Behind-the-scenes on Typeform for Growth: Q&A with Typeform’s CPO and CRO

Keeping with our history of refining and redefining online engagement, we’ve newly released Typeform for Growth — a suite of new capabilities designed to help companies capture and convert more customers with an end-to-end solution. 

You might be thinking: ”Sounds great, but why exactly did Typeform build these new features? How did they go about the process? What makes Typeform for Growth special?” 

So, we sat down with our Chief Product Officer Aleks Bass and Chief Revenue Officer Kristen Habacht — two of the driving forces behind the creation and launch of Typeform for Growth — to get the inside scoop on the latest innovation.  

Aleks: Over the last year we’ve really honed in on our target customer and focused on deeply understanding their needs. Typeform is moving from innovating on the form as the main source of value, to focusing on solving complete use cases for specific customers.  In this case, Typeform for Growth is a solution to help GTM teams with lead  generation and orchestration. The other “why now” reason is simply because now we can — technology and AI have evolved to the point where it’s possible to synthesize conversational data at scale, connect to many different sources of data, and automate workflows more effectively than ever before.  

Kristen: Today’s market is more challenging than what many of us have experienced. Competition is fierce, buyers are holding their purse strings tighter, and consumer companies like Amazon, Spotify, and Netflix — as well as social platforms like TikTok and Instagram — have raised the bar for personalized experiences in the B2B world. Businesses are having to find new ways to be faster, more engaging, and more relevant to capture buyer attention and interest. It’s not just about getting a fish on the line, but about being able to pull that fish into the boat efficiently. GTM teams are looking for solutions that can do that all in one place at a reasonable price. So, we built Typeform for Growth to help solve this problem.

Kristen: As a revenue leader, what makes me excited about Typeform for Growth is twofold. First, most companies are hacking together tools MacGyver style. This results in data fragmentation that makes it impossible to understand your customers holistically, and creates cracks in the funnel that customers inevitably slip through. So, what do you get? GTM inefficiencies and revenue leakage. Typeform for Growth has capabilities that replace the need for multiple tools — streamlining your GTM tech stack in a way that allows data to flow across tools and leads to move seamlessly through a unified funnel. It’s a more intuitive, connected way to generate leads. Second, with Typeform for Growth you can unlock something that many companies haven’t figured out yet when it comes to improving engagement with your customers — which is how to turn every interaction into a personalized experience. 

Aleks: Let me double-click on how this works at a features-level, starting with the more engaging experience that Kristen is talking about. Typeform for Growth offers all-new video capabilities — giving you a new format to engage your audience in a way that makes them feel like they’re actually interacting with a human instead of a static form. It puts a face to your brand in a whole new way. What’s more, automated data enrichment enables you to replace the basic form questions with meaningful ones, so that you can increase completion rates, while getting deeper insights. Spam prevention with reCAPTCHA ensures all leads that come through the door are valuable to your business. Then with native scoring, qualification, and routing, you can put every lead into the right flow, even with incredibly high lead volume — which you can’t do with other form-building software. Finally, AI-powered reporting and analysis opens up opportunities to look at responses people have given you over time and identify patterns and insights. You can funnel these insights outside of Typeform and into your other systems to inform everything from your GTM approach to product development.

Aleks: One of the reasons we’re so excited to bring our customers Typeform for Growth is that it’s the first solution to market that combines forms with video questions, data enrichment, the ability to create and automate workflows, and AI analysis. It’s is the only offering that brings these capabilities together to specifically improve lead generation in one end-to-end solution. 

Kristen: Zooming out to the bigger picture, Typeform for Growth keeps the human at the center of everything. Right now there’s a trend of trying to remove humans from processes and implement AI instead — which works brilliantly for things that computers are better at, like analyzing large data sets, but falls short in other areas. We built these capabilities to optimize the experience for both the creator and the respondent. It supports users with automation and AI in the right places, while prioritizing the creation of moments for connection between companies and their customers. Now with multimodality — meaning integrating multiple methods of communication — you can use text, images, audio, video to create a richer, more dynamic and human-centered way to engage depending on what the scenario calls for, just like in the real world.

