Here’s a controversial statement:
A Growth team isn’t the best fit for every company.
Growth teams are for companies with high volume, are product-led, and have a self-service aspect. A common problem is that even though these companies have Marketing and Sales teams, a body of work often gets neglected.
For example, companies with an inside sales model typically have people to nurture each stage of every problem they come across, whether it’s marketing, user onboarding, conversion, retention, and upselling.
There is often a gap at product-led organizations because more often than not, these people don’t exist.
Why build the Growth team in the first place?
At this point, you might be thinking: but isn’t growth the responsibility of Marketing and Product?
Not exactly.
The Product team thinks about the core jobs to be done that they can solve long-term, as well as creating new tools that can add value to the product.
The Marketing team creates demand and tells the story in the broader market.
The Growth team’s job is to capitalize on that demand within the existing audience and commercialize it and show value very quickly, which elegantly complements Marketing and Product roles.
In this article, we’ll touch on:
- How to develop a growth mindset.
- Balancing the demands of having a growth team while doing your real job.
- Setting priorities to garner quick wins.
- Leveraging user research.
- Common issues you may run into.
- How to develop your skills as a leader.
How to develop a growth mindset
If there’s anything you learn from this article, remember to consider working with frameworks instead of tactics. A single tactic may not work every time, but the framework will lead you to the answer.
To succeed in product-led growth, you’ll have to take a growth approach to solve specific problems.
Here’s what that looks like:
- First, admit that you don’t know the answers: you won’t know the right campaigns to run nor all the ways to improve the conversion rates.
- Then, get inspired: In the past, I would learn the “right way” to do a task, apply six iterations, and five of those would fail before I found a method that worked for me.
Eventually, I learned that there was no right way, only a commitment to the process of experimentation, which was more of a system than a body of work.
Balancing the demands of starting a Growth team while doing your real job.
Once you take a growth approach to problem-solving, you’ll start applying this new method to other problems, some of which might need more resources.
It’s complicated to balance your old responsibilities with the growth demands, so you’ll need to join forces with people who share a similar commitment to growth.
Find other people in your company who are lone wolves but are taking a growth-minded approach to their day-to-day work. Look for someone interested in scaling a growth squad that might eventually turn into a more dedicated team down the road.
Eventually, you’ll find yourself within a scaled-up team committed to growth.
How to scale from “lone wolf” to a Growth team
The most common route to developing a fully staffed cross-functional product-led team is to scale from being a “lone wolf.” As you may already know, lone wolves tend to have limited resources and can only work on one KPI at a time.
As a lone wolf, you can start to scale by working with an engineer and a designer to form a “Growth Squad.” This new squad allows the lone wolf to move faster, take bigger swings, and unlock newer and bigger opportunities.
Your Growth Squad will focus on one or two KPIs and earn quick wins using these three strategies:
- Removing friction in the user experience.
- Highlighting what's valuable to customers.
- Creating user profiles that help with segmentation.
Once you’ve garnered some quick wins, more opportunities will start to reveal themselves, and your team will start to think bigger.
Once you have your cross-functional team, you’ll start specializing: a portion of your Growth team might work on user acquisition, another on user onboarding, and another on activation.
What to expect in the early phases of building a larger growth department
Some things to keep in mind as you build a Growth team:
- You’ll be hyper-focused on one KPI: Depending on the growth model, you’ll focus on one KPI in the early phases of composing your growth model. For example, at Wistia, I focused on new user acquisition, so the KPI was the number of installations of our freemium product.
- There will be a lot of experimentation: You’ll find yourself optimizing by running a lot of A/B tests. To break through a growth plateau, we often performed A/B tests to identify why certain pages were getting a lot of traffic.
For example, ask, how can I get more installs from this page? Run 10 tests in a row, change the copy and images, and try different videos and sliders.
Don’t be afraid to use A/B testing software like optimizely and VWO.
