When product and marketing are more aligned in an organization, there can be some amazing outcomes, including when CMOs and Chief Product Officers are more in line. It also helps when CMOs are able to establish and maintain trust both within the C-Suite as well as across the organization.
Today we’re going to explore both of these and more and look at strategic leadership and growth tactics with Tifenn Dano Kwan, Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude, a leading digital analytics company.
About Tifenn Dano Kwan
Tifenn’s mission is to shape the future of work through superior digital experiences, great teams, and technology that customers love. At Amplitude, she leads its global marketing strategy and team as its Chief Marketing Officer. Prior to joining Amplitude, Tifenn was the CMO at Collibra, Dropbox, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass. Tifenn holds a Master’s of Law from L’ICES, l’Institut Catholique de Vendée and a Master’s of Management from Audencia Business School. She is a graduate of the Kellogg Executive Education CMO Program.
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited.
Greg Kihlstrom:
When product and marketing are more aligned in an organization, there can be some amazing outcomes, including when CMOs and chief product officers are more in line. It also helps when CMOs are able to establish and maintain trust both within the C-suite as well as across the organization. Today, we’re going to explore both of these and more and look at strategic leadership and growth tactics with Tifenn Dano Kwan, Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude, a leading digital analytics company. Tiffen, welcome to the show.
Tiffen Dano Kwan: I’m very glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in here, why don’t you share a little bit about your journey to becoming CMO at Amplitude?
Tiffen Dano Kwan: You know, it all started in my home country, which is France. I come from a small town in Brittany on the West Coast. And I actually started my journey in the tech world. in Paris at the end of 99. And my first company was MicroStrategy, which still exists to this day. So I’ve always spent my career in the tech industry. I started in business intelligence, so worked with MicroStrategy, Cognos, business objects, so very leading brands at the time in the BI world. When business objects was acquired by SAP, I was in Australia at that time, and they moved me to Singapore. So I started really an international journey and really enjoyed it. Very much so. Even though my secret, not so secret goal was to move to America, which happened in 2011 when the SAP mothership asked me to come and help them in North America, and I started there and had various roles until SAP Ariba, which was an acquired brand, asked me to lead their go-to-market efforts, and that was in 2016. This literally changed my life because a couple of months later, they offered me my first CMO role as a CMO of SAP Ariba. I stayed there for another couple of quarters, and then I moved to Dropbox in 2019. It was a great experience. First exposure to the true power of product-led growth, and I’m sure we’re going to talk about this today. And after that, I decided to move to the pre-IPO world with Colibra. I stayed there for a couple of years, and then I have been at Amplitude since October 2022. So it’s going to be almost two years and a couple of days. And I’m just delighted with that journey. That has been an incredible marketing journey for the past 20 or so years.
Greg Kihlstrom: All right, so now I want to dive in here and talk about a few things with you. The first thing that I want to talk about is what we’re calling the next C-suite power couple. And this is chief product officers and chief marketing officers, and just how this collaboration can really enhance business strategy and execution. So Tifenn, you’ve spoken about the importance of this partnership. How do you see their roles evolving to foster a more integrated approach at companies?
Tiffen Dano Kwan: Yeah, absolutely. So first, before we talk about the how, I would love to spend maybe one or two minutes on the why. Why is it that we’re starting to see that convergence happen between product and marketing? And how new is this? I will tell you this, for the longest time, the marketing leaders and teams were asked to significantly spend time, efforts, budgets on acquisition. And to this day, most of marketing teams and budgets are very much focused on acquisition. I don’t see that change much. However, what I see happen more and more is marketers being asked to really handle the entire customer engagement journey. When you think about a customer engagement journey, of course, it starts with acquisition, you need to acquire them, you need to capture them. But very quickly, a lot of those customers are going to start interacting with your product. What I mean by product is that most likely your offerings, your services, your products are online. So they’re going to go either to your app, to your e-commerce site. They’re going to leave somewhere online in a digital platform. And marketers are asked to engage with that experience more and more. And that engagement means that marketers have to start thinking about the way they are driving renewals and loyalty and engagement online. So it’s a very different engine and motion than the typical acquisition of customers. You really need to work there. And then inevitably, as you do so, Those surfaces are typically shared with product, especially if you have a logged in experience for your customers. That’s where the convergence happens is when product teams are in charge of a logged in experience and marketers are sending those people to that logged in experience or trying to send reminders or notifications, push notifications, it’s inevitable that at some point the product teams and the marketers are going to have to interact. And if they don’t, it’s a missed opportunity. So to your point, how do we foster that relationship and that partnership, right? That’s a big one. I would say the three things that I’ve seen most happen when done well is it starts with a conversation and it starts with learning each other’s language. You’ve got to have a common language across product teams and marketers. Remember, marketers are inherently thinking about acquisition first. Product teams think about retention first, usage, engagement, because that’s what they do. They build features into digital surfaces, apps, e-commerce websites, and their job is to make sure that they retain and engage users. in that surface. So first is trying to understand each other’s language and finding a common goal and common objective. That’s what we call a no-star. And it has to start with this. How do product and