GROWTH

THE ENTERPRISE

PLAYBOOK
How to build a high-performing
Growth Team in a large enterprise

/andyfboyd
 THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

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/andyfboyd
 THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

INTRODUCTION.........................................................5 CHAPTER 6: THE GROWTH JAM.........................................76

OVERVIEW...........................................................78

CHAPTER 1: THE JOB OF GROWTH............................. 8 FRAMING.............................................................79

GROW THE BUSINESS AGAINST SPECIFIC KPI(S).................... 9 AGENDA ............................................................ 80

PROVIDE INSIGHT AND LEARNING.................................. 10 FACILITATION........................................................82

VALIDATE AND/OR FIND PRODUCT MARKET FIT.................... 12

CHAPTER 7: KEEP IT MOVING -

CHAPTER 2: TENETS OF GROWTH - THE ONGOING AGILE PROCESS............................................89

WHERE GROWTH WORKS BEST................................ 13 A BRIEF OVERVIEW ON AGILE....................................... 91

FOCUS ON THE ENTIRE SYSTEM.................................... 15 ADD EXPERIMENT TASKS AS PART OF YOUR SPRINT............. 94

LIGHTWEIGHT (CONTINUOUS ADD A “RUNNING” COLUMN....................................... 98

IMPROVEMENT) PROCESS.......................................... 19 CAPTURE AND SHARE LEARNING ................................. 100

WORK ACROSS FUNCTIONAL BOUNDARIES........................ 21 SPRINT 1-N: LAUNCH YOUR FIRST

SET OF EXPERIMENTS, REPEAT................................... 102

CHAPTER 3: GROWTH LEADERS -

CREATE A GROWTH CULTURE..............................................24 CHAPTER 8: TOOLS - EXPERIMENTS BY

COMMON GOAL / KPI ACROSS TEAMS..............................26 GROWTHHACKERS............................................................. 104

VELOCITY GOAL FOR EXPERIMENTATION...........................30 SETUP OBJECTIVES............................................... 105

DEEP COLLABORATION BETWEEN FUNCTIONS.....................32 GROWTH IDEAS.................................................... 108

EMPOWERED TEAM..................................................34 EXPERIMENT CARDS...............................................110

TRANSPARENT, OPEN CONVERSATIONS............................36 ORGANIZE YOUR IDEAS............................................114

CONSISTENT INCREMENTAL PROGRESS............................37 MANAGING THE GROWTH PROCESS...............................116

DATA FOR DECISION-MAKING, NOT PERFECT DATA................39 GROWTH MEETINGS................................................121

BONUS: PEOPLE MAKE DECISIONS, NOT DATA.................... 40

CONCLUSION........................................................ 128

CHAPTER 4: PREREQUISITES..............................................46

PRODUCT / MARKET FIT.............................................47

THE TOOLS OF GROWTH............................................ 51

THE GROWTH STACK................................................ 61

CHAPTER 5: THE GROWTH PROCESS ................................63

ORGANIZING THE GROWTH PROCESS.................................... 64

GETTING STARTED........................................................ 66

SPRINT 0 - BUILD YOUR EXPERIMENT BACKLOG........................ 68

INTRODUCTION
 INTRODUCTION THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

A
re you looking to build a growth team and do not know where to
start? Look no further. This is the enterprise growth playbook,
developed through experiences building growth teams in small
and large enterprises. This includes building my own teams, participating in
established teams, and helping to launch many internal growth teams.

First, a bit of background on me. Over the course of my career, I’ve used
growth tactics against a target KPI to see consistent strong double-digit
improvements and many cases of high triple digit gains. I have spent half of
my career in small companies both in digital marketing as well as product
management – mostly focused on launching and scaling new products.

The latter half of my career has been spent in IBM. After helping to bring
IBM Watson to market, I built the growth team in IBM Watson, which
became a model for other growth teams in IBM. In a corporate function,
we took my model and established multiple “growth squads” within various
parts of IBM. I later moved into the Cloud unit where I have focused on
growth at the portfolio and product level.

To be fair, I didn’t create all these teams. Some I created, some I didn’t.
Not all the growth teams succeeded. We failed in some cases, but we
saw tremendous success in many others. I learned a lot of lessons
along the way. I will share these lessons to help you establish a high-
performing growth team.

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 INTRODUCTION THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

Now, back to Growth. People often think that “Growth” is a silver bullet, as
with the “Get Your Free Email at Hotmail” example or the Dropbox referral
program, that catapults a product/business to success. These tactics were
effective and generated amazing results, but I do not have any of these
examples, personally. While perhaps not as creative, my results have been
significant and consistent in their own right and that has everything to do
with having the proper cross-functional team, a good growth process, and
have a growth culture. You can experience results like this too.

I believe that process and culture are the most-important missing

ingredients required to build a high-performing Growth Team. The goal
of this book is to help you, a growth leader, lay the foundation for a
successful growth team by outlining the proper team, tools, culture, and
processes for your team.

Disclaimer: The thoughts and opinions in this e-book are my own and
don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions .

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CHAPTER 1:
THE JOB OF
GROWTH
 CHAPTER1: THE JOB OF GROWTH THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

G
rowth is a relatively new role in larger companies. But what is
it? In simple terms, the growth team is focused on growing the
business using a cross-functional, agile team and data-driven
decision-making. The primary outcome should be to accelerate growth
of the business defined by some key KPI such as users, revenue, usage/
adoption, and retention; however, the growth team provides other
benefits as well. Your growth team can provide three critical functions
for your product portfolio:

GROW THE BUSINESS AGAINST

SPECIFIC KPI(S)

The growth team is best-known for intensely focusing on and improving

your key KPIs. The growth team will understand the numbers of the
business (i.e. customer acquisition, activation, revenue, retention). They
will build and execute plans while working cross-functionally to improve
those numbers to achieve the stated growth goal.

Growth teams have skills in product management, marketing,

development, data and analytics, and agile processes.
They will apply these skills to rapidly test and improve their focus-KPI.
Again, using data-driven decision making.

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 CHAPTER1: THE JOB OF GROWTH THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

While the growth team should have deep expertise in the numbers of
your business and what levers will move them the best, it is critical
to note that they are not a reporting function. Relying on the growth
team for reporting is a mistake. The growth team knows the numbers
inside and out and how to move those numbers. Bogging them down
with reporting will hurt your business. Growth is a business building.
Reporting, on the other hand, is operational. The reporting/analytics
team will report on the numbers and provide insight but typically are not
involved in improving the numbers directly.

PROVIDE INSIGHT AND LEARNING

I like to say that a good growth team will get neck-deep in the data
and walk around in it. By this, I mean that they will spend a lot of time
digging into the most critical numbers to understand what is happening
in the business. They will peel the onion layer by layer. More importantly,
once they understand the numbers, they will get to work to improve
those numbers.

Initially, they may make some small wins, they may fail, they may even hit
some home runs. The net effect of all this data-driven experimentation is
that they start to deeply understand what works and what doesn’t. They
will understand what drives the numbers.

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 CHAPTER1: THE JOB OF GROWTH THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

The knowledge about what moves the numbers is when they become a
powerful asset and producing three benefits for the organization:

##The first benefit is that they will grow the

business by pulling the levers that drive growth.

##The second benefit is that they will share with

the broader team what is and is not working;
therefore, improving decision making for the
broader team.

##The final benefit is they can help you reduce risk

in transformational projects. This is similar to the
idea from Jim Collins of “firing bullets
and cannonballs.”

Quite simply, some organizations launch large transformational efforts

with little validation as to whether they are on the correct track. In some
cases, this is the right approach; however, in most cases, a few simple
tests can help you understand the dynamics and guide your decisions
on the larger effort with lower risk.

My favorite example of this was a project I did on a website. Over a few

months, we improved the conversion of the website by a substantial
amount. We cataloged months of knowledge, such as data/analysis,
user interviews, and dozens of experiments. We then took a step back
and decided that we were optimizing the wrong thing, we needed a new
website. We built a new website that ultimately performed 50% better
than the already highly optimized website.

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 CHAPTER1: THE JOB OF GROWTH THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

In this case, our dozens of experiments and months of learning were

the “bullets” that allowed us to launch an entirely different website
(cannonball) with low risk and big gains. Now, some might argue that
a website is a trivial project, which I understand. However, we saw this
scenario play out in larger efforts. I share the website example because
it is an easy example to which any business can relate.

VALIDATE AND/OR FIND

PRODUCT MARKET FIT

Most would argue that a growth team is not responsible for product market
fit. Product market fit should be the role of the Product Management
function. I agree with this, but I also believe that the growth team cannot
function if there is no product market fit. You cannot grow and scale a
business that is fundamentally broken. Before the growth team can really
get to work, there must be some validation that there is product market fit.

If the product management function is doing its job properly of finding

product market fit, then the growth team can help to confirm and validate
it through benchmarking of KPIs and improving those KPIs. If you have not
achieved product market fit yet, or have made some missteps, you may
need to get to work with the product team on the fundamentals before you
can start your growth efforts. The Growth team can assist in this regard by
testing against key KPIs that would help understand where the product and
market fit issues are, and they could work collaboratively to fix them before
getting into scale type activities.

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 CHAPTER 2:
TENETS OF GROWTH
- WHERE GROWTH
WORKS BEST
 CHAPTER 2: TENETS OF GROWTH - WHERE GROWTH WORKS BEST THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

I
f you asked professionals, “What is a growth team?” most would have
no clue. From the enlightened, you would most likely hear a multitude of
answers that center around marketing and A/B testing. Marketing and
A/B testing are certainly important components of building a strong growth
team; however, it’s only one part of what makes a growth team successful.

A good growth team will do much more than marketing, a good growth
team will work across the entire business but not all at once, mind you. A
good growth team will look for areas of opportunity and inefficiency across
the entire business that they can capitalize upon to accelerate growth. As a
growth leader, you must think about the customer experience as an entire
system that you can exploit.

The example below is a typical software product / SaaS business where

the user comes to the website, registers, uses the product, pays for the
product and continues to pay for the product. This could also be called a
“self-serve” experience. There are other experiences that a customer might
have as part of the system – e.g. a sales process and a customer success
(onboarding, expansion) process.

CONFIGURE
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SPENDING
(OPTIONAL)

SALES CUSTOMER
PROCESS SUCCESS
PROCESS

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 CHAPTER 2: TENETS OF GROWTH - WHERE GROWTH WORKS BEST THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

With this as our construct, we’ll break down some of the core tenets upon
which you must build your growth team to make it more effective.

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FOCUS ON THE ENTIRE SYSTEM

As you have learned, if you only focus on marketing pages, you are only
optimizing and improving one part of the business (the inbound lead/trial
part), and you are missing the remainder of the system. Net, you miss a lot
of the potential to grow the business.

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The true power of a growth team is improving the entire system.