- You’ll need lots of help: To run an effective A/B test, you’ll need the help of a designer to show you what’s possible, especially if you want to redo a page or think through a new experience. You can also partner with an agency. Conversion rate optimization agencies can help you make the most of your time.
- You’ll learn a lot from engineers: When I got more engineering help, it expanded my perspective on what could be possible. For example, brainstorm ideas, and the engineers can respond with: “What if we made a lightweight version of the product that somebody could interact with for free which would prompt them to save an account? This wouldn’t have been possible as a lone wolf, and as you scale your team, similar opportunities will reveal themselves.
How to set priorities to garner quick wins
Prioritizing should be a collaborative process, so meet with your stakeholders, whether it’s people in product, marketing, or the executive team.
Here’s what that looks like:
Put together a document that defines your growth vision: Walk your stakeholders through your definition of growth. Share your work with them, whether it’s your KPIs and hypotheses. The goal is to present a roadmap that accurately represents what things may look like for the next six to nine months.
Ask questions to garner feedback: Questions such as, “what do you think I should work on?” will get you a lot of feedback along with ideas about what you should prioritize.
Use a framework to prioritize your experiments: Use frameworks such as the Sean Ellis ICE framework to prioritize experiments. Here’s what that looks like:
- Use Google sheets to keep a running list of at least 20 ideas.
- Rank them in terms of impact or how confident I am that the idea will succeed relative to the amount of effort involved.
- Choose experiments that'll have a high impact, relatively high confidence, and low effort involved. Those are where you’ll find your quick wins.
Eventually, you’ll find that after a few quick wins, you’ll begin to develop a longer-term strategy to keep the momentum going.
How to balance small details with the bigger picture
Sometimes you’ll get overwhelmed with what to prioritize, especially regarding focusing on the smaller details versus the bigger picture. Both aspects are super important, and both should be on the roadmap.
Try to prioritize based on impact first, which includes assessing the amount of effort involved.
For example, websites or in-app optimization that require tweaky optimizations such as changing colors, copy, images, and page layouts can require very little effort. A much greaterr effort may involve making new tools to get more top-of-funnel users.
Try to run a mix of low-effort and high-effort optimizations.
Regardless of the effort, the level, these tactics come from the same process:
- Identify the KPI that you want to focus on.
- Gather a cross-functional crew of people with different perspectives on the project.
- Develop a list of ideas, which can range from optimizations to developing new tools.
- Prioritize your ideas based on impact and effort.
Ultimately, you should consider what will be the most impactful for the business while involving creative people in the process.
How to develop a weekly cadence for your ideas
To implement your ideas, you’ll need to develop a robust plan.
Every quarter, set a high-level direction by picking one or two KPIs to focus on. From that quarterly plan, put together a loose, directionally accurate, three-month roadmap. The ideas generated from brainstorming mentioned earlier should underpin this roadmap.
In addition to monthly planning, it's helpful to have two main meetings throughout the week.
In my experience, Mondays are for sprint planning: connect with your colleagues, and talk about programs, projects, or experiments ready to run.
During this meeting, identify who needs to collaborate with who, reveal any unknowns that need to be surfaced, and ensure the engineer has everything they need to develop essential tools and projects.
Full Story Fridays
There's no better way to figure out what to do than watching people interact with what you’ve built.
On Fridays, we have a meeting called Full Story Fridays. A designer, an engineer, a product manager, and anyone interested in our project will meet. Here’s what this meeting looks like:
We open up a tool (like Lucky Orange) and watch people interact with what we were working on, whether it’s a project experiment, a new webpage, or a program app. As you watch people interact with it, you will come away from that session with amazing ideas that can instantly add value to your work.
On these days, we’ll do UserTesting sessions. For example, we'll do a version of the pricing page and hear about what users think of it.
When people click on something that isn’t clickable or get stuck on a page they shouldn’t be on in their first session, It's valuable because these meetings double up as user-testing.
