How Laura Borghesi Helped MongoDB Go From 0 to 100 Growth Experiments
When Laura joined MongoDB as the Senior Director of Growth Marketing, she helped create an experimentation mindset throughout the company. She accomplished this by empowering various teams through methods she learned over her extensive experience in growth. Today, Laura strives to use this experience to develop the growth function at Gympass as the VP of Growth.
Prior to joining Gympass, Laura worked in growth marketing across various companies. Her first role in growth was at Google where she helped achieve a double-digit million dollars in pipeline growth. She also collaborated with Capital G, Alphabet’s independent growth fund, as an advisor where she helped develop growth strategies for various portfolio companies. Following Google, she led growth marketing at Stripe and MongoDB. Today, Laura serves as an advisor at OpenView and VP of Growth at Gympass.
Laura joined the Xoogler.co community for an exciting fireside chat where she discussed how she approaches growth, how to start a growth function at a startup, best practices, and experiences throughout her career. The chat was moderated by Veronique Lafarque, VP of Marketing at Strivr.
Fireside Chat with Laura Borghesi
From Italy to New York, you’ve demonstrated an appetite for new challenges and international travels. Can you tell us about yourself and what drives you?
I was born in Tuscany, Italy and I started my career there as a social media manager. That was back when we had very few tools and companies like Instagram did not exist yet, so it was before social media became a primary marketing strategy. Then I moved on to join Google which was one of the best experiences I’ve had both professionally and personally.
What drives me are new challenges, chances to stretch my thinking, and opportunities to learn. I never like the feeling of knowing something already. It’s probably why I enjoy doing growth! I also love to get to know people from different backgrounds and upbringings — whether it is different colleagues or the different users that we serve.
Now let’s zoom in on your professional experience in growth marketing at Google, Stripe, MongoDB, and now Gympass. Can you start by sharing your definition of growth marketing?
I always say if you ask 10 people what their definition of growth marketing is, you will get 10 different answers. The most common understanding of growth marketing is that it’s an evolution or broader take on performance marketing or online advertising. In my opinion, that is extremely narrow. Growth marketing goes beyond that. It takes the full user life cycle into consideration.
I view growth marketing as a data-driven scale and set of initiatives that connect potential users to your product.
The most successful growth teams build their optimizations on the foundation of data. And since the ultimate growth metric is revenue and lifetime value, creating a set of initiatives that drive a significant increase to these metrics is vital.
You joined Gympass only a few months ago, so you are probably still in “building” mode. Can you tell us about your experience at MongoDB?
It was exciting! A big piece of growth is experimentation, and at MongoDB, we went from 0 to 100 experiments in a year. These experiments ranged from simple changes on the website to new flows for signups and monetization.
Our experiment team started with one person and remained under ten people. Instead of hiring, we created a culture that educated other teams across marketing, product, data science, and so on to apply the same experimental thinking. So the experimentation team was not just running experiments, they were educating and enabling other teams. That is how we got to 100 experiments. This is especially important for startups with constrained resources.
How did you empower people to launch experiments?
We educated the importance of experimentation, built common processes, and made sure people were excited about running the experiments. We created a mindset around creating better results through adjustments in the product. And these adjustments were driven by hypotheses formed from insights in the data. It was also key to build processes that allowed people to effectively design tests and communicate results. To ensure people were excited, the team created a process to collect ideas and we even created a betting system around the experiments. People bet on what they thought the winner was going to be. That created excitement on top of the business impact.
How do you prioritize experiments?
To determine which experiments to pursue, we score experiments on potential impact, feasibility (how hard would it be to implement it), and internal love. Potential impact and feasibility go hand in hand because we want to avoid experiments that have minimal impact and take lots of time to put together. Internal love is how much people love the idea. That is how we make the “gut” feeling more objective. There are some ideas that come off the gut that are surprisingly big winners.
How can startups start a growth function?
Startups are always wondering who they need to hire. I always say start with the people you have. If you have a marketer or PM with a fundamental interest in growth, they can be great for starting a growth function. Start with one person which can dedicate a little time learning about growth, then bring the function to life with other colleagues who are willing to help build it. That’s a strong starting point.
If you do have headcounts, I would start with a product manager or an experimentation manager who can be tasked with finding all the possible KPIs that ultimately will generate more revenue or higher lifetime value to your users. The first task for any experimentation manager should be to find where you can get the highest ROI as quickly as possible.
Can you tell us about product-led growth?
Product-led growth is a go-to-market motion where the product serves as the main driver for acquisition, expansion, retention, and monetization.
The product is created with growth in mind, so it becomes the ultimate marketing channel. The beauty of it is when one person uses the product, it prompts others to use it as well. For instance, Zoom is centered around product-led growth because if one person hosts an event on Zoom, it “forces” all of the attendees to use the product.
How do you go about using data very early on to build a product?
You don’t need thousands of data points to gain insights. Even though more data points give you more statistical significance, you can still pick up on patterns from information from a small number of users.
What are some of your biggest growth pitfalls and learning experiences?
One pitfall stemmed from not being intentional enough while selecting experiments. When my team strived for velocity and ran lots of experiments, we began running experiments without taking failure into consideration. As a result, we were not as prepared for unexpected results. To improve, we needed to understand how much money or users we could lose if we pursued each experiment. But it’s also important to keep in mind that failures are often stepping stones to learning more about the users.
Another pitfall I had was from focusing on too many long-term projects like SEO that took a long time to see results. It is important to find a balance between long-term projects with strong impact and short-term projects with more immediate, incremental impact.
What is your experience working with a branding team?
It is important that the growth and branding team have a good balance. The branding team often comes to the table with big, bold ideas. On the other hand, growth generally involves incremental, compound effects. At Gympass, we create a balance through a shared calendar that schedules both bold branding ideas and smaller growth experiments. In addition to balancing ideas, branding and growth can work together and support each other very well. When branding is the main driver, growth supports them with more analytical thinking. When growth is the driver, branding puts the creative spin on things.
—
Resources to learn more about growth:
- Reforge provides a comprehensive overview of the systems and frameworks that form the foundation of successful growth.
- GrowthTLDR is a great podcast that breaks down complex concepts into manageable, actionable insights.
If you found this article insightful, subscribe to read more recaps of Xoogler.co events! Learn about future Xoogler events through our monthly Xoogler Newsletter and Linkedin. Be sure to check out the recap of our Fireside Chat with Carol Carpenter, CMO of VMware:
