The Stacked S-Curve Playbook for Sustained Growth | Tatiana Birgisson (Serval, Rippling)

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/ We'll be dropping episodes every other week. Want to follow along and listen to new episodes when they're released? Subscribe to Growth Talks on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.