Carol Tran

Carol Tran is a product-led growth executive, multidisciplinary entrepreneur, speaker, philanthropist, and change agent for suboptimal business conditions.

An industry-agnostic professional, Carol’s years in entrepreneurship and branding and marketing for startups led her to become a growth hacking leader with a reputation for professional excellence, radical transparency, and achieving tangible results fast. She partners with company leadership, acting as a guide to reveal inefficiencies and grow the business using limited resources.

Having grown and sold multiple businesses, entrepreneurship and giving back are what drive Carol’s work. In her previous role as Head of Growth at Dolby Laboratories, Carol leads projects for developers, working to increase product accessibility for API products. She breaks down communication barriers, translates between profit centers, and leverages analytics and technology to create and automate processes, paving the way for rapid growth. Using part-data science, part-operations, and part-marketing, her role centers around navigating volatility to focus all organizational efforts on the same shared goals with repeatable, scalable systems.

This is the essence of growth hacking: using data to detect problems, predict future trends, and grow the business holistically.

Her passion for entrepreneurship translates across verticals: with broad professional experience from e-commerce (Bare Escentuals, Zenni Optical) to law and finance (Morgan Stanley) to high-tech/SaaS (Oracle) and retail (Nordstrom). Carol’s diverse industry background helps her diagnose problems quickly, illuminate blind spots, and promote growth. She believes strongly in philanthropy and giving back to her community, working closely with non-profit organizations to help them to think like startups, unlocking the dynamic nature of money and cycling funds back into their respective causes.

Experience

• Reported directly to the CEO. Worked with the product, marketing, and engineering teams to grow a $500 million dollar company to $1 billion dollars. Oversaw expansion to the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

• Reported to the co-CEOs. Increased brand perception and customer acquisition from $10k to over $7 million of a consumer-based product.

• Reported directly to the CEO. Increased the user growth by 5x after the initial launch of the product. Worked with developers and the product team to create a suite of products from the initial offering of their SaaS platform.

• Reported directly to the CEO and CTO. Launched acquisition campaigns and live interactive events to increase product adoption. Increased their user growth by 10x prior to being acquired by Hulu.

Carol holds graduate degrees at Golden Gate University, as well as undergraduate degrees at University of California at San Diego. Her speaking roster includes the DataX Conference, Growth Innovate Conference, Mobile Growth Summit, Women Who Code, Reuters Strategic Marketing Conference, CMO OnCon Conference, and the Lean Startup UnConference, where Carol educates audiences on the realities of growth hacking: what it is, what it isn’t, and how to grow revenue and build a huge customer base with limited resources. She is passionate about mentorship and uses her platform to inspire women to raise their voices, live their values, and become strong advocates for change in corporate environments.

Expertise

Entrepreneurial, Product-Led Growth, Product Management, Go-To-Market (GTM), Product Marketing, Data Metrics & Market Research, ROI Data Analysis & Visualization, Performance A/B Testing Metrics, SEO / SEM / ASO, Mobile Apps, Demand Generation, Brand Equity & Social Management, Content Writing, Digital Performance & Optimization, Identifying Security Vulnerabilities, Ethical Growth Hacks, Building Technical Architectures

Location

San Francisco / Silicon Valley / Los Angeles / San Diego

Roles

Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Growth Officer, VP of Product Growth, Head of Product Growth, Growth Advisor, VP of Operations

Sectors

Technology, SaaS, Ecommerce, Retail, Fintech, Healthtech, Edutech, Mobile Apps, Telecommunications, Transportation & Logistics, and Artificial Intelligence

Traits

Communicator, Problem Solver, Identifying Security Vulnerabilities, Data Literate, Relationship Builder, Out-of-the-Box Thinker, Strategic Advisor & Coach, Strong Presentation Skills