Kate Syuma

Maven

Partner

Manychat

Supported the Growth Motion at Manychat by:
— forming and up-skilling the Growth team
— providing advice to the Growth team to inform ongoing Growth initiatives 
— uncovering opportunities for PLG Activation (in-product flows and lifecycle communications)

Growth Advisor

Antler

Supported 10+ startups worldwide as a part of the Antler advisory community. Provided advice on:
— PLG (Product Led Growth): introducing PLG strategy and opportunities for business growth
— Product Discovery and User Research: finding the right methods to inform the product strategy
— Product-led Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Monetisation: finding relevant leverages and combining them with clean UX to grow the business
— Onboarding flow: uncovering opportunities to uplift Activation
— Business model design: finding the right model for Monetisation (e.g. Free Trial, Freemium)

Advisor

Miro

Supported the Growth at Miro through the stages of a startup to hyper-growth, and business at scale: 50→1800+ employees, 1→50 mln users, 1→11 hubs globally, 3→55 designers, 5→170+ people in the Growth stream. Now Miro is a high-performing B2B SaaS with a $17.5B valuation (January 2022), 99% of the Fortune 100 trust Miro.

📌 Key results:

[1] Co-led and strategized the initiatives in the Growth stream, covering Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetisation, and Community Platforms that led to sustainable business and ARR growth. Supported the scale of the Growth stream at Miro from 1 team to a business unit of 5 sub-streams (170+ individuals). 

[2] Scaled the team from 1 to 11 diverse Product and Content designers in the Growth stream.

[3] Led and strategized design efforts for “0 to 1” strategic initiatives, such as Miroverse, Self-serve Monetisation, and Onboarding experience. 

[4] Redesigned the Business model to launch Freemium as a foundation for sustainable PLG (Product-led Growth). 

[5] Established the design processes for effective collaboration: Experiments reflections, Growth Design Jams, Growth Design Sprint, UXR, and Design discovery.  

[6] Co-led the launch of the Localisation program to help Miro become global. 

[7] Established Career development frameworks and improved the calibration process for the 55+ designer org.

Head of Growth Product Design

After combining design leadership with the IC role for a while, I took the responsibility of building the Growth Design Team at Miro from scratch.

📌 Key results:

[1] Scaled and up-skilled the design team from 1 to 7 Product designers (Middle and Senior ICs) for the Growth stream: Acquisition, Retention, Monetisation, Community Platforms, and Professional Services. 

[2] Led the designers across 5 sub-streams to deliver solutions for Product Acquisition, Sharing Experience, Activation, Onboarding experience, Visual Learning Center, Templates experience, Monetisation CR triggers, etc.

[3] Co-led and established the Hiring Framework for the entire Design organisation. 

[4] Co-created with Growth Product Leaders new strategies: Pre-products, Community-led Growth, Viral loops, and Templates. 

[5] Led Miro.design project as a reflection of Miro design team and culture.

Product Design Manager, Growth

📌 Key results: 

[1] Led design efforts for Product Acquisition, Sharing Experience, Activation, Onboarding experience, Visual Learning Center, Templates experience, Monetisation, etc.

[2] Introduced User Research process at Miro to discover and validate experiences for Mind Map, Visual Notes, Smart search, and Notifications. 

[3] Designed end-to-end and launched the first version of Miroverse that became a standalone platform for Community-led Growth.

[4] Designed 100+ experiments with end-to-end experience in Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Monetization, and Hand-raisers teams

[5] Redesigned the Business model to launch Freemium as a foundation for sustainable PLG (Product-led Growth).

[6] Established the Onboarding process for new designers to support the growth of the design team

Lead Product Designer (Growth and User Research) 

📌 Key results:

[1] As a founding designer in the Growth team and 3rd designer at Miro, covered the end-to-end design for 3 strategic domains: Growth, Enterprise, and Design System. 

[2] Designed end-to-end experience for Pricing & Billing to introduce the Self-serve model.