marketing teams sit down and understand the commonality and the shared objective that they have and ideally find a no-star objective or metric that they can all align. That’s the language we need to establish between the two teams. And then inevitably, if that language happens, it’s going to create a better balance between the acquisition, engagement, monetization, and retention motions. It’s going to force the marketers a little bit outside of their comfort zone. It’s going to have to be. because that’s how you break in when you learn someone else’s language, right? But if the marketer starts to think a little bit more about retention, they start to understand how product teams really work. And if product teams understand why marketers spend so much time trying to capture demand, then they create natural empathy across the two worlds. But the true power, in my view, is then when they use a single platform to share the data and the insights that come out of observing, analyzing how customers engage in and out of those surfaces. Think about it. You go to a website. You’re captured by the website through a form. And then you go and you decide to try a solution. you subscribe and engage to a product, and then you start receiving notifications either in the platform or you receive text or emails. All of this constitutes data. That’s data that if captured into a single platform and analyzed by both teams at the same time, means that you can tailor features, campaigns, thanks to that data, which is how people are actually navigating through the multiple surfaces that you offer to them. That to me is how, to answer your question, how teams can work together. is really understanding them.
Greg Kihlstrom: You touched on this a little bit, but I want to explore this a little bit more. What does this look like at the at the C-suite level? You know, there’s, you know, product and marketing not necessarily known to be adversarial relationships, you know, per se. But to your point, they’re often siloed and they have different incentives and things. You know, what does it look like when it’s done well? And, you know, chief product officers and chief marketing officers are really in that alignment.
Tiffen Dano Kwan: So when it looks well, you actually generate value and revenue. That’s everybody’s wish, right? But it starts with a continuous communication and feedback process, right? You want to make sure that your teams talk to each other on a regular basis, and you have to set them up for success. Right? So the role of a CPO and a CMO is to make sure, number one, that they display true partnership. It matters. So it means that on a regular basis, your CPO and your CMO really have to share the stage. They have to speak together. They have to develop content presentations together. Right? The second is they have to make sure that they have a common framework in understanding how the teams work together on shared goals. So if the teams are launching, for example, a new product, it happens. That’s a typical situation where teams are going to have to collaborate together. You have to have a framework to ensure that the teams have common goals. They have very shared KPIs and objectives. So an OKR type of structure, if you like, and where each team is given very specific objectives, but you have to put them on the same page. So you go back and the CPO is going to go to me and say, Tifenn, what is your team generating on that particular deliverable? And I’ll go back and say, hey, Francois, who is the name of my CPO, this is what I’m doing. And in exchange, how is your team contributing? And you look at the efforts of both teams. So my recommendation is always when you work with a C-level partner is to make sure that you have a visual understanding, a dashboard of sorts of how your teams are actually driving the work and driving results. And it works when you start really compromising on things that are sometimes inevitably going to happen between teams. And when you start giving credit to the teams and sharing success together, that to me is really, really important. So I’m going to give you an example. We very recently had a big launch. It was called Amplitude Made Easy. And our product teams, our growth marketing teams work extremely closely with our product teams. They came up and brainstormed ideas on how to make the launch as effective as possible. It resulted in creating a launch video. The launch video featured our CPO, and the product analytics leader. So that was the first step into demonstrating partnership. It was not marketing, creating a video with marketers. It was marketing, really showcasing the product, embracing the voice of the product team and featuring our CPO and the head of the launch. That was the first one. The second one was really making sure that on a regular basis, literally on a weekly basis, and towards the end, it was almost even more frequent, those teams would really have stand-up meetings, joint meetings, integrated planning meetings to ensure that all of the elements of the launch would be put together across product teams, engineering teams, web teams, product marketing teams, communications teams. That to me is a true power of that convergence, right? And again, you have to have very specific goals. For us, our main goal was the amount of signups that we would get from this launch. It was very clear. So it’s a product, right? It’s a product signup. And we helped. We helped through multiple channels. And it was an incredible display of partnership. So you want to make sure that you do this hand in hand together. You send a signal of partnership. You compromise when there are some inevitable conflicts that may arise in others. You find a way to really think about a bigger picture. And that’s usually your North Star objective. And more importantly, you celebrate success. You celebrate together.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Well, and so, you know, this brings me to the next topic I wanted to briefly touch on here, which is to accomplish this, you know, to build that strong relationship with the chief product officer, as well as the rest of the C-suite, it takes building trust, right? And, you know, I think within the C-suite, the role of CMO as any other role has evolved over the years. And certainly, marketing is looked at in a specific way and as opposed to other roles. And there’s a continual evolution here in the role. And certainly, marketing plays such a key role in the growth of the organization that building this trust is key. What strategies have you found effective in you know, balancing what can sometimes be maybe a short-term execution expectation with really delivering on the long-term strategic impact that a CMO, you know, a great CMO can really deliver.
