There’s a reason meetings are dreaded so much.
More often than not, they’re just a poor use of time with minimal impact.
However, there’s one meeting we swear by:
A Growth Process Meeting.
Growth Process Meetings are weekly 60-minute leadership team meetings designed to create a meaningful impact and align the company. By following this structure, your team will become aligned and ensure whatever you’re launching makes a big impact.
In this article, I’ll share the framework for this meeting and show you how to get started.
Let’s go.
Pro Tip: Before you start this meeting, be sure you have your value engine mapped out, as it will guide a lot of the conversation around solutions.
The Impact of Growth Process Meetings
Instead of relying on the founder’s intuition (which is good but not always correct!), the structured steps of this meeting help your company leaders go through key data, understand the biggest bottlenecks in your business, and get clarity on the right experiments to launch.
Who should participate in these meetings?
Anyone who is a leader and helps shape your company’s strategy should attend.
In a product-led company, this could look something like this:
- CEO
- Chief Revenue Officer
- VP of Product or Chief Product Officer
- Customer Success Manager
- Sales team lead (if your company follows a product-led sales motion)
For larger teams, try capping the meeting at seven.
And if you’re a smaller team, still consider running this meeting. For a while, it was me and our Director of Content, and we made massive progress every week all because we followed this process.
The Structure of Growth Process Meetings
If you’re familiar with EOS (check out Gino Wickman’s book Traction), this may look similar to an L10 Meeting.
However, this process has two big changes:
- The scorecard metrics are different.
- Most of the meeting is spent reviewing your growth process instead of doing IDS.
Let’s see what this looks like in action.
How to Roll Out Growth Process Meetings
Start by actually booking a weekly time for this meeting.
Ideally, it’s on a Monday, so you can prioritize tasks for the week accordingly.
Here’s an overview of the structure of this meeting:
- Wins (5 min)
- Strategy Review (2 min)
- Company Scorecard Review (5 min)
- Goal Review (5 min)
- Growth Process (40 min)
- Top 3 Weekly Priorities & To-Do’s (5 min)
- Rating (3 min)
Let’s explore these seven steps.
Wins – 5 minutes
Kick off your Growth Process Meeting on a positive note.
Encourage everyone to share one piece of personal and professional good news.
Quick Strategy Review – 2 minutes
Establish the tone of the meeting by reading your business strategy out loud.
If you follow the ProductLed System, you’ll review these four questions:
- Where will you play?
- How will you win?
- What capabilities must you have?
- What strategic choices must you make?
For more insights, read my article: How to craft a winning business strategy for SaaS.
Product-Led Scorecard – 5 minutes
Reviewing your company scorecard is where the Growth Process Meetings begin to deviate from the structure of L10 meetings.
Why?
Because the scorecard metrics for a product-led company are unique; they focus on how value is delivered to users. Your team should track these ten key metrics:
- Revenue
- Cash Collected
- Cash Balance
- North Star Metric
- Visits
- Signups/ Ideal Signups
- Setup
- First Strike
- Key Usage Indicator
- Upgrades
Collectively, they give you a solid foundation to understand what’s happening in your product-led business and if you're moving in the right direction.
Here’s where you can learn how to create your own company scorecard.
Goal Review – 5 minutes
Take five minutes to review your goals. Depending on your company, you could call them Rocks, OKRs, or an alternative goal-setting framework.
Keep it simple and ask each team member whether they are on or off track for their core initiatives.
Growth Process – 40 minutes
This is when it gets fun.
The flow of this section should flow something like this:
Step 1: Pinpoint opportunities
The goal is to list all the challenges you’re facing as a business. These challenges should be based on your company scorecard results.
For example, you have a really low free trial signup number, even though a ton of traffic is coming to your site. You’ll want to add that as a challenge you’re facing.
Once you’ve listed out all of your challenges, you need to decide as a team what the most important issues are.
This is key: only choose one or two core issues to solve this week.
Step 2: Prioritize solutions
Once you’ve chosen your opportunities, take two minutes to brainstorm at least five to 20 potential solutions.
Next, have a discussion about which one of those solutions you should focus on for the week.
As you go through this, consider the amount of impact, the effort it takes, and how confident you are that the solution will succeed.
At this point, each solution will fight for its life, as every team member will have a say in whether or not it should be the focus for the week.
Stage 3: Produce solutions
Next, test your solutions with the right experiment.
In the following week, you're going to review your solution. Did it make an impact? Should you integrate this solution into your current workflow or kill it and mark it down as a lesson learned?
Only some solutions will be successful, but going through every step of the process increases your chance of success.
Weekly Priorities & To-Dos – 5 minutes
Next up in the meeting is to review your weekly priorities and to-dos. The top solution is the #1 priority for the team that week.
Rating – 3 minutes
End the meeting by asking everyone to rate it on a scale of one to 10. This feedback helps you make future meetings more effective.
Kickstart Your Growth Process Meetings
These meetings are structured to be impactful yet efficient, taking only 60 minutes of your leadership team’s time each week.
By prioritizing structured discussions and collaborative problem-solving, you can ensure your product-led company stays on track and achieves its full potential.
Ready to get started?
Here’s a detailed Growth Process Meeting template.
The first step is as simple as deciding who is at the meeting and when it is.
And then you’re already on your way to launching experiments to make an impact.
Growth Process Meetings fall into the process component of the ProductLed System™️. This comprehensive go-to-market system includes the nine key components that make up a successful product-led business.
You can implement everything in the process component by reading this article on how to identify and pull your #1 growth lever every 7 days.
Alternatively, if you’d like to work with a coach to implement the process component into your business, check out ProductLed Academy.
It’s our intensive coaching program where we’ll help you build a strong foundation for product-led growth so that you can scale faster and with more control.
What’s unique about this program is we’ll work with you and your team to implement the proven ProductLed System™️ so that you can scale faster with less stress.
We’ll review everything we went through today (and a ton more!) with your team to ensure everyone is aligned on your growth process.