[3] Designed end-to-end experience for Advanced User Management, Integrations, and Settings panel to improve the experience for Enterprise customers.

[4] Led the design and engineering effort for the first version of the Design system at Miro.

Product Designer (Growth, Enterprise and Design System)

Maugry

Maugry is an IT consulting agency focused on creating mobile applications for new technological projects. 

I was responsible for creating an end-to-end experience for a mobile app (iOS and Android) for the Historical Regional Museum. As a result, I covered CJM, Navigation patterns, Design system, and Visual language and provided the final deliverables to the client.

User Experience Designer

Vitamin Group

Vitamin Group is a design agency focused on creating mobile and web applications for various business needs.

I was doing an internship project focused on UX audit, navigation, and IA improvements for the Business & Data Analytics platform. As a result, I uncovered multiple UI and UX improvements to level up the platform's usability to make it ready for "go-to-market".

UX Designer

Freelance

Partnered with startup founders to design the UI/UX for various mobile apps (iOS and Android).

UI/UX designer

Marketing boutique agency

As a Digital designer, I was working in a boutique marketing agency and focused on creating visual identities, branding, and marketing materials for various companies.

Digital Designer 

Kate is a Growth Advisor with diverse experience in building products that combine great user experience with a real business impact. Previously Kate was shaping the product through hyper-growth at Miro for 6+ years, passing through company growth from Startup to Business at Scale. 

Throughout her experience, gained diverse expertise across Product Design, UX, User Research, and Growth Strategies by covering Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetisation, and Community Platforms.

Hosting Growthmates podcast 🎙️ about personal and professional growth.

This is how it all started 6 months ago…

I left Miro in September 2023. In October, I took time off to travel across Europe with my best friend who I haven’t seen for almost 2 years — Viktoria Kharlamova ✨

We took a car and spent 2 weeks without any plan — riding wherever the eyes took us. We passed through Italy, Croatia, Slovenia, and reflected on 5 years we worked together and what we’d like to envision in the future.

One story that we both remembered: while we were still in our 2nd year at Miro, we had an idea of helping others with User Onboarding. For some reason, we had so much passion for doing that, so instead of watching Netflix shows in the late evenings we joked that we watch Slack onboarding recordings 😅

In parallel, the extended time off and that trip took me to deeper considerations — What do I enjoy? What kind of value I can deliver?

These thoughts brought me to this: 
1. I’m very excited about research
2. I find a lot of pleasure in visualizing insights
3. And there’s one theme I’ve been passionate about for years. Where I can combine both PLG and UX I truly love 💜

Guess what was that theme? 😉 Yes, User Onboarding. 
  
After coming back from this trip, we finalized our first industry research project, surveyed 80+ companies, and created a 20+ page report that over 2000 people downloaded.

We talked to many people who found the report useful, and many folks mentioned that they'd like to get some support from us to improve this experience. We decided to produce that help in a format that can help more people and created the course on the topic of Self-Serve Onboarding.

So here I am today: 
→ Launching the first course next week
→ Maintaining the passion in what I'm doing day-to-day  
→ Writing this story late in the evening, but truly enjoying this ride 🚀

Grateful for this 🙏

*Save these 5 principles with examples for your next Onboarding project 👇

I explored some of my favourite products to uncover how they are leveraging the behavioural principles for User Onboarding. Let’s take a look what I found 👀

1️⃣ Visceral Delight 😍 in Dropbox. Take a look how they visually communicate product value on the website to create a memorable connection, and with great motion.

2️⃣ Hick’s law 🤓 in Figma's FigJam. Limiting the number of choices to the magic number “3” — user has to choose one of 3 main use cases to start from.

3️⃣ Learn by doing 💪 in Canva. Playful slide deck “Your First Week in Canva” helps to onboard new users. When users partially create something, they value it way more (and memorise it better). Love it 😍

4️⃣ Ikea Effect 🛠️ in Linear. By performing each of these 9 action in a checklist, the user becomes closer to Aha-moment and Activation. Showing contextual helpful explanation helps users complete unfamiliar tasks.