Improvements in one part of the system are compounded by improvements
in other parts of the system. This compounding is what makes your growth
team powerful.

To see exactly what I mean by compounding, let us look at a simple

example. Pretend that your product has the following conversion rates:

## View Registration: 10%

## Create Account: 90%

## Configure and Setup Product: 80%

## Use product: 80%

## Convert to paid: 30%

## Retention: 98% Monthly

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The number of paying customers would look like this over 5 years:

700

600

500

400

300

200

100

0
1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 33 35 37 39 41 43 45 47 49 51 53 55 57 59 61

Imagine you could improve the “view registration page conversion rate” by
25%. With this improvement, the number of paying customers would grow
to look like this over 5 years:

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This is a strong improvement, and I’m sure your boss would be quite
pleased with the progress; however, imagine if you could improve a few of
these levers across the system.

IImagine you improve the “view registration page conversion rate” by 25%,
the paid conversion rate 25%, and the retention rate 25%. You can see the
growth curve is much better:

Therefore, by improving multiple steps in the journey, your improvements

start to compound upon one another. This is the power of growth.

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LIGHTWEIGHT (CONTINUOUS
IMPROVEMENT) PROCESS

When I share some of the results my growth teams have achieved, people
are intrigued and they typically ask, “What is the secret?”. People expect
that I will share an extremely interesting experiment such as the “Get Your
Free Email at Hotmail” example. These tactics were incredibly effective, but
I do not have any of these examples. The answer I give is “process.”

IIn fact, you would be quite bored if I was to describe to you most of the
tactics we employed. The real secret is a simple process that facilitates
continuous improvement. In my experience, a simple weekly process gets
your team focused on constantly improving. Success then comes over time
through constant, systematic small wins. To borrow a baseball analogy, a lot
of singles and a few doubles, triples, and maybe a home run.

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To illustrate the point, imagine you are confronted with two possibilities:

1. You can get 1% better every day this year.

2. You get 10x better by the end of the year.

Now, you may have already seen this math - so, if you have, then my
apologies. For those of you who have not, the answer is that you want to
get 1% better every day. At the end of the year, you would be 37x better
from where you started vs the 10x in one shot. I won’t cover the process in
this section, but rest assured it is focused on consistent improvement. It
is also lightweight and flexible, which allows teams to make changes and
adjust quickly based on learning.

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WORK ACROSS
FUNCTIONAL BOUNDARIES

In many organizations, responsibilities become distributed across

multiple silos and work is “thrown over the wall” from one team to
the next. For example, the marketing team believes their job is to get
prospects to the website. Once their job is done now the product team
takes over. This will not work.

For starters, you miss out on a lot of opportunities by not bringing cross-
functional skills across silos. Secondarily, because of the power of
compounding, you must have the ability to work all the touchpoints to
improve the entire system, and you need your peers in all functions to help.

MARKETING PRODUCT SALES CUSTOMER

MANAGEMENT SUCCESS

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The most effective approach is to form a cross-functional squad that

brings owners from each of the functional areas of responsibility into
the growth team. This includes marketing, product, sales, and customer
success. This allows the empowered team to make decisions and execute
across all areas of the experience. Not only does this improve the team’s
ability to execute, but it also brings new perspectives and skills over the
organizational “line” to benefit the team.

MARKETING PRODUCT SALES CUSTOMER

MANAGEMENT SUCCESS

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For example, I’ve seen multiple occasions where a product manager is

primarily focused on a functional UI, whereas a marketer or customer
success representative sees an opportunity for an up-sell (e.g.
Customer Success: “Customers who add more users in this dialog are
typically more likely to buy a premium, we could add a link to upgrade to
a paid plan here in this dialog”).

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I’ve also seen examples where a product manager/engineer has been able
to dramatically improve the results from a marketing demo by a adding
deeper understanding of the customer needs/benefits on a feature.

In some organizations, forming a cross-functional team like this can create

concerns around “stealing credit for another team’s work”. I’ve found that
the most effective way to inoculate against this is to speak in terms of “we”
and “they” vs “me” and “I”. In other words, the growth team should be
generous in their praise for the beneficial work that is happening outside
of the team and only use the words “we” (as in us, the collective team, not
only the people with “growth” in their title) to promote the advances that
the collective growth team is making.

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 CHAPTER 3:
GROWTH LEADERS -
CREATE A GROWTH
CULTURE
 CHAPTER 3: GROWTH LEADERS - CREATE A GROWTH CULTURE THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

I
t is an expected norm that new, smaller, entrepreneurial companies
are more inclined towards a working growth mindset - everyone wants
to “act like a startup.” This norm is not because large companies
are not fast or smart. In my large company experience, I’ve seen teams
repeatedly achieve the impossible and deliver a project with amazing
speed. Similarly, I’ve worked with the most brilliant minds in the world.
A big part of the reason that large companies struggle with something
new, like a growth team, is because the systems, processes, and
cultures are designed and optimized around a different way of doing
business. Growth, as a newer set of skills, was not around twenty years
ago. What is more, as companies grow, they build silos where teams
become distributed and form microcultures. These are the things that
make it difficult to operate more nimbly.

As previously noted, I have come to believe that the process and culture
are perhaps most important. We will focus on the process, but you must
also work to establish the proper culture. Your job is to create a culture
that fosters cross-functional work that is aligned on a common metric,
which rewards learning. It must also allow a process that enables iteration
vs too much planning.

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We will cover each of these in more detail but this is your cheat sheet:

Create a culture of Growth

What works What doesn’t work Guidance for Growth Leaders
• Common goal / KPI across teams • Disconnected goals/metrics across silos • Shared KPI – Product Management, Marketing, (optional) Sales
and Engineering leadership agree to a common target KPI that the
collective growth team will improve.

• Velocity goal for experimentation • No capacity for experimentation • Velocity – OM, Marketing and Engineering leadership, commit to a
target number of experiments per month

• Deep collaboration between functions • “Protect my turf” – working in silos, throwing • Collaboration – Product Management, Marketing, (optional) Sales
work over the wall and Engineering team attend sprint meetings and daily scrum
• Accountability – Product Management, Marketing and Engineering
leadership attend “end of sprint” readouts on results
• Empowered team • A heavy process, with too many approvals • Cross-functional team design/launch experiments - Marketing,
Product Management, (optional) Sales and Engineering are
empowered to work together at the level of execution to decide,
design and launch experiments, should not require multiple
approvals
• Transparent, open conversations about what is • only reporting positive results, hiding details • Reward learning and action – reward the team for acting. Celebrate
working vs what is not. of failed experiments, a “failed” experiment if the team learned or has a new hypothesis
and is taking the correct next action. Don’t accept “it failed, and we
don’t know why”.
• Consistent incremental progress • Too many big bets • The right mix of big bets and incremental gains. Have a focus on
small improvements daily which will compound to larger gains.
Celebrate “small” wins.
• Data for decision-making, not perfect data • Spending too much time trying to get • Decision-making vs perfect data - focus the team on making
“perfect data” decisions to improve adoption/retention, not “perfect data”.

COMMON GOAL / KPI ACROSS TEAMS

What works: Common goal / KPI across teams

What does not work: Disconnected

goals / metrics across silos

Whether you are in a large or small company, data and metrics drive your
actions. As a company grows, and the silos start to form, it is inevitable that
we will select different metrics that we will own and/or drive. If your executive
team is smart-enough to align your metrics, then count yourself lucky. All too
often we are governed by metrics that do not necessarily align outcomes.

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For example, the marketing team may have a pipeline target. The product
manager is responsible for an overall revenue number. The sales team is
responsible for new MRR per month. In theory, these numbers align, but the
reality is that they don’t always align.

MARKETING PRODUCT MANAGEMENT SALES

Goal: $100k Opportunity Pipeline Per Month Goal: Achieve $200m revenue for portfolio Goal: Achieve $60k new MRR per month

MARKETING ACTIVITY PORTFOLIO NEW CONTRACT

For example, the product team is focused on growing a next generation

product line and are not investing in the legacy product. The marketing team
needs to help bring that new product to market, but they are focused on a
pipeline number for sales which is really your largest / legacy product. The
sales team is going to close quota, so they will close against any product
in the portfolio. However, it is probably the legacy product since it is in the
market, whereas the new product is a harder sell. Oh, by the way, this is an
MRR business, so the product management team truly just needs to focus
on revenue churn to hit their number. New MRR will not get you there. So,
while the numbers seem to align, they are out-of-whack one layer down.
This results in inefficiency.

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Teams take local action in their role to achieve their number, but it loses
efficiency because the other teams are not wholly focused on this same
number. If the strategic objective is to grow the “next generation” product,
then the metrics for the team, or a subset of the team, should align around
the adoption objective for the next generation product.

The following shows an example of better-aligned metrics so that all the

teams are moving in the same direction.

MARKETING PRODUCT MANAGEMENT SALES

Goal: 200 new active trials per month Goal: %20 free to paid conversion for Goal: Achieve $30k new MRR per month
for next generation product next generation product for next generation product

MARKETING ACTIVITY PORTFOLIO NEW CONTRACT

Now, I 100% advocate aligning metrics like the example above; however, if
possible, the most effective growth teams I’ve been a part of have aligned
around the same number.

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For example:

## Total number of active users

(product and marketing)

## Total number of paying customers

(product and marketing)

## Revenue for a single product

(product, marketing, and sales)

When we aligned the team around the same metric, everything snapped
into place and improvements started to compound upon one another. In
the marketing example, the product and marketing teams teamed together
under the mantra of “you bring them to the funnel, we’ll bring them through
the funnel.” Our actions would compound upon one another. This resulted in
doubling our trial metric in only two months.

So, the question is, what do you do? Executive leadership (top-down) and
functional leaders (bottom-up) align around a single focus metric. This
will get the team focused and eliminate the subtleties in differences in
measurements. Note, the single focus doesn’t have to be forever but pick an
area to focus on for a specific timeframe.

As the team becomes more cohesive, you can expand to select other targets.
Finally, build executive accountability around that metric such as regular
reporting: cross-functional where the executive leader and functional leader
are looking at the results and the actions to drive that number.

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VELOCITY GOAL FOR EXPERIMENTATION

What works: Velocity goal for experimentation

What doesn’t work: no capacity for experimentation

We all want to be agile, we want to run iterative experiments, but we can’t

always do so. What gets in our way? Unsurprisingly, the thing that gets in our
way is time and priorities - revenue targets, roadmap commitments, perhaps
customer/contractual obligations, monthly operational reviews, etc.

These commitments are important; however, sacrificing incremental

improvements and experiments may mean that you are sacrificing learning.
How so? Think of it this way, how many data points do you need to identify
a trend. The answer is 3.

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If you are only making monthly releases, you are effectively only learning
every two months because you need at least 3 dots to see a trend. If you
release weekly, you learn something new every 2 weeks. The team who
releases weekly will complete 4 learning cycles in the same amount of time
that the “monthly” team completes one cycle.

