Customer-Insight Career Leverage
Grow your career by pulling ground-level customer insights up to executives instead of waiting to be promoted
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Most people try to grow by working hard in their existing role, which caps them at their manager's ability and willingness to advocate for them and the role's explicit trajectory. Schaffer's alternative takes that power back: become the person who knows the customer, package those insights, and share them upward until you become the obvious owner of new opportunities. It builds an individual brand that survives manager changes and reorgs.
Origin
Laura Schaffer developed this at bandwidth (her first job, ~2010) where she noticed a repeated sales pattern and pitched building it as self-serve e-commerce, then scaled it at Twilio where she turned a Voice-of-the-Customer digest into a company-wide session attended by CEO Jeff Lawson. The 'ungate your knowledge' phrasing she credits to Elena Verna.
Core principles
- 01Working hard in-role limits you to your manager's advocacy and the role's built-in ceiling
- 02Executives are sharp but structurally disconnected from customers, so customer insight is a scarce, universally valued currency
- 03Insights that map to North Star metrics carry the most weight
- 04This supports your manager rather than working against them — it makes calibration promotions easier
- 05Ungate your knowledge: share skills and insights beyond your explicit role
How to run it
- 1
Get close to customers deliberately
In whatever role you hold, make it a personal policy to engage customers well and take notes not just on your own space but on broad pain points relevant to the business.
Pro tip This is accessible from any role — customer-facing teams talk to customers daily and already hold more insight than most of the org.
- 2
Package insights into a shareable digest
Write down what you hear and start sharing it. Schaffer's Voice-of-the-Customer notes became a digest people asked to be added to.
Pro tip Don't ask permission — just start doing it, the way she started sharing reports at Twilio.
- 3
Let it compound into a forum
As demand grows, host a recurring session (e.g. quarterly Voice-of-the-Customer) and pull in other people's insights so you become the curator, not just a contributor.
- 4
Recruit trusted internal advocates before the pitch
By the time you propose a new initiative, line up respected long-tenured colleagues who independently advocate for it so the 'meeting before the meeting' is already done.
- 5
Pitch the opportunity with data
Convert the accumulated insight into a concrete proposal — Schaffer used 'we think it's easy, it is not, here's the data' to pitch and win approval for Twilio's first growth team.
Watch out Not every idea gets a yes immediately; leaders want better ideas but won't follow all of them, so expect to not always get your way.
In the wild
Joining Twilio in product marketing for messaging with no growth team existing, Schaffer kept doing her job well while systematically learning customers. She heard that users struggled to get started — contradicting the company's high-conviction belief that Twilio was extremely easy. She started sharing a Voice-of-the-Customer digest that grew into a quarterly session CEO Jeff Lawson attended, establishing her as the customer expert within months.
→ With trusted early-employee Andre Crow independently advocating, her annual-planning pitch to start a growth team was approved 'almost very easily,' creating Twilio's growth engineering/product team.
Common mistakes
Grinding only inside your current role
You cap your growth at your manager's ability to advocate and the role's explicit trajectory, and you restart from zero when your manager leaves.
Framing it as going around your manager
This is meant to support the manager and accelerate their ability to promote you; positioning it as adversarial wastes its main benefit and creates conflict.
Is it for you?
Best for
Individual contributors in customer-facing or adjacent roles who feel overlooked and want to create their own advancement path
Not ideal for
Roles with zero customer exposure, or situations where you cannot share insight broadly across the org
From the transcript
“your executive team and executive teams at companies are often very sharp but the nature of their day-to-day just does not link them with customers”
“there's not a single leader or executive it isn't going to be stoked to hear about valuable customer insights that highlight problems they might not…”
“carve your own path don't necessarily assume your managers will give you the path that makes most sense for you”
“I pitched this idea hey we think that it's easy it is not here's data that I have”
“ungate your knowledge”
From the episode
Career frameworks, A/B testing mistakes, counterintuitive onboarding tips, selling to developers
Laura Schaffer (VP of Growth at Amplitude)