5️⃣ Hooked Model 🔁 by Nir Eyal in Grammarly. Showing premium suggestions as a “Variable reward” and incentivising users to come back.

— — —

🎁 For more behavioural patterns, frameworks, and insights — join the upcoming Self-Serve Onboarding course which we launch with Viktoria Kharlamova and a special guest Phil Vander Broek. The registrations are closing on 14th of April ⏰ 

(link with 15% discount in comments)

— — —

I’m Kate Syuma, uncovering ways to grow your product through PLG and better User Experience. To get a sneak peek of the upcoming course content, check “5-step Growth Flow Review” on Appcues Product Adoption academy 🤓

#plg  #onboarding #product #growth #ux #patterns 

5 behavioural principles for User Onboarding

Which one of these growth mistakes have you ever encountered? Check yourself 👇

Personally, I experienced all of them. My attitude to that is simple — whenever you make a mistake, you’re multiplying the learning. 

Luckily, one of the first learnings during my time at Miro was the understanding that User Onboarding is the base for the entire product-led growth. If it’s not designed well, it can damage the entire product ecosystem, even if the core product experience is excellent. 

Together with Viktoria Kharlamova and Matt Woods, we unpacked 5 mistakes and learnings through the lenses of User Onboarding. Here’re some of them 👇

🚨 Lack of Clear Product Value Communication
🚨 No understanding that Growth is a complex system
🚨 Incorrect Activation metric

Find 5 mistakes with learnings to them in a full article with best practices from Dropbox, Figma, Coda, and more.

If you also realise the importance of Onboarding and Activation, we invite you to revamp this experience together with us and receive feedback directly on our upcoming course. 

⏰ It’s just 2 weeks left before the Self-service Onboarding course starts, and we prepared a special bonus for everyone who wants to join.

Find links in comments 👇

#plg #onboarding #growth #learnings

Over the 1st year of Growthmates, I had a privilege to learn from dozens of leaders from Dropbox, Amplitude, Canva, Coda, Atlassian, and more. Now I need your take 🙌

While working at Miro, I was trying to connect with other leaders to constantly learn and get fresh perspectives. This personal aspiration was laid down as a foundation for Growthmates — the place to connect and learn from industry leaders and make these insights available to everyone.

For the 1st Growthmates anniversary, we’d like to create something valuable and memorable — “The Playbook for Growth Teams” that will collect insights from the episodes and fresh perspectives from this industry research 🚀

𝐖𝐡𝐨 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐟𝐨𝐫:
🔹 Founders interested in building and scaling PLG model throughout the company
🔹 Company leaders at different stages of Growth
🔹 Product Leaders and Design Managers who are working with Growth Teams 
🔹Individual contributors in Growth teams — Product Designers, Product Managers, User researchers, and others.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐢𝐝𝐞:
👉 How to build a high performing Growth Team
👉 Emerging challenges for Growth teams and how to resolve them
👉 Examples of delivering high-quality experiences for PLG
… And more frameworks, practices, and inspiration for you and your team

𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐲𝐨𝐮 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐞:

1️⃣ Take a 10-min survey to contribute with your insights and get the first copy 🎁 https://lnkd.in/gWtmwdi3 

2️⃣ Mention your friends and colleagues in comments for whom it might be useful 👇

Thank you for being a part of this journey 🙏
———

I’m Kate Syuma, uncovering ways to grow your product through PLG and better User Experience. Building Growthmates to discover how top experts grow their products and themselves, and share this knowledge with everyone.

#product #growth #playbook #survey

Have you ever asked yourself: what's your personal philosophy of building products? 