Now, imagine how quickly you can learn if you release daily. Of course, some
experiments take longer than 1 week to run, nevertheless, the guidance
holds. The more releases/experiments you run, the more quickly you can
learn. In this day in age, you cannot afford to learn slowly, particularly in the
technology industry.

While I ordinarily wouldn’t advocate for an activity-based goal, in this case,

I think an activity goal helps to enforce a learning culture. Give your team a
goal for number of experiments completed in a week or month.

This will ensure your team is prioritizing incremental improvement/

experiments - ie: learning. It will also help your team to build the muscle of
launch, measure, learn, repeat. Finally, because some experiments take time,
it will help you to build a portfolio of experiments/learning by launching short-
term and long-term experiments to keep the learning velocity high.

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DEEP COLLABORATION
BETWEEN FUNCTIONS

What works: Deep collaboration between functions

What doesn’t work: “Protect my turf” – working

in silos, throwing work over the wall

Operationally, it takes product management, development, marketing, and

sales to define, build, deliver and sell a product. All too often, there is too
much separation of duties across role boundaries.

Product Management:
Define the product

Design
Design the product

Development
Build the product

Marketing
Market the product

Sales
Sell the product

For example, the product manager defines the product/feature (with

customer input) and works with development and design to deliver the
product. When the product is nearly complete, the marketing team is
engaged to create the marketing message/collateral and take it to market.

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Due to specialization, focus on specific roles/responsibilities, the product

manager is not thinking about marketing in the product definition. This
leaves a set of critical skills out. Marketing skills could help in the design,
which could improve the adoption/conversion based on the new feature. For
example, could we market the new feature “in app” with an upsell that moves
the customer to a higher plan/payment level.

Or, perhaps, the marketing team crafts their messaging without the benefit of
the input from sales who has had a myriad of customer conversations. In this
regard, the sales team can help the marketing team develop messaging that
has already been “field tested.”

Whatever the scenario in your organization, there are assuredly

inefficiencies when the team does not work together. To achieve the
best results, form a cross-functional squad, which involves product
management, marketing, and sales functions in the design of the product/
feature. This allows you to bring skills across the organizational line which
should improve the effectiveness of your releases.

PRODUCT PRODUCT
MANAGEMENT MANAGEMENT

(ACCOUNTABLE) (RESPONSIBLE)

DESIGN DEVELOPMENT DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

DEFINE AND MARKET AND
(RESPONSIBLE)
BUILD THE (RESPONSIBLE) (CONSULT)
SELL THE (CONSULT)
PRODUCT PRODUCT

MARKETING SALES MARKETING SALES

(CONSULT) (CONSULT) (RESPONSIBLE) (RESPONSIBLE)

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EMPOWERED TEAM

What works: Empowered team

What does not work: A heavy process

with too many approvals

Large organizations tend to be criticized for being slow-moving. The reason is

too much process and bureaucracy. I don’t believe it is entirely the case that
there is too much bureaucracy. While bureaucracy exists, nearly all processes
can have exception processes when something needs to be expedited. More
often, the problem is too many decision-approvals because people aren’t
properly empowered to make decisions.

This could be because the team is empowered but seeks to reduce

personal risk by spreading decision making across a group – to which this
must be dealt with. The issue could also be that the leadership has not set
boundaries around the decision-making process in terms of what does/does
not need approval.

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Whatever the case for your team, push the decision-making authority down to
the growth team, which removes the layers of approvals. In some cases, you
need proper approval processes so you will need to ensure your processes
have the appropriate level of granularity. Do not let all decisions get hung-
up in a process. Provide proper guidance for what constitutes a bigger and
non-reversible decision and simple guidance for the team around when the
decision needs to go through it. This allows the team to act quickly where they
can but ensures the right oversight on things that require it.

For example, boundaries could be something like:

## If there is a revenue/customer-risk, less than $100,000,

then no approvals needed.

## If there is a brand-risk, i.e. a negative experience could result

in negative press/negative impact on the brand, then seek
additional approvals.

## If the project requires less than 3 months of development,

then no approvals needed.

In some cases, the decisions are not well-contained within the team who is
making the changes. For example, the team is making decisions that affect
a product/experience that is owned by someone else. In this case, I have
a rule, which is “we turn the key together.” The growth team can setup the
changes to get it ready to launch and then ask for “approval” (or, if possible,
just provide an FYI for awareness) to the person who owns that process/
experience. This helps to ensure a good working relationship with the
stakeholders that your growth team must work with.

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TRANSPARENT, OPEN CONVERSATIONS

What works: Transparent, open conversations
about what is working vs. what is not

What does not work: Only reporting positive

results, hiding details of failed experiments

Because we care about our personal brand, we sometimes tend to report only
positive outcomes. In simple terms, the world becomes rosier as information
floats to the top while the ugly failures stay down at the front lines. The reality
is that we need both the positives and negatives in order to learn what does
and doesn’t work. The failures are a form of data that you as a leader can use
to make decisions and grow your business.

EXPERIMENT EXPERIMENT EXPERIMENT EXPERIMENT

As a leader, you need this data, so it is your job to create a transparent

culture where your team feels they can share both the positives and
negatives without fear of retribution. The caveat is that you need
accountability. You obviously do not want to create a culture where people
do not care whether they succeed or fail. You can enforce accountability
without sacrificing transparency.

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There are two simple checks to ensure the classification of a “good” failure:

1. Was the “failed experiment/project” initially based on sound market

data as well as a good logical step based on a customer?

2. When the team presents the failure, have they taken the time to learn
what caused the failure and are now actively taking the logical
next step?

If the answer to both is “yes,” then the team should be supported in their
efforts and not adversely penalized. If the answer to either is no, then it is truly
a failure and you should hold the team accountable. Failure with no learning
and no next step is truly a failure.

CONSISTENT INCREMENTAL PROGRESS

What works: Consistent incremental progress

What does not work: Too many big bets

As business leaders, we tend to focus on defining a strategy building a roadmap

and then executing. This is a good thing. However, in some organizations,
because it can be difficult to measure the impact we have made, we sometimes
reward people (i.e. promotions) for delivery upon commitments vs. impact to
the business metrics. Again, this is because complex delivery is in many cases
easier to measure than a contribution to a specific KPI.

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This means we create a big plan (i.e. roadmap or project) and doggedly
pursue the delivery of that plan. Sometimes this is the right thing to do, but
not always. On the other hand, we can make significant improvements by
focusing on consistent incremental improvement. While the small wins may
not seem like much initially, the magic of the small improvements is that they
can compound over time. This can lead to significant outcomes.

To illustrate, the chart below demonstrates the difference between a goal of

1% every day versus achieving a 10x improvement by the end of the year.

To be clear, you do need large projects, but we should also focus the team on
consistent, small improvements daily which can compound to larger gains.

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DATA FOR DECISION-MAKING,

NOT PERFECT DATA

What works: data for decision-making, not perfect data

What does not work: perfect data

In many cases, the data we want is imperfect: we want more data, the data
isn’t totally accurate, etc. We should get good data where we can; however,
sometimes we can’t get perfect data.

As a leader, your job is to look for trends and make decisions, and in many
cases, the data is good enough for decision-making. To get past the issues
of “perfect data,” understand where the issues are with the data. Focus on
understanding accuracy and reliability.

Your job as a leader is to simply understand the sources of bias in the data. As
long as it is generally reliable, you should feel empowered to make decisions
to keep moving your business forward.

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BONUS: PEOPLE MAKE

DECISIONS, NOT DATA

Whether you are in a large or small organization, you undoubtedly have a

myriad of data analysis tools available to you. With all these tools and data
available, it’s increasingly easy to fall into the trap of telling yourself, “We need
more data to make a decision.” There are three big reasons this is a trap:

1. DATA IS IMPERFECT

It can be quite difficult to get good data in some companies. For example,
accounting systems may be complex due to international accounting law.
You may have access and permission issues, and data and systems such as
analytics and sales tools may not all “talk” to each other. Alternatively, it may
be impossible to design a good A/B test because other teams are changing
variables underneath you without your knowledge or ability to control.
Whatever the reason, your data will always have flaws. Fix this where you can
but get comfortable with the fact that the data isn’t perfect – it will likely never
be perfect, there will always be bias.

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2. WAITING FOR PERFECT DATA WILL SLOW YOU DOWN

Understand where and what the issues are so that you can make decisions
knowing where there may be bias. Waiting for perfect data will only slow
you down.

3. DATA CAN BE MANIPULATED TO TELL ANY STORY

We have all done it. We have all manipulated data to tell a good story.
Employees are naturally inclined to share the most positive news while
downplaying the negative. Statistical rigor can help minimize this, but it
is not a perfect cure. Unless you do all the analysis yourself, which will
limit your effectiveness as you grow in your career, then you need to
understand that people will naturally share the positive and you may not
always get the negative.

As a growth leader, I want perfect data, I want statistical rigor to eliminate

bias but it’s not always available or possible. What’s more, as you grow in
your career into an executive role, you will inevitably encounter situations
where you cannot get all the data due to issues such as complexity, speed,
etc. Whatever the reason, you must realize that you make decisions, not
the data. Data is simply your tool to help guide your decisions.

When you view yourself as the decision-maker, you lessen your dependence
on perfect data. This will make you more effective as a leader and, ultimately,
an executive. To do this, you must train yourself on three principles:

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A. Will More Data Change the Decision

A mentor shared this principle with me, and it entirely changed the way I think
about using data for decision-making. This person, now a CEO, said that
he does not tolerate his team “asking for more data before they can make a
decision.” He asks, “If you get more data, will it change the decision you will
make or only make you more comfortable?”

If people were honest with themselves, nine times out of ten, the answer is,
“Make me more comfortable,” in which case he says to make the decision. In
the cases in which you do need more data, get it. Learn to ask yourself this
simple question and you will find that your decision time increases as well as
your confidence in your own decision-making skills.

B. Reliability vs. Accuracy

When it comes to imperfect data, there are two dimensions to consider:

accuracy and reliability. To illustrate, imagine you have a metric that is
“100.” If your data is accurate, it would measure 100 every time.

120

100

80

60

40

20

ACTUAL KPI KPI IN YOUR REPORT

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If your data is reliable, it may measure something like 101, 99, 98, 102, 100.
While the data is not exactly accurate, it is reliable.

103

102

101

100

99

98

97

96
1 2 3 4 5

KPI IN YOUR REPORT ACTUAL KPI

When I compare data sets from different systems (for example, an

accounting system compared to a BI reporting tool), I am looking for
reliable data. This allows me to ignore some of the inconsistencies and
irregularities and to focus on trends and patterns as my basis for decision
making. You can use reliable data even if it is not 100% accurate, but in
most cases, the difference in accuracy would not change
the decision anyway.

