In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58).
Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05).
In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success.
In this episode of The Breakout Growth Podcast, Sean Ellis interviews Tally’s Vice President of Growth, Mark Powlen. Tally offers an automated debt manager, which analyzes a user’s financial profile to determine the best and fastest way to pay down credit card debt. Their algorithm finds the lowest available interest rates and leverages an integrated credit line to saves customers money as they reduce their debt. Tally only makes money when their customers derive this value, and this deliberate “alignment with users” is an underlying theme of Tally’s breakout growth success story (24:58).
Making users less stressed and better off financially is the company’s mission, and to make this actionable the company has built teams and processes around a North Star Metric that focuses on how quickly users are getting out of debt (23:40). This informs and drives a test, learn and adapt growth approach driven by Tally’s dedicated growth team, but embraced company-wide (13:05).
In this episode, we will learn how Tally drives growth through cross-functional alignment and how intentional growth leadership has made this possible even as the company has grown to a team of 132 employees from just 8 four years ago. We will also dig deep into Mark’s approach to high-velocity experimentation and learn how the development and prioritization of tests leverage quantitative learnings from analytics paired with qualitative information from user research and customer support feedback loops. For fans of Sean Ellis’ “Hacking Growth” this episode will certainly resonate, as Mark and his team have embraced the book’s key principles on their way to breakout growth success.
We discussed:
How lessons of the last financial crisis have helped Tally through Covid-19 and why demand is increasing through the crisis (7:25)
Why the emotional triggers of debt-induced stress have driven the market to embrace Tally as a trusted solution (11:45)
The rapid data-driven experimentation process driving growth, and how ideation and prioritization are tied to the company’s North Star Metric (28:48)
How Tally’s growth engine is fueled by word-of-mouth, incentivized referrals, PR, and paid channels (15:30)
The challenges of asking for personal information early in the funnel to show users value (34:04)
The importance of reducing scope in the experimentation process to drive the velocity of improvements
How lessons of the last financial crisis have helped Tally through Covid-19 and why demand is increasing through the crisis (7:25)
Why the emotional triggers of debt-induced stress have driven the market to embrace Tally as a trusted solution (11:45)
The rapid data-driven experimentation process driving growth, and how ideation and prioritization are tied to the company’s North Star Metric (28:48)
How Tally’s growth engine is fueled by word-of-mouth, incentivized referrals, PR, and paid channels (15:30)
The challenges of asking for personal information early in the funnel to show users value (34:04)
The importance of reducing scope in the experimentation process to drive the velocity of improvements
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