After working at Apple, Google and building 0-1 products, Mohammed Abdoolcarim shared — it's all around trial and error 💪

"The people who put something out there and learn by doing are the ones who actually perform the best. And it turns out that even Brian Chesky from Airbnb and others like him, didn't know what they were doing in the early days of Airbnb. 

You're not born creative. It's something that you can learn."

👉 Watch on Youtube (NEW): https://lnkd.in/eeMMniGs

Also available on:
👉 Apple: https://lnkd.in/er5NMmNt
👉 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eiVYRpsW

P.S. Huge thanks to Mindaugas Petrutis for the introduction 🙌 This is how Growthmates finds new fantastic guests. If you have a candidate in mind → drop the mention in comments 🙏

Take these 3 lessons on innovation from Apple 👇

Mohammed Abdoolcarim was creating Siri before it was acquired by Apple. One day Steve Jobs entered their room, and they became a part of the most innovative company in the world. Mohammed joined Growthmates to share the secrets from unique Apple innovation culture, such as: 

1️⃣ Being obsessed with the customer
2️⃣ Getting timing right
3️⃣ Being able to tell a narrative

My favourite part ❤️ — "teleport a customer into this dream world that they desire and to be able to tell that story through your whole product experience".

Find in a full episode stories about:
🔹 How Steve Jobs entered their room to acquire Siri
🔹 Embracing trial and error and be okay with failure
🔹 Prioritizing creativity in product development
…and more. 

🎧 Listen to the full episode (link in comments)

🎁 For more stories like that from Amplitude, Canva, Coda, Dropbox and more experts, subscribe to my newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gPsa9rv3
— — — 

P.S. Thanks Appcues for supporting this episode 😉


#plg #innovation #ux #product #growth

How to attract the Top-1% of talent? 

Tom Scott attracted Design and Product talent for the top companies. He joined us on Growthmates to discuss how to attract the right type of talent at each company stage. Here’s what we uncovered 👇

𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐲-𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬:

1️⃣ Builders at heart: seek individuals who are builders, adaptable to a scrappy environment, and capable of close collaboration with founders.
2️⃣ Fractional hiring: it helps to minimize risk and allow flexibility for both sides, emphasizing finding senior talent with growth potential rather than junior hires.
3️⃣ Deep generalists: expertise in UX, visual design, and possibly brand, capable of handling various tasks with a growth mindset. 

𝐒𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬 𝐀/𝐁+ 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐞𝐬:

1️⃣ Player-coach mentality: maintain close founder relationships and embrace a player-coach mentality, balancing hands-on work with team building.
2️⃣ Deep expertise: uncover specific areas such as UX, visual design, and product development, preparing for team expansion.
3️⃣ Vision for Growth: assess candidates' potential for long-term relevance and growth within the organization, considering their adaptability to future stages.

…And more insights on we hiring for Scale-ups, unconventional career paths for anyone who is looking for a shift.

🎙️ Find full episode on your Apple, Spotify and YouTube (links in comments 👇)
📩 Subscribe to the newsletter to get new episodes right in your inbox (link in profile)

——— 

Thanks Appcues for supporting this episode 🙏

#hiring #growth #startup #career

Going solo or enjoying teamwork again? 🙃

It’s been a while since I truly felt myself with this “Beginner's mind”. However, in this independent journey, I feel it every single day. 

Learning how to create, organize, and share knowledge in different shapes and forms — starting from Advising to launching the first course. But doing all things alone can be tough. 

This is why from day one of my solo journey I decided to always keep some teamwork partnerships in parallel.

Today, we just finished the first week of our first Self-Serve Onboarding course. And I'm so grateful to all individuals who trusted us and joined from many parts of the world. Thanks Viktoria Kharlamova for this partnership, Phil Vander Broek for joining as a guest, and Maven team for giving us the platform for that. 

I maybe don’t have one team that I see every day, and I miss that.
 
But I’m grateful to having many dynamic and constantly changing teams that appear on my current path 🛣️

#solopreneourship #teamwork

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