#19 The Evolution of Growth and Growth Teams, Patrick Moran, Head of Growth Marketing Robinhood, Reforge EIR, former Netflix, Spotify, Houzz

Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing. We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.

Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I am very happy today because I'm sitting down with Patrick Moran, Talk Growth. Patrick, welcome. Thanks, Ty. Happy to be here. Happy

Thursday. Happy Thursday or Friday junior or Friday light depending on how you wanna phrase it. I'll take it. I'll take either. Do you, do you have any plans for the weekend? Yeah. I don't know I don't know. This this might sound controversial to a lot of college football fans. I'm flying out to Ann Arbor to go watch to go watch Michigan under the cloud of all of this sort of sign stealing sort of situations. But, I don't know. It's not like I bought tickets knowing that this would

happen. So so I'm I'm more in it and I'm excited and, we'll see how it goes. Hey. Like any true fan. Right? You're you're showing your, your support, and, you can't control all the all the maneuverings they do to try to attempt to win, whether it's real or accused. We'll see how this ages. We'll listen to this podcast us from now and go look back. Yeah. Yeah. With thoughts on whether this ended who ends well or not so well for whatever

school. We'll bring back the predictions at the end of the pod. How's that sound? It sounds good. Yeah.

Predictions. Well, I'm I'm super excited to talk to to Patrick today. For the audience out there that doesn't know him, he was part of the Internet marketing team at eBay while I was there. He's gone on to do some really impressive things in growth. He's led performance marketing and growth for brands like Netflix, TiVo, Spotify, House. He's currently at Robinhood. His his

resume and track record is speaks for itself. I also wanna add that Patrick is part of the, just a great growth and product and marketing community called Reforge, one of the best created in my view. I'm a longtime student and participant, and he was also an entrepreneur in resident at Reforge, teaching, counseling, sharing a lot of really great insights and part of the the team that put together the curriculum for, just some really powerful learnings in growth and and marketing and product. So

definitely check that out if you have not. Highly recommend it. And in addition to that, Patrick has his own podcast called Finding Market Fit, which you should also check out. So there's a lot going on. Did I did I miss

anything in there? No. No. I I that that's that's great. I mean, I at this point now, I I hope I deliver some nuggets at intro, but appreciate it. Thank you. It's it's well deserved. So growth marketing, how has it evolved in your view? You've seen so many things change from your Internet marketing days, which feel like ancient history at eBay to, you know, growing teams, to building channels, to to looking at kind of like there's so many things

to talk about. But but how how you think growth marketing has evolved in your view? I mean, it's a great question. I think it actually really mostly started as Internet marketing back in the day when most folks would try to buy display banners and, to to essentially sort of just advertise, their products. Right? And the form that it took was mostly kind of like print magazine. Right? So I'm gonna go go buy placements and I I get to sort of buy against eyeballs Mhmm. And things like that.

And then eventually sort of that that evolved into basically paying on a cost per click basis. Right? So back before I think Google ended up buying this company called Overture, which is called go dot com, where they were charging cost per click on search results. And that, I think, sort of led to or the initiatives led to, okay. Well, now we can actually track, you know, some of these initiatives. Right? As opposed to trying to make, you know, some type of

correlation between an increase in eyeballs to sales. Now it's like, okay. Well, I can now correlate or derive a lot much stronger correlation to clicks and sales. And then I think, obviously, from there,

the technology just got a lot more sophisticated. And then you had things like programmatic display coming along where all of this inventory, right, from display banners, sort of started to enter kind of like a stock exchange, and you had all of these agencies bidding for some of this inventory practically real time.

I think the challenge a a multi device sort of situation on a per user basis. Right? So before, it was just I have a desktop, and then I potentially have a laptop at home. Now it's like I have a desktop, potentially have laptop at home, and then now I have a phone. And so it's like, okay. Well, am I, you know, overlapping? Am I hitting the same person over and over again? And I think that was a challenge with programmatic display. And so until Facebook and Google came along, you know, like,

you know what? We're gonna tie this all to your email address. And I think that's how that's one of the reasons I'm not saying the only reason, but one of the reasons why they became so massive is because they were able to sort of generate all of these properties with, significant levels of traffic and then marry essentially desktop and mobile together. And then so now that's sort of proliferated, and now you have, like, a handful of