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C. Big Enough to Matter

In simple terms, if you are looking at a small number with low variation, it will
take a long time to confirm (statistically) that the change is, in fact, better or
worse. This can make it difficult to make decisions. It can also limit your ability
to launch new tests.

If a statistical approach is not possible or will take too long, watch the trends
and look for big changes. In many cases, you can look at the data and decide
if it is making a difference. The chart below was a target metric that we were
trying to improve. Regardless of the statistical data, we knew in week one that
it was better, and we did not wait to confirm. We rolled it out straight away.

35

30

25

20

15

10

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I have had countless other cases where we looked at a line and saw
relatively no change. The mistake is to say, “Wait, let us gather more data
and see whether the number improves.” The chart below shows a change
we rolled out. If you squint a bit, it looks a little better. It could also be a
statistical variation.

0.4

0.35

0.3

0.25

0.2

0.15

0.1

0.05

The simple fact is if it is that difficult to determine whether the change is

a winner or loser then the answer is that it really does not matter anyway.
It does not hurt you, but it does not truly help you. Move on to find
something that can make a bigger improvement.

Now, the caveat is that I’m not saying to ignore statistics entirely. If you
can take a rigorous approach promptly, that is a good thing. However, in
many cases, we do not always have that luxury. If you find yourself in that
situation, then feel empowered to decide based on whether the change is
material or not.

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CHAPTER 4:
PREREQUISITES

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PRODUCT / MARKET FIT

A
s we have already covered, you should not build a growth team
if fundamentally you do not have a viable business. You will be
dumping water into a leaking bucket. The growth team should
focus on scale when you have something viable. That being said, you
may not have the luxury of waiting on product / market fit before starting
your growth team. In this case, the growth team can work closely with the
product management function to understand where the issues are and then
address (and validate) them together.

Let us digress into a brief segue into what is product market fit and how to
do some light validation before you start.

WHAT IS PRODUCT MARKET FIT?

Marc Andreesen defined Product market fit in his post, “The Only Thing
That Matters.” Andreesen does not define product market fit as being in
a good market with a product that can satisfy that market. He goes on to
describe when it is and is not happening:

## You can always feel when product/market

fit is not happening.
The customers are not quite getting value out of the product, word
of mouth is not spreading, usage is not growing that fast, press
reviews are kind of “blah,” the sales cycle takes too long, and lots
of deals never close.

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## And you can always feel product/market fit

when it is happening.
The customers are buying the product as fast as you can make it,
or usage is growing as fast as you can add more servers. Money
from customers is piling up in your company checking account.
You are hiring sales and customer support staff as fast as you can.
Reporters are calling because they have heard about your hot new
thing and they want to talk to you about it.

LIGHT VALIDATION OF PRODUCT MARKET FIT

This book will not go into exhaustive detail on validating product market fit,
but there are two steps you can perform to check for product market fit -
customer conversations and benchmarking. These analyses will help you
walk away with an understanding of whether you have a product that you
can work with or not.

Customer interviews are exactly what they sound like - speaking with the
sales and customer success team or the customer success team finding
out which types of customers you win with and why customers choose
you vs. the competition. Speak with a few new customers and, if you can,
a few “losses” (customers who considered your offering but decided not
to proceed) about the same thing. It will not take many conversations to
understand whether or not you have a viable product / market fit.

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If you have product market fit, similar to Andreesen’s comments, you will
find generally happy customers using your product to solve real problems.
The lost deals will have reasonable explanations. If you do not have it, you
will find dissatisfied customers who are struggling to use your software
in real ways. Losses will find consistent themes around the fundamentals
– not solving a problem, no need for it, does not work as advertised, too
expensive, etc.

For the quantitative types, you can also compare your key conversion marks
with industry metrics. Such as trial conversion rates, paid conversion rates,
and retention rates. While there is always some bias in averages, you should
find that your key KPIs are in the same ballpark of the industry averages.

SEAN ELLIS PRODUCT MARKET FIT SURVEY

If the explanation above leaves you feeling dissatisfied, there is another tool
you can use to determine whether you have product market fit. The product
market fit survey created by Sean Ellis is a quantitative tool that enables
you to understand help you understand if early customers consider your
product a must-have. You can read a detailed description of how to use the
survey on the Growth Hackers blog.

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The survey asks a simple question to understand how users would feel if
they could not use the product. Ellis posits that understanding how users
feel if they cannot use the product is a leading indicator of whether there is
a true product market fit. How can you use the tool, it is simple, the survey
is a single question.

“How would you feel if you could no longer use [ProductName]?”

## Very disappointed

## Somewhat disappointed

## Not disappointed

## N/A I no longer use [ProductName]

The survey should be sent to users who have recent “real usage” of the
product. To describe “real usage”, Ellis uses an example of Uber – the
popular app that matches riders and drivers to provide transportation
between locations for a fee.

For example, if you were Uber and wanted to get feedback

from people who have tried the service, it wouldn’t be enough
to focus on people who just downloaded or signed up for
the app. You would want to survey people who had actually
taken a ride (or driven a passenger if they are a driver).

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After you’ve sent your survey to users with real usage, the question is
inevitably how to determine whether there is product market fit. Sean
Ellis has benchmarked nearly 100 startups and has found that the magic
number is 40%. According to Ellis, companies that struggle to find growth
typically had less than 40% of users respond “very disappointed” in the
survey, whereas companies with stronger growth potential typically always
exceeded the 40% threshold.

THE TOOLS OF GROWTH

To be effective, there is a small set of tools that your growth team will
require to be efficient. These tools enable a deep understanding of users,
the ability to optimize conversions, and reporting. It is important to note
that all these tools are not mutually exclusive, some of the tools may span
multiple categories. By the way, if you do not have budget, the good news
is that there are a lot of free tools that you can use to get started, such as
Google Analytics and Optimize for example.

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DEEP UNDERSTANDING OF USERS

User behavior is at the core of growth. Happy users result in happy and
retained buyers, ergo improve user behavior and improve the business.
However, you cannot improve user behavior if you do not understand it.
There are two broad categories of tools to help you better understand user
behavior: qualitative and quantitative tools.

QUALITATIVE

Qualitative is good old fashioned “talk to users and understand their needs.”
The objective is to understand your customer in a deep way that analytics
simply cannot. For example, understand what customers need, why they
choose you, where they struggle to use your product, and what problems
your product does or does not solve for them.

There are many questions you will want to answer. Talking to customers
and prospects is one of the most valuable things in which you can spend
your time. There is a vast array of materials you can use to learn this such
as Customer Development (Steve Blank), Design Thinking, User Interviews,
etc. If you are fortunate to have a design team with user research skills,
count yourself lucky; however, a good Product Manager should be fluent in
these types of techniques.

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Barring these user interviews, there are also a variety of tools that make this
easier. There are tools such as Full Story, Tea Leaf, and others that record
users’ sessions. Your growth team can (and must) watch these sessions to
understand how users are using your product.

Another great tool for this qualitative understanding is UserTesting.com,

which allows you to see and hear your customers using your products. You
can define targeted tasks, ask survey questions, and more.

QUANTITATIVE

“Quantitive” is the hard data that we all know and love. While we are all
accustomed to looking at reports such as revenue, web traffic, etc., these
metrics are not to which I am referring. The most important tool is a tool that
enables the ability to do cohort analysis.

Cohort analysis breaks your users into smaller groups for more detailed
analysis. In terms of segments, the sky is the limit. You can segment users
based on any number of things, such as when they become a customer,
campaign codes that brought them to you, amount of annual spend,
people who have/have not used a particular feature, and more. You need
this ability to look at the groups of users who you are affecting based on
your experiments.

Without a doubt, my favorite tool for this is a product called Amplitude.

Amplitude provides many functions, but my favorite reports are the funnel
analysis and cohort analysis charts.

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OPTIMIZE CONVERSION

To improve conversion, you’ll need the ability to interject a change into the
user experience / product to (hopefully) positively influence performance.
There are many ways to do this. Typically, the best way is to change the
product itself. This of course takes time and assumes you know what to “fix”
in order to positively change performance. In the absence of knowing the
correct changes and having the time and resources to change the product,
you need tools that allow you to interject and test. There are two basic tools
you’ll want: A/B testing and nurture

A/B TESTING ON WEB PAGES / PRODUCTS:

You have likely heard of A/B testing because it is a big part of the ability to
optimize conversion. If you are new to the term, an A/B test allows you to
segment groups into two cohorts to compare whether one variation (web
page, product feature, etc.) performs better than the other.

CONTROL VARIATION

25% CONVERSION 30% CONVERSION

Of course, there are other more advanced types of testing such as multi-
variate testing. There are plenty of resources available regarding testing, so
this section will not cover this. The focus of this section is to cover the tools
you need to conduct your testing.

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I recommend using a tool like Optimizely. Optimizely allows you to run

sophisticated tests in the UI - i.e. change the marketing pages or the
product itself. While it’s always best to have a designer/developer helping
you, a tech-savvy person can setup and run tests on marketing pages and
even the product itself. If you do not have the budget for Optimizely, Google
offers a free testing tool called Google Optimize.

If all else fails, you can also use the “poor man’s a/b test.” The poor mans
a/b test is essentially measuring the baseline, making the change, and
measuring whether you improved over the baseline. This is not perfect,
obviously, but you should be able to determine if you are making changes
that are big enough to matter.

While both Optimizely and Google Optimize allow you to see conversion
metrics in the tool itself, the ideal scenario is to integrate the testing tool
with your analytics / BI tool. This will allow you to evaluate the performance
of your variation vs. control against any number of metrics.

My favorite example of this relates to an experiment on product demos.

We developed new demos that were featured on our product pages. The
variation with the demo converted trial sign-ups by 50% compared to the
old demo. What was more interesting; however, is that all the subsequent
metrics (signup, activate/use the product) got incrementally better. In
fact, product activation improved by 100%. I believe that the new demos
made the user more committed to signing-up and using the product.
This insight was only available because our testing tools were directly
integrated into our analytics.

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NURTURE

Outside of making changes in the UI, the other method of programmatically

interjecting into the experience is to use in-app messaging or email nurture.
By this, you can intervene in the experience to provide information such as
support resources or documentation. You can also enable a user to directly
communicate with sales, customer success, or support.

As you can imagine, this can be an incredibly powerful tool when

used appropriately. The question, of course, is how you use nurture
appropriately. Most people think about the happy path that is easy.
The happy path means progressing a user along with the steps they
are expected to take. The happy path is important; however, challenge
yourself to think about both the happy path and the negative path where
users drop off between each step.

