Hi there,
I turned 33 this month. And instead of the usual thanks-for-the-wishes post, I asked for something.
Full transparency: I miss being part of a team.
Consulting gives me so much variety, but I miss being in the room, learning from the people around me, and seeing one product all the way through.
So I’ve quietly been making room in my portfolio for one bigger engagement. Going deeper with one subscription app, ideally wellness or impact, a team of 15 to 100, a product growth role.
More days a week, part-time or full-time, remote or hybrid in London. I’ve done this before. It’s the work I love most.
I double-checked that post with three people; as writing “I miss being part of a team” out loud felt like admitting something wasn’t working. (It is working. I just want a different shape for part of it.)
I never expected what would happen next, as people really showed up:
Suggestions sent by people I’ve never met.
Intros I’d never have found on my own.
Two conversations I’m still in.
A few messages that were just “same, actually.”
None of that happens if I post “33 learnings of this year”
So that’s the theme of this month, and honestly, the thing I’d most like you to take from this issue: be specific out loud.
Whether you want a role, a speaking slot, a co-founder, or feedback on your paywall, people are generally willing to help.
They’re just not psychic.
The more precise you are about what you’re after, the easier you make it for someone to hand you the exact thing.
Nobody can help you with a secret. The best things that have ever happened to me, I’ve dared to ask for.
Storytime over, now here’s the rest of August.
What’s been happening with clients
I’ve started an audit with a new client, and I’m loving it. They’ve built a custom in-house tool that's been great to use and nerd out over.
It’s also where I’ve had to hold myself back. There’s so much in there. My instinct is to keep pulling threads and follow every interesting one.
This month I’ve been actively practicing not doing that. Depth on the questions that matter, rather than depth on everything.
I love doing growth audits, and given that I’ve been focused on keeping space, they are the main type of projects I’m accepting right now.
What I’ve been presenting
Andrew Capland and I ran Rise of the Growth Engineer on 19 August, a workshop on how growth roles are being rewired right now.
The career ladder is looping rather than climbing, and we mapped four archetypes: the founding growth hire, the player coach, the strategist, and the growth engineer.
The questions were the best part. Three worth repeating:
“Do you need a coding background to be a growth engineer?”
No. Andrew’s example was someone shipping to production without one. Curiosity and the confidence to try things matter far more than a CS degree.
“How do businesses actually perceive growth profiles?”
Many still quietly mean marketing when they say growth. (Regular readers will know this is the hill I’ll die on)
The move: define your version of growth before the conversation gets going, then test for about 90% overlap with what they actually need. If it’s 50%, that’s not a negotiation; that’s a different job.
“Isn’t there a risk companies hunt for a unicorn and under-hire?”
Yes, and this is the honest one. It’s the growth hacker myth of 2015 in new clothes (I’m still ashamed I used to call myself a growth hacker all those years ago).
Growth engineers tend to be strong on data and automation and lighter on customer research and strategy. You get quick wins and a slow strategic mess.
If you missed it, don’t worry; there is a recording.
What I’ve been writing
Three articles were written this month. None of them are out yet, but I am hoping to share a few new ones next month:
Why would someone pay for your app when AI does it for free? (RevenueCat). Chegg and Duolingo faced the same threat but had opposite outcomes. This will share 6 ways to differentiate from a blank text box.
A guide to physical products and apps (RevenueCat). Five levels of physical, from brand merch to membership-native hardware. This was a dream to write with my e-commerce and app background.
Why Your Pricing Tests Keep Failing (Convert). Pricing decisions stack like a pyramid, and most teams test the top layers while the bottom ones are quietly broken.
I’ll share each one here when it goes live.
What I’ve been up to with Women in Experimentation
Deep in prep for the WiE Summit (9–10 September). I’m organising it with the WiE team and Convert, introducing some of the speakers, and running a short session of my own on how to work out your positioning, whether you’re in-house or consulting.
It’s a topic I end up advising a lot of fellow consultants on. Positioning gets treated as a branding exercise when it’s really a decision about what you say no to.
Sign up for free to attend.
This month’s flip-flops
Every month I share not just my wins but my challenges, so here are my monthly flip-flops:
1. I tried to shorten an onboarding that didn’t need shortening. We were revamping onboarding and seeing drop-off, so I did the obvious thing and started cutting questions that weren’t adding value.
The founder stopped me. The problem wasn’t how many questions there were. It was one question, and the mental load of answering it.
Onboarding length isn’t a question count. It’s the intensity of what you’re asking, and that goes up fast when the topic is sensitive, or emotional, or full of terminology people don’t have yet.
Four easy questions and one hard one is not five questions. It’s one hard question with four warm-ups.
Simple wins, and this was a good reminder of it.
2. I got disproportionately embarrassed about one slide.
During this month's webinar, a slide in the presentation was missing some information. Small. Nobody died. And I felt genuinely embarrassed, in a way that was completely out of proportion to what actually happened.
I think that’s new, and I think AI is why. When the tools are this good, a mistake stops reading as “you’re human” and starts reading as “you didn’t even check.” The irony is that I ran that deck through Claude 3 times and checked it myself…
The bar for what counts as sloppy has quietly moved, and I’ve absorbed that without ever agreeing to it.
I’ve been rereading The Perfectionist’s Guide to Losing Control by Katherine Morgan Schafler this month, which is either good timing or the reason I noticed at all.
Her argument isn’t “stop being a perfectionist,” which never works and mostly just adds guilt on top. It’s that there are different kinds of perfectionism, and the job is to work with yours rather than against it.
What I’ve been enjoying
The birthday itself. My husband planned a surprise weekend away, which was absolutely amazing. New Forest and the Isle of Wight, lots of dog walks, and no laptop.
Doing more things with other people. The webinar with Andrew. Connecting with Ioana Iordache to discuss collaborating and planning a dinner in Berlin before Business of Apps in November, as well as continuing to work with Alice Muir, which has been a real pleasure.
Freelancing gets lonely, especially for someone as extroverted as I am.
Online isn’t the same as in person, but it’s a lot better than nothing, and I’ve stopped treating these as a nice-to-have.
I’ve also gotten to see Rosie Hoggmascall in person more. My goal is to drag her out of the office in time, but it’s as much for me as it is for her. It’s nice to have friends in the space who get it.
We even did yoga in the park the other day, followed by a lovely picnic she’d arranged.
If you missed my newsletters this month
Looking ahead to September
You’re receiving this while I’m working from the Netherlands, catching up with friends and family.
Then the first week and a half of September is conferences, back-to-back:
App Growth Summit London (3 Sep): attending, purely as a human in the audience
Appsforum London (7–8 Sep): running a workshop and hosting a panel
WiE Summit (9–10 Sep): organising, introducing speakers, and my positioning session
It will be a busy few months conference-wise.
Then a workshop at App Growth Annual in New York in October, followed by another at Business of Apps in Berlin.
I’m also planning a dinner during the Berlin trip with people in the app growth space, because I badly underestimated how big that scene is there, and I’d like to meet some of them IRL.
If you’re at any of these, tell me. I’d love to meet you. (See: entire theme of this newsletter.)
Also in September: the audit gets handed in, discussing a few new potential bigger projects / roles, and I finally get to meet my new nephew in France!
In July I wrote about deliberately doing less. This is what I used that new space for. Not more things. Better ones, and more of them with other people in the room.
And if there’s something you want this coming autumn, say it out loud to someone, specifically.
Worst case, nothing happens.
That’s also what happens if you stay quiet.
Till next time,
Daphne