for you. And so the really interesting thing about this marketplace was that the community around it was crazy. Like these people love the product. They were ambassadors, they love they're huge advocates of the brand, and really took it upon themselves to spread word of mouth, and really drive adoption within their communities. So from a growth perspective, when a marketer hears things like that around brand, advocacy, and community and word of mouth, they're like, boom, referral program, right? Like, that's, you know, one plus one equals two, of course. And so naturally, working with the founders, we started designing, and ideating on launching a referral program for the business. You know, you kind of go through these steps, when you're doing this, you think about, okay, what's the offer? Is it two or two or one sided? How do you make it lucrative, but also easy understand where the mechanics, where do you build? Do you outsource it? Or do you build it yourself internally, all those steps, etc. We essentially went in with as a hypothesis of, hey, the people in this marketplace are fanatics about the brand, we think that we can launch a referral program, and it'll take off and really drive top of funnel growth and brand awareness. So the company, so let's do it. So designed it built it shipped it. And lo and behold, it was kind of dead on arrival, honestly, we shipped it and went through had like this, like, pretty elaborate promo strategy, built it into the products have felt cohesive, and then felt like we're going out with a pretty competitive offer. It ended up not taking off whatsoever. I think we got like a few referrals successfully. But when we did the classic, like funnel breakdown of like, okay, where's the drop off, and it just turned out to be like everywhere, like it would just not taking off within the community. And people weren't seeing it as an effective way to promote the brand and to or that they didn't think that offer wasn't lucrative enough. And so I think looking back on that we did retros on it, etc, we actually ended up sunsetting the program, the key lessons that I extracted from it, and that sort of like, I take with me now, when I'm thinking about referral programs, is one is to make this incentive as compelling as possible. I think when you hear about these sorts of programs in the past, you know, Uber DoorDash. All these like gig economy marketplaces, but also Dropbox, the incentive and the offer is typically at the forefront of why it's successful. It's easy to understand. And it's extremely compelling, because it solves an immediate need. And for the time that we built this, it was somewhat compelling. But the time at which it was useful and valuable, was something that we hadn't actually nailed. And so that's a lesson that I really take and kind of underline whenever we're talking about referral referral programs. Now. The second broader lesson for me was, this program was like one of 10 things we launched in a quarter. And I think, looking back, we probably could have made it work more like identified why it wouldn't work, or iterated on how to make it successful if we had brought some more focus to our work. And so, just another lesson to think about, hey, if there are 10 things, how do we draw some really, really clear cut lines to make sure that we're focusing on the most important three things, and intentionally saying we're not going to do the other seven, because they're not worth it or our time is better spent elsewhere? So that's a failure. That's, you know, battle score that I'll take with me and, you know, come come out with a time learnings, I think on the other side, something that was really successful and maybe like a little surprising. early on during my time at notion I was running web optimization. And we did we tested everything. Yeah, no notion back then was that a state where the marketing site or homepage hadn't been updated, like yours, or at least many months? Marketing team was small, like, everyone did a little bit of everything. And so I was doing, I was running a few experiments and had gotten some wins. And then one of the experiments that ended up running and it was only because I was doing some pure analysis and looking like, hey, people, like in b2b SaaS companies, they use different language around how to get people to enter the sales funnel, and go to the pipeline. And on the top now, they classic, you say like contract sales, which feels very transactional? Yeah, I was like, okay, yeah, get to the point, go talk to the salesperson do I actually want to do that, you know, etc. Others were using language like requested demo, or, you know, get in touch with our team or things, other variants like that. And so we tested it, we did like a multivariate test using use a third party vendor. It actually ended up seeing that different language. And I think it's still up now. But requested demo ended up being extremely effective. And it led to like, increase pipeline and wish we kind of like backed up all the way down into like, hey, this actually drives like significantly meaningful revenue for us, when it gets all the way down to close deals. It all started from obviously one of the most important and valuable services, your website and your homepage. But from a very basic, like CTA text test, and I think that really just made me remember that it's never too late. Or it's never not a good idea to test the simple things. And most of the time, they're going to work.

Jon Taylor  22:15  
I think that's a really cool story around the request to demo. I have a follow up question around. How do you select tests, like some of the advice that we've talked about with other gases, like, the first step in launching an AV test is having an idea of what to test and if it's worth testing, and selecting your tests, and I think you kind of hit on that point a little bit with a website optimization, but I'm wondering if you could go a little deeper on that for our listeners?

