Growth Tactics For Technical Buyers with Weights & Biases Lavanya Shukla, VP of Growth at Weights & Biases

2. FUEL
A framework for
exponential
growth
Lavanya Shukla
VP of Growth,
Weights & Biases

3. Team Background
● OpenAI
● Google
● Waymo
● Microsoft
● DataRobot
● Stanford
● Harvard
● Berkeley
● Twitter
● MongoDB
Figure Eight (acquired by Appen)
● Meta
● Github
● Domino
● JP Morgan
● Alteryx
Funding
Angels & Advisors
Richard Socher — Chief Scientist, Salesforce
Greg Brockman — CTO, OpenAI
Nat Friedman — CEO, GitHub
Tom Preston-Werner — Founder, GitHub
Anthony Goldbloom — Founder and CEO, Kaggle
Vladlen Koltun — Chief Scientist, Intel
Lukas Biewald, CEO
Co-Founder & CEO
Figure Eight, Powerset, OpenAI
Chris Van Pelt, CISO
Co-Founder & CISO
Figure Eight, Powerset
Shawn Lewis, CTO
Co-Founder & CTO
Beep, Google
Weights & Biases

4. #1 End-to-end MLOps Landscape | W&B Positioning
Chris, MLOps
Manage ML infra, need to
ensure platform security,
model governance, and
efficient resource utilization
DATA MANAGEMENT & STORAGE DISTRIBUTED TRAINING MODEL OPTIMIZATION MODEL SERVING
Carey, ML Practitioner
Build ML models to solve
business problems, need
simple, collaborative,
productive way of build &
manage models
Data Lake & Warehouse Data Storage
W&B Managed
Storage
Platform agnostic, default to best-of-breed
Abstract away infra
details with
declarative,
composable, low-
code workflow
Provide visibility &
control into
deployment details
for optimization &
governance
Data Exploration &
Preparation
Model Training
Model Evaluation &
Selection
Model
Mgmt &
CI/CD
Model
Monitoring &
Governance
W&B
standard
workflow
Version data
& pipelines
Artifacts
Data prep,
visualize
Tables
Experiment
tracking
Experiments
W&B Platform abstraction & extensibility toolkit
Optimize
models
Sweeps
Evaluate
models
Evaluation
Model
Repository
Models
Production
monitoring
Production*
Orchestrate
training
Communicate
& collaborate
Reports
Launch
W&B – 2012

5. Users
Experiments
Flywheels
Learnings
FUEL: A Framework For Exponential Growth

6. ● Build flywheels not funnels
● Set a northstar metric.
Be obsessive about optimizing it.
● Start measuring everything now
Flywheels

7. Growth Funnel Growth Flywheel
Awareness
First Run
Product Activated
Product Qualified Lead
Weekly Engaged User
Discover
The Product
Use
The Product
Build Publicly
On The Product
1. Build Flywheels Not Funnels

8. Discover
The Product
Use
The Product
Build Publicly
On The Product
W&B’s Growth Flywheel - Content

9. Be obsessive about optimizing it.
Manager,
Executive
3x user
base
Grow
2.1%
weekly
Userbase
● Weekly
● Engaged
● Cloud or Local users
Grow
Create
model
Fit &
deploy
model
Create
internal
platform
Manage
team
Academic,
Researcher
ML
Practitioner
ML Ops
Engineer
2. Set a northstar metric.

10. ● WEUs
● New Users per week
● New Users by channel
3. Start Measuring Everything Now

11. ● Find your PIC
● Behind every metric you want to move is
a decision you want the user to make.
Users

12. Intent
What problem are they
trying to solve?
Channel
Where are they
hanging out?
Persona
Who is
the user?
1. Find Your PIC

13. Carey
ML Practitioner
Build ML models to
solve business
problems, continuously
manage & improve
models for better
business outcome
Chris
MLOps
Manage ML
infrastructure, ensure
platform uptime,
security, model
governance, and
efficient resource
utilization
Morgan
CTO / CDO
Responsible for the
business outcome of
the company’s ML
activities, cultivate
data-driven culture &
tech competency
Adrian
ML Team Lead
ML budget owner,
response to business
needs & allocate team
resources to high-ROI
projects
Tim
Responsible AI
(emerging persona)
Govern & mitigate
risks from the
potential adverse
consequences
of decisions;
Responsible AI, AI
Ethics, Explainable AI
1. Find Your PIC

14. Train Models Discover Reports Write Report
User Journey – Creating a report
2. Behind every metric you want to move is a decision
you want the user to make.

15. Content Loop – Reports Published By Users

16. ● Finding good experiments to run
● How to run experiments?
Experiments

17. Quantitative - what is happening
Build mini models
Qualitative - why is it happening
Talk to customers/potential customers and aggregate answers
1. Finding good experiments to run

18. Other Communities
Twitter, Towards Data Science,
HN, MadeWithML
Github
Building and using repos
Google
Finding solutions
Kaggle
Building their portfolio,
learning new techniques
Academics
Grad Schools, Labs
Using
Complementary
Tools
HuggingFace, RayTune, PyTorch
Go where your core users are
1. Finding good experiments to run

19. Community Led Growth

20. Discover
The Repo
Use The Repo
Integration
Integrate Into
Public Repo
Oct 1
2019
Jan 1
2020
Apr 1
2020
Jul 1
2020
Oct 1
2020
Jan 1
2020
Apr 1
2021
Jul1
2021
Oct 1
2021
Jan 1
2022
Apr 1
2022
Jul 1
2022
W&B’s Growth Flywheel - Repos

21. 2. How to run experiments?

22. 1. The real job of a growth team is to build a machine
that gets better at running experiments over time

23. ● The real job of a growth team
● Create Playbooks. Productionize learnings.
Learnings

24. ● Data driven... and creative
● Know your user inside out
● Care about building in public
● Great writers or speakers
● Gumption, Grit, Honesty and Curiosity
● Talk to them about strategy & prioritization … constantly
How To Build A Growth Team

25. Users
Experiments
Flywheels
Learnings
FUEL: A Framework For Exponential Growth

26. Good Luck!
Twitter: @lavanyaai
Email: lavanyashukla@gmail.com