Managing your growth marketing program — Review

An integral part of growth marketing is structuring and managing an effective growth team that can scale the organisation. Building an organisation centered on growth is key towards its success. However, the chosen growth model would depend on the stage of an organisation. For example, if you’re a startup, your whole team should be the growth team whereas if you’re a bigger organisation, you may need to have a separate team that focuses purely on growth hacking.

CXL Institute has an entire module dedicated towards growth program management, which is indicative of its importance.

In today’s write up, I’ll take you through my (summarised) take of what a growth program management could look like and how organisations can optimise its growth process.

To be a growth hacker is to be a pirate

Traditional marketers tends to focus only on acquisition as the key lever of growth. Growth marketers, however, are bolder as their main objective is to achieve growth in any way possible. This means that they function on a couple more levers of growth more fondly known as AARRR (hence the pirate reference).

1. Acquisition — Uncovering sources and motivations to get potential users to try your offering
2. Activation — Finding the “aha” moment whereby growth marketers get the first taste of the core value of their offering
3. Retention — Focusing on the core value that the offering provides in order to retain users
4. Referral — Creating a loop in order to generate new users
5. Revenue — Setting a perceived value price for users willing to pay for your offering

Growth teams are primed to cut across various work functions including business development, support, product and marketing/PR in order to understand the user journey and essentially hack the growth of a said organisation.

Finding your North Star Metric

Growth teams have latched onto the concept of the North Star Metric which reflects an aggregated value that gets delivered to users. Fundamentally, this acts as the lens for evaluation tests and monitoring overall growth progress. Value drives intention, referral and ultimately, sustainable revenue. For example, Airbnb’s metric is number of nights booked which is its main revenue turn key.

The Growth Process

So what constitutes an effective growth process?

1. Engages the entire organisation to leverage insights, skills and authority of different individuals
2. Drives immediate growth results through focused high tempo testing
3. Helps you learn how to drive sustainable results

The process constitutes of four main areas:

1. Analyse — Find high leverage growth opportunities by creating a “situation document” whereby you itemise and evaluate quantitative analysis, quantitative feedback and past testing learning.
2. Ideas — Once you’ve analysed the data, you can then get into the creative problem solving stage whereby you generate ideas to achieve certain objectives, brainstorm around those objectives and encourage ideas from anyone at any time.
3. Prioritise — Part of the growth process is working in teams, of which you need to prioritise weekly growth meetings in order to align, delegate and execute. You can nominate favourite ideas pitched by team members, decide which tests to run based on resources and expectations and assign owners to run those tests.
4. Launch — This is where execution happens. The test owner takes charge in determining the minimum viable test, scheduling resources for executing the test and ensuring its success metrics are clearly defined and tracked. Once the tests have run, it gets analysed in order to analyse its impact on the goal progress. These tests are recorded and archived for reference by other growth team members and the organisation at large. Analysis of the tests can also lead to new ideas.

Putting a Growth Team in place

Your growth process can only be achieved a growth team in place with a clear structure of roles and responsibilities.

Growth team models

Autonomous (independent)

• Reports to the CEO
• Benefits: Greater speed and iteration
• Examples: Uber, Facebook, Pinterest

Functional

• Reports into another team, typically the Vice President of Product
• Benefits: Better trust that user experience will be balanced with growth
• Examples: LinkedIn, Twitter, Dropbox

Who should be on the growth team?

1. Growth Master — This is the head of growth
2. Shared resources — This can include design, engineering, marketing, analysts, etc.
3. Add dedicated people to core team as needed in order to hit testing tempo goals
4. Contract temporary specialists to explore new marketing channels — You can then look to hire them full time once the channel’s effectiveness has been proven

What makes a good Growth Master?

• Entrepreneurial — This essentially means that he/she needs to be willing to take on risk and accountability for the job
• Disciplined — Has a clear process, and follows through with it
• Mindset — As growth marketers, the important headspace to be in is the one of continuous improvement
• Analytical — Someone who looks for proof in data and doesn’t just go by gut
• Leadership — In order to lead a growth team, they need to possess the skills necessary to keep both him or herself and the team focused and motivated

Actioning on a Growth Meeting

The whole purpose of a growth meeting is to keep the team focused on achieving a pre-agreed number of growth objectives. Doing regular check ins allows teams to optimise the growth process quicker in order to hit testing targets. These meetings are meant to be task oriented and stray away from becoming brainstorming sessions.

Qualifying an idea

In order to qualify what ideas to test, team members first need to conduct research, craft a hypothesis and determine the growth lever that it intends to move. A simple evaluation structure to rank ideas is the ICE model which stands for impact, confidence and ease. Ideas are scored between 1–10 in order to determine its importance.

Weekly growth meeting agenda

According to one of the original growth hackers Sean Ellis, having a strategically planned out growth meeting saves a lot of time and energy whilst keeping the main objectives in mind. Here’s how he does his growth meetings:

15 minutes: North Star Metric, other KPIs

• How is it trending?
• How are the sub metrics performing?
• Why does your team believe changes to the metrics happened?

15 minutes: Objectives progress, key learnings

The objective owner presents:

• Progress against objective
• Lessons learned from running tests
• Drill into what’s really going on with the objective

10 minutes: Tests launched versus planned

• Update the team on which tests have successfully launched in the past week
• Understand what prevented a planned test from launching
• Discuss ways to improve testing throughout

20 minutes: Nominations and decisions

• Go through nominated ideas as a team
• Hold a 30-second pitch for each idea
• Discuss ideas based on available resources, confidence and potential impact
• The Growth Master then decides on the short list of tests and assigns passionate owner / project manager to oversee the execution

Post growth meeting

Growth Masters should address blockers from the previous week and play an important role in helping project managers stay on track and overcome any obstacles they may face along the way.

Things that Growth Masters need to be wary of

• Observe and report instead of micromanage — your team members need to feel empowered, not looked after
• Help focus the team on the objectives — Too many times, teams will be led astray of which it’s important for the leader to steer them back to the game plan that best addresses the objectives that they’ve already set
• Act as the process champion
• Recognise the entire team’s own success and failure — This is important when it comes to building the morale of the team

Tuning your growth machine

Over time, growth teams need to be able to figure out the mechanism of their workings. Some key items to bear in mind:

1. Choose better and higher impact experiments — Understanding the learnings from past experiments is just as important, if not more important, than running the experiment in the first place. Find efficiency at every stage of the process where possible and prioritise the quality of your tests instead of the speed.
2. Build an effective growth team — Streamline the way you work with different teams by aligning your team members and resources. Growth Masters also need to invest the time needed to train their team to be better at shipping experiments.
3. Utilise tools — But don’t have too many tools lest you want to suffer from analysis paralysis. It’s also important to utilise good tools.

The growth process is not a sprint, but a marathon. The sooner such a mindset gets embedded within the culture of an organisation, the better its success at actually achieving meaningful growth.