Sara Schmidt

I sat down with Reforge to talk about Sprig on Sprig 🌱 Check out some examples of how I use our product to make impact strategic & product decisions! In-app survey for product experience research: https://lnkd.in/g32rWs4s Process (and FigJam) used to audit a core user journey: https://lnkd.in/gqNQHHxq In-app survey to recruit beta testers: https://lnkd.in/ghmnzhA9

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Silas Mähner 🔍🌎 🔍🌎 and the team on CleanTechies have spoken to a lot of carbon accounting platforms. Here are the main reasons they think Gravity is different: - We offer something to every key stakeholder: Execs love the ROI focus, Procurement Love the Marketplace, ESG teams get their wishes - Our product is super simple and easy to use: We've focused on genuinely serving customers. Many companies would have to hire a Proper ESG Team before adopting GHG software, Gravity makes it easy to upskill and empower anyone to manage the carbon measurement process. - Focus on Return-On-Investment: Investing in decarbonization presents a unique opportunity to reduce business risk and drive savings. We firmly believe that if a customer spends $1 on our platform, it needs to return $5 in energy savings. - More than just a GHG Accounting platform: We firmly see a need to go beyond carbon accounting. That's why we're building out a marketplace of providers to help customers reduce their energy costs – at a discount.

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Exciting insights from Amplitude's Women in Product Discussion by Shadi Rostami, Senior/Executive VP of Engineering, and Jenny Chang, Head of Product Design! Today's discussion on "How Product Leaders Must Evolve to Put the Customer First in the Age of AI" shed light on the transformative power of AI and data in enhancing customer experiences. The potential of AI and data to transform the customer experience is immense, but it all hinges on trustworthy data. In an era where data reigns supreme, ensuring its reliability and quality is paramount. Effective data governance practices are not just essential; they're the bedrock upon which customer trust is built. While Data Governance has not been the most exciting water-cooler talk, it's undeniably one of the most critical factors in today's data-driven landscape. Amplitude's Data Assistant product is paving the way for seamless data governance through intelligent recommendations and automation. Linking the impressive overview of how Data Assist is making data governance effortless and more accessible for teams: https://lnkd.in/eJyMk5jz #24WIP #EvolveExcelPM #EmpowerWIP #WomeninProduct #DataGovernance #GenerativeAI #Amplitude

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Does your team treat its PMs like a "spec generation" service? Check out my latest blog post where I discuss how startups can empower product managers to drive innovation and understand customer needs deeply. Discover actionable steps to transform your product management practices and foster a culture of innovation. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/gmRtan6b Eager to hear your thoughts!

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Two things I’ve seen the best PMs do really well: 1. Creating hype: They get everyone in the organization excited about any initiative and align xfn teams. 2. Open-mindedness: They don’t get too attached to a specific idea. Instead, they take a step back, view things objectively, and obsessively gather feedback from as many people as possible. Kevin Anderson is one such awesome PM who has a genuine curiosity and infectious passion for Experimentation. I had a fireside chat with Kevin last week hosted by Statsig, where we discussed various topics, including the latest trends in experimentation, build vs. buy, reducing friction, measuring success, and so many insightful anecdotes that you can check out here: https://lnkd.in/gRgi4KDd #productmanagement #experimentation #data

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Thanks to Polly M Allen and Rupa Chaturvedi for sharing their insight and experience with the Reforge Generative AI course. A bit late in celebrating the course as I completed this last month, but I have been heads down building product! My takeaways overlap and resonate with my time with Amazon, where Alexa's use of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) AI was grounded on delivering customer value, safety and privacy, and simplicity. 1. Despite what some people tell you, Gen AI still needs good product fundamentals. You may be able to get a quick proof of concept out, which may help you learn quicker (which can be an advantage), but like any other product - it has to deliver real customer value. 10x-ing zero is still zero. 2. Hybrid systems are likely the best balance for speed and cost for your product. Under the hood, most applications do not need purely LLM solutions. Hybrid AI systems that combine NLU systems provide drastic savings on costs and enable areas for injecting control. 3. Pick and choose your providers across the various areas of your implementation. Various models perform in different arenas better still, and continue to evolve - as do services like bubble.io, voiceflow, Lex, etc. Marketing and benchmarks are cheap to propagate (for them) so evaluate and test your PoC with a few before committing (much like traditional products).

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If you have a YC interview coming up - reach out and our team of YC Alumni can help set up some mock interviews

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Delivery-focused. Execution-oriented. Not Strategic. Or (my new favorite internet slur) ZIRPM. In a startup context, getting stuff off the production line IS strategic (despite what the haters say). Here are a few reasons why: Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog: https://lnkd.in/dPDuKYQb

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I am incredibly inspired by and grateful for my teammates at Verse for achieving our first fundraising milestone together: we recently secured $20.5 million in Series A financing led by GV (Google Ventures) 🙌🏾 🎉 with participation from Coatue, CIV, and MCJ Collective. I've been trying to contain my excitement for weeks 😊 as am sure are my colleagues now that we can share the good news. I'd like to give a big shout out to the engineering team - Jessica Greenfield, Kaleb Pace, Shawn Toubeau, Brandon Clayton, Ryan Kladar, Ryan Triolo, Yuzhou Jiang, and Mahdi Kohansal - for the speed and precision of every line of code they've written, and to Seyed H. Madaeni, Ph.D., Matt Penfold, Shehzad Wadalawala, Dane McKay, Alison Mickey, Debi Ryan, and Tanner McAuley for leading and driving us on the business front. We'll be on the look out soon for more folks to join us 😉 As we used to say at my last job: "We haven't won yet." The path to decarbonization will be a multi-decade, if not multi-generational effort. Verse is just one organization in a constellation of thousands developing real solutions to the climate change problem. Until we achieve net zero emissions at a global scale 🌏 🌍 🌎 our mission remains to be done. #software #ai #energy #sustainability #climatechange #startups https://lnkd.in/gG-DEX5x

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The path to 10x work from Andrew Chen: "Open yourself up to serendipity by expanding your world and experiences. Reject core loops and checklists, embrace serendipity." Sounds like the path to 10x Life, Andrew Chen.