Aleks: Absolutely. As Kristen said, we stayed true to our human-first approach, and we also wanted to fill a gap in the market — currently the small- and mid-market is being priced out of achieving a best-in-class, efficient lead gen workflows. Multiple tools have to be strung together, and when you’re relying on multiple tools at higher price points, the cost and complexity adds up. So, we wanted to make the power of these capabilities available for the businesses that need it most. This means you can streamline your customer acquisition process with the most impactful features, tailored to your current needs and scale, that will grow with you.

Aleks: Blending research and design is something I am incredibly passionate about because, when executed well, it results in breakthrough products. At Typeform, we integrate various market and business perspectives across teams and customer touchpoints into our development process. This holistic approach allows us to pinpoint product priorities with precision and execute strategies effectively. Often in product development, an idea may gain general acceptance, but by the time it is built and released, it can become disconnected from actual customer needs. That’s why maintaining consistent customer touchpoints throughout the development process is crucial. Additionally, staying aligned with our go-to-market (GTM) partners and the broader business is essential. If we build something customers asked for but it’s not selling or being adopted, that signals an opportunity for improvement. By ensuring that our process is driven by customer feedback and market insights, we create products that truly resonate with our users. This method not only keeps us focused on actual needs but also ensures that what we build is both relevant and impactful.

Kristen: Typeform has built a business around the concept of understanding customers. Our approach to innovation reflects this philosophy, ensuring customer listening and feedback drives our development process. Then when we actually go to build, design is front and center. The way people interface with technology is through design — so we believe intentionally designing the experience to be intuitive, beautiful, and enjoyable will improve the impact of your product. 

Aleks: At the root of it is the fact that we all want the same outcome — to create better products that create better impact for our customers, ultimately driving a positive trajectory for our company and customers over time. Our different functions have different lenses, but if we bring those lenses together we can make better decisions. Instead of coming from a place of friction and conflict, we approach it as, “Here’s the information I have. There’s the information you have. Let’s put it together and come up with a joint approach that we can operationalize for our mutual success —  because there is no road to success for anyone at Typeform without collaboration.” To operationalize it, we’re doing a couple key things: 1) Kristen and I maintain a strong relationship with open communication, so that we have a forum for discussion and alignment; 2) we bring our teams together at a regular customer sync meeting — which makes it less of a “GTM thinks X, Product thinks Y” and instead centralizes us on what the customers want; 3) we have ongoing touchpoints with key GTM partners around the roadmap and plans for what we think we’ll be doing in the future, so we can get their feedback. When developing Typeform for Growth, this was especially valuable because Kristen’s GTM team is the ICP we’re targeting with our new features, so learning from them about pain points and making sure the product we’re building aligns to goals of GTM teams everywhere made all the difference. 

Kristen: Love all of that. The piece I would add is that I often hear: “Typeform is a product-led growth (PLG) company, so that means product must make the decisions in isolation from GTM.” This is a huge misperception that many companies are getting wrong. I want to clarify and underscore that PLG is at its best when these two teams do exactly what Aleks just said — they come from the customer-centric perspective and align on solving customer problems together, both in terms of product development and go-to-market. The PLG part is about the customer journey — it’s not about the company’s set up, or who makes the decision and who doesn’t — it’s instead about how the customer can enter the product and discover the value. The customer is the unifier for product and GTM, and building a partnership in service of our customer journey is the special sauce, what makes PLG really work.

Aleks: Typeform is going to be one cohesive platform that solves for different jobs that target different customer groups. We’re starting by focusing on marketers and the customer acquisition flow first, but we’re going to keep building on that. Now imagine this: You’re a business leader, and you go into Typeform to get the insights you need to make key decisions for your business based on different challenges, jobs to be done, or strategic initiatives. Because Typeform connects with other systems that you’re using in your business, you have all the data collected across your business at your fingertips in one centralized place. But it’s not just data you can see, it’s data you can play with and act on, giving you the power of both insights and action. On top of this, you have new and exciting ways to better engage your customers and continue to collect data, quality touchpoints to make sure your data is clean, and support from AI to ensure you’re pulling through the most interesting themes and valuable insights. 

Kristen: Yes, and what’s super exciting for me about this is we’re solving real problems that I’ve felt my entire career. Typeform is becoming the place that lets you get insights about your customer at every stage throughout the full funnel and their lifetime with your company — helping you holistically understand them, so that you can make better businesses decisions and deliver better experiences in the delightful, engaging way that Typeform has always been known for. 

Want more Typeform for Growth? Discover more about what you can achieve with the new suite of features here.