Laura Schaffer on Growth at Amplitude, Developer Psychology, and Good Friction

Laura Schaffer on Growth at Amplitude, Developer Psychology, and Good Friction

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Laura Schaffer on Growth at Amplitude, Developer Psychology, and Good Friction

Source: Lenny’s Podcast Speaker: Laura Schaffer Date: ~2022 Link: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

Key ideas

  • Create your own path by generating insight others do not have. Schaffer’s career arc — from operations to growth, Twilio to Amplitude — did not follow a conventional PM ladder. The pattern: she consistently created leverage by becoming the person in the room who knew the customer best. At Twilio, she proposed and ran the first growth team, not because she was invited to, but because she built the case using customer interview data that no one else had collected. Customer insight is currency; those who accumulate it get to define their own scope.
  • Bad friction vs good friction — the developer onboarding paradox. The standard growth reflex is to remove friction. Schaffer complicates this. In a Twilio onboarding experiment, her team tested adding an extra screen asking what the developer was building before they reached the API key. The intuition said fewer steps = higher conversion. The result: +5 percentage points. The mechanism: asking the right question at the right moment made users feel the product understood their context. Good friction signals competence; it tells the user they are in capable hands. The distinction is whether friction creates relevant value for the user or merely adds steps.
  • Developer psychology: aversion to sales and elevated accountability. Developers — especially those responsible for the technical stack — have a different relationship with product decisions than, say, a marketing buyer. They distrust sales processes because they see them as adversarial. They feel accountable for the consequences of their tooling choices in a way that a non-technical buyer does not. This means developer-oriented PLG must do the opposite of traditional sales motion: show, do not tell; let the product speak before a human appears; give free access to the real product, not a demo version.
  • 80% of experiments failing is a sign of health, not failure. At Amplitude, Schaffer ran growth experiments where the baseline expectation was an 80% fail rate. Most people treat experiment failure as embarrassing and avoid it. Her view: if your experiments are not failing most of the time, you are testing ideas that are too obvious. The fail rate is a proxy for how aggressively you are exploring the edge of your knowledge. The best teams build a statistical culture around this — not just tracking wins but tracking learning, including what the failed experiments rule out.
  • The “phone number pilling the hotdog” story and user psyche. A famous Twilio onboarding insight: when developers arrived to get a phone number (the core product action), they had to pick an area code. Users kept choosing area codes near them — even though Twilio numbers are fully virtual and location is irrelevant. The team learned they were fighting a user mental model: people mapped virtual numbers onto physical concepts they already understood. Designing for user psyche means designing for how users think the product works, not how it actually works.

Overview

Laura Schaffer joined Amplitude as Head of Growth shortly before this recording (described as “day 2.5”). She previously built Twilio’s growth team from scratch and worked in growth and product roles at several PLG companies. The episode covers: how she proposed and built Twilio’s first growth team, bad vs good friction in developer onboarding, the Twilio phone number experiment, developer psychology in PLG, running experiments at a high fail rate, and the early signals that Amplitude was investing in product-led growth. She is one of the more technically rigorous guests on the PLG subject.