TPH Spotlight: Leah Tharin
Paving the way through Intellectual Honesty and a Growth Mindset
We’ve heard many stories about when people meet someone they hold in high regard, only to be disappointed because that person ends up not as kind, or not what we wanted them to be like. I think the saying is ‘never meet your heroes’. When I met Leah Tharin for the first time in person, that saying couldn’t have been more false.
I learned Leah was going to be speaking at a conference in Edinburgh called Turing Fest that I was also on the agenda for as a speaker. I had been following her to learn all things PLG for a while, like many of you likely are, and immediately gasped and showed my husband who I’d be meeting in person. His words: “Be chill. Nerd out. I know you’ll be awkward.” He knows how this goes. I sent her a message on LinkedIn asking for her take on something and she replied in …. under 5 minutes? I needed to kill the awkward before I saw her live.
Day one of the conference, she tapped me on the shoulder as she passed by to get to the keynote, and I of course, awkward-girl waved. I’ll spare the details of the rest of the time in Edinburgh (aside from a shameless selfie when you hit the bottom of this article), but Leah gave me her ear, her advice, her perspective, and most importantly her time. No matter how old we get, the experience we have in times like these with people we look up to helps us see the stuff real idols are made of.
For those of you who don’t know who Leah is, she’s become one of the most sought after minds in the world of product-led growth. This strategy has disrupted traditional growth models over the last 5 years in digital and tech, and continues to be a focus for many companies as we move towards more experience driven, customer centric models that fuel efficient growth.
Allow me to nerd out as we dive into what’s made this no-nonsense, class act who she is today.
Education & Professional Highlights
Born and Raised: Switzerland🇨🇭. Leah lived in Vienna, Austria 🇦🇹 for 2 years, which she recalls was a sobering experience due to the abrupt change of scenery from her sheltered life in the Swiss countryside. She was thrown into (for lack of a better term) adulting, faced with responsibilities she didn’t have before in a city where she had no connections.
Education: “My relationship with academia is torn” were the words she used when asked about her higher education. Nonetheless, she focused energy on the following:
Informatics (comparable to computer science) at a school in Switzerland, where they shortened theoretical study by a year in order to apply practice through an internship.
Human Interaction Design studies from a University of Applied Sciences.
We’ll focus on her professional experience at :
DeinDeal (Head of Product)
Smallpdf (Product Lead)
Jua (Head of Product & Growth)
*NEW* Solopreneur at www.LeahTharin.com
Founder and Seller of a Boardgame Cafe
Academia - what really stuck.
A question I ask guests for this series is how much of their college degree was put to good use. For Leah, she felt like a lot of it was pretty useless, noting that she can’t actively recall most of what she learned because it wasn’t attached to an actual problem in life she was able to practice with. Leah believes one of the best realizations was that she should focus more on how to work rather than what to work on.
For those in college or early in your career, Leah recommends the following:
“Learn how to learn and predict your performance. We expect young people to know what they want to do for the next 30 years in their careers when they definitely have no clue about it. You can mitigate this somewhat if you learn how to learn properly.”
I sense a little bit of a theme here with some product hearts, as my last spotlight on Josh McLaughlin also cites ‘learning how to learn’ as a critical skill!
Leah felt her time in school was heavily skewed towards achieving high grades instead of conflict solving - something she believes we all need to focus on as we grow in our careers.
Overall, she feels there are other ways to learn and become disciplined in your craft and career. Talking to people including your idols, and engaging with their world is one way. Leah notes that the way we learn is driven so much by what we enjoy, so finding passion is not just about the topic that interests you. Her example here is, of course, product-led growth. Some may look to her and feel as if she’s fascinated about the framework itself. Truth be told, she’s actually fascinated with the complex mechanics behind it and human behavior that drives decision making. This, she feels, lives in many disciplines. She notes that she wishes someone sat her down when she was younger and asked her a complex, yet simple question: “So Leah, what’s really driving your passion?”
Leah’s Two Core Values
Alright, we’re about to get a little real here. This, my friends, is one of the reasons I personally want to share more about the people behind the LinkedIn and social media posts. It’s easy to feel as if they have it all figured out. But it’s taken so much for them to get there between introspection, iteration, and execution.
Leah shared her core values are intellectual honesty and a growth mindset. The reason these are so important to her is because she believes she failed so spectacularly at them most of her professional life.
While discussing values, she also shares that her father is a pretty big influence on her life. He’s someone who operates with such honesty and openness with the world around him, is an extremely tough worker, never likes conflict, and never boasts about his achievements. He’s also selfless and lives for those around him.