different other platforms like TikTok and Snap. And it's certainly gotten a lot more The the the advertising space has gotten a lot more sophisticated, but that's that's the acquisition portion. I mean, there's also the retention portion that I think over the course of the last five or so years has also started to grow when, you had companies like Braze and Iterable and some of these messaging platforms come through the ranks. Because

before then you had a lot of these b to b email only platforms. And so once you started to introduce, like, algorithmic type messaging and things like that, and you're on Instagram and you get a certain message on a certain periods of time, it now ties to sort of retention. So now you kinda see full funnel where it started out, I think, as an acquisition play or an advertising play from, you

know, something like the Procter and Gamble's of the world back in the day to now where it's actually like, okay. Well, it's much more data driven, and things like that. So, hopefully, that's helpful. I mean, there's a lot of information there, but that's Yeah. Absolutely. You kinda touch on the acquisition and retention

areas of of growth, if you will. And maybe it would be interesting to hear how you've viewed those and maybe where retention's an interesting one where I think it didn't get enough airtime until perhaps later than it should have from some marketers. And I'm maybe curious to hear your perspective on retention, how you've approached

it, maybe some of the the folks that seem to be getting it right. Obviously, it's become kind of a a table stakes requirement in growth, but maybe you can elaborate a little bit on retention because I don't think it gets maybe enough airtime on this pod. I don't know if it gets enough airtime for some brands and some individual marketers, but I'm curious

to know what your thoughts are on on it. So I guess if you take a step back, right, and you try to sort of define, the formula for growth, it really is I mean, in at its most simplest form, acquisition plus retention minus churn over periods of time.

Right? So over one period versus another period, and that's your essentially, your net growth. If you look at subscription services, or other software, more SaaS, level companies, maybe you can kind of, like, take a little bit of a different approach for ecommerce. But for a lot of those companies, that's generally speaking, that's the formula. Now, I mean, you could you could certainly make it a lot more sophisticated. You could say, like, MQLs and then SalesLend and then

activation Mhmm. Engagement, then you can break out engagement to various cohorts, and then you can have various churn rates by cohort, etcetera, etcetera. But generally speaking, at the highest level, it's acquisition plus the people who came back minus the people who left, that's growth. And so generally speaking, for the most part, on the acquisition side, just advertising and marketing were just so synonymous synonymous with each other that that's really the world that they played

in. And for the most part, product owner retention. Right? So whatever that meant. Right? Whether it's you're communicating to your users on the platform, you're sending them emails, you're sending them push notifications,

because it's very much part of the product experience. And so as you see, like, the growth of, like, CDPs and MarTech infrastructure, and some of these messaging platforms, it started to take a little bit more of, the feel of, like, paid media sans the dollars, where the way that you would test would be fairly similar, the way that you would assess activity would be fairly similar, and things like that. And so you now had kind of, like, acquisition people expanding into retention

and product retention people expanding into acquisition. Right? And so I think you've seen that now over the course of, you know, sort of the last several years. And it's just a lot of also just new people coming into the space who are not Internet marketers at eBay back in back during our days. Right? I mean, they they didn't see that world. So they're capable of coming into

this world where it's like, okay. Yeah. This makes sense to me. There's no you know, we're not gonna optimize for eyeballs anymore. Right? So I think that's that's how it sort of evolved. And I think then you had programs like Reforge and and other programs that basically have just doubled down on the fact that, look, in order to drive acquisition, you need strong product market fit. And the unit economics

actually define that. Right? So if you look at an LTV CAC situation, you're I mean, if you want to optimize to an ROI of one or at least one, your LTV has to be equal to your CAC, you know, given a certain payback period. And your LTV is a function of retention. Right? It's a function of retention and monetization.