CONFIGURE
CONTINUE
VISIT VIEW CREATE AND SETUP USE CONVERT
USING /
WEBSITE REGISTRATION ACCOUNT PRODUCT PRODUCT TO PAID
SPENDING
(OPTIONAL)

SALES CUSTOMER
PROCESS SUCCESS
PROCESS

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HAPPY PATH

The simple guidance is that you should provide limited (only critical)
information in the happy path via in-app messaging. Critical pieces of
information that will educate and progress. If you cannot simplify the UI,
or provide this in the UI itself as informational bits, then you can use a
variety of techniques:

## In-app pop-ups / messaging with tips and helpful links

## Allow users to interact with you directly

via a chat mechanism

## A guided tour during the first use to help users get

started, configure, and setup product

NEGATIVE PATH

For the negative path, the most effective technique is email. You can use
email to bring people back to the spot you lost them. For example, a user
creates an account but does not configure and use the product. You can
email the user a link to the configure section of your application along
with documentation and a short instructional video. In my experience,
the negative path emails (win-backs and bounce-backs) are the best
mechanism to improve conversion rates by decreasing the drop-off rates.

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UNDERSTANDING HEALTH OF THE BUSINESS

The growth team will not only need to understand what is happening with
cohorts of users, but they will also need to understand the overall health
of the business. This may include the full business / product or simply a
target KPI for which they are responsible, such as daily active users, a
conversion rate, etc.

The most common mistake that new teams make is too many metrics and
too many dashboards. This causes a few problems:

## It is almost impossible to derive any insight

## People don’t know what metrics to pay attention to vs. not

## The users of the dashboards become overwhelmed and

create their own reports or ignore the dashboard entirely

Therefore, the most important thing is the ability to condense your key
metrics to a few small leading and lagging indicators, which help you
quickly understand and diagnose health. You should aim to have only a
small set of three to five metrics.

This sounds impossible, right? Well, take, for example, the human body.
The human body is tremendously complex, yet nurses and doctors will
triage the state of a patient in the ER based on a few simple things: pulse,
temperature, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, respiratory rate, and pain.
These few vital signs diagnose the severity of an issue and point doctors
and nurses to where to focus next.

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Similar to the concept of vital signs, you should have a small set of KPIs that
allow you to easily monitor and diagnose where there are problems within
your business and where you need to investigate further. The Pirate Metric
Framework by Dave McClure can help you do this as it is loose enough that
you can apply it to just about any business but rigid enough that it allows
you to measure the key vital signs across the funnel.

ACQUISITION
USER FINDS YOU

ACTIVATION
USES YOUR PRODUCT FOR THE FIRST TIME

RETENTION
CONTINUES USING YOUR PRODUCT

REVENUE
PAYS FOR YOUR PRODUCT

REFERRAL
REFERS OTHERS USERS

As a starting point for your KPIs, pick a metric from each category and start
to monitor and track this with your colleagues. You may make adjustments
and/or add other metrics, but this simple and concise framework will allow
you to escape the trap of too many metrics and dashboards. It will get you
focused on the metrics that really matter.

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Once you have selected your metrics using the framework, I would suggest
you display them (if possible) using the month over month cumulative view.
The month over month view allows you to watch the day-to-day trends and
quickly understand how you are performing in the current month vs. the
previous month. It also allows you to see how you are performing year over
year. At a glance, this tells you whether you are growing or not.

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THE GROWTH STACK

If you have the luxury of building a suite of tools for your growth team, then I
would recommend a general stack that looks like this:

BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
A/B
TESTING
EMAIL /
NURTURE
CRM ...
COHORT ANALYSIS / SEGMENTATION

AI MODELS /
DATA SCIENCE

DATA

This is not a technical architecture but a conceptual view of how the team
can work using the tools. At the data layer, you want information about
users, campaigns, web data, products, and usage of the products.

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Your growth team can segment users to get insights about usage,
conversion, and more. Once you have segmented those users, you can then
target them with tactics like A/B testing, email marketing, and even sending
them different sales and/or customer success campaigns. After you have
conducted an experiment against the cohort, you can use your business
intelligence tools to analyze the results.

If you want to go for extra credit, the data science team can build a pipeline
off to the side enabling them to do similar work, such as segment users,
find insights, and then experiment with various segments/cohorts of users.

EVALUATE TOOLS TO
RESULTS ENGAGE USERS

BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
A/B
TESTING
EMAIL /
NURTURE
CRM ...
UNDERSTAND AND
SEGMENT USERS
COHORT ANALYSIS / SEGMENTATION

AI MODELS /
DATA SCIENCE

DATA

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CHAPTER 5:
THE GROWTH PROCESS

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ORGANIZING THE GROWTH PROCESS

T
he basic idea of the growth process is having a steady stream
of experiments that are going to incrementally improve your
metrics. To do this, you will implement an agile system in which
you create a backlog of experiments, run weekly sprints whereby you
are launching new experiments, tracking active experiments and sharing
learnings through playbacks, and documenting the results.

SPRINT 1 SPRINT 2 SPRINT 3 SPRINT 4

TEAM REVIEW WEEKLY METRICS

KPIs, Progress against goals
OPERATIONAL MODEL

(adjust priorities as needed)

WEEKLY COORDINATION
Marketing, Dev, Design, Product

REPORT MONTHLY
Metrics and Experiments
EXPERIMENTS

EXPERIMENTS RUNNING

ANALYZE, PUBLISH, SHARE

COMPLETED EXPERIMENTS

PLAN & LAUNCH

NEXT EXPERIMENT

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The process will have the following principles:

AGILE:

## Weekly sprints (for more iterations)

## Review metrics weekly

## Coordinate with stakeholders weekly. If you have the luxury of all

sitting on the same team, this is all done in “sprint planning.” If
you work in a matrix organization, this allows you to connect with
the people who need to help you get your experiments out the
door without making your meeting excessively large.

VELOCITY (LAUNCH X NUMBER OF EXPERIMENTS PER MONTH):

## You should have outcome metrics (e.g. improve new customer

signup by x), but an activity-based metric helps to achieve a
certain amount of velocity, which gives you a good mix of simple
/ complex improvements.

## Always have some minimum experiments running. This depends

on the type of business you are in and what you are optimizing.

## Plan the next set of experiments in parallel.

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RETAIN LEARNING:

## Publish results so you have a history of “learning.”

## Monthly playbacks: what did you learn and what is next for a
broader set of stakeholders.

When you put all these together, you have a fast-acting team that is
constantly learning and improving.

GETTING STARTED

With a firm understanding of the value of a growth team and the general
process, the question is inevitably how to put it into practice. Let us now
turn to get your team organized and running. The process is simple, it
follows an agile methodology of “Sprint 0” to build your backlog and
then continue to iterate.

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The following shows your initial sprint schedule:

SPRINT 0 SPRINT 1 SPRINT 2 SPRINT 3

EVALUATION - PRE-REQUISITES SPRINT 0 SPRINT 1 SPRINT 2

Software/Tools Training on growth Launch first experiments Launch next experiments

Product instrumented fundamentals / process Launch the first set of Note: experiments may take
Testing tools (e.g. Optimizely) experiments time to run so “sprint 2” may
Deep Funnel Analysis be too soon
TASKS

Cross-functional team Document the high-level Monitor

Form cross functional team journey map Monitor progress of running Integrate
with ”leads” from required Funnel Analysis experiment Start to Integrate experiment
functions – Product “issues” into typical agile
Management, Marketing, Build the experiment backlog Plan process – backlog grooming,
Sales and Engineering Generate a list of experiments Analyze user behavior, plan playbacks
to improve conversions next set of experiments
Executive Support
Alignment on target KPI Plan Sprint 1 Playback
Support running of the Prioritize the experiment Gather team (including
experiments backlog sponsoring executives) to
Commitment to attend end of Agree on first 2 experiments show the funnel analysis, the
sprint playback (or more) experiment, the results and the
next experiment in the backlog

To that end, you’ll need to build your experiment backlog and then establish
an ongoing growth process.

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SPRINT 0 - BUILD YOUR EXPERIMENT

BACKLOG

STEP 1: SELECT A PROCESS /

METRICYOU WANT TO IMPROVE

This is somewhat self-explanatory, but you will want to pick a target

metric such as user acquisition, paid conversion, or retention. Your
target metric will vary based on the needs of the business. Let the pirate
metrics be your guide.

As you select your target metric, consider the following:

## The most powerful lever to grow a recurring revenue business is,

of course, revenue churn. The issue; however, is that it is likely
the hardest metric to affect and it will take the longest to move
/ measure - especially compared to another metric like user
acquisition. As a growth leader, you must balance the needs of
“Growth” of the business with the ability to get the team rallied
around a number and starting to see progress. If your team is
brand new, focus on a metric that is meaningful but also one that
you can start to affect in the first thirty to sixty days. This will
motivate the team.

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## A common mistake that teams make is trying to take on too many

metrics at the same time. As your team is forming, do not target
too many metrics. Instead, focus on a single metric that you can
start to meaningfully improve. This focus will allow you to start
to gain learning based on tactics that work and tactics that do
not work, and it will also allow you to start improving the number.
Again, this will be a motivating factor. Then, after the team starts
to solidify and show progress in improving this metric, you can
start adding other focus metrics into the mix.

STEP 2: DEMO THE EXPERIENCE AS AU SER

– AND DOCUMENT IT, VISUALLY

Assuming you are improving an actual product, the next step is to go

through the software product as a user would experience it and document
each step in a visual tool.

Now, if you are fortunate to have user research professionals in the

organization and if you have the luxury of time, you should commission a
study through the user research team. The user research team can guide
you, but the basic approach is to recruit new users to go through the
product. The research team will give the user that task that relates to the
metric you are trying to improve. This will allow you to see what real users
are actually doing.

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For example, if you are focusing on user acquisition and activation, you will
give them a scenario such as, “You are evaluating products that do [insert
your product focus here]. Your task is to research [your product here] as a
possible option. You will sign up for the product, configure it, and use it for
the first time.” The user will go through the process with minimal prompting
from you or the research team. You will immediately start to see areas that
are strong and areas that need improvement. This will give you a rich set of
qualitative understanding as a basis for your growth work.

Now, if you do not have user research professionals in your organization,

you can do the study on your own. The output of this step is a short
summary of some of the learnings: things you do well, things you do not,
and ideas of things you can do to improve the experience.

The next step is to go through the product and document, visually, the flow
that you are going to improve. This must be a shared resource for the team.

You may say, “We know the product, and we do not need to do this.” Don’t skip
this step. This step is important, particularly in larger organizations, because
people tend to get too far removed from using the actual product. They talk
a lot about the product, the business, and the users but never actually use
it. Watching real users and documenting the product yourself helps to align
everyone around what the user is truly doing with the actual product.

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When you are done, the output should look something like this

GOOGLE SEARCH WEB PAGE REGISTRATION PAGE ACTIVATE ACCOUNT LOGIN (DASHBOARD)

Signup

offline process

STEP 3: GET THE DATA FOR EACH STAGE OF THE PROCESS

After you have documented the steps of the process you are trying to improve,
the next step is to try to build a funnel to show the drop off at each stage of the
process. A histogram quickly shows the scope of the drop off at each stage,
which will help you to identify where to focus.

1200

1000

800

600

400

200

Visits to Visits to Create Login

webpage registration page account

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STEP 4: BUILD YOUR EXPERIMENT BACKLOG

After documenting the process and gathering the data, you will likely
already have a handful of ideas for things you want to do to improve your
metric. Start to lay those ideas over the top of the histogram, it will start
to paint the picture of the ideas that you have and where you can make
the best impact.

1200

Improve signup offer

Retargeting Campaign
1000

800

600

Reduce fields
Improve copy
400

Bounce
back
200 Nurture

Visits to Visits to Create Login

webpage registration page account

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You will want to log your experiment ideas into a tool such as GitHub,
Trello or Northstar.

Write up your ideas with the following details:

## PROBLEM
An insight regarding a problem area based on
qualitative or quantitative data. Example: The 12

registration form only converts at 20%. We have found

that 80% of the people who fail to complete the form 10

stop at the phone number field.

8

## SOLUTION (HYPOTHESIS)
This is what you think will happen. It is best if you can
6
quantify the result, but it can be inefficient to create
an entire business case for each action. Example: If we
remove the phone number field, we can increase the 4

conversion rate of the form from 20% to 40%.

2

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## EXPERIMENT
This is the design of the experiment. It is best to list
as many details as possible. Where possible, include
screenshots of the original and variations. Screenshots
help to communicate the change and are more
important for people who revisit the learning later,
well after people have forgotten the exact specifics.
Example: The experiment will show an original with all
form fields. The variation will include all form fields but
will remove the email address field. We will target this
to 20% of the traffic. We will target it to all audiences
because it does not require any type of translation.

## METRIC
This is obviously the metric you want to improve. I
typically suggest building a report or dashboard to
show the metric before you launch the experiment. In
some cases, you may believe that you can measure the
experiment as intended only to find that there are some
nuances which prevent you from measuring it in the
way you intend. If you create the report at the outset,
before you launch the experiment, you will be sure you
can measure it appropriately. If not, you can adjust the
design / metric to ensure you can measure what you
intend to measure.

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STEP 5: PRIORITIZE

Since you cannot tackle all these ideas at the same time, the next step is
to prioritize. Group your ideas against the dimension of low to high impact.
The impact is measured by the ability to improve the key metric. Then shift
them around based on easy and hard to execute with the keys here being
time, resources and complexity. The easier tasks are obviously simple, fast,
and have resources, whereas the harder tasks are some combination of
complex, time-consuming, and may or may not have resources to complete.
Before you check this step off, agree on the experiments that you intend to
launch as part of your first sprint.

PRIORITIZATION GRID

WAVE 3 WAVE 2 WAVE 1

EASY TO EXECUTE
IMPROVE REG PAGE COPY BOUNCE BACK NURTURE

IMPROVE SIGNUP OFFER

RETARGETING CAMPAIGN

REDUCE REG FORM FIELDS

HARD TO EXECUTE

LOW IMPACT HIGH IMPACT

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CHAPTER 6:
THE GROWTH JAM

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T
he getting started process outlined earlier is good for teams who
are starting fresh; however, it’s not always practical to start fresh.
In some cases, you are working within an established team and you
need another mechanism to generate new ideas to spur growth – whether it
be holistic growth or a focused objective.

The process to use in this case is the Growth Jam. The Growth Jam is a one
or two hours focused brainstorming session which will generate an idea
backlog and prioritize the top ideas generated in the session. What is more,
the Growth Jam is fun for everyone who participates. Sometimes we spend
too much time in the day-to-day and do not get enough time to focus on
growing the business.

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OVERVIEW
Running the session is easy. There are three main parts to cover: framing,
agenda, and the brainstorm session modules. Below is a high-level
template, each will be described in further detail.

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FRAMING

Framing the Growth Jam should be done in advance of the meeting, and it
is perhaps the most important part of the entire exercise. In the framing, you
will want to set an extremely targeted objective, include the target KPI you
are trying to improve as well as the time frame in which you want to improve
it. A common mistake in brainstorming is that people do not consider the
boundaries of what they can or cannot achieve; therefore, you will also
include within which parameters your work will need to be constrained.
Finally, as a growth leader, you should have a good view of many of the
opportunities that some of your peers operating in different silos may not
see. To start the brainstorming, give them a list of some of the assets and
resources that the team can leverage in pursuit of executing the ideas.

It is important to note that people will come up with ideas that are outside
of the boundaries of the frame, which is acceptable; however, during the
voting session, which will be covered shortly, you will want to direct people
to vote on the ideas that meet the targeted objective within the constraints
you have provided.

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The following is an example of the framing:

AGENDA

The agenda is straight-forward. The purpose is to move the meeting along

through the session with the end-goal being to have a backlog of ideas and
a prioritized list of ideas, which the team can execute.

The first half of the meeting is focused on brainstorming (diverge), and the
second half is focused on refining the focus and solutioning (converge).
During the first half, your job as a facilitator is to get the ideas on the table
which is done silently. If participants start to present ideas, kindly advise
them that you are not yet “problem-solving,” and that the team is simply
generating ideas and solutioning will follow later in the session.

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During the second half of the session, your job is to get buy-in on the top
ideas and then start to refine the idea – getting the key issues, blockers,
and details on the table. You will likely not solve the entire idea in this one
session. You are simply priming the pump as the smaller squads’ form
around each (top) idea.

There are two sample agendas below: a one-hour and a two-hour agenda.
As the facilitator, you can adjust the duration of the meeting based on the
amount of time available and the amount of discussion you want to have.
More discussion is helpful in the brainstorming and refining the details. It is
possible to run the session in one hour, but the best sessions are typically
at least ninety minutes. This allows for good discussion, but it is not so long
that the team loses patience.

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FACILITATION
To run an effective Growth Jam, you must allow some time for pre-work.
This is important in the creative process; however, during the session, there
are three main sections of the collaboration document:

1. Ideas - brainstorm

2. Top executable ideas – agreement and buy-in from the team

3. Implementation - what needs to happen to do the selected ideas

PRE-WORK

It is important to call out a key aspect of facilitation – the pre-work. While

the agenda appears to happen all in one session, there is plenty of research
that shows that brainstorming is more effective when people have time to
think on their own in advance of the brainstorming session, so you will want
people to start generating and documenting their ideas in advance.

Therefore, prepare the Growth Jam framing and agenda and a virtual
collaboration space in advance. We typically use a Box note or a Google
Doc for collaboration. Send the agenda at least 24 hours in advance, if
not 48 hours, and ask the team to start documenting their ideas before
the meeting in the collaboration space. You will give them instructions on
the framing and then the “template,” (to be described later in this section)
direct them where to post their ideas in advance. Some of the participants
will not document ideas until the meeting, which is to be expected, so you
will allow for some silent brainstorming time.

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IDEAS

The Ideas part of the Growth Jam is focused on generating ideas and then
voting as a team to filter up the top ideas.

GENERATING IDEAS

Before (pre-work) and during the ideas section (brainstorm), part of

the Growth Jam participants will list the ideas that will help accomplish
the objective. This part of the Growth Jam must be done in silence and
preferably anonymously, this helps to minimize groupthink and reduces
everyone selecting “the highest-ranking employees” idea.

You will direct participants to write their idea in a simple template (below).

Most of the elements are straight-forward, but the two most-important items
are the “time to implement” and “revenue size estimate.” Note, revenue may
not be the objective, in which case this is the impact on the target KPI.

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For both of these items, focus on rough sizing. This will help them think
through the impact, with some simple numbers, as well as the difficulty
in execution. These are not hard estimates or a business case. Think
of a t-shirt size or Fibonacci number for agile estimation - the goal is to
quantify the idea against impact and execution, which will help during the
voting process.

Depending on the number of participants in the session, you may want to

limit the number of ideas that each person or function team can propose.
For example, a Growth Jam with five people each contributing two ideas
would generate ten ideas. This is an adequate number for discussion and
voting. However, a Growth Jam with ten people each contributing two ideas
will generate twenty. This is too many, and people will struggle to think
about all the ideas to vote on the best ideas; therefore, it is best to limit
each member to one idea.

DISCUSSION OF IDEAS

When everyone is done listing their ideas, the participants should have
some time to read through all the ideas that have been generated. Inevitably
there will be questions about ideas in the list. Allow participants to ask
questions to help clarify the description and the logic around the sizing.
Note, this is not a time for solutioning. The discussion should be focused
on clarification. As the facilitator, you will find that participants will jump to
solutioning. Redirect the focus back to clarification or move on to another
question if the team goes too far into the details on one particular topic.

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TOP IDEAS

The “Top Ideas” section covers two main topics: voting the best ideas up
(filter-up), and agreement/disagreement with the selections (filter-down).

VOTING

During the voting section, direct the team to cast votes on their top ideas
with each participant only receiving three votes, or whichever number is
appropriate. Before they cast their votes, remind them to vote on the ideas
that best-satisfy the objective while considering the constraints. They
should not arbitrarily vote for the idea that they think is “the coolest idea.”

This part of the session should also be done in silence and anonymously, if
possible. Similar to brainstorming, this helps minimize groupthink and voting
for the idea from “the highest-ranking employee” in the room.

When everyone is done casting their votes, count-up the totals and select
the top three ideas, or whichever number of ideas you have the capacity to
execute. Move these into a separate section of the document so that the
team can focus the remainder of the session on these ideas.

FILTER-DOWN

It is not advisable to simply “proceed blindly” with the top-voted ideas.

There may be reasons that the idea will not work, cannot be executed, or
possibly someone on the team vehemently disagrees with the selected
idea. Allow some time on the agenda to ask whether anyone strongly
disagrees with the top-voted ideas. This “disagreement process” will
surface any issues described earlier, and it will also help to enforce buy-in.

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It is important to note that it is not required that everyone agrees with

the ideas. Your team likely has some decision-making process whereby
a decision must be made. Ultimately, everyone on the team should share
their opinion as to whether they agree or not, but you must make a decision
in the meeting as to which ideas will move forward with the entire team
committing to support the go-forward decision.

IMPLEMENTATION

The final step of the Growth Jam is a discussion of the implementation

details. You will not create an entire plan in this step. You want to get
some of the broad brushstrokes of the plan. The reason for this part of the
session is obvious - you want to make the plan actionable.

The other benefit is practical in that you have all the key stakeholders “in a
room together” (virtual or physical). All too often, after the brainstorming is
finished, people instinctively go back to problem solving within their silos.
This slows down execution because information does not flow freely. You
may also find decision-making is slowed. Refining the start of the plan
together allows a cross-functional discussion of the issues as well as fast
decision-making across silos.

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For each of your top-voted ideas, start to generate the following

information:

## Who leads the work - not an organization or a team, name

of the person

## Who do we need to help - add name(s) (Silent)

## Blockers - any known blockers that stand in our way?

(Discuss)

## Important Details - add any important details to consider

(Discuss)

## What do we stop - is there something we should stop in

order to support this idea (Discuss)

## Tentative timeframe

## It is important to note that teams can be making

comments in silence in the collaboration document or
verbally in the meeting.

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Oh, and by the way, when you get to the “important details” section, this
is the place where the team can finally start to criticize and solution ideas,
so let them at it. They have been dying to get to this part.

Finally, after refining the ideas, close the session and agree on a
timeframe for when the team will get back together to review a final plan.
If that is not necessary then decide on a timeframe for when the team
will have the target launch date decided. A completed idea may look
something like the following:

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CHAPTER 7:
KEEP IT MOVING -
THE ONGOING AGILE
PROCESS

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W
ith your backlog now created, the goal is to launch your
experiments and then begin the iterative, agile process to keep
improving your metrics. Assuming you are working with part
of an established marketing and product team, you will need to integrate
your growth process into the established process. Pause before you jump
into sprint one because there are a few simple changes to make to your
existing agile process.

The good news is that these are incredibly lightweight:

1. Add experiment tasks as part of your sprint

2. Add a “Running” column to keep track of what is live

3. Capture and share learning (playbacks and archive)

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A BRIEF OVERVIEW ON AGILE

If you are new to Agile, you should take some time to read about the
methodology to understand the principles and processes. This e-book will
not go into great depth to describe Agile but will offer a brief primer.

The basic tenets which apply to the growth process in this e-book
are as follows:

## Focus: You can complete more tasks by limiting your

active work in progress.

## Prioritization: you must prioritize your most important,

highest impact work.

## Adjust: adjust your tasks and priorities as you learn, or as

new work is added.

Agile is an iterative process where you work to complete work in a defined

timeframe, a sprint. Sprints are typically one or two weeks but could be a
month or longer, you can decide the duration of the sprint. During the sprint
timeframe you will not start or take in any new work – of course, there can
be exceptions. While sprints have a defined start and end, the sprinting
process is continuous, your agile team will continue to deliver work over the
months, years through a constant set of sprints.

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The basic method of organizing your Agile sprint follows a process like this:

## Backlog: you will organize the work in your backlog before

the start of your sprint. The backlog will contain the tasks,
experiments in your case, that you intend to launch in the given
sprint. The experiments will be prioritized with the most important
at the top, the least important at the bottom. The reason for this
prioritization is that it forces you to work on the most important
tasks first. The goal is to complete all the tasks in the backlog in
the current sprint and you will not typically pull in new work after
the start of the sprint.

## In Progress: Each task, experiment in your case, is assigned to

an owner. The experiment owner will pull one experiment into “in
progress”. Note that agile teams will have a limit on the number
of active experiments that can be assigned and in progress at any
point in time, typically 1 – 3. The experiment owner will work to
complete and launch the “in progress” experiments before he or
she pulls in a new experiment into “in progress”.

## Complete: When the experiment is launched, it will move into a

complete column – this e-book recommends adding a “running”
column, which will be described later in this chapter.

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The preceding section loosely describes a sprint cycle. Your agile team will
continue to loop through this process: prioritize the backlog, launch the
experiments in the backlog during a sprint cycle, then repeat the process.

Finally, there are a series of agile ceremonies that govern the sprint process
to enable your team to continuously deliver work. While this is not an
exhaustive list, the most basic set of ceremonies are:

## Sprint planning: before the start of the sprint, the team will
prioritize the backlog and define the work that will be completed
during the sprint.

## Daily Standup: daily, the team will meet together to discuss the
work in progress. This is not a detailed status update, the team
members will discuss: what did I complete yesterday, what
will I work on today, is there anything that is blocking me from
completing my task(s).

## Retrospective / playback: at the end of the sprint, the team will

meet to show the completed work – working demos are always
welcome. The team will also share what worked well, and what
didn’t, in the spirit of continual process improvement.

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ADD EXPERIMENT
TASKS AS PART OF YOUR SPRINT

Assuming you are working within an Agile construct, you likely have tasks
for your different functions such as development tasks and/or design tasks.

The first change is to add experiments as part of your sprint, which has
two facets: creating experiment cards and then adding them to your
existing sprint.

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CREATE AN EXPERIMENT TASK

The experiment is at the core of your testing process. Fundamentally, the

Experiment should capture the following:

## TITLE
Create a simple title for the experiment

o E.g. “Bounce back nurture”

## INSIGHT
the insight from quantitative or qualitative (user research) that you
have observed.

o E.g. “We have seen that 20% of users drop off after
the account creation and never return to login to use
the product”

## HYPOTHESIS
based on the insight, the behavior or metric you want to change
based on the insight.

o E.g. “We can reduce the drop off between account
creation to login from 20% to 10% by sending an email
with how to get started content and login link to users
who have created an account but never logged in.”

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## EXPERIMENT DESIGN
the basic framing of the experiment

o E.g. “We will send an email, targeting users who created
an account but haven’t logged in after 48 hours.
The target will be English-only, based on the
web browser setting.

o Note: where possible, include screenshots or a visual
representation of the experiment

## TARGET METRIC
the metric you wish to improve

o E.g. The conversion rate from account
creation to login

o Note: If possible, build the report and include a link to
the dashboard / report before you launch the
experiment. In some cases, you may not be able to
easily report upon the metric you wish to influence;
therefore, building the report before you launch the
experiment will guarantee that you can measure the
change from the experiment.

With a firm understanding of the components of a good experiment task,

you can now proceed to create your initial set of experiment tasks.

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ADD EXPERIMENTS TO YOUR SPRINT

Now that you have created one, or multiple experiment tasks, you will add
experiment tasks in your sprint along with your development and design
tasks. This ensures you have visibility on the experiments the growth team
is working on. It also integrates it into the development flow. You will likely
need design and development resources to implement your experiments.

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ADD A “RUNNING” COLUMN

The change you are making is to add a queue for experiments that are
“live” (running). First, a quick primer on the purpose of the columns in the
Kanban board:

## Icebox: For new ideas that need to be examined in more

detail and will not be prioritized in the short-term.

## Backlog: Items that have been planned for short-term but

have not been started.

## In progress: Items that are being worked on but have not

been completed.

## Testing: Items that need to be tested and/or reviewed

before moving to complete.

## Running Experiments: Items that have been built,

launched, and are awaiting results.

## Complete: Tasks that have been completed.

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The tasks here are experiments that are live, gathering data. There are a
few benefits for this:

## It helps prevent launching experiments that will overlap or conflict

with one another.

## It helps remind you that you launched the experiment, you are
gathering data, and you will need to analyze it before closing it
out. It is easy to fall into the trap of saying, “We will run a test,” and
launch it and move on without having the rigor to analyze the result,
which is where the learning truly happens in the test.

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CAPTURE AND SHARE LEARNING

The final change relates to how you handle a completed experiment.

When an experiment is completed, the experiment owner will analyze
it and summarize whether or not it was successful against the stated
hypothesis / goal.

People often make the mistake of keeping what they have learned to
themselves. In the best case, what has been learned lives on in tribal
knowledge. In the worst case, the person leaves the role and the learning is
lost. You do not want this; you want to retain the learning so that everyone
can benefit from it whether or not they conducted the experiment.

To retain the learning, you will need to do two simple things:

## Share the learning with the team: As part of your agile process, you
likely have playbacks to demo the work that was completed in a
sprint. After the experiment is completed and analyzed, the growth
team should “playback” the experiment results, whether positive or
negative, to the entire team during the sprint in which the analysis
was conducted.

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## Retain learning in a tool or system: The best practice is to

memorialize the learning in a wiki page or database where the team
publishes the experiment results. Brevity is key. The best format
is a simple description of the experiment (e.g. change the calls to
action on the marketing page) and a summary of the result (e.g. the
new call to action improved conversion 50%).

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SPRINT 1-N: LAUNCH YOUR FIRST

SET OF EXPERIMENTS, REPEAT

With your backlog created, and the agile process adjusted, you
are now ready for sprint one. As you move through your sprints,
your growth team will be focused on four basic tasks:

LAUNCH

As in any agile process, you will be focused on launching your first

set of experiments.

MONITOR

In sprint one, you may not have any live experiments yet; however, as you
move into your next sprints you will have experiments live. With your live
experiments, you should go through, monitor, and review the results of the
experiments to see how they are progressing.

You are looking to see whether they are complete (enough data to decide
whether or not the experiment was a success), or if they need to continue
to gather data.

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PLAN

Based on what you are learning with your active experiments, or through
an ad-hoc analysis of user behavior, you will start to draft and plan the
next experiments that will fill the icebox and backlog in the coming sprints.
Inevitably, you will need to prioritize the experiments you will launch, but
throughout the sprints, you and your team will generate new ideas.

PLAYBACK

Playbacks were covered in the section above regarding capturing and

sharing learning. The goal of the playback is to share and publish the results
of completed experiments.

REPEAT

You will repeat the plan, launch, monitor, and playback for all of your
subsequent growth sprints.

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CHAPTER 8:
TOOLS - EXPERIMENTS
BY GROWTHHACKERS

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T
he process discussed in Chapter 7, “The Ongoing Agile Process”,
makes no assumptions about the specific tools and systems
that your growth team uses to manage day to day activity and
collaboration. If you can select a new tool to manage your growth process
then consider using Experiments.

Experiments was developed by GrowthHackers and has a variety of

features that will help you generate new growth ideas, lead your growth
team and process and even track and report on results. In the chapter
that follows, you will learn how to use Experiments to manage your growth
process and team.

SETUP OBJECTIVES
A growth team is typically charged with improving one KPI or a small set of
KPIs. Creating a three-layer-cadence of KPIs that gives you both the focus
but also the flexibility to act upon where the biggest opportunity lies. The
layers are: North Star Metric > Objectives > Ideas.

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One of the many benefits of Experiments is that you can add your team’s
objective(s), KPI(s), directly into the tool. Before really getting started with
Experiments, take the time to add your objectives into the tool. This will
serve as the foundation for all of the ideas and experiments, not to mention
the process, that your growth team will work upon. In the image below, you
can see that the team has defined three common objectives.

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After objectives have been defined, you can map all ideas and experiments
against that objective. As a growth leader, you can look at the specific
objective to quickly understand the ideas, active experiments, and learnings
against that target objective. In addition, if you track the improvements, you
can track the progress against improving the KPI. In this regard, you can see
the longitudinal impact of your efforts which is the true power of growth.

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GROWTH IDEAS
Now that you have defined your objectives, the next step is to start to
generate ideas on how to achieve your objectives. New growth teams
often struggle with how and where to start. If you need help generating
ideas, chapters 5 and 6 describe two processes that will help you
generate your idea backlog.

If after reading chapters 5 and 6 you need additional inspiration,

Experiments provides a great resource to generate ideas called Growth
Ideas. In Growth Ideas, Experiments crowd-sources ideas from their sizable
community of Growth Hackers. You can filter the ideas against multiple
dimensions depending upon the nature of your specific challenge.

