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Carman Wenkoff is the EVP & Chief Information Officer at Dollar General. In this role, Carman has led the company’s digital transformation, implementing technology advancements to enhance the brick-and-mortar retailer’s offerings and elevate the overall customer experience. Throughout Carman’s career—from working in construction to practicing law, founding a tech company and now as the CIO of a major retailer—he has always addressed challenges head-on. In this episode, Carman shares the secrets to successfully leading a company through digital transformation, and explores how staying true to his purpose and focusing on making a difference in people’s lives have been the most important driving factors behind his success.

Our next guest Matthew Moore started his career at GE before going back to school for management consulting to grow as a leader. He realized that growth during his time working for the Boston Consulting Group. Matt's journey into driving mobile growth kicked off when he became the first Chief Customer Officer of Yum! Brands where he oversaw Pizza Hut for Europe and UK, and he also launched Pizza Hut Digital Ventures. During his time at YUM Brands, he pivoted the culture towards building digital in-house as most of Pizza Hut's business was online already. After that, he returned to his motherland, Canada, to lead digital for the iconic Canadian brand, Tim Hortons. Under Matthew’s leadership, they have shifted heavily to mobile through various strategies, including mobile ordering, loyalty programs, guest personalization, and more. Loyalty programs have arguably been one of their biggest wins during Matt's time at Tim Hortons. Tim Horton's initially achieved a 30% adoption rate and eventually 50% once the program was fully launched. Hear this and how Matt used to travel 300 days out of the year, his philosophy on why you need to find purpose in your work, and his experience working all over the world on this episode of How I Grew This.

In this episode of How I Grew This podcast, Kar Paramasivam talks about the growth strategy at Blue Apron, a direct-to-consumer, chef-designed meal kit company. Starting his career as a banker, Kar shifted his focus to startups, where he got his first opportunity to lead a growth team at Shipt. From this point, Kar made his way through companies like Spacious.com (acquired by WeWork), Nutrafol, and CUUP, to his current role as a VP of Growth at Blue Apron. Kar shares some successful campaigns and approaches his team adopted to leverage Blue Apron's app and increase user retention and engagement.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada Seghete is joined by Kristen Banks, Vice President of Marketing and Digital Products at Ultimate Fighting Championship. They dive into the exciting world of fan-centric entertainment brands and explore the various marketing strategies involved in building a loyal fanbase. Kristen offers valuable insights into how to connect with fans, acquire audiences, and develop long-lasting relationships throughout the customer journey and funnel. Whether you're in the sports industry or any other fan-centric industry, this episode is a must-listen for marketers looking to grow and engage with their audiences. Kristen Banks is a data-driven marketing leader with more than fifteen years of experience. Her current position at UFC involves overseeing the digital licensing business, which encompasses the creation, promotion, and forecasting of video games, mobile games, digital objects, and NFTs. Before joining UFC, Kristen held senior positions at Universal Orlando Resort, NBCUniversal Media, and Landers & Partners.

Greg Shelly is the VP of Enterprise Digital Marketing at Canadian Tire. Greg is, admittedly, obsessed with attribution and performance, and he cares about organizations needing to understand how their investments are driving customer outcomes. Before joining Canadian Tire, Greg led the business insights and marketing analytics organization at McDonald's and spent eight years at Dell in e-commerce and digital marketing. Being in sales and on the front lines of business lets you truly understand the customer’s perspective. It is a sensible, logical start to a career in digital marketing. People who can hack together data-driven solutions can help companies understand their customers in a concrete way that gives them confidence in their marketing decisions. Pushing your comfort zone in your career is necessary to challenge yourself. After a few years, you will start appreciating those struggles for helping you grow professionally and at a personal level. A loyalty program sets the foundation of digital growth by helping companies collect data to better understand their customers. The customer ceases to be a mystery when you have data to understand them. Without a mobile-first approach, you cannot build a close relationship with your customer on a web browser. Being on someone’s phone means you have created value in their lives, and you have to make efforts to stay installed on their phones. Action-ready, non-siloed data is the key to better digital marketing regardless of the business use case. Having the right people, the right data, and the right tech makes business growth possible through digital marketing. Personalization is about being customer-centric and talking about the things that matter to them.

The Covid-19 pandemic pushed the healthcare industry to its limits, but it also led to new opportunities in terms of accelerating digital transformation. In this episode, we discuss the growth of digital transformation in healthcare with Tracey Weber, SVP of Digital Products, UX and Operations at CVS Health. Tracey joins us with over twenty-five years of experience in leadership roles across multiple consumer industries and extensive digital operations. Before joining CVS Health, Tracey was the General Manager of Marketplace and Digital Ecosystems at IBM, the President and COO of Gilt Group, and held several other leadership positions at companies like CitiBank, Travelocity, and Barnes & Noble. Today, Tracey shares some of the newest trends companies adopt to fulfill the rising consumer expectations for digital healthcare experiences.

