Mastering onboarding | Lauryn Isford (Head of Growth at Airtable)

**Lauryn Isford** (0:20)
Let's go ahead and start with Lenny's Podcast.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:34)
Lauryn was most recently head of growth at Airtable. Before that, she was a product growth lead at Facebook, working on user growth, internet.org, and growth of Facebook in India. Before that, interestingly, she led growth for Blue Bottle's e-commerce business. In our conversation, we dive deep into Lauryn's favorite topic, onboarding. Why it's one of the biggest and most undervalued growth levers, what she's learned about optimizing onboarding flows through her work redoing Airtable's onboarding flow, what she's seen work and common pitfalls around onboarding, plus a ton of advice around figuring out your activation metric. I could talk all day with Lauryn about growth, but we had to cut this off to keep this to a reasonable length. Enjoy my conversation with Lauryn Isford after a short word from our wonderful sponsors.
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Lauryn, welcome to the podcast.

**Lauryn Isford** (3:28)
Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:31)
We've chatted a bunch over slacks, like all these different slacks we're in, and Twitter and emails, but we've never actually chatted real-time, and so I have a million questions that I want to ask you. So thank you again for being here.

**Lauryn Isford** (3:42)
We have never chatted real-time, so everybody's getting the first conversation, and I'm really looking forward to it.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (3:48)
I know that you have this pretty spicy contrarian take on experimentation, and that I think you believe people run experiments too often, and maybe not everything should be an experiment. Can you talk about that?

**Lauryn Isford** (4:00)
Yes. So experimentation is a really big part. Growth culture, growth hacking culture, PLG culture, growth marketing culture, any kind of growth, at least in my sphere. And sometimes teams can be really, really dependent on experimentation when trying to grow a business.
A great example of this would be consumer growth at scale. Think your classic big social company. I worked at one of them. I am a former employee of Metta back when it was called Facebook.
And when you're at scale trying to grow a social app, experimenting can feel second nature, can feel like a necessary step in your product development process that you want to drive more signups or you want to drive better activation with new customers. So you change some buttons, change the design and A, B test it, and then see if numbers go up or down and then make your ship decision based on that.