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If you happen to find an idea that you like, you can easily import it into your
project by either selecting the individual idea or multiple ideas. The ideas
will then show up in the ideas section of your project.

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EXPERIMENT CARDS

Now, with a backlog full of ideas, you have a new problem, how to
organize your ideas. Experiments provides a mechanism for this in the
Ideas section; however, before we jump to Ideas, let us take a brief segue
into experiment cards. At the most granular level, the experiment card is
the singular idea, it is the collection of experiments that ultimately drive
the process and related improvements.

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In chapter 5, in the section on organizing the growth process, you learned

the basics of what content to include when creating a good experiment. To
reiterate, the core components are as follows:

## Title: Create a simple title for the experiment

## Insight: the insight from quantitative or qualitative (user

research) that you have observed.

## Hypothesis: based on the insight, the behavior or metric

you want to change based on the insight.

## Experiment Design: the basic framing of the experiment

## Target Metric: the metric you wish to improve

Experiments will allow you to define other facets of the experiment, add the
following items which will be useful in managing your process and reporting:

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ICE SCORE

ICE score stands for Impact, Confident, and Ease of Execution. This e-book
will not go into great detail on ICE score, you can read more about ICE at
Growthhackers.com. In short, the ICE score is as follows:

1. Impact – Impact on the target metric / KPI

2. Confidence – Confidence you will achieve the expected

result

3. Ease – Ease of implementation

The ICE score allows you to rate the ideas for the purposes of prioritization.
In a small team, the prioritization discussion can be relatively easy;
however, prioritization can be more difficult when there are many ideas to
consider. This tends to happen when working in a larger team with multiple
stakeholders who are submitting ideas. This is where the ICE score can be
particularly helpful.

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OBJECTIVES

You have previously learned about Objectives; Objectives are the higher-
level goal of what you are trying to improve. As described above, growing
the business against a defined set of KPIs is one of the core functions of a
growth team. Your team likely has a primary objective – or, a small set of key
objectives – such as increasing signups, increasing monthly active users,
decreasing retention, etc. Map your experiment to the specific objective
you are trying to affect.

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COMMENTS

Comments are a discussion from the team about the experiment. For
anyone familiar with modern agile tools, the comment function has become
an indispensable mechanism for collaborating “outside of the meeting”. The
growth team can leverage the comment features to ask questions, make
progress, etc on the experiment outside of the meeting – with all the detail
retained for future use.

ORGANIZE YOUR IDEAS

At this point, you understand what makes a good experiment card and you
should also have a list of ideas, it is now time to turn to organize those ideas
and experiments. The ideas section in Experiments will help you organize
your ideas, be sure to enter all of your ideas into the tool taking time to
assign an ICE score for easy prioritization.

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A good growth team will likely work with many stakeholders and those
stakeholders will always have their own ideas – or, even if they don’t have
ideas, they would like to contribute to the process. Another benefit of
Experiments is that it allows you to collaborate with your stakeholders’
ideas in two ways:

## Contribute ideas: Stakeholders can contribute their ideas

directly into Experiments. You can also use the tool to directly
solicit ideas from stakeholders. Their ideas will obviously show
up in your project.

## Vote on ideas: On each idea card, you will see the “clap” icon. The
clap feature allows anyone to vote for ideas, providing a numerical
score for the most “claps”. If your team and your stakeholders
are voting regularly for ideas, you can then use the clap feature
as a filtering mechanism to bubble the “best” (based on votes,
anyways) ideas to the top of your list of considerations.

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MANAGING THE GROWTH PROCESS

In Chapter 7, you learned about the basic sprint process and how to
structure your Kanban board. Using Experiments, the same principles apply:

## Focus: You can complete more tasks by limiting your

active work in progress.

## Prioritization: you must prioritize your most important,

highest impact work.

## Adjust: adjust your tasks and priorities as you learn, or as

new work is added.

## Sprints: a short timeframe, typically one or two weeks, in

which you will complete a defined set of work. During the
sprint timeframe you will not start or take in any new work
– of course, there can be exceptions.

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The basic agile process described in Chapter 7 also applies in Experiments:

prioritize your backlog, launch the experiments from the backlog in the
current sprint and repeat. The structure of the Kanban board uses slightly
different column headings than what was previously described, below is a
description of how the Experiment column headings map to the process
described earlier.

## Up Next = this is the “backlog”, the prioritized list of experiments

for the current sprint

## In Progress = in progress is the same, it is the Experiments that the

team is actively working on

## Ready to Analyze = this is the “running” column. Periodically check

the experiments here to see if they are conclusive before moving to
the Learning / playback phase

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CAPTURE AND SHARE LEARNING

As previously mentioned, growth teams often make the mistake of keeping

what they have learned to themselves. In the best case, what has been
learned lives on in tribal knowledge. In the worst case, the person leaves the
role and the learning is lost. You do not want this. As a growth leader, you
want to retain the learning so that everyone in the organization can benefit
from it whether or not they conducted the experiment.

To retain the learning, you will need to do two simple things:

## Share the learning with the team: As part of your agile process, you
likely have playbacks to demo the work that was completed in a
sprint. After the experiment is completed and analyzed, the growth
team should “playback” (share) the experiment results, whether
positive or negative, to the entire team during the sprint in which
the analysis was conducted.

## Retain learning in a tool or system: The best practice is to

memorialize the learning in a wiki page or database where the team
publishes the experiment results. Brevity is key. The best format
is a simple description of the experiment (e.g. change the calls to
action on the marketing page) and a summary of the result (e.g. the
new call to action improved conversion 50%).

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The Experiments tool simplifies this process of institutionalizing learning.

When an experiment is complete - after you have analyzed the performance
and made a final decision - you can add the test results and move it into
the “learning” phase. This will move the card into the learning view, forever
memorializing the result for the team and for anyone else who wants to read
about the experiment.

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As you have learned, Experiments allows you to add additional information

to your experiments such as objectives. This additional data can be
beneficial to your team and organization in the learnings view. Using
the advanced search, you can filter learnings based on the additional
pieces of metadata. This will allow you to understand specific tactics
that have worked, or not, against whatever dimension you are trying to
better understand versus sorting through the entire learning database.
For example, imagine your team is charged with improving retention,
Experiments allows you to filter on the retention dimension and see all
previous experiments – positive or negative – which will help you to quickly
learn what has and has not worked.

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GROWTH MEETINGS

Chapter 7 describes the basic agile meetings as it relates your growth

process, if you skipped the chapter, it described the basic agile ceremonies:

## Sprint planning: before the start of the sprint, the team

will prioritize the backlog and define the work that will be
completed during the sprint.

## Daily Standup: daily, the team will meet together to

discuss the work in progress. This is not a detailed
status update, the team members will discuss: what did
I complete yesterday, what will I work on today, is there
anything that is blocking me from completing
my task(s).

## Retrospective / playback: at the end of the sprint, the

team will meet to show the completed work – working
demos are always welcome. The team will also share what
worked well, and what didn’t, in the spirit of continual
process improvement.

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While we have briefly covered the sprint process, we have not discussed
the Growth meeting. If you are following an agile methodology, the Growth
Meeting is your sprint planning meeting. Experiments provides a feature to
manage your growth meetings, aptly named “Growth Meetings”. The growth
meeting should have a basic agenda as follows:

## Dashboard: metrics / achievement of objectives

## Active experiments

## Sprint planning

While the agenda topics are quite straight-forward, the remainder of the
chapter will cover how Experiments can help you lead these topics.

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DASHBOARD

As discussed throughout this e-book, your growth team is likely charged

with achieving an objective with some set of target metrics. If you are using
Objectives, you can periodically enter the progress that your team is making
against that objective. This allows you to track progress over time but it is
also useful to keep your team focused on your primary goals as well as the
actions that will make the most impact.

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At the outset of the meeting, look at the dashboard as a team to understand

where you are in relation to achieving that metric and to develop a growth
culture inside your organization. This will ensure everyone on the team
understands where you are with the goal and provides valuable context
before planning your next set of tasks.

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ACTIVE EXPERIMENTS

Your growth team will always have some set of experiments running. Before
you plan your next tasks, quickly discuss the experiments in the active
queue. This is not a detailed status update, it is a short discussion on what
you are seeing in the data as well as how close the experiments are to
completion – completion in terms of having the ability to make a conclusive
“it worked” or “it did not work” decision.

This discussion will help you understand whether you are blocked in a
particular experiment. For example, you should not plan to work on and
launch a new experiment on the “signup form” if you have an active
experiment running there. The discussion will also help you adjust your
priorities for the next sprint. For example, if changes on a marketing page are
not yielding much improvement, your team may be better served to focus on
a different part of the funnel to keep making progress on your objective.

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SPRINT PLAN

The last part of the agenda is the sprint planning, which is selecting
the next set of experiments to move forward. While this has not yet
been discussed, Experiments allows you to nominate ideas, in the Ideas
interface, by clicking on the “star” icon on each idea card. Nominated
ideas will be shown in the Nominations sections, these are the ideas for
consideration in the next sprint.

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If you are light on new ideas, you can go back to the Ideas section of
Experiments and find new ideas. Click on the star icon to nominate the idea
to move the “best” ideas into the nomination queue.

This concludes the overview of the Experiments tool. Experiments

provides more features than what have been covered in this chapter. As
a growth leader, it is your job to maximize the performance of your team
– and Experiments is a tool that will enable you to do this effectively -
so take some time to explore the tool further and learn more about the
features that can improve the effectiveness of your team.

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 CONCLUSION THE ENTERPRISE GROWTH PLAYBOOK

A
rmed with the knowledge in this book, you now have the tools
you need to launch your own Growth Team. As you have learned,
a growth team can be a powerful tool in your pursuit of growing
your product or business. While we often hear of tactics that ignite
exponential growth, the reality is that there are many simple improvements
you can make which can accelerate growth.As a growth leader, the key to
achieving these results is to provide your team with the proper tools and
lightweight process. Perhaps, most importantly, you must create a strong
growth culture to help your team thrive. I hope the material in this book will
enable you to do that effectively.

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WORKS CITED

Andreessen, Mark. “Part 4: The only thing that matters.” THE PMARCA
GUIDE TO STARTUPS.
blog.pmarca.com, June 25, 2007.

Ellis, Sean. “Using Product/Market Fit to Drive Sustainable Growth.”

Growth Hackers, April 5, 2019.

McClure, Dave. “Product Marketing for Pirates: AARRR! (aka Startup

Metrics for Internet Marketing & Product Management).”
Master of 500 Hats, June 20, 2007.

The Experiments logo, images and any parts thereof are Copyright (©) by
Growth Boulevard, Inc. https://growthhackers.com. All rights reserved

Except where otherwise noted, the contents of this publication are

Copyright (©) 2020 by Andy Boyd. All rights reserved.

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