For Leah, she went through some tough spots in her private and professional life where she vulnerably shares she bent the truth so she wouldn’t appear weak and therefore not deserving of affection. This, she felt was a complicated interplay between a not-so-perfect time in school as a child, and the good values she took from her dad. It influenced her far into her career and one day, she decided to face it head on and deal with it.
While she progressed professionally, and worked through her inner conflict, she still found it difficult to say the words “I don’t know”, feeling as if she couldn’t bear the thought of someone thinking she was clueless. I believe many of us know this feeling all too well, especially those in high visibility product seats. She, like many of us, felt as if she had to be an expert in everything. I think that’s a little thing called imposter syndrome. People either didn’t offer help because she hid it all so well, or they were maybe able to see through the charade.
She sums this part of our convo up by saying:
“This is a big problem in business. Your job usually is about enabling others, and being intellectually honest about what works and what doesn’t is part of it.”
She believes she made her own learning journey more difficult by not sharing at times that she simply did not know. It’s important for us to work on this early in our careers. Asking for assistance does not signal weakness - it actually creates trust and builds bridges, which increases empathy across an organization, and for the duration of your career.
Entering the Workforce as Technology Boomed
In 1999, Leah joined a bustling tech landscape as a UX Researcher - a field where there was little to limited information available to learn from at the time as it was so new (ProdOps people, sound familiar?). They were actually called Webdesigners at her job, and they did everything from design, site programming, analysis, and marketing of the site/product.
Leah remembered when her love for understanding complex user interfaces surfaced. Two critical events happened: Google was something new she bookmarked and it subsequently led her to delete her Altavista homepage (yes, I too did a double take when she said Altavista). And, this sort of important guy, Jakob Nielsen, came onto the scene talking about information architecture. It made her realize how everything is probably broken on web interfaces, and she wanted to understand and do more.
DeinDeal, Head of Product
In 2011, she landed her first Head of Product role at DeinDeal, who were going up against Groupon. Between working on upskilling herself and the trials and tribulations of startup life (14 hour days, 7 day weeks, hyper growth, small spaces and several office relocations) she learned a lot in the 7 months before the company was sold. And Leah also decided to exit when the ink was dry.
Takeaways: Many of us who have gone through startup life know what the highs and lows and learnings are. For Leah, she felt she was both ‘on’ all the time, but also fell into a ‘hole’ of corporate slowness. In this role she was able to make a meaningful connection with two individuals - Christoph and Andreas - who ended up lifting her up about a decade later in life.
Smallpdf, Product Lead
You’d think after her experience at DeinDeal she might not want to do #startuplife again. But in 2019, she was back at it at Smallpdf, thanks to Cristoph. At about $3 million in ARR, and millions of users, they were looking for someone to kick the product team into gear.
By the time she got to Smallpdf, she had already founded three startups. Three! She was very comfortable knowing in this new operator role she was brought in for that she would not have to lead so many people, but ended up managing the core product team of 11 at some point. Though managing and building at the same time was stressful, Leah laid the foundations for B2B at Smallpdf and the desktop application.
Perhaps it was her ‘always on’ experience at DeinDeal that helped her married with her founder experience, but she was able to help keep everything together during massive growth and pains of scaling the business day-to-day. Quick stats:
22 to 150 employees in her time
50,000,000 MAU
Core acquisition channels increased their efficiency over the years to convert active users into paying customers by almost 90%
One of the top 150 websites in terms of traffic worldwide at its peak
Takeaways: “the biggest gift I took from Smallpdf was my phenomenal friends and leadership role models that showed me how to think about business at scale, without grinding through people.”
Preach, Leah. Success can be achieved while having fun, and treating people with kindness.
Jua.ai, Head of Product
Leah is currently the Head of Product & Growth at Jua.ai, a company that leverages new tech and AI to deliver some of the most accurate weather predictions across Europe and America. In her seat she notes she has been able to bring all of her experience together, to rebuild a product organization of highly technical individuals who will lead the company into a new era.
In her time she helped the team go from a bit of technical chaos to build using outcome driven processes, while establishing a culture of autonomy through accountability.
Leah thought she had her work cut out for her at Smallpdf with the amount of data and complexity of the business and landscape, but at Jua it’s at a whole other level. These elements bring new challenges on the cost and product sides of the business which in turn impacts growth. Today as we face challenges and opportunities AI will bring, she believes we need to leverage new tech to be as predictable and reliable as we can for our customers.
Solopreneurship - in her bones.
Leah recently shared with her followers that she will be embarking on a new journey, thanks to her experience, learnings, and the support of those around her (who you’ll read about later). As she works on exiting Jua, she ramps up her own practice full-time, offering advisory services to those seeking how to build and grow through the product-led lens. Leah can’t wait to be able to geek out on this subject and she’s finally able to give herself the freedom and space to be available for those who will no doubt benefit from her expertise. It’s a huge accomplishment, and one well-earned.
