AMA: SurveyMonkey Senior Director, Head of Product & Lifecycle Marketing, Morgan (Molnar) Lehmann on Growth Product Marketing

Honestly, I might be the wrong person to ask here, because SurveyMonkey has never had a dedicated growth PMM on our product marketing team — even as we scaled to having both product and solutions marketing. So take my answer with that caveat. 😅 That said, we've tried a few different models over the years, and I have some genuine opinions about what's worked. Model 1: Shared responsibility by product area For a long time, we had PMMs aligned to product areas, and if growth experiments were runnin ...Read More

This one is close to home! SurveyMonkey has a massive free user base, and converting a meaningful percentage of those users to paid plans is genuinely one of the more interesting challenges in growth product marketing. So here's what I've learned. It comes down to segmentation and personalization. You can't just slap conversion messaging on your whole free base and call it a day. That's how you train users to ignore you (or worse, resent you). What actually works is understanding who your free u ...Read More

This is a really natural evolution in a company's growth journey, and also one of the harder internal pivots to pull off cleanly. Most companies start with a heavy emphasis on acquisition. You're building a user base, proving product-market fit, filling the funnel. But at some point, the math starts shifting. Maybe you're not hitting top-of-funnel targets with your current budget. Maybe you have a large, underleveraged base that represents a more efficient path to revenue than expensive new user ...Read More

There's a principle I'd start with here: growth experiments should almost never take you away from your core brand experience. If you're designing an experiment that would fundamentally change what your product feels like, you probably need to rethink the experiment. The exception is if you're intentionally running a brand experiment — but that's a very different thing, and you should know that's what you're doing going in. The way I think about maintaining coherence while still adapting for dif ...Read More

This question is particularly interesting for a horizontal product like SurveyMonkey, where the use cases span from a student doing a class project all the way to an enterprise running continuous employee listening across thousands of people. That range means no single framework does all the work. Different frameworks are actually better predictors at different stages of the customer journey. For conversion, ICP is king. Knowing which roles, industries, and segments are most likely to convert is ...Read More

Growth loops get talked about a lot in PLG circles, and there's a tendency to assume that any product with high exposure automatically has a strong viral loop. SurveyMonkey is a good case study in why that's not always true. The most obvious loop on paper is the survey end page. Every survey taker sees it, the exposure is enormous, but we've found that intent coming from that channel is extremely low. Someone filling out a survey isn't in a "I should create surveys" mindset. High reach, low conv ...Read More