Travis Trembath, Vice President, Fan Engagement at PGA TOUR, joins us in this episode of How I Grew This podcast. The PGA TOUR is the premier sanctioning and organizing body for men's professional golf, representing the best players in the world. Currently, Travis serves as the voice of the fan for the PGA TOUR and is passionate about building great teams and positively impacting people. Today, Travis shares some insight on the PGA TOUR’s strategy for acquiring and engaging fans, delivering the right content on the right platform for different types of fans, and advice on how to become an engagement, insights, and marketing leader.

This episode of How I Grew This is handcrafted by our friends over at: fame.so

Daniel Shlossman is the SVP, DIgital + Growth @ sweetgreen. He leads marketing, product, and digital channels. In his three years at sweetgreen, Daniel has been focused on enabling customer growth through channel expansion and improvement, including the launch of sweetgreen’s off-premise business, via Outpost and delivery. Daniel’s incredible background includes roles at Uber (as Head of West Coast Operations & Marketing) and at NFL (as their Director of Product for Fantasy Football). Disruption in any market starts with passionate founders who see opportunities to scale in all domains and are not limited by a particular mode or channel of growth. Don’t think that you need to build a mobile app because “everyone else is doing it”. A mobile app gives you the opportunity to use your resources to add value to your customers’ lives and grab a huge chunk of the market in the process. Even with a great product-market fit, your team is the most crucial aspect of building a mobile app. A collaborative culture among people who love to work together allows for that facilitation across different departments and different channels and is crucial to make growth happen. You should identify opportunity areas and really go after them. Even if you don’t know something - you will make mistakes and learn from them. It’s important to have candid conversations to get better with each decision. Follow a detailed diagnosis process within your team to learn from your mistakes as well as projects that were fully or partially successful. Sometimes, the best ideas come from taking something your customers already love and making it even better. One great way to turn such commonplace ideas into massive growth opportunities is to combine a few popular features that customers are experiencing in your app or your competitors. Also, look at enhancing key features to add something new to the app. Successful pivots in tough times like the pandemic require nimbleness and agility in executing a response to the new situation. At sweetgreen, they found this opportunity via shifting operations to donations to frontline medical workers in need. They repurposed and adapted their existing processes to respond to this opportunity. Personalization allows you to get close to the customers. At sweetgreen, Daniel thinks about personalization from the perspective of the customer. This way, personalizing a service goes far beyond small changes that give customers some control over the product you create for them. It means letting them care about the product in a way that grants them ownership of the product resulting from the service, including full customization of chosen ingredients.

Patricia Martorana is the Senior Product Manager, Mobile Growth at The New York Times. Over the past four years, Patricia has grown extensively as a Product Manager. She led the cross-functional team in developing The New York Times subscription footprint and designed the customer journey within the news, cooking, and game sections. She previously had worked in marketing and editorial roles at companies such as the New Yorker and ESPN. Let your existing customers - who are friends with non-subscribers - introduce your product to new users. Plan your growth strategy with all forms of media in mind across all platforms. Monitor growth channels regularly to decide what channels are working for you and what channels are not. Use data to drive these decisions forward. When modeling or remodeling your onboarding experiences, prioritize the kinds of behaviors that you want to introduce. Before showing subscribers any push notifications, explicitly ask them for push notification permission immediately after app installation. A subscription plan is about building relationships and nurturing them over time. Your product team must adapt the product according to the dynamic growth of different user personas. Introduce new features to users and help them discover the benefits over time in a calculated manner using data - don’t bombard them with all features at once.

Ben Okkenga is the Senior Product Manager at RTL2, a TV network from Germany. Ben has spent the last ten years building growth in various departments. Currently, he is responsible for RTL2 projects and products, like the gaming website, mobile apps, and Smart TV applications. In this episode of How I Grew This, Ben talks about how to attract, engage, and retain users on your app, the product that brought RTL2 Connect the Smart TV Award, and how to succeed as a product manager.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Lisa Yokoyama, Senior Vice President and Head of Product for Amex Digital Labs at American Express: Lisa Yokoyama - Mastering the Arts of Product Leadership and Management at American Express, joins Mada Seghete to discuss her career growth and experience at American Express, Lisa's work in the nonprofit space with Peace Corps and Population Services, and share advice for those early in their careers who want to move into product leadership. Lisa is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in product development and management. As the Head of Product within American Express' innovation lab, she drives the product vision, strategy, and roadmap for enterprise-wide digital solutions and oversees a team of sixty product leaders and managers focused on automation and digital consumer commerce, a business line she built from the ground up over the past ten years.