And so from that standpoint, I think that's where you're now seeing kind of, like, people who or marketers who kind of now are much stronger partners with product and much stronger partners with finance who can actually truly see full funnel and how their activity sort of impact growth and monetization much more holistically than when you're just looking at acquisition. Yeah. There's so much good stuff in there, and I think it really outlines how things have

evolved and I think gotten more sophisticated. And in some ways, at a macro level, have gotten, I think, a little less slightly less siloed is the theme I'm picking up. The combination of the partnership between product and finance and and marketing seems to be very powerful one. Maybe that'd be a good topic to kinda delve into. You've had so many great experiences and so many interesting consumer brands. What are some kind of

best practices that you recommend people listening around? If you're a marketer, how do you best partner with product and finance? So there's a couple couple of things that may maybe I'll start with product. Right? I think the challenges or at least, yeah, some of the challenges I've always seen with working with with product is that usually product products lens is optimizing towards user like usage and marketing's lens is optimizing towards a p and l or towards a budget. And those two things

usually come together. But oftentimes, when you drill down into the people who are actually executing, you know, you start to that's where things start to go kinda like awry. Right? And again, when you're the acquisition focus, you're working towards, you know, some level of efficiency. And when you're completely usage focused, you're working towards, okay. Why aren't you bringing me more more

users or more qualified users? Right? And, you know, generally speaking, I mean, obviously, that's a very simplistic sort of perspective, but generally speaking, it kind of has that flavor. But over over the course of time, you know, you've seen now a lot of companies and, actually, mostly started with Facebook, but you've seen a lot of companies now give product and marketing, put them in the same team, and then you have the same KPIs. Right? Just like, okay. Well, we need to grow x

users or monetization by this amount over this period. Go do it. And when you sort of pair teams together, they'll be forced to come up with a solution and understand the trade offs that come with that solution. And so now it's not it's no longer kind of like this. Well, it's no no longer, like, okay, marketing is gonna throw something over the fence. And then product is like, you know, was, like, gonna volleyball it

back. Right? Now it's it's kinda, like, part of, like, the same same group of folks. And and I think I've just found that I've just found that extremely helpful. And I think so that's the first thing. The second thing to get slightly more tactical is that when you have marketing and product in the same team, you're forced to come up with kind of like an objective growth model where it's an accounting of how users are flowing in and out of the product and the

dollars that are associated with that. And once you have a holistic and kind of, like, objective map or model that both teams can work against, then you're now working off the same map. Right? You're not you're not just working off of the product strategy map or the brand strategy or the marketing strategy map. You're working off of the same map. Right? So and Reforged, actually, in the growth series talks a lot about,

like, the growth model. There's the quantitative growth model, which is an accounting of how users flow in and out, and then this qualitative growth model, which is a description of how, you know, your your product growth. And once you have that map, then it's a lot easier to sort of, as a team, you know, kind of point to opportunity areas and areas that that you wanna prioritize. So, I mean, I think I think those are kind of, like, you know, really good

things about product and again Absolutely. Yeah. And again, like, it's just over time, you're now seeing a lot more people coming to the workforce or coming to the space who have a much more, who have a stronger understanding of product and marketing in this way, as opposed to kind of, like, you know, sort of sort of the the other ways. But I'll pause there. Yeah. I think it's, sometimes challenging for folks to

unlearn certain things. And so your notion of, you know, people coming in with a coming in with a fresh perspective or not having to unlearn some of those things and may maybe coming with some basic understanding of how, you know, modern growth teams operate is an interesting one for sure. And then, yeah, happy to dive into finance. Like how yeah. Just to restate, like, how does marketing best work with finance in your in your experience?

I think, having sort of a good understanding of what your dollars can deliver and what it can't deliver is always sort of a good place to start. And, usually, that's predicated off of a couple of things. One is having a clear understanding of what your unit economics are and what you're baking into your CAC and what you're baking into your LTV. Right? So a lot of companies just bake revenue into their LTV, which is fine. I mean, it depends on the stage of the

company, but other companies bake in contribution margin and things like that. Right? And so it's that's important for finance perspective because they care about cash flow. They want to know when their returns are coming. Is it coming in six months? Is it coming in three months? Or is it coming in two years? And then the same thing is is baked in the CAC. And so I think you understand your economics and then payback period is usually a

good starting point. The next one is, okay, well, marginal returns. Right? So I think one of the things maybe that finance typically doesn't necessarily fully appreciate sometimes is that just because you give more budget or less budget that the impact is linear either way. And at some point, there's going to be a curve. Right? So if you give me more budget, I'm going to hit some level of

marginal returns. And if you completely strike some of my budget, that's gonna impact one, operational capabilities. But two, the feedback loop that I send back to Facebook and Google and some of these other publishers is now diminished. So I think just understanding kind of like the impact of increase and decreasing

spend, I think is really important. And then the third thing, which will always sort of be a little bit of a stress point, especially when marketing is optimizing for upper funnel advertising and making investments in sort of brand development, is just, okay, well, how are we going to derive the effectiveness of our of our initiatives? Right? And I can speak all day about the effectiveness of advertising. Right? You know, where you can use whatever, and then and AB testing or whatever.