Perhaps the most interesting part of Leah’s story to me so far is her time as a founder. In 2015, she founded a brick and mortar store and cafe with an online shop. This she said was what she wanted to do to counterbalance her tech endeavors at the time. Driven by the desire to dabble in experimentation and a strong passion from her childhood of board games, she learned so much more than she bargained for. She jokes that if we think tech is difficult, we should give retail and running a business on the side a shot as well. Leah’s business was cash flow positive in two years, and she sold it after 7 years. I personally believe the following were her best achievements in this role:
4.9 rating on Google at the time of sale
No employee churn in the 7 years the cafe was run
She chose to put people first: her customers, and those delivering the experience to them. She regrets that she never brought on a co-founder to help her out on the admin side of the business to take care of financials and deal with partners and distributors.
Shoutouts to these humans along her path:
Leah has already noted her father is a huge influence in her life, and that she has been given opportunities through several colleagues that have helped her become who she is today. Here are some other individuals she wishes to recognize and thank as she’s grown:
Ralph Gloor was her favorite math teacher during her school years. She said she’s very bad at math (same, sis) and didn’t know back then it was due to dyslexia, which makes it harder to comprehend complex mathematical concepts. Gloor was extremely patient, but with a no bs attitude and got straight to the point. Leah struggled in his class but he never made her (or any student) feel bad or incapable through his style and humor.
Stephanie Schoss, her CEO at IPM is who she admires for her extremely focused leadership style, business sense, and giving nature. This stuck with her long after her time there, and she leveraged a lot of what Leah learned from Stephanie by observing her later in her career when she started working hard at her imposter syndrome.
She learned a lot from Mike Pilawski, the former CPO of Smallpdf. Mike gave her the tough love and guidance Leah needed to understand strategy and how it intertwines with growth and product. He also gave her resources she refers to as ‘spot on’ that have helped her over the years.
Finally, some of you may know the name Elena Verna, or as Leah refers to her, “my friend, WHOOP buddy (fitness watch), and absolute advising beast around growth”. She credits her for teaching her how to run her own show and for paving the way for women like her (and so many others), through her work, presence, and impact on the product & growth community. She shared that Elena is always there when she needs someone, makes her laugh, and that they’re a tiny bit competitive with one another. A little friendly competition as we push past our boundaries never hurts!
Diving into Leah’s Product Heart
With each spotlight, I ask my guest to answer a few questions I hope will help both aspiring product hearts start their journey, and experienced ones think about theirs.
Here are Leah’s responses in her own words:
What advice would you give to Product Managers today?
Leah: “Product Management is an incredibly diverse field and one where you have to put your learning resources together for yourself. Forget academia or the “one” resource that gives it to you. It doesn’t exist. Learn as little as you need to gather practical experience… fail fast and find your preferred way of learning. For me it’s newsletters and podcasts. Substack, Beehiv, Medium they are all great resources if you just look into the right direction for an absolutely laughable price compared to what you can learn.”
By the way, Leah also has her own Substack in case you have not yet subscribed. Make your way over there.
What advice would you give to Product Growth professionals today?
Leah: “Understand the connection to retention and monetization. Specifically in growth you need to understand that growth is not just bringing people in. It’s about bringing the right people in and in the case of PLG, how to connect them as fast as possible to value and the famous “Aha” moment. You can only understand this wholly if you understand what your product does and how.”
What grounds you as a product person?
Leah: “The fact that I’m mostly wrong, and that’s ok. When I’m right, I compensate with enough upside to make up for it :).”
What do you remind yourself of on the hardest days in this space?
Leah: “Life is much more than the amount of followers or clients you have. Once you lose a friend or family member you’ll be grounded fast.”
Imagine someone waved a magic wand and allowed you to sit with YOU, at the beginning of your professional journey. What would you say to yourself, Leah?
Leah: “Stop upholding this ridiculous picture of yourself. Be yourself unconditionally. You deserve to be loved and if you put the work in, you’re actually quite good at what you do.”
What do you feel people coming up in our space should spend time learning about or doing?
Leah: “Strategy, business casing, and financials. If you don’t understand how a company fundamentally works and you just create “fancy” products you’re missing out. You can’t think big, you don’t understand what effects your changes have in a company and you keep yourself as a result artificially small.”
My hope with each spotlight I share with all of you is that it allows you to gain a bit of perspective you didn’t have before. Each of these individuals have given us a bit of wisdom through some vulnerability and reflection.
To Leah: I know I speak for your followers when I say a sincere thank you for your time and for what you’ve given our product community. Keep being real with all of us.