Sylvain Gauchet is the Senior Manager, Growth Product and Mobile Marketing at Babbel, an internationally successful language learning app with millions of active subscribers and the #1 innovative education company in the world. At Babbel, Sylvain focuses on areas such as growth, early product adoption, and monetization. Before Babbel. he co-founded Apptamin, a creative agency that works with brands to produce creative video ad campaigns and app store content. Product-led growth is not just about helping customers solve their problems but also about the company’s bottom line. Balancing friction with positive signals and enough rewards throughout the onboarding process is crucial to customer retention, as it ultimately affects the bottom line. Improve this process by understanding the voice of your customer and by experiencing onboarding flows of other apps you admire. Emails and push notifications customized to your category are important ways to manage the customer lifecycle and bring them back when drop-offs are detected. Humans are thick-skinned and crafty. A life-defining pandemic didn’t change our capacity to communicate. We found a way out by finding new and better ways to communicate. If customers adapt like this, then product teams must also adapt in an appropriate direction for their category. In Google UAC, launch all ad groups at once. Don’t wait for an ad group to perform well and then tweak others before their release. Google favors your initial campaigns, compares all the new campaigns against them, and reduces the reach of newly-launched ad campaigns. You don’t have to be talking to an expert to be mentored by them. Listen to their podcasts, videos, and other resources - learning from them passively is also a great way to be mentored by experts. Keep exchanging knowledge with people you meet and implement what you learn. You might make mistakes, but you will also learn from them.

Martijn Lancee is the Senior Manager for Mobile Growth and Business Strategy on LinkedIn, where he has grown as a product leader over the past three years. Before LinkedIn, Martijn spent eight years at Google, where he was responsible for developing and implementing Google's app distribution strategy focused on preloads and pre-installs. Working on mobile growth preloads as a strategy, Martijn advises developers to launch a test with Digital Turbine and ironSource to understand how preloads could work for them. The challenging part is that you have to build that trust in time. Converting desktop and web users to start using your app offers more engagement and monetization. To convert users, you should constantly make effective app banners and let your users know about the benefits of using the app. You need to drive member value when launching a new feature or app. LinkedIn puts a lot of effort into ensuring that the platform is valuable to everyone with a job or looking for a job.

Surendra Bashani, Senior Director of Product Management at Best Buy, joins us in the next episode of How I Grew This podcast. Surendra describes his role at Best Buy, where he focuses on various programs to see how customers behave and improve their customer experience. To measure the success of the programs, the team checks the metrics from adoption to increase engagement. They also measure customer feedback through CSAT surveys, customer satisfaction surveys, NPS, and store associates’ feedback and experiences. Growing a business depends on the company, the product's life cycle, and the problems you can solve. There are two parts to grow, marketing and creating value for customers. Furthermore, Surendra talks about the impact of mobile technology on business growth. Three main elements drive the adoption of AR and VR. Firstly, the speed and power of hardware and AI on smartphones. Secondly, faster data. Thirdly, customers' interest in the metaverse and emerging gaming experience. Finally, Surendra gives valuable advice for people who want to become successful product managers and leaders. If you also want to become a top product leader, listen to this episode of How I Grew This podcast.

As people's reliance on technology grows every year, many travelers believe a positive digital experience is the number one criterion when choosing an airline. So airlines try to meet the latest technological demands to remain competitive and grow their business. To better understand the most recent digital trends in the airline industry, we invited Kevin Bowling, Senior Director of Digital Experience at Hawaiian Airlines. Leading the digital experience technology team, Kevin is responsible for mission-critical customer-facing products, including HawaiianAirlines.com and iOS and Android apps. Today, Kevin shares Hawaiian Airlines' approach to digital innovation to better engage and retain different types of travelers.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mariana Kuiken joins Amanda Vandiver to discuss how brands can leverage performance marketing and disruptive marketing trends to grow their businesses. Mariana is currently the Growth Marketing Lead at Zalando, where she works on developing new marketing opportunities through machine learning advertisements, user-automated content and augmented reality. Before that, she held various marketing roles at companies like Delivery Hero and LightInTheBox.

Tomas Warden joins us today from Telstra, where he has spent the past thirteen years in various roles. Currently, he is the Principal of Digital Engagement and Experience, responsible for driving the E2E digital experience strategy across Telstra's digital sales and service channels. Telstra is Australia's leading telecommunications and information services company. In this episode, Tomas shares insights from his career, mobile growth strategies, and how his team drives growth through the company's app.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Akio Bandle joins Mada Seghete to discuss ZipRecruiter's growth journey, the company's experience with user acquisition for mobile apps, transitioning to remote work and getting into product management. Akio is currently the Product Lead at ZipRecruiter. Before joining the company, he worked in various organizations, from small startups to large enterprises. Akio is an experienced product manager, product advisor, and marketing analyst.

In this episode of How I Grew This, Mada is joined by Katherine Kelly, VP of Higher Education Marketing at Handshake, to discuss how Handshake leverages mobile growth opportunities in higher education and the job market. Katherine started her career working in higher education and moved over to tech. She was an associate producer at ESPN, an Instructor of Design History, and a Research Assistant at The Victoria and Albert Museum. Katherine was also an Editor, Writer, and Host of her web series, ‘Just the Tips’.