But then there's other stuff that, you know, marketing will wanna invest in to to sort of double down on the brand. And I think those things, you would have to take much more of a business and strategic approach. And I think that alignment is pretty critical at the highest level in order for budget to trickle down, effectively and for the teams to sort of understand what what's going on. But generally speaking, I think that's, you know, those two teams, I think,

have been really important product and finance. I mean, I have not been in b two b. I'm sure sales is equally just as important in in b two b, but for me, it's it's it's always been product. That's super interesting. And maybe maybe switching gears a little bit with with some of the experiences you've had, What are some of the things that kinda yielded the biggest

moments or learnings for the growth team? And you don't have to give maybe every last detail of, like, an experiment run, but, you know, thinking about personnel, experimentation, media mix, test, like, what was something that just kinda, like, knocked your socks off in terms of, wow, I didn't think it was gonna actually be that good, or conversely, wow, I didn't think it was actually gonna perform that poorly. Maybe some some larger

moments for you and your experience in testing and in growth? I think for any growth marketing person, maybe even for any professional at for for that standpoint, we're always trying to balance being a first principle thinker and being objective about things and biased. Mhmm. I just don't believe that you can completely get rid of bias because bias is Mhmm. Is the the the fruit of all of your learnings. Yeah. But at the same time, you know, obviously, the

other end of that spectrum is that you don't wanna be completely biased with your activities. Right? And so I think for me, consistently, some of the bigger learnings that I've had are things like, well, this channel worked for my other company in this way. Therefore, it's going to work just as effectively for this new company in this other way. That's consistently been kind of like, you know, one of the things. Right? So I think channel and then even when you get to MarTech. Oh, you know what?

This MarTech stack worked for us really well. You know, and I'll give you an example. Like, this MarTech stack worked really well for us at Netflix. Therefore, this is the same MarTech stack we should use at Spotify. And as similar as those companies might seem at the surface, they're two very different companies.

You know, one is a pure subscription company. The other one is a freemium subscription company. The other one is a freemium company. The other one, you know, optimizes towards a ten foot screen, like, a screen that's ten feet away from you, and then the other one optimizes for a handheld device. Right? Like, it just there's you know, once you dig in and then there are different stages. Right? There when I was at Netflix, they

were, you know, I don't know how many years old. And when I was at Spotify, they they was pre public. Right? So it just what works for something does not necessarily work for so I think that's that's one. The second is especially when you're planning. The level of bias on how quickly you assume you can execute perfectly is is one of the things that I'm always kind of like on the lookout for, which forces prioritization.

Right? Because I know that we're not gonna be able to, you know, optimize ten channels at the same time including email and push, but maybe we can, you know, get push off the ground in a quarter or something like that. And this leads to a lot of sort of consternation because it's like, oh, you know what? We tested TV. It didn't work. Well, did you really test it? I mean or did you just reuse some YouTube videos, port it over to the trade desk, and then, you know, essentially get, you know,

some optimal sort of results. Right? Like, these are things like so and then the same thing, like, with TikTok. Like, though TikTok's not working. Well, did you really test it, or

did you just sort of reuse, you know, Instagram Reels content and then didn't give TikTok enough time. So, like so I think that's that's maybe kind of like a second one. And then I think the third maybe sort of surprises, I guess, or or sort of maybe mistakes is, and this goes both ways, how far we can push marginal ROI. That that has always I've not gotten that consistently right. I mean, I've I'll I'll sporadically get it right, but not consistently right. There

are times where it's like, oh my god. Like, we can push this even more. Like, we can push spend, you know, two, three x more and still get decent returns. And it's because, you know, may maybe we didn't take into consideration seasonality fat factors. Maybe we didn't take into consideration, like, you know, the product team just made, you know, some optimal, changes to conversion rates or whatever it is. And at the same token,

there's been situations where it's like, wow, we can't spend any more. Like we've hit the ceiling already. We've gotta go figure, you know, something else. So I think I think those are maybe some of the things that consistently That's amazing. Those are those are some really interesting learnings, and that might be interesting to just kinda double clip on

