B2B Growth for Scaleups. leahtharin.com

B2B Product-led Growth & Sales

Honest, sometimes funny, battle-tested cross-functional Growth & Product insights, board member, growth advisor.

I love working in the operational details with my clients and am an Innovation Product & Growth Nerd.

I run PLG and PLS cohorts at Maven:
https://maven.com/leah-tharin/productledgrowth

and wrote Leah's Product-led Growth Guide:
https://www.leahtharin.com/p/the-product-led-growth-guide

www.leahtharin.com -> (Blog, Podcast, Guides, Rates to work with me. contact)

Leah Tharin

Gary is hiring a Retention Growth PM currently in my team at Usercentrics. Help us find a great candidate for this role. 🙏

I can honestly say that working with Gary (and his team!) is an absolute delight, and I wish I had a caring manager like him when I was younger. You'll learn a lot while working on something where you can actually meaningfully change things.

I would like to confirm that this is not the same Gary that I'm featuring in my Gary from Sales memes, in case you were wondering. 😀 My Gary here has a serious meme game, and we battle daily to see who's funnier.

So if you know a thing or two about retention, please join us, we really need you!

Director of Growth Product Management @ Usercentrics | Driving Growth Strategies | Retention & Expansion

🚀 I'm hiring a Retention Growth Product Manager

You’ll own retention outcomes end-to-end, from churn insights to shipped product initiatives that drive GRR, NRR, and retained ARR.

You’ll work on in-product engagement, cancellation flows, experiments, and win-back, partnering closely with Growth, Product, Engineering, Design, and Data.

If you love data-driven problem-solving and building products that keep customers, let’s talk.

📍 Candidates must be based in Munich or Lisbon.
👉 Apply or DM me
🔁 Referrals welcome
#hiring #productmanagement #retention #growth #saas

Growth Product Manager – Retention (m/f/d) & 1 other

Buğra Gündüz

CEO @ HockeyStack (YC S23) 🖤🏒

We build AI agents that increase revenue by centralizing customer data and understanding what drives revenue. Backed by Bessemer, General Catalyst, Y Combinator, et al. We hire exceptional outsiders that want to win. Email me at bugra@hockeystack.com if you're one of them.

Co-Founder & CEO

996 is performative. The first two years of HockeyStack, I slept 4 hours a night. I didn't drink water. I didn't eat. I survived on coffee. It was bad for me and worse for the company.

At the start of the startup journey, you don't truly understand how long it's going to take. No matter what other founders, investors, or advisors tell you.

Everyone says it's going to take ten years, but you're young and ambitious and you disregard that advice and act like it's a sprint. You think that if you can sprint to your Seed round, you can sprint to a million dollars in ARR, you can sprint to your Series A — it's all going to be okay.

But the problems in your startup only get larger over time. It never gets easier. The stakes get bigger, your competition gets bigger.

You must design your life to endure the journey. I had lots of habits that were destructive for my health and for my mind, and I was only doing those things because I thought if I just got to the next milestone, it would be OK. That meant I would go to sleep at 11pm and wake up at 3am and I would feel like shit the whole day. Do you think I made great decisions in that state?

Founders need to be thinking about everything long term. Not just trying to survive the day and move on.

If you have a deadline coming up tomorrow that requires you to skip sleep or work yourself into the ground, that deadline itself is the problem you need to solve. The fact that you're not eating, not sleeping, not drinking water, sacrificing your health and social life? That's a structural problem in how you're running your company.

People glamorize the unhealthy founder lifestyle because you're "in grinding mode." But it's performative. What's actually good for your company is you being healthy and in the best mental state possible to make the best decisions.

That's the only way to survive.

CEO @ HockeyStack -- Building AI agents for sales & marketing

Today, HockeyStack is introducing World’s first custom GTM Agent platform that understands your data, self-improves, and runs on Nex-LM — HockeyStack’s AI Model for GTM: 

2 years ago, we completely shifted the way Marketing Intelligence worked with an action-based model that is fundamentally different than how CRMs collect data, a custom report builder, an AI analyst, lift reports, custom attribution models, cookieless tracking, and more. 

Last year, we introduced Account Intelligence and Workflows — growing 50% faster than Marketing Intelligence while delivering topline revenue to our customers. 

This year, we are turning our big bet into reality: HockeyStack will be where GTM teams build, launch, and scale GTM agents across Marketing, Sales, and Post-sales. 

Together with our Agent Builder, we are releasing 14 out-of-the-box agents and the first AI model built for GTM — Nex-LM. 