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Strategic alignment across product and field is complex and not easy to get right, but it's a pleasure to work alongside Brett Crane, Trevor Jett (Childers), and Jarod Greene. It's wonderful to be in conversation with them, sharing what we have learned, in this webinar: https://lnkd.in/gc-qp7Hk

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Great insights in here on how the 1-2 day commute trend is opening up the talent pool by allowing hires from greater distances. Interesting to see the ripple effects this has on real estate and population density in more rural areas.

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I sat in on a few sessions at the Product Marketing Alliance here in Seattle this week. I enjoyed the discussions about AI (lots of them), positioning, storytelling, GTM. While I took away some useful topical insights, I also came away with a personal insight. I realized that throughout my career, I’ve done much of the work called “product marketing” without consistently calling it that. - Spearheading customer interviews to discover pain points  - Uncovering the customer’s “truth”   - Blending data + intuition to make decisions  - Coming up with a hypothesis and proposing solutions to test/address problems in the customer journey  - Working with the product team before the product is fully built, informing the downstream roadmap  - GTM planning - Conducting competitive analysis  - Championing the user/buyer - Facilitating naming  And I love this stuff (except for the naming if I’m being honest). Why is Product Marketing a more common job description in B2B tech or just big tech vs B2C, e-commerce, CPG and DTC? Thanks to Dani Kellogg 🧪, Caitlin Snaring, Stuart Pitts, Jamie Gier, Sanjay Kidambi and many others for stirring up insightful conversions. 

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Ever wonder how to make users fall in love with your product at first click? 💘 Dive into my latest post, "UX Design and Onboarding Strategies for Explosive Growth," where I spill the beans on creating a user experience so smooth, it’s practically butter. 🧈 #ProductLedGrowth #PLG #UXDesign #UserOnboarding

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🤖 Growth marketing agents 🤖 - they're getting smarter and more capable thanks to next gen tooling and infrastructure Just chatted with Isabelle Hughes and Vishal Khanna from Exa - they're building some awesome embeddings-based search tools. Here's a few of the top use cases I walked away with that are relevant for above-the-API growth marketers and cold emailers 1️⃣ Finding lookalike companies based on embeddings Exa claims to have the smartest lookalike search and deepest indexes of any company doing lookalike modeling I've talked to recently. What they've done differently is build a smarter 'looker-upper' (using more than just raw cosine-similarity), and not just a bigger database of things to look up 2️⃣ Finding recent company news Run API calls through Exa API to find nuanced articles related to your target prospects companies Pricing is a bit expensive if you're a volume maxie cannon loader, but for lower volume enterprise-y type stuff in Clay this might be a great substitute for other data providers 3️⃣ Automated newsletter generation Everyone wants a newsletter but nobody wants to actually read the news. Might actually build a product around this one, but pull in recent news using Exa about any topic, summarize with an LLM, feed it a template, and off you go with your shiny newsletter 4️⃣ Automated technical white paper creation This type of content can be tricky for marketers in technical industries Here's what I'd do: Scope the outline of a 60 page white paper using a best-in-class AI model, and instead of using the out of the box outputs for each step in the outline, loop in an Exa search for the top 10 technical content pieces (using Exa's nuanced embedding-based search) to provide RAG context for each section's prompt. The result should be a technically-informed, super relevant full length white-paper. (Might build that one myself too) Looks cool Exa keep it up

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Chief Product Officers have the shortest tenure of any C-Suite member: 2.5 years. In my recent interviews with Product Leaders, a common theme emerged - navigating a role under a non-technical Founder/CEO can be extremely challenging…but not impossible: CPOs that focused on educating their org about how product works, shared their vision and strategy constantly, and showcased how product metrics tied to clear ROI and customer value had longer tenures and better, more collaborative relationships with the rest of the organization > those who didn’t.

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Business #Leaders and #Managers in my network - check out this session on #AI for Leaders during #SeattleAIWeek: https://lnkd.in/gzyrfeE2! Learn from Trent Gillespie about how you can leverage AI in your business and connect with #startups building solutions for businesses. Followed by networking all at the AWS Skills Center!

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I feel like I’m constantly in conversations around how AI will change org structures. As we scale Seam AI, we are dead set on constructing our team for the future — not the way it’s been done in the past. This means augmenting hiring with powerful intelligent systems. Sales • AI-powered growth: Call data entry, automated personalized outbound, AI data enrichment. Marketing • Automated audience building and campaigns: AI identifies and targets contacts in our ICP, managing multi-channel campaigns. Engineering • Routine debugging: AI handles common coding issues, allowing engineers to focus on complex problems. • PR reviews and code generation: AI assists in pull request reviews and codegen, speeding up dev cycles. Finance • Expense reports and bookkeeping: AI automates our day to day accounting and bookkeeping tasks, ensuring accuracy and saving time. • Contract extraction: AI extracts critical information from contracts, helps with negotiating and compliance. Data • Automated ETL, transformations, and reverse ETL: AI manages data extraction, transformation, and loading processes seamlessly. • No longer need to know SQL: With AI handling complex queries, the need for deep SQL knowledge diminishes, empowering more team members to leverage data effectively. This isn't just about efficiency — it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we build teams. AI lets us run our startup like a mature organization. cc: Coatue

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