HubSpot - 🍕 How Wistia earned absurd growth

Lesson 1: Sometimes, just go with your gut.

"Two-pizza team" is a Jeff Bezos term that describes a scrappy business strategy. Basically, your teams should be small enough to suffice on two pizzas. That's roughly five to eight people. (Unless, of course, one is a college student. Then it’s about one to two people haha.)

After years of over-processed approaches, Savage put Bezos' philosophy into practice. 

Before switching to two-pizza teams, Wistia released 12 product updates annually. This included a new webinar tool and new interactive video elements like in-video quizzes.

After restructuring its product teams and simplifying its strategies in 2023, Wistia released 72 updates — 6X over the year before.

How? By turning away from flawless road maps and exceptional internal comms, and toward innovating based on customer feedback every two weeks. 

"This change fostered a more dynamic approach to product development and feedback, and it encouraged constant evolution and learning within the teams," Savage tells me. 

His two-pizza teams consist of product managers, designers, tech leads, and engineers. At their core, they work like a small business within a business.

"The key to innovation is building these small teams that work the way a startup can — in fast sprints," he says.

That's the how. But what I find most interesting is the why: Before, Savage says his employees consistently pitched bulletproof, data-driven projects — but the instinct-driven items, often based on limited customer feedback, were ignored. 

"The ideas might've had very little data, so they were never at the top of the list,” he says. “But it turns out some of those ideas were the most impactful. It's completely changed Wistia as a business."

If your employees are endlessly updating internal docs and polishing fancy slide decks to pitch to leadership, you might want to ask: Is all of this getting in the way of driving bigger impact?

Lesson 2: If a few people like something, go build it.

Savage has a hot take: If you can get 10 people to love your product, you can get a thousand people to love it. 

He's so confident in this concept that he claims there's "no need for further testing" once you've proven a few people think it's a good idea: "We tend to underestimate how universal an experience can be, and we rely too heavily on quantitative data."

Sometimes, instinct-driven ideas are unvoiced because you don't feel you have the data to back them up. But if you rely too heavily on quantitative data, you risk ignoring real-time feedback that could lead to your next great idea. (Uber famously started with very little data to support its concept.)

"Zone in on your first happy customers, figure out what they like — and keep doing it."

Lesson 3: Go all-in on what's working to grow faster.