How to sell your ideas and rise within your company | Casey Winters, Eventbrite

**Casey Winters** (0:00)
The goal of your Kindle strategies, these like non-scalable hacks, they only exist to unlock the fire strategies, to unlock the things that could take you to millions of users.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:12)
Pinterest, Airbnb, Reddit, Canva, HipCamp, Thumbtack, Fair, Tinder, Eventbrite. What do these companies have in common? Casey Winters. Casey has worked with and advised more consumer companies on their product and growth strategy than anyone in the world. He's also very generous with his time and often sets time aside to help founders and product leaders.
I always learned so much talking to Casey and I'm excited for you to hear this episode. In our chat, we covered Casey's advice on making trade-offs as a product leader, justifying non-sexy product investments, the spectrum of product people and how to level up your skills, new growth trends and tactics that he's seeing, when to focus on growth, and a bunch of advice on growth strategy and so many other things. As a bonus, we're going to be doing a live AMA with Casey in my Newsletter Slack community on August 5th at 10 a.m. Pacific time. So if you'd like to ask Casey any questions, make sure to get there. Until then, enjoy this episode with Casey Winters.
Hey Casey Winters, what do you love about Coda?

**Casey Winters** (1:19)
Coda is a company that's actually near and dear to my heart because I got to work on their launch when I was at Greylock. But in terms of what I love about it, you know I love loops. And Coda has some of the coolest and most useful content loops I've seen. How the loop works is someone can create a Coda and share it publicly for the world. This can be how you create OKRs, run annual planning, build your roadmap, whatever.
Every one of those Codas can then be easily copied and adapted to your organization without knowing who originally wrote it. So they're embedding the sharing of best practices of scaling companies into their core product and growth loops, which is something I'm personally passionate about.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:56)
I actually use Coda myself every day. It's kind of the center of my writing and podcasting operation. I use it for first drafts, organize my content calendar, to plan each podcast episode and so many more things. Coda is giving listeners this podcast $1,000 in free credit off their first statement. Just go to coda.io/lenny. That's coda.io/lenny.
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Casey, welcome to the pod. I feel like every time that we chat, I leave with at least one new perspective that kind of blew my mind on product or growth or even just the world. And so I'm really excited to have this conversation, mostly to selfishly extract as much knowledge out of your head as I can in the hour that we have together. And so with that, welcome. Welcome.

**Casey Winters** (3:50)
Very kind, happy to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:52)
So you've worked at so many iconic companies and worked with so many iconic companies. It almost boggles the mind just looking at your LinkedIn, trying to scroll through LinkedIn and you have to click on see additional experiences. And there's just so many places you've worked, so many companies you've worked with.
Could you just give listeners maybe a 10,000 foot view of your career arc through product and growth?

**Casey Winters** (4:15)
Well, I started my career as an analyst at apartments.com on the marketing side.
So it was my job to measure every channel for effectiveness in driving leads. These are things like SEO, AdWords, affiliate marketing, email. So once I got good at measuring that, I naturally started working on optimizing those channels directly. And then I started going to do user research and understand how the product could be better so that we could convert leads better. And it was at that point that I got the feedback from the company that I was this weird marketing and product hybrid. And they really know what to do with that because those were two totally separate departments.