Go big or go home

Lessons learned from my time at Remind.

“Go big or go home” was the ethos of the Facebook growth team in its early days.

Be bold.
Solve high stakes problems.
Learn faster.

After seven years of spreading Facebook around the world, these beliefs were in my bones. They led me to Remind in 2014, and guide me now as I move on from the company to explore what’s next. More importantly, stepping away from Remind has made me realize how these beliefs have shaped my contributions as a leader and marketer. Here’s what I learned.

Going big.

At 5 million teachers, students, and parents, Remind was still a one-way mass texting start up when I joined three years ago. Folks were scrambling to prepare for back-to-school when the founders brought me on to help them turn Remind into one of the biggest, most impactful brands in US education.

In a short time, we were able to do just that:

• 23 million monthly active educators, students, and parents
• 1.5 million teachers connecting classrooms in 70% of US schools
• 40,000+ Remind Connected Educators
• And a growing body of research that points to how much teachers, students, and parents can achieve with fast, accessible, and effective communication

These are staggering achievements when you think about the size and complexity of the US education system. But there’s more than A/B tests behind these numbers. For me, “Going big” at Remind meant shaping the culture of an organization to drive results.

Some lessons.

Lesson 1: Growth as a starting point, not the end game.

Remind had a strong viral engine but it occurred mostly offline. The product spread in school hallways and via printed handouts a few months out of the year. Moreover, we had to navigate school data policies and increase student engagement if the product was going to move beyond early adopters. Growing Remind was less obvious than growing Facebook. We invested in typical near term tactics (invites, notifications, paid campaigns), but also took bets on risky programs that needed time to prove out and scale (community, local operations).

Our team pushed beyond the quarterly growth OKR by balancing short and long-term decisions. We established community as the most effective driver of both growth and sentiment. We strengthened Remind’s reputation for safety in a complicated industry. We developed and tuned our enterprise business model (and closed Remind’s first school and district sales). My experience proved that a passionate and versatile team could do more than promote features, execute growth tactics, or service customers. At Remind, marketing and user success pushed the company to think and plan ahead.

Lesson 2: Values work when they are painful.

The most important work our team took on was to articulate and defend Remind’s purpose and core beliefs. The company was always focused on becoming an essential communication platform for schools, but in 2014, we lacked a point of view for how to get there from mass texting. Product and leadership changes also meant that certain values were in constant re-evaluation. For example, Remind’s core value of ‘teacher-obsession’ was tested all the time as we built more features for students, parents, and school administrators.

A vision statement explains why your company matters, but values define how you get there. Remind’s most important values were the ones that were painful to maintain. We realized that the controversy around ‘teacher-obsession’ was what actually advanced the company towards its vision. Our role was to ensure these debates were happening all the time and at every level. As a result, we influenced everything from who we hired and promoted, to how we launched products, to how we approached revenue, to how we communicated big company changes. Aligning Remind around a new vision and shared beliefs was important, but using data, market insights, and user empathy to defend these beliefs every day drove our team’s impact.

Lesson 3: Growth does not equal trust.

Remind had several “successful” growth campaigns and product changes that also led to a corresponding spike in support tickets, low app store reviews, or decline in sentiment. Our mistake was to correlate adoption with trust. For teachers, using Remind to connect with students and parents was a really big deal. They put their personal reputations on the line with each invite or message, and they expected more from us. While PMs were expected to test limits of the product, marketing’s role was to promote a higher standard of work. So we pushed to find measures that kept us all accountable for the quality of the user experience, in addition to topline metrics. Launching a new feature like chat, for instance, meant we had to agree on what success really needed to look like — driving message replies (conversations) or message sends (conversation attempts). The dialogue between teams was invaluable.

As a marketing and user success team, we viewed every project as a reputation-building interaction, from how we chose to grow and nurture our community, to how we managed our terms and policies, to the launch of our first brand campaign. Personally, I think Remind’s biggest wins were the moments we pushed ourselves to raise the bar — when hitting stretch goals were just as important as how we hit them.

Home.

I’m grateful to Remind for three fulfilling years. I’ve grown as a leader, marketer, friend, and more recently, as a working mom. As for what’s next, I’ve decided to rest and recharge for a few months. Nap time with my toddler feels pretty high stakes right now, and I’m learning a lot.