Josh Kim  22:40  
Yeah, for sure. Um, and so, you know, I think there's like a very rigorous way to do this, right? You say, Okay, if we break down all of our options into numbers, and we say, just let's just say like website optimization, for example, I've gone through this exercise with my team. You look at the website, how much monthly traffic does each page get? If you break that into like impressions and like amount of clicks? And like how that turns in converting the signups? What are those relative rates, if you apply lips against them, what's the size of the prize, and you eventually turn it into like a math equation where you can look at, okay, if we test on this page and see this expected lift, we can generate this many more incremental signups, which turned into this many dollars based on historical all conversion rates, yada, yada, you basically turn it into like a big spreadsheet with different variables that pointed to like this should be done. First, there should be a second, third, fourth, fifth and stack ranking. I think that's a great way to do it in the beginning, because you can basically apply some methodology numbers logic to the madness. The challenge is when you don't have that data, and you actually can't like, turn it into a simple equation. And that's where I think you kind of again, have to lean on a bit of the art around it, and say, like, well, intuitively, like, where do we think makes the most sense? It's probably a combination of what hasn't been touched in a while, where do we know a bunch of people go to, and what do we think is the most valuable piece of the pie. And so you know, in a world where perfect data doesn't exist, and earlier on and startups, you typically don't have access to that you kind of have to lean onto that intuition, which is built and developed over time as you work on the business and you start to get a feel for where the highest leverage points are.

Philippe Gamache  24:42  
Yeah, very cool. Even like in the race like is what I've used in in past companies that like if you did the right prioritization model for the partner program referral idea, it was probably like a decent left on it, but the potential impact of it like there's, there's so much art that goes into that right? Like, what is the potential impact of that the scale was just so big that it probably still would have come out like at the top of the list on the RE scoring, and it probably still would have ended up being part of the list of experiments. So yeah, it's interesting to hear how you prioritize that. And also, how do you balance like, spending time figuring out what you want to test versus actually just launching stuff and getting tests out the door. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at census census is a data activation platform loved by marketing teams at Sonos, Canvas crocs notion, and more. As a customer, I've experienced the magic of census firsthand there, no code, audience hub and reverse ETL enabled me to use our cloud data warehouse to power growth and create highly personalized customer journeys in all of my marketing platforms like iterable and Google ads. If you like to humans martec podcast graphics, and you want your very own image, we're doing a monthly raffle for a personalized t shirt designed by us enter to win at get census.com/humans. Yeah, I'm curious your take on? No, you said in one interview that I've read, notion CRO has been a meaningful program for driving top of funnel growth. But under the hood, it's taken a bunch of time and tooling and process and roadmap to get there as to talk to us about that journey and maybe touch on the tech stack piece. Obviously, like peanut martech podcasts, we love to talk about stack there. And maybe like specifically, and I been pretty deep on on lifecycle for most of my career. Curious about the lifecycle experiments earlier on and at notion. And you know, like the stack I looking at the code on notion they're like, does a mix between amplitude and segment thrown that into a data warehouse? I know you guys are using segment census. And then you thrown that into the the ESP like, yeah, I would love to get you unpack that? Yeah,

