5 learnings in 5 years as a Growth Analyst
Meet Pavel Hryshchenko, Growth Analyst, who recently celebrated 5 years in the company (we call it a Preplyversary!). Our curiosity was through the roof to find out what were his most valuable takeaways during this time. Let’s find out!
I joined Preply 5 years ago in the Growth Tribe, back when there were only about 30 people in the company. Looking back, it’s hard to believe that now there’s more than 333 of us in Preply! This rapid growth is quite unbelievable, especially given the high number of talented colleagues who joined us during this time from diverse backgrounds (we have over 44 nationalities now!). As the very first employee to move from our Ukrainian office to Barcelona, I witnessed the positive impact of such a diverse workplace first-hand.
There have been a lot of changes, or rather iterations, in the past years throughout the company: improving organizational structure, shifting focus markets, elevating the way Preply delivers learning experience to our customers, and much more. One thing that remained constant was our drive to improve and continue to learn.
Over the years, there have been more learnings that I can probably count, but here are my top five learnings during the past five years:
Make A/B testing your habit
It doesn’t matter what you think about a new feature — Always test it via A/B experiments before rolling it out to your audience. At Preply, we take pride in running lots of experiments, not only on the product side but also in CRM, Prospecting or Retargeting campaigns. This helps us to understand better the impact that different changes might have on our customers before we make the decision to implement it. For us, the whole purpose of experimentation is to build the best solutions for our learners so we try to do everything to improve their language learning experience.
Fail fast to win faster
At any given point, the probability of failure with your hypothesis is around 90% and unless you test it out, you won’t know if your specific idea will be in the top 10% that’s going to be successful. So one of my learnings has been to move fast and expose yourself to failures as fast as possible. If you can launch a quick test — do it today, so tomorrow you can test a new idea that might be the one that works!
Champion the company values
It’s imperative to embrace your company values to be truly ready for the wild ride! Especially when working in a company aiming to change the industry and going through a hyper growth stage, having a shared set of values strengthens your efforts. In years, I’ve realised just how much our values supported me in building a strong understanding how my daily tasks tie in with bringing value to our customers.
Think opportunities, not problems
I would say that the mindset shift when approaching challenges is something that I’ve improved significantly for myself since joining Preply. Everyone here has a growth mindset so I have been continuously inspired by the people around me to always think broader and find opportunities where others see problems.
Put people first to build a strong foundation
The diversity of people who are working at Preply is the key to the success not just for our product, but also for effective collaboration and creating a nice work environment. I’ve met a lot of interesting people, worked with talented colleagues, and even made great friends here. The combination of different cultures, experiences, and individuals is what makes Preply the place to be!
You can be next in line to celebrate a Preplyversary with us!
We’re actively looking for talented candidates to join us in building the most effective language learning platform to help customers across the world to learn languages more effectively. So if you’re excited by this challenge apply to one of our open positions!