a couple of those to to learn more. So the notion of kinda like forecasting and that and I'd love to hear when building out plans, models, forecasts for a level of accuracy to set expectations, managing up, managing to finance, managing to other stakeholders. How do you mitigate some of those biases that you reference? How do you mitigate some of that overpromise that

you referenced? So I think at the highest level, I think for the most part, everyone understands that when you have a forecast that it's only as good as your guess for that day. Mhmm. I think everybody also understands that what happened last week is old news and what's happening this week is new news. Right? So, like Mhmm. Things change so quickly. So I think a forecast has to be paired with strategic direction relative

to your vision. Right? So this forecast is a reflection of our best guess of what we're able to achieve, but, really, it's in service of what we want to achieve as a business. And I think those two things have to be sort of paired together. And then from there, I think it's also the more effective, I guess, situations that I've been in were situations where you're revisiting the forecast on a monthly basis. Because, again, things change. So it's not fixed.

It's kind of like, you know, sort of a dynamic situation. Totally agree. Yeah. And you kinda referenced something earlier about trying something and then kind of assessing and saying, what Did we really try this? Did we really give it the honest chance to succeed and learn properly? I think that's a really interesting concept. Is there a way that you recommend people think about if a tactic or a channel or a campaign was given an honest chance to succeed

before kind of calling it a loss and a learning and moving on? It depends on what the goals are. So if the goal so let's just take paid, for example. Right? So if the goal for the channel is to be a supplement to your two big channels, then from that standpoint, maybe your bar for, you know, accomplishment or whatever is maybe not as high. And so from that standpoint, maybe you give it, you know, three weeks, two weeks, you know, a month. Let it simmer. And

then from there, be like, okay. Well, if we were able to two x this, if we're able to three x this, would it meet our goals? And if not, you know, maybe let's move on and and do something else. But if you're trying to figure out your second biggest channel because you're hitting marginal returns on your first biggest channel, then your level of investment into trying to figure out how to make that channel

work then has to increase. So from then from that standpoint, it's like, okay. Well, what exactly it is that we need to make this work? Creative. We need to understand the dynamics of channel. We need to understand whether or not we can target audiences against it in the way that we need we need to. We need to understand whether we can test against it in the way that we need to and things

like that. Right? So I think that's that's probably one of the things that I I so I think consideration is is just contextually, you know, how important or what exactly is it that we're expecting out of this channel. So and it's a very sort of performance driven lens. I mean, there's also kind of, like, a much more upper funnel, lens as well that that I'll take into some of these things. And mean, I could talk about it later, but but generally speaking,

that's that's how much time I'll give it. Yeah. No. That's fantastic. You you kinda brought

up creative. Obviously, you know, in the last I don't know. You we could probably land on the last five years, maybe maybe more. You know, paid social in particular has kind of demanded it. The ability to kind of immediate buyer way to success has diminished where creative has really been elevated in the importance of the factors in getting paid social, specifically

to perform well. Not to get too minute, but you kinda mentioned creative. I'm just wondering from like a it obviously can span into multichannel, right, not just paid social. But, like, how have you leading acquisition, leading growth, how have you kind of set up for success to kind of think about creative in the right way, in the right volume, with the right types of tests? I'm I'm curious to hear maybe how you've approached

that or how you are approaching that. Yeah. So creative's definitely been a lot more important, especially over the last few years for for a few reasons. One, on the publisher side, they're taking on much more of the algorithmic bid bidding. So back in our day at eBay, we were doing our own bidding on a per keyword basis, you know, and taking that control out of Google. Now

Google's like, you know what? We have this thing called smart bidding. You can't do that anymore. We will essentially dictate where your inventory is gonna go, etcetera, etcetera. You give us our parameter. You give us your parameters and your campaign structures and etcetera. The same thing with Facebook. So creative's definitely been, you know, really important from that standpoint. So there's a couple of things. One is that I think there's maybe a dozen or so creatives that can run

at the same time on paid social. And ultimately, platforms like Facebook or even TikTok will optimize towards the best serving creatives. So from that standpoint, you're just pumping in creatives over maybe two or three week standpoint or, you know, sort of frame, and then it just continues to learn until it starts to get stale and then, you know, then you kind of,

