Building high-performing teams | Melissa Tan (Webflow, Dropbox, Canva)

**Melissa Tan** (0:00)
My aha moment of the value of first principles thinking was when I was at Dropbox. We would hire a ton of really smart people that had never done sales and had them do sales. There are a lot of disadvantages to that, but I do think it led to a ton of innovation. That's how we got our very innovative go-to-market motions, because a lot of those people then moved into different functions at the company. They had all this context on who the user was. They had talked to so many different users at that point. If you take people that are just super smart, they've never done it before, one advantage of that is they can innovate, because they also, I think they come in with, I don't know anything, let me just figure this out.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:38)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast, where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products. Today, my guest is Melissa Tan. Melissa was the longtime head of growth for Dropbox's B2B business. She was also their first growth product manager. Then she went on to do full-time advising for companies like Canva, Grammarly, Miro, and Roe, helping them with their growth strategy and helping them build their growth teams. For the past two and a half years, she's been leading growth at Webflow. But hot off the presses, as Melissa shares at the top of this podcast, she's going back to full-time advising life. So if you're looking for help with go-to-market plans, growth strategy, building a growth team, lining your sales, marketing, and growth efforts, she's about to become available, so definitely reach out. In our conversation, we get deep into what it takes to build a high-performing team and also how to build a high-performing growth team specifically. Melissa shares advice for becoming a leader that people will follow from company to company, how to best develop your people to become the best versions of themselves. She talks about the most common ingredients of a high-performing team and what she's learned from working with companies like Canva, Grammarly, Miro, Ro, Webflow, and Dropbox. We also get into how to interview product managers and she shares her actual interview process, plus who your first growth hire should probably be, the most common mistakes people make when they first start to invest in growth, and a real talk story of what Dropbox did right and what they did wrong in their shift to B2B. There are so many golden nuggets of lessons in this episode and I'm excited to bring it to you. With that, I bring you Melissa Tan after a short word from our sponsors.
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Melissa, welcome to the podcast.

**Melissa Tan** (4:14)
Thanks Lenny, it's great to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:16)
I'm excited to have you on.