Tiffen Dano Kwan: The one thing that we’ve seen work, and it’s not just for me actually, but it’s in general between product and go-to-market organizations, is you need to be super, super clear about the rules and responsibilities. Whenever there is friction or conflict, it’s because people are confused about the scope and the boundaries of their role. that I will tell you 99% out of the time, my phone rings and I see escalations for that very reason. So you have to reinforce the role, the responsibilities, but more importantly, you have to respect the boundaries. That is actually really hard because you have different personalities when you work with people who are just extremely responsible and they feel like if something doesn’t go well, they have to push and they have to take charge. And that’s where I see sometimes conflict. Why would you take charge if it’s not your responsibility in the first place? You can call it out, you can express concern, but you shouldn’t just take over because you can. It’s not your place. So what I keep doing over and over, and I have a great partner in Francois or CPO to do it, is to just reinforce the accountability, reinforce the scope and the rules and responsibilities. So that’s number one. Then as you reinforce the rules and responsibilities, you have to reinforce the accountability. That’s why you have to put everything on paper. I know it sounds basic, but that, in my view, how you can most effectively measure success or measure challenges and failure, right, is being very, very clear about the goals, very, very clear about the responsibilities, the scope, the boundaries of it, reinforce it all the time, and just make sure that the teams are super clear about their accountability. And when you do this, it becomes easier. Why? Because you don’t lead through emotion, you lead through data. I go and I said, the teams are saying, okay, we have some conflicts here or friction and we don’t understand. And I say, show me the data. What’s going on? What is happening? And that becomes the greatest unifier in my view. But if you don’t set it up where you have very clear objectives, very clear results, very clear metrics, then almost all the time you can start seeing friction. So that to me is the critical point in any relationship. And you’ve got to spend a lot of time doing this and not leaving the room until you have an agreement on what your no-star or what your key metrics are, who’s in charge, who’s going to make the decisions when there’s friction and when there’s ambiguity, and who’s going to be held accountable for it.
Greg Kihlstrom: The last topic that I wanted to talk about and spend a little time here is product-led growth and just how to maximize this, how to look at this in the most strategic way possible. And you’ve said that product-led growth is key to enhancing customer lifetime value. I certainly agree with that. How do you look at embracing product-led growth at amplitude and what impact has it had on retention and profitability?
Tiffen Dano Kwan: That’s a great question. We’ve had such an incredible journey with our product-led growth motion. So first of all, we are big fans of product-led growth because this is what Amplitude offers to companies. But we drink our own champagne and we are using product-led growth ourselves. We launched actually our paid offering in October last year. and we’ve seen incredible results and growth. We are very maniacal about measuring and tracking and forecasting, obviously, everything that’s coming out of this. But the fundamental idea or vision was number one, making making Amplitude more accessible. We wanted to make sure that every company would have a chance to try and buy Amplitude at lesser cost. I think that’s very important to put this in perspective. We are today able to offer Amplitude and our platform to very large enterprises, and we do this very well. But every company, founder, startup should be able to understand and use analytics. We fundamentally believe that modern companies or even the more traditional companies will change their business model and embrace analytics and digital products moving forward. So we want to make sure that every company very small, small or large, as an ability to really embrace digital analytics. That is our philosophy, because we want them to build better products, better experiences, and we know that they’re going to need analytics for it. So we created this. And what we’re starting to see is what we call the staircase effect of product-led growth. You have a company that starts with a free plan, has really some good experience there. And then as they engage with us, they start upgrading and they start going into either a plus offering or a growth offering. They start engaging with our sales team and they start to expand and get more comfortable with our platform. But as they do this, they are also growing themselves as a company. They’re expanding and we are here to be on that journey with them. And eventually, those small companies will become bigger companies and hopefully will become enterprises. That is the actual purpose of product-led growth is to accompany a customer in their journey. We just happen to apply that product-led growth to analytics, but many companies, other companies can do this as well is meeting the customers where they are on their own journey, on their own ability to pay for a service like Amplitude or another, and meeting them where they are and supporting their growth by having a flexible pricing model. And that’s what product-led growth gives you and gives any company in the world, is you have this ability. And it’s also self-service. So the customers can do it on their own time, And everybody wins. It’s more profitable for us as vendors, and it’s more flexible for our customers. And that’s really, in my view, the true power and the true value of product-led growth.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, and I think one of the key components of that type of visibility on data and the access to the data is that it allows teams to be able to innovate and to experiment. And that also takes the right kind of leadership that encourages that, right? Because it’s one thing to say you want to be innovative and yet it’s another to actually do that and support that in practice. How do you look at that? As a marketing leader, how do you look at encouraging that kind of innovation and experimentation within your own team?