Josh Kim  27:02  
for sure. I think that's actually a great example is to go dive in bit deeper into the lifecycle. Because I have a bunch of experience in that too, and help build out the team and the processes there. And I think it's a perfect blend of how we've leveraged tooling, and martech, but also people in process to actually turn that into a really successful engine for us. And so kind of going back to the beginning, but I was originally brought to notion lead lifecycle. And at that point, we kind of had our ESP in place, and that was about it. Like, as any lifecycle person will know, like, data is probably the most important part about getting anything done with that channel and strategy. And what we really struggled with for like the first year was like, how do we enable the right data to get to the place that we actually send messages to the people at the right time? classic, classic issue. And we eventually figured out like a patch solution for that, that like work to get us to the next phase. But once we had sort of built up the practice and started to get people to actually start sending messages, people on the team, what we realized was it had become extremely ad hoc. And so, you know, we go through the cycle of identifying our roadmap, you know, drawing up hypotheses, strategizing ideating. And then from there, you have to go through the process of okay, well, we have to design things with the right things, build them QA, and then ship, test, measure, rinse and repeat. Each piece of that process has a failure point, whether it's, you know, oh, well, we're getting a ton of copy feedbacks, like we need to, like, you know, figure out how to navigate this. That's a pillar point. Or, hey, the data scientist is backlogged and can't, you know, analyze this experiment that's been done for two weeks. And so we're backed up for like four weeks. That's a failure point. Or it's, I want to try out this new segment. And I need to find a way to get data engineering to send it into our USP for us, we can actually test it another failure point. And what we realized and remembered is that for growth teams, shipping velocity is like the most important ingredient to our success. Because in a quarter time, if you can only get 10 shots or experiments up, and you can count on maybe one or two of those being wins, then making actual impact is heavily dependent on shipping quickly and consistently. And so, what we did was essentially sort of break down our processes into key points and started having conversations and idling around well, how can we either use tools to automate or leverage people to build processes or many tools for us, or outsource things so that they are just completely running independently. And so for example, for targeting, we ended up using a combination of segments and sensors and the self serve way that allows a team to actually push their own attributes, profiles, whatever they need, into our USP. So they don't have to, you know, go through the sprint process and like, release process did engineering and data platform teams to actually enable targeting for experiments. So data scientist, partly from getting tired of getting constant pings from us, he helped us build is really smart integration to static, that enabled the team to essentially self serve their own experiment setups, but more importantly, their own results. And so they can now own the process from ideation, design, build, ship, and then analyze all on their own by leveraging static, and our ESP. And then for the more tactical things around like, template creation and coding, copy, creative, we ended up outsourcing a bunch of things. And we built like templates, or creative so that we didn't have to spend a bunch of time and cycles working with the creative and brand team. And instead, they gave us something that was like, Hey, this is like stamp certified, we're good to go, as long as you stay within these restraints. And then the team go crazy testing whatever they want it in that's super important element to really choose performance. All in all, essentially, by like leveraging Bartek, leveraging tooling, leveraging process, people automation, we were able to remove a ton of dependencies that we had on other teams, and individuals. And the end result was amazing. So I think you're one, when we hadn't had all this in place, we're shipping like maybe a couple of experiments quarter. Over the last year, we've shipped over 75 experiments, I think, close to 100. And our hit rate was somewhere between like 10 to 20%. And so the team has really turned it into an engine of like, hey, we have an idea, we have now built a path to get that idea into an experiment in like, a couple days. Which means we're paired with notions top of funnel, and we can get an experiment results really quickly. And, um, they've now become like the de facto team that people go to with like a question or hypothesis or, you know, they want help understanding our users or something. And we can turn that around relatively quickly. So that I think is like a great example of, you know, how we leverage these tools, but also people and process to really get the best possible outcome. And of course, none of this would have been achievable without a lot of partnership with our data team or engineering teams. These a really helped us Ida design and build all this so that we can get to the state really quickly.

Jon Taylor  33:23  
Yeah, it's so cool to kind of get a glimpse into the growth operations that you're running. And, you know, it kind of dovetails nicely into the next question that I have really around Martex role in a top tier growth team, and I have a hypothesis, Josh, that I could take you out of your team and put you into a low tech team, and you probably still be able to build up a fair amount of velocity. The analogy that comes to my mind is a tool doesn't make the carpenter but it can make the carpenter a whole heck of a lot faster. The nail gun versus the hammer we can we can build things faster than ever before ship things that have velocity. You know, and I was curious to talk to you a little bit about what are the what should teams be looking to augment? Like, what processes internally Can you augment with the latest and greatest martec?

Josh Kim  34:10  
Yeah. Thank you for the words, those very kind I would hope so. Later, I think the beauty of where we're at currently, like with a lock ton of tools being built for knowledge workers within the AI space, still in like this low code, no code movement, is that new tools are popping up every day. I'm sure both of you get like 10s of emails a day or week with like, Hey, I'm building this thing. I love your thoughts or, you know, whether it's Mar tech or whatever it might be, and that runs a danger of you know, potentially feeling tool overload and there being a lot of noise in the market. But typically, the guidance that I give to my team is that if you find yourself doing a task, like more than once a week, there's probably a way to automate it. And there's probably either a tool or a process or some sort of automation to minimize what I like to refer to as like task overload. So that you can actually remove that from your mental overhead and make more space for deep thinking and strategic strategic thinking. And this is an option opportunity to make a plug for notion as a great tool for that round automations and databases, to do a lot of this heavy lifting. And so I think that when I talked to my team about this, and we talked about, like, well, I'm so busy, and like, you know, I have all these things I need to do. I think, once you like, sort of break that down into well, what can you do with the time that you have, if you kind of study what your current daily, weekly, monthly tasks are, and how you might be able to automate, automate them so that they're lower bandwidth for you can quickly turn into like gray, let me actually do more with my time and turn more towards these tools that can make me more efficient. And I found that it can be kind of scary, like how efficient people can make their work. Once you identify the one to like three tools that work really well for you, and learn how to use them to your advantage.