Use tools like Full Story, VWO, and Hotjar to get feedback from real people who are your ideal customer profile.
How to leverage user research
If you’re not fortunate enough to work at a company with someone on the Product team, you must develop a strategy for acquiring and leveraging user research.
Here are some ways you can do so that:
- Running Surveys: For a website, an easy thing to do is to create a pop-up survey saying: “Hey, thanks for stopping by! Would you mind sharing the one thing that's stopping you from creating a free account, free trial demo, whatever it is today?”
Most people will ignore that pop-up, but you'll eventually get real answers, and for every answer you receive, you can assume that 300 other people share the same sentiment.
- Sign-ups: When a user signs up for your product for the first time, add a question to your form that says, “Hey, thanks for signing up for the tool, would you mind sharing the main reason you installed an account today?” The response will reveal why and how they are using your product.
If you collect enough of these answers, you'll learn that everybody who signs up fits into at least five different profiles and that you can customize their journey to help whichever profile you want to prioritize. This helps with segmentation.
This method can be a gold mine for optimizing the new user experience.
Common issues you may run into
- The “resource hamster wheel”
When you don’t have help as a “lone wolf,” what tends to happen is that it limits what you can execute. Working on your own, you’re only making incremental changes, which may yield incremental results that won’t excite your executive team.
They’ll say that they won’t give you more resources because you’re just doing a lot of small things that aren’t making any changes.
This is called “The resource hamster wheel.” You're stuck with small projects because your resources are limited. Without big results, you can’t get buy-in.
The solution: document and over-communicate your roadmap.
When you're creating your roadmap, make sure you're sharing the big opportunities that you can’t execute alone with your boss or whomever growth reports to.
Create a project plan as if you were going to do it and say, “Hey, look at this amazing project. I know we can't resource it now, but I thought through the opportunity and here's what I think can happen for the business. If we execute this, here are the results that I think we can achieve.”
It becomes a much different conversation where they'll go, “wow, I'm really interested in that. How can we make that happen?” Then you can start having the resource conservation because they're excited about it, and you'll be way more likely to be successful there.
- Bumping into other teams
Getting executive-level buy-in won’t save you from bumping into other teams.
When you immediately start bulldozing through amazing designs, replacing them with dead simple stuff to see how it would impact conversion, you can bump into other teams.
Just because one person receives executive-level buy-in doesn’t mean everyone has it.
The Solution: build a foundation of trust
Take a completely different approach to lay a better foundation of like trust between teams:
- Define your vision and KPIs and share it with the team: First, define what growth is, what KPIs to focus on, and how to execute them.
- Share your experimentation process: Share your approach to experimentation, and how you plan to run them. I would share how I will prioritize the user and leverage the collection of qualitative feedback to run experiments.
- Include other teams in your brainstorming: Ask other teams for their opinions before I execute projects so I'm not interrupting what they've done.
- Get aligned: Alignment involves being transparent about what you're looking to do and why you're looking to do it. Be proactive about letting those people know, even if it's a little uncomfortable and painful.
Key Takeaways
Let’s go over some of the key takeaways:
Frameworks over tactics: Find a system to find the right answer. It's not just about getting to the answer with one tool or one tactic, but to invest in systems. Find mentors that can teach you problem-solving systems which can be incredibly helpful for growth and every position.
Define growth to your key stakeholders:
Most people have never worked with a person or a team who's focused on growth, so the onus will be on you to describe it to them. Give them a definition of growth and how you work.
Align your team: Define the values and principles for our team to lay the groundwork for effective leadership. Don’t assume that what you have in mind is what the team automatically has in mind; a regular cadence of brainstorming and meeting can transform a misaligned team into an aligned one.
Document your approach: Document all of those things that I've talked about and find ways to proactively share that with people and to go really slow with it so that you can be aligned from day one, and they will be a supporter and an advocate and someone that helps you be more successful and not a speed bump to your success.