Nex-LM understands how you run GTM — pipeline, deals, patterns between top-performers, your product, upsells, and more. 

So you don’t have to explain, coordinate, or chase execution.

The agents just work.

This is GTM that runs itself. 

And finally Makes Space To Think.

You cannot delegate any part of company strategy to AI.

The strategy of a company is a vague problem. 

That is not really an optimization problem. It's an opinion problem. 

You might have many different strategies that are correct, and if you delegate larger strategy work to AI, you're going to get something that humans and organization do not agree with.

Humans are needed to build accountability around the strategy, and build consensus around the strategy and the organization. And the leadership team needs to be confident that the strategy is correct based on what they've seen in the past.

When you tell your team, “Hey, go to Claude and draft me a marketing strategy document and tell me what our marketing strategy should be like”,  that is a bad thing that AI should never do. It will not work.

A lot of leaders won't admit that they're doing this, but they're doing it in small little ways every single day.

Nobody told me this when I started the company:
I'm a builder at heart. I come from an engineering background. I've been coding since I was 9 years old, and I built digital products throughout primary school, middle school, and high school. That's how HockeyStack got started.

One by one, as the company gets successful, all the things that made you initially start the company get stripped away and replaced with other duties. You have two choices:

One, you can adapt to that change and become a people leader—a good manager, a listener to your employees. You can become good at clarifying your vision and allowing everybody to follow.

Or you choose to remain a builder, and you're not a CEO at that point. You're just an engineer or a product manager working at the company.

Nobody told me that. You go in feeling like, "Let me just build something people want and sell it to people and the company will be successful." But a lot of the problems we're dealing with today and that we dealt with over the last year were mostly people problems rather than building-things problems.

You need to scale yourself and you need to allow the team to perform at the level that you perform at. And that is fucking hard.

You have to grow up. You can’t be just a builder forever.

Most startups die because of fear.
I’ve noticed that I was sitting on a lot of decisions that I was afraid to make really early on, and I started a ritual:

Every weekend, I grab a notebook, head to a cafe, and write down the decisions I'm afraid to make. The ones I've been sitting on. The ones I keep avoiding.

That's it.

As a founder, you almost always know what you need to do next. Or at least what you need to do to learn more.

You're just not doing it and hide behind excuses.

When you avoid decisions out of fear, you're slowly killing your company.

Make the call. Move forward. Repeat.

We completely changed our product strategy this year.

At the start of 2025, our plan was simple: build a foundational data structure, then layer lots of applications on top to cover the entire revenue organization.

Then we started working with AI agents.

And we realized something: you don't need 20 different applications to go broad across an organization. You need a few incredibly powerful core applications that can serve multiple use cases at once.

Our Blueprints feature is the perfect example.

One piece of infrastructure now powers:

- Predictive marketing capabilities
- Revenue forecasting
- Intent scoring
- Attribution models
- Self-learning AI agents

Same core ML infrastructure. Multiple business-critical use cases.

This realization forced us to flip our entire approach:

Instead of thin infrastructure + thick applications, we're building thick infrastructure + flexible applications.

It's counterintuitive, but the future isn't more tools. It's smarter infrastructure that adapts to whatever you need it to do.

When you're deploying AI agents for a customer, it's dangerous to listen to only VPs and managers. They're not lying intentionally, but often the process they want to automate doesn't actually exist within their company.

The sales reps are executing a completely different process than what their manager describes. So when you build the "ideal" workflow the VP outlined, the reps don't adopt it. The agent fails.

This is why most AI agent deployments don't work.

What you had to do instead: build tools that discover process from existing data, rather than just interviewing leadership. Someone from your team has to embed with the company, talk to both the managers AND the AEs, look at the actual data, and marry all of that together.

Otherwise you're automating a fantasy process that nobody actually follows.

👇 ~15% of our revenue in our record-breaking Q4 was "Reconnect" deals generated by this agent.

It finds the closed lost deals to revive, finds the best next steps, creates tasks for your team, executes autonomous outreach, and informs you and your team with a revival report in Slack. All before your alarm goes off in the morning. 

"I found 3 high‑priority revival opportunities. Top signals: repeat website intent + leadership/funding changes. I created follow‑ups for the owners—check the task queue for details."

Reply "CLOSED LOST" if you want to see how I set it up.

taplio

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Buğra Gündüz

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taplio

The Battle

Leah Tharin

Buğra Gündüz

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Posts

Engagements

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Leah Tharin's LinkedIn Performance

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