like, replace it. I mean, there's you can break it out between video and static and some of the best sort of creative performance, creative agencies out there, especially for video, are able to split your video into, you know, three or four parts and then

iterate on each part. Right? So the entire video is maybe thirty seconds or fifteen seconds, but they have different versions of the first five seconds, different versions of the next ten seconds, and then different versions of, you know, the last, you know, whatever, fifteen seconds, right, or whatever it is. So I think a lot of companies have gotten really good at this

or a lot of, like, sort of creative agencies have gotten really good at this. And I think it's just a matter of being able to sort of being able to sort of test a lot of this as well. Right? So I think that's that's really important. The other thing is people come to different platforms for different reasons. And so what might work for the same person on Instagram might work or not work for the same person on TikTok just because expectations are a little bit different.

So I think being able to tailor your creatives, relative to to sort of channel behavior, I think is is gonna be is is pretty. So, yeah, I can't stress enough the importance of creative, especially these days. And it's it's interesting because you're now forcing or it's now kinda like a forcing function for marketers to really think about the brand more than they have before, and it's not just sort of a set of numbers. But you know?

Yeah. Is there a trend or tactical or or channel that you're you're kind of, you think is maybe underutilized or underrated? I know that's a bit of a general and it's hard to apply to all brands, but just generally, is there one that you kinda think people sleep on a little bit and don't realize its value from a channel or tactic or or campaign perspective? Yeah. I mean, I think it it would really depend on that that really depends on the company and the

competitive set of that company. I guess, you know, if you wanna take a sort of a broad brush, right, I mean, obviously, most companies from a from an acquisition or a paid media standpoint will always use Google and Facebook to some degree, and then you have usual suspects, right, with TikTok and what have you. Mhmm. But, I mean, remember, people still listen to the radio. You know? People still see billboards outside. Right? And so,

you know, people still get mail. And I'm not saying those work all the time. I'm just saying that Mhmm. There are other ways that people consume information. People could also, consume information through podcasts and through newsletters, and things like that. Right?

So there are other ways to reach your consumers. I guess just having a true understanding of your the behaviors of consumers, I think is is extremely important, so that you're not just sort of relying on Google and Facebook a hundred percent of the time. Yeah. But the programmatic nature of some of these channels, I think, has allowed people to buy them with much more

conviction. Yeah. I love that. Very cool. You know, in Reforge, there's a lot of discussion around kind of alignment across teams, getting buy in from leadership, the notion of managing up. Before we get into some funner, topics, I'd love to maybe wrap up with this question of how have you found success in managing up and aligning expectations around shared vision, language, maps as you referenced earlier. Love to hear how you've approached that and how you recommend

people approach that. One of the mistakes that I made for many years is assuming that what my boss tells me is the only thing that matters. And what I've started to better understand is contextually, where is my boss in his or her career journey? How is he or she positioned within the company? And if I were in that position, what would be important to me? And then I'll layer on the verbal communication. And but then at the same time, that gives me more context into understanding

what's important or trying to understand what's important. I think having that level of empathy is so critical because at the end of the day, she or he is also just a person who is also just trying to be successful. Right? So I think that's important. And then I think layered on to that, it's just and it's one of the reasons why I've had a really great time at bForge and doing this podcast is because I get a view of what exceptional marketing looks like from other

marketers. So then when I layer that on to what my boss is trying to do, it's a lot clearer to me. Right? And so from there, I have a better way to provide support. And then I do the same thing with finance and product and with the founder. It's like, okay, well, now that I have a marketing lens, what's important to them? Right? So is it the product roadmap? Is it growth? Is it combating seasonality? Is it you know? So I think, you know, having and and

and you'll you'll you'll get a glimpse of this. Right? I mean, you'll get a glimpse of it from from the plans. You'll get a glimpse of it from, you know, conversations, but you'll also get a glimpse of it of when you go through kind of, like, executive discussions, executive meetings, what bubbles up. Right?