Jon Taylor  36:36  
Yeah, it's so cool. I mean, I'm sure a few of our listeners are thinking maybe unfairly, like, hey, well, you're working at cool companies like notion and Spotify, like you have endless martech budget, and all of this. And I'm curious, like, you know, if I were to pluck you out as sort of saying the last question and put you into startup, what advice would you have for that like, low budget, low tech, one person growth team on at a startup, like, what transferrable skills do you think that you'd bring? And What lessons do you think you'd have for folks?

Josh Kim  37:09  
Yeah, that's funny, I think you'd be surprised, honestly, in my experience, just because a company has a big brand or you know, a large presence, that then typically doesn't mean that they've got it figured out from like a tech perspective, if you really start to look under the hood. And in some cases, it's been actually quite the opposite. But I think that would have looked back as to like how Mar Tech has evolved, or like, progressed within an organization, in my experience, it's usually gone one of two ways. The first, and Spotify is a good example of this is when Mar tech investment is approached from like a top down perspective. You know, a leader or the company says, Hey, we're gonna make a big investment. Because we have conviction or proof that this will work. Spotify wrapped is a good example. They say, we're going to make this happen, don't care how much it costs. But we believe it's the right thing to do. And we're going to make it beautiful and make it work. That ends up in having conversations to say like, well, that means we need a huge team of engineers, data people, data scientists, marketers, to pivot towards working mostly on just this big brand campaign, and making it happen. And that then turns into well, we need to make these investments, we need to build piping, we need to enable the data, we need these new tools to enable this, etcetera, which results in a big investment, but it comes from the top. And that means it's going to happen, and you're gonna see if it works in in Spotify as case with rapt, did work. And that's why it keeps happening. And that's why during that season, really the back half of the year in preparation for rat, a large percentage of the company is working on it. And that's what makes us so successful. On the flip side, and notion, I've seen more of like a bottoms up approach, where we take this more like how do we like sort of prove out these bets that we have, and start to identify and illustrate the need to make more investments. And so for example, like the lifecycle team, that are called out, they basically made a lot of things happen and drove a ton of impact with little to nothing. They had to sort of like duct tape a bunch of systems and automations and processes processes together to actually build up velocity and make impact in naturally the case with lifecycle. Yep, yep. It's painful, but you know, it takes time. And now they're in a state where they can say like, Hey, we made all this happen if we can invest in this way. We think we can through x impact or things like that. And so So that's typically how I've seen the shape of this in terms of like driving the conversation or martech and investment to take place.

Philippe Gamache  40:10  
Very cool. I love the breakdown there. I think there's, there's so many threads that I want to pull down on from your tech stack answer all the way to your answer here on comparing, you know, stuff coming from the top or bubbling down. But I was curious to get your take on this idea of notions growth through community and product and it maybe you can get threads on on Spotify also, because there are definitely some some similarities on the growth model. There's but from the outside looking in, at least, it seems like notions growth has been fairly linear and straightforward. But we know that like growth is never easy. And it seems like community and product at least are two of the big components of the growth strategy. Talk to us about these two factors and how they've played a role at notion or Spotify also.

