This one’s a dynamite! With over 9 years of experience spread across product engineering, growth hacking & data analysis, Mona has paved the way for female engineers in the industry. She is accredited with being the first female engineer at Airbnb, Apture, socialmedia.com and Sixapart. Currently, Mona Gandhi leads the Growth Team at Airbnb and is a Board Advisor at PopXo and LBB (Little Black Book). As the Keynote speaker at the first edition of EngageMint, she will share her learnings on what true growth really means.

An alumni of the Indian University, Mona started her career as a software engineer with Sixapart, a San Francisco based blogging platform. She later moved on to lead the analytics team at Apture, which was eventually acquired by Google. Post this, she joined Airbnb in 2011 and founded the growth team. At that time, she was a one-person team, driving 3x growth and laying the foundation for building retention and compounding referral loops into the product. When working for an early-stage startup, it’s not easy to balance out the execution of strategies which give you immediate gratification with the one’s which will give you long-term returns. But after several experiments, risks and projective data analysis, Mona cracked the formula for sustainable growth at Airbnb.

One of the biggest challenges faced by her was aligning the numbers the entire team was looking at, to set their targets and measure growth. This was followed by the challenges of building a trusted global brand with personalised experiences for both – the hosts and the guests. Achieving this for a lean startup is not easy. This is why we couldn’t think of a better person than Mona Gandhi to open the first edition of EngageMint. We look forward to learning from her experience of thinking scientifically about growth through testing, measuring, iterating and long-term projective planning.

Here’s what Mona Gandhi has to say about her experience at the first edition of EngageMint: