In this episode of Growth Talks, Tatiana Birgisson, COO at Serval, the AI-native enterprise service management platform, joins host Krystina Rubino to unpack the mental models that have carried her from founding a beverage company out of her dorm room to scaling go-to-market at Rippling to building an entire function from scratch in a category that barely exists yet.

Tatiana breaks down her "stacked S curves" framework for sustaining growth, explains why executional excellence is the only way to know when a channel is really fizzling out, and shares how Serval discovered it had less than 1% visibility in LLM search results—and what they did to fix it.

🗝️ Key Takeaways:

• Growth isn't one curve, it's many. The best growth leaders launch the next channel before the current one peaks—waiting for the metrics to soften means you're already too late.

• Executional excellence comes before diagnosis. You can't tell if a channel is truly maturing until you've ruled out that you're just running it poorly.

• LLM visibility is the new SEO. Serval found they had under 1% visibility for their core terms in AI search tools—and treated it as a wake-up call, not a footnote.

• Management is changing. Fewer standing meetings, fewer layers, more "super ICs"—the best managers are still doing the hardest work themselves, not just coordinating it.

• Judgment beats hours. In an AI-native world, the edge goes to whoever can spot the highest-priority problem and apply exceptional taste—a skill Tatiana has seen consistently in parents.

⏰ Timestamps

00:00 Introduction with Krystina Rubino
01:25 From Founder to Operator: Lessons from Mati Energy
06:58 Building Rippling's Cross-Sell Function from Scratch
14:54 The Stacked S Curve Model, Explained
17:41 Knowing When a Channel Is Really Peaking
20:37 Defending New Bets to a Skeptical CFO
22:50 Why Serval Bet on LLM Search Over Google
30:22 The A/B Test
37:24 Unlearning "Professional Management"
44:42 GTM Strategy that Cuts through the AI Noise
46:49 Why Parents Make Great Operators in the AI Era
55:09 Tatiana's Favorite Growth Non-Hack

🔗 Mentioned in this episode:
Serval: https://www.getserval.com/
Rippling: https://www.rippling.com/

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