Laura Schaffer

Laura Schaffer went from a sales role at 50-person Bandwidth to building the growth engineering team at Twilio (cracking the top-50 employee tenure list) to VP of Growth at Amplitude -- a career built by creating roles that did not previously exist, making her framework for career diversification a product of direct experience, not theory. Their core argument: Career growth is not a straight line -- stay close to the customer, find insights others miss, and let diverse experiences build the foundation for later specialization. The evidence is specific: Bandwidth: joined in sales, noticed repetitive customer interactions, proposed self-serve e-commerce flow, created a new role for herself. Furthermore, twilio: started sharing customer insights in a digest, grew it into quarterly voice-of-customer sessions the CEO attended, pitched and built the growth engineering team. Amplitude: joined as VP of Growth on day two and a half of the episode recording -- another role change driven by opportunity and accumulated diverse experience. In Laura Schaffer's own words: "Career growth is definitely not a straight lineup, but there's definitely some frameworks and methods that have worked really well for me." (On career growth frameworks.)