Matt Bilotti

About the episode:

"How do you define growth at your company?" This is typically one of the first questions us Growth folks ask each other☝️. The answers can really differ from company to company.

Even within the Growth community, there isn't always widely accepted consensus.

For Matt Bilotti, Growth is a specific process and approach used to solve important problems.

Over the years, Matt has worked in Growth roles with some of the brightest minds in the space, though he still considers himself a Product person first, who likes to approach things from a growth perspective.

In the latest episode of the How I Got Here podcast 🎙️, I had the pleasure of chatting with Matt about his career, his takes on Growth, and what he's learned watching Drift go from $0 in revenue to over 400 employees.

We covered a lot of ground during our conversation:

- Going 0-1 on projects outside his core competency.
- The pressures that come with working in growth and how to manage them.
- The different approaches to growth he observed during his time at HubSpot vs Drift.
- Takeaways from his time working with Brian Balfour & Guillaume Cabane.
- What he'd do differently if he could start over.
- and much more!

About Matt

Matt Bilotti is the Product Lead, Growth & Lifecycle at Drift. Being with Drift for five and a half years, he has watched the company grow from earning $0 to $107M in revenue. He has worked across departments, roles, and functions with his core footing in product-based roles. He wrote a book with David Cancel entitled Burndown: A Better Way To Build Products and he has the Growth Podcast for Drift.

Show Notes

[00:50] About Matt and what he does

[01:59] On being a product person with a growth mindset

[02:23] How he started doing growth roles with Drift

[06:06] His story on the 0 to 1 moments early on

[08:49] On the reality of Drift starting with a not-so-clean data

[11:41] Working with Hubspot and his takeaways

[14:05] The importance of focusing on the value for users and the problem at hand

[16:04] On growth team goals and its pressures

[18:29] How he sees the growth version of Hubspot and Drift’s first version

[21:11] How the team and projects at Drift evolved over time

[23:33] How his role changes over time with growth at Drift

[25:18] How the other angle of growth type work influenced him on what he does

[26:51] What skills he focused on to be successful in his role and achieving plans

[28:35] His learning moments

[30:55] What he could have done differently, working on growth, to bring people on the loop 

[33:18] About his Growth Podcast