In this episode of the GrowthTLDR, we talk to Tomas Pueyo, the VP of Growth at Course Hero, a platform that helps students answer their study questions.
Tomas is managing the entire product and growth department that consists of 150 people.
We talk to Tomas about how leaders can best set their teams up for success, how Course Here defines their north star metric, and why Tomas feels team design is an essential part of leadership.
We also get into the work Tomas has done in providing analysis around COVID and how two of his articles have generated more than 60 million views.
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Happy Growing!
Time Stamped Notes:
- At Course Hero, the growth team includes both growth and product; it consists of 150 people
- Course Hero provides students with an easy way to share notes. It also provides students with ways to get unstuck via tutors and connecting them to other students.
- Tomas discusses why it makes sense for product and growth to be the one team at Course Hero
- As a leader, Tomas feels the best way to help teams be successful is to define their success metric and then give them the autonomy and ownership to be successful.
Teams should have the autonomy to prioritize their work. Confidence is the key to prioritization. How confident are you this project will have an impact?
To be confident, teams need to work at understanding the problems they're solving
- At Course Hero, there is no separation between product and growth teams. Instead, dependent on the pod's objective, the pod's leader will either lean more towards growth or product.
- Tomas walks us through how the Course Hero team measure if users are getting value from their product
- The Course Hero team prioritizes user retention, e.g., a user returning to consume more content after X days
- One of the challenges Course Hero faces in improving user retention is how to make the user's first experience more memorable. Most users google a study question, find Course Hero, and get the answer to their question. It's hard to make that experience memorable in a way that would create a lasting connection with the Course Hero brand.
- The number one way Course Hero can make that first experience memorable is to suggest other content that users might find relevant to them.
- Two things to consider as part of your team design is how things are naturally forming and making them official. And then the more traditional top-down approach. Tomas tries to re-org his group only once per year.
- Tomas talks to us about how two pieces he wrote analyzing COVID went viral and got over 60 million views (and counting)
Tomas talks us through why he feels those articles were so successful.
- Tomas on LinkedIn / Twitter / Medium
- Kieran on LinkedIn / Twitter
