Grow meaningful products
By leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.
I’m Kate Syuma – a Founder at Growthmates, Growth Advisor, ex-Miro Head of Growth Design, where I started as a founding member in a Growth Team, and passed through hypergrowth from Startup (50 people) to Series C Unicorn (≈2000 people, $17.5B valuation).
Being in Product Growth for 6+ years, I continuously sought to connect with industry leaders to gain fresh perspectives and insights.
This personal aspiration became the foundation for Growthmates – a platform for learning from industry leaders and an advising practice that guides companies in growing meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.
Clients & Podcast Guests
Build Product-led Growth and advised companies like:
1:1 Coaching / Mentorship clients coming from companies like:
Growthmates podcast, newsletter, and reports featured leaders from companies like:
Services
For Businesses: helping you grow meaningful products by leveraging PLG and enhancing UX quality, together.
Activation & User Onboarding Audit
Uncover growth opportunities and improvements to drive Activation metrics with uplifting UX quality of the entire Onboarding experience.
- End-to-end audit of activation and onboarding flows
- Past experiments analysis to uncover new iterations
- Uncovering UX improvements
- Hypotheses for growth opportunities – “quick wins” and “big bets”
- Prioritisation and execution reviews
- Live sessions with the team
- Access to best practices database
Starts at $6,500 ($5,000 for early-stage startups)
Tell about your challengeGrowth Advising (PLG, Research, UX) on a retainer basis
Personalised frameworks and best practices for your team to drive your Product Growth holistically (Activation, Retention, ARR) with levelling up product quality and team expertise.
- Weekly sessions and async collaboration hours
- Workshops to co-create growth strategies and solutions
- Defining the optimal teams structure and support hiring for the Growth & Product Org
- Holistic UX analysis of the product to uncover improvements and raise the quality bar
- Analysing your Product, ICP, Business model to uncover growth opportunities across Activation, Retention, Monetisation
- Up-skilling the existing teams on PLG, UX and User Research
- Improving team processes (OKRs Traction, Design Reviews, Learn & Iterate sessions)
Starts at $8.000/mo
Tell about your challengeGrowth Team Workshop / AMA-sessions
Empower your team with new tools like 5-step Growth Framework and Growth Design Sprint. Get a fresh perspective with facilitated Q&A sessions.
Starts at $2,500
Send inquiryGrowthmates Podcast & Newsletter Sponsorship
Feature your product to the engaged audience on Growthmates podcast, newsletters, and industry reports. Current sponsor is Appcues.
Starts at $2,000
Send inquiryNeed ad-hoc support?
Book 1 advising session for your burning questions to get some insights ASAP.
Starts at $590 / 1-hour session
Book a sessionFor Individuals: get guidance to progress in your career to leadership position and advance your expertise in PLG.
1:1 Coaching / Mentorship
For individuals and leaders in teams who’re seeking guidance to foster career growth, IC→ Leadership transition, and want to receive regular feedback to improve their work.
*package from 8 sessions
for 2+ months period
Self-Service Onboarding Course
Get frameworks to improve your user onboarding that becomes the base for your product growth.
Next cohort:
2-25 September, 2024
Experience
10 years of experience in creating and scaling digital products, including over 6 years dedicated to Product-led Growth.
I’ve been a Head of Growth Product Design at Miro and spent over 6 years. I’ve been part of a founding Miro Growth Team from Startup at Seed round (50+ people) to Series C Unicorn (2000+ people), built a team of 10+ members for the Growth stream, was a part of Growth Leadership, created experiences for the whole funnel from Activation to Monetisation, and built new verticals like Miroverse.
Key outcomes from my 6 years at Miro:
1. Covered the entire funnel in Growth
Covering Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Monetisation, and Community Platforms that led to sustainable ARR growth.
2. Scaled the Growth and Design functions
From one team to a business unit of 5 sub-streams in Growth (170+ individuals), scaled design team from 1 to 11 people, hired ICs and Group leaders for Growth.
3. Created and validated 200+ experiments
Drove key business metrics for the whole funnel from Activation to Monetisation.
4. Introduced User Research processes in a Startup
Conducted over 10 research projects to drive new strategic launches: Mind Map, Visual Notes, Smart search, and Notifications.
5. Built 0 → 1 experiences like Miroverse
Led and strategized design efforts for “0 to 1” strategic initiatives, such as Miroverse, Self-serve Monetization, and Onboarding experience.
6. Activation and virality metrics x2 growth
Improved Sharing experience to support a multi-player collaboration use case that led to x2 virality metrics growth.
7. From Free Trial to Freemium Redesign
Redesigned business model from Free Trial to Freemium that supported future product scale from 1 to 50+ mln users.
8. Established Growth team processes
Hiring processes, Experiments reflections, Design and Product Reviews, Sprints, User Research and Discovery.
Case Studies & Collaborations
The Evolution of Miro Onboarding
How the approach evolved with examples and key learnings across 3 phases:
Phase 1: Startup learnings [50 people, 1 million users]
Phase 2: Hyper-Growth and Big Bets [150 → 1000 people, 3 → 10 million users]
Phase 3: Growth at scale and the power of smart iterations [≈1,800 people, ≈50 million users]
Bonus: The approach to the activation metric and how to define it.
Antler VC: Supported 10+ early-stage startups
Supported 10+ startups worldwide as a part of the Antler advisory community for almost a year. Provided advice on introducing PLG strategy, uncovering opportunities for business growth with focus on establishing high-quality UX. Focused on early-stage startups in European markets.
Grammarly. A series of AMA-sessions with Growth stream.
Hosted a series of AMA-sessions with Grammarly Growth Team to provide actionable advice and best practices with the focus on Activation, User Onboarding, and building Growth team processes at scale.
Manychat (Series A) — Growth Advising
Hosted a series of AMA-sessions with Grammarly Growth Team to provide actionable advice and best practices with the focus on Activation, User Onboarding, and building Growth team processes at scale.
Tutorful (Series A): Onboarding Audit
Conducted a holistic audit of Onboarding journeys, identified key CR to registration opportunities with tackling UX issues. Helped the team understand key user behaviour patterns and shape a robust growth-centric roadmap for Activation flows to increase CR to registration and Activation metrics.
