How can product leaders balance focus and innovation to sustain high-growth trajectories as their businesses scale to new heights? In this episode of Product Talk hosted by Sid Shaik, Vonage Product VP Amitha Pulijala speaks on her experience scaling B2B product businesses. She shares how Vonage’s suite of products help businesses personalize customer conversations across touchpoints. Amitha discusses inheriting a business with 5,200 customers and prioritizing success metrics and experimentation. She led growth efforts post-acquisition that increased revenue 10x through disciplined focus. Amitha emphasizes the importance of product-led growth driving sales leads. She also stresses sustaining growth through alignment with vision and adapting strategies to growth stages.
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Show Notes
- Scaling requires defining clear success metrics and conducting rapid, data-driven experimentation.
- Disciplined growth comes from focusing on core capabilities and logical adjacencies.
- Growth levers include increasing wallet share, market share, and tapping new customer segments.
- The strategy depends on a company’s product, customers, and growth goals.
- Product-market fit and ease of use are crucial for driving organic growth.
- Layering product-led and sales-led motions reaches both self-serve and enterprise customers.
- Product usage data informs the sales funnel and motion from self-serve to sales outreach.
- A growth mindset across the organization is needed, with leadership driving alignment.
- Sustaining growth requires continuously setting and achieving new, ambitious targets.
- Scaling strategies that worked early on can become barriers to future growth.
- Discipline involves a long-term focus on sustainability over quick gains.
- Growth stages determine which strategies to apply at a given time.
- Generative AI is transforming customer engagement and experience.
- 5G enables new immersive and remote use cases across industries.
- Company culture is as important as other factors for business success.
- One size does not fit all – scaling approaches vary across companies.
- Early focus was on features but culture and unit economics ensure longevity.
- Masters of Scale shares valuable scaling lessons from top tech companies.
- Continuous improvement and aiming higher keeps the growth engine running.
- Defining discipline involves focus on core areas rather than spreading too thin.
About the speaker
Amitha is the Vice President of Product at Vonage where she is driving the strategy and vision for Vonage’s Customer engagement solutions. Amitha enjoys working with dynamic teams to launch scalable products and loves exploring new technology. Amitha is a product leader who believes that the product success comes by having a clear vision combined with powerful storytelling, a data-driven experimentation mindset and an undeniable customer obsession.
About the host
Sid is a seasoned Product Leader in the Data Platforms domain. At present, he runs Product at Cloudera for its fastest growing product line, Private Cloud Data Services. Prior to Cloudera, he co-founded a Silicon Valley startup-- Performance Sherpa; his company built performance engineering workflow automation for databases and middleware. Prior to those roles, he worked at Yahoo!, Qubole, Asterdata and Oracle in various Product and Engineering roles. As a Product Manager, Sid loves the creative process of discovering, defining and solving meaningful technology problems in large markets and enjoys scaling product businesses. In his down time, he enjoys taking his kids to soccer practice, he practices yoga, and advises startups.