Tiffen Dano Kwan: So we have made experimentation a lifestyle into our work life at Amplitude. And I would encourage every single company to experiment. You have two types of experimentation. You have what we call feature and product experimentation. You go to product teams, and they want to release a new feature. They want to test, but they’re not so sure. They may not have all of the data. Well, they may. They may use amplitude for it, but they want to test. So they’re going to create an A-B test protocol as they’re thinking and creating that new feature. and they will leverage insights using platforms like Amplitude to see which group of users they want to try the experiment on, right? What’s very powerful is that you let the data tell you what works. I’ll give you a typical example, and that happened to us at Amplitude, and I know it happened to many companies. You have very opinionated leadership teams coming to you and saying, I want a homepage, I want a specific webpage to look this way. I don’t like this color. I don’t like the layout of this. And it happens. You can have very opinionated or very convicted leaders that come your way. Instead of telling them, you know what, we don’t know whether it’s going to work. It doesn’t feel like it’s the right decision. You don’t want to burn bridges. What you say to them is that, let me run an A-B test on it. Let’s create a grouping, like 50% on your proposed approach and 50% on another iteration of it. And let’s see which one works best. So you let the data and the performance of the surface tell you what works best. And I’ve seen this work 100% of the time. You go back and you say, we’ve run the test, and this rendering led to X amount of clicks for raw conversions, and this rendering actually didn’t work. And that is the best way to make decisions. And that to me is the power of experimentation. So you can do it also with obviously web experiments. And in my view, that justifies the iteration of teams. It gives them a safe space to iterate and knowing that failure is possible and failure is healthy. So it gives them this ability to do it really well. And I love this and I do think it’s going to become a lifestyle for any working team who is embracing it. Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I love that you mentioned that, you know, just that idea of embracing failure, because I think that’s the That’s one of the things that kind of scares teams off in some companies where, again, there’s this expectation to innovate, and yet not every experiment is going to go 100% perfectly for anyone who’s ever done an experiment. So it’s one thing to say that it’s okay to experiment, but if you’re not able to accept an experiment that isn’t 100% successful, then you know, to your point, you’re not really embracing innovation and experimentation. So I love that you include that as part of your leadership as well. Well, Tifenn, it’s been great talking with you. Thanks so much for joining. I’ve got one last question before we wrap up here. And thanks for all your great ideas and insights. One last question, though. What do you do to stay agile in your role? And how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Tiffen Dano Kwan: It’s a great point. I think, first of all, you have to find a place where you thrive. You have to know where you think you can add the most value, and it takes practice and repetition and certainly some failures. So to me, this is what I’ve found, is that there’s going to be maybe a size of company, a type of company, a type of culture that’s going to work best for you, right? And that to me, is something that I have experienced, experimented with. You have to always give yourself an ability to grow and learn, of course, and stretch yourself. Embrace being uncomfortable, because when you’re uncomfortable, this is when you grow. But you still have to find a formula that works for you, that makes you happy. At the end of the day, I really fundamentally believe that the people who are thriving are the people who will find that great line between happiness and challenge, right? You’re happy, you’re thriving, you have your formula, you know what works, but then you start stretching those boundaries with more confidence and a sense of safety because you know who you are. you know what you’re capable of and you allow yourself some levels of vulnerability and challenges, but that’s okay because you know fundamentally who you are and your boss, your team knows also who you are. They are comfortable with a level of experimentation and failure on your part. That to me is a bit of that secret of agility, but it takes time and it takes practice.