And why is that important? Right? So I think having contextual understanding of where the business is, where, leaders wanna be in their careers, And then, having a true critical understanding of what marketing can do and how that might impact this business, has been, I think, really critical in sort of trying to understand how to best

manage them. Patrick, what you shared on that front was amazing. I I love that of, like, thinking about what is important to them, where are they at in their journey, what are the needs that are kind of pulling and pushing on them specifically? And I think it's such a place of empathy, place of leadership. It's you're you're asking questions to understand those things. It reminds me of some of the

a a lot of Reforge, but I'll also, like, admired leadership principles. I don't know if you're you've come across that. I'm sure you have. I really love that. It's one of my favorite parts of this conversation. I just think that it's human eye everyone can kind of feel like that that everyone on the team is very much a human dealing with their own things in their career and and personally. And I think, coming from it from that lens makes you probably

much more effective at managing up and supporting one another. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the biggest mistakes I've made in the past was just trying to enforce my mental map on what the leadership team should be doing based off of books that I've read or discussions that I've had or what have you. But the thing is, like, you have to understand or at least I've consistently realized

that this is a dynamic place. They're also people and just getting a true understanding of of contextual relevance and, you know, where they are. Yeah. I have a lot of respect for that empathy and also just intellectual flexibility. You're not trying to enforce an app on someone else. That's a really awesome thought. So much learning, so much candor, and appreciate you sharing. I'd love to jump into some fun topics maybe to wrap up. Your the

Michigan football is top of mind. You're going there this weekend. Are they gonna get are they gonna get penalized for cheating? Yes or no? That's a trick question because as of now, there is no, there is evidence. There's there's, alleged evidence of them, cheating, but there's nothing I don't know that there's sort of empirical proof. I think there's investigations that are still ongoing. I will say that there's a lot of smoke. So whether how how big that fire is, I guess nobody

really knows. Now will they get, will they get punished for it? It depends on what comes up. Right? Depends on Yeah. On that level of I what I will say, however, is that if there is evidence that other schools are doing the same thing, then I think the reaction of the big ten or the NCAA or whatever should be appropriate to, a lot of these things. But Yeah. I'm just a person who is completely You're just a fan. Reading whatever I can read

from ESPN, whatever other sources. Are they gonna silence the haters and win it all this year? Yeah. I think so. I I again, this might age. This might age, but but but I I I think so. I have not seen them this good now. Again, people can argue, well, the reason why they're good is because they're stealing signs or what have you. But, I guess as a fan and as a biased fan for that, I will say that I think I think they're the best country. They're the best team in the country. I'd love to

see it. Love to see it. Maybe, maybe a UT Michigan showdown would be, I I wouldn't hate that just personally. I think there's there might be a slight possibility that that could happen. I guess it depends, on what happens with with the top four with, you know, some of the top conferences coming into the playoffs, but I wouldn't mind that at all. I think that would be awesome. Is, is Harbaugh gonna be a long

term Michigan coach? Do you think he's gonna go back to the NFL? Depends on what they find. If he if he wins if he wins, he stays. If he cheats, he goes. Oh, wait. If he doesn't win, he's I don't know. I apparently, they have he he's he they they already have an extension in a long term like, a a an extension contract or a long term contract for him. So which he hasn't just he hasn't yet signed because of all of these sort of allegations. So but I don't know. Yeah. Your best you're Stay tuned.

Mine. Patrick will be on, the next episodes to, maybe in a few months from now or later on to see how it ages and to revisit these predictions. Love it. Love it. Thank you so much for joining, Patrick. I really appreciate it. It was awesome to talk with you. Tons of really, I think, actionable, learnings from your rich experience. And for folks that wanna learn more about you, what what would you suggest? Where could they find you and learn

more? Yeah. You could find me on LinkedIn, Patrick c Moran. So I've been, yeah, I've been I'm currently at Robinhood. I was at Netflix and Spotify. The only reason why I give those companies is because there is another Patrick Moran, who, by the way, is much more of an amazing marketer than I am, and he was the CMO of Calendly. So that is not who

I am. However, I know of him. I've pinged him a couple of times because, you know, I've I've been asked to join some boards, and I've been asked to, like, you know, interview for some of these b two b CMO companies. I'm just like, that's that's a different Patrick Moran. But, anyway, I have the Patrick Moran who is more on the consumer side, who is currently at Robinhood and has spent time at Spotify. How is it Netflix? Amazing. And definitely

check out the podcast. I highly recommend it. Some really great growth practitioners there as well. Yep. Finding market fit. Finding market fit. Very cool. Well, thank you. It's been a pleasure and, go go blue this weekend. Go blue.