Josh Kim  41:04  
Yeah, totally. So the community and goal for notion is really, really interesting. And it's one of the reasons I actually came Inotia. Because when I was first talking to the team, I was like, I don't know what this company does, I don't know. And then upon, you know, doing some Google searches, looking it up on Reddit, I was like, wow, like, this thing has legs. Like, you know, people are really fanatic about it. hardcore fans see hardcore fans, like really, really, really like tons of super fans, you know, people out there who are getting like notion tattoos, or like, you know, are making a living off of building notion templates. And it all comes down to like, being obsessed with productivity, and while they tell the world about it, and I think that's really the essence of what our community strategy team have been trying to capture is, you know, this is like, community was run by a very small team and happens super organically and grassroots. In the beginning. It was primarily about engaging with our superfans getting feedback about our product, and sort of just like running with ideas, and you know, figuring out ways like we can continue to sort of stimulate an engagement community. Fast forward a few years, we've seen, really, really rapid growth across each of our sort of community audiences. We have ambassadors, we have champions, we have consultants, and then most recently, student leaders were, you know, they're active in communities on campus. And each of them really serves a different purpose, and attracts a different type of notion user as well. And the way we engage with them is differently to but I think across the board, if we look at how communities leverage today, they really drive a lot of the lifeblood of notion of the product. They're involved in everything from like product launches, and beta testing, too, you know, how we get feedback about the product, and how that comes to life within our development process. They help advocate for us, they build many communities on their own. And we're really like, we want to enable them and empower them to do their best work out there. And so we have communities globally. And we are really just trying to help them the pack continue to be passionate about the product and the brand. And really bring that magic to others in a way that feels like they're driving it. And we that's how we would define success.

Philippe Gamache  43:41  
Yeah, it's fun. You You know, you have a good product, when you see these, these fanatics, and the community just kind of grows organically. In a sense. They're another community, I wanted to ask you about. You and I have this in common. In 2018, you took the retention and engagement cohort course at reforge. While you're at Credit Karma, I took it a year and a half after that, but talk to us about the role, the course add in accelerating your career, maybe how you're able to speak about growth and different systems and processes that, you know, maybe you understood some of it before, but it kind of crystallized some of the systems that just curious to take there.

Josh Kim  44:20  
Yeah, for sure. I think the biggest value add, about taking that course at that time my career was coming out of it. It armed me with the knowledge and sort of like the terminology and the baseline info to be able to think and speak about growth in a systematic way. I think kind of probably sounds similar to your experience. But Previously, I had the puzzles aside the puzzle pieces in place to really be thinking about it. Yeah, like how do you think about top of funnel and how do you think about like engagement and like using different channels to drive? different metrics? Next. But going through the process of really studying the art of growth, and how can be broken down into metrics and phases, and user types and segments, and like how that all works together in a model was super valuable. And so I would personally recommend taking reforge classes to all practitioners to get a super, super solid foundation, how to think about growth, because it covers all the basics all the way from like unit economics, to lifecycle stages to activation and onboarding. But they have even deeper pluses out to specialized courses around product marketing, brand strategy, and advanced growth strategy as well.

Philippe Gamache  45:46  
Yeah, they even rolled out a Mar tech one. At some point last year, too. Yeah. So it's pumped to see the cool, very cool.

Jon Taylor  45:54  
It's been it's been such a pleasure to talk to you Josh. Like it's for me myself. It's been selfishly a very fun interview to have I feel like a masterclass myself. But one question we ask all of our guests at the end of the show is around happiness and success. You're a growth marketing lead expert in residence, cat dad, camping fanatic. One question that we asked everybody is, how do you remain happy and successful in your career? How do you find balance between all the things you're working on while staying happy?

Josh Kim  46:24  
Yeah, for sure, love this question. I'm always reminded of like, a piece of advice that I heard early on in my career Early on, is that, you know, your career is a marathon, it's not a sprint. And I think especially in the earlier years, it's very easy to feel like I need to do as much as humanly possible to get ahead, and to feel like I'm achieving success. And then what I found is that there's a stage in which you're like, I've worked my ass off, I am doing as much as I can. Wow, this is a long road ahead. So I think early treating it in that way has helped me at least mentally frame it as like, yeah, it's gonna be a marathon and you got to really just enjoy the journey as it goes. And that brings me a lot of internal peace. And then I think also just seeking out the things within my role or scope that bring you the most energy so and so for example, a couple of things right now for me our growth and development of my team. I'm in really taking a driver's seat in that pairing with them on that and to cracking really tough growth problems Ross strategy, like how do we make this work? Like what are the really key questions we need to ask and how do we apply first principles to it? Those are really the areas that are really doubling down on and finding the most

Philippe Gamache  47:56  
awesome answer. This is such a fun interview really appreciate your your time obviously will link out to notion and John and I were just getting like we need to do just a deep dive episode on how we use notion John's like consultant I use it day in and day out for for the podcast, but also for for my startups so huge fans of the brand and really appreciate your time coming on the show, man. Thanks a lot.

Josh Kim  48:22  
Yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me. So you guys

Philippe Gamache  48:34  
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