Growth is at the heart of every product success story

On September 29, 2016 an online talk was organized with the tech lead of Facebook Messenger’s Growth team Zorayr Khalapyan at Microsoft Innovation Center Armenia. The talk was organized within scopes of HyeTech Talks, which is a platform where speakers from successful companies like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Cisco, Amazon, etc share their personal experiences on how they build world-class products, how they apply technologies at a scale of billion users, how they do business in Silicon Valley. The aim is to share Silicon Valley engineering and business culture with HyeTech network as well as the Armenian technology community and startups.

The talk gathered more than 80 developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, interested in this topic, who made an online connection to Zorayr, located in Silicon Valley. Zorayr marveled at learning engineering fundamentals and building things, and that path took him through classes at Stanford, Harvard, winning first at a national level Java competition, majoring in CS at UCLA, interning at Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and eventually starting on Messenger as an iOS engineer. 

The speaker shared some of his learnings about growth and gave the participants a few helpful tips on improving your growth strategy.  Zorayr started his presentation, highlighting the importance of the growth, in particular the factor that apps don't grow on their own and most successful companies have a specific strategy. He introduced the growth terminology and basic levers: customer acquisition, activation, customer retention, churn and resurrection with real examples. During his presentation he stressed the significance of finding right growth tactics for the right market. The talk was followed by a very interesting and useful Q&A session, during which representatives of various teams, startups and companies asked his opinion on growth tactics and common mistakes of early-stage startups, specifics of small markets etc.

The talk was put together with support of Davit Baghdasayan at Microsoft innovation center Armenia