How long does the average head of growth stay in the same role? Two years? Three? Five??

Sadly, I’ve noticed it’s more like 12 to 16 months.

Why so much turnover? Because being head of growth is hard.

If your company is underperforming (which is common right now with everything going on in tech), you might suddenly become the scapegoat. People expect the person with “growth” in their title to fix everything, regardless of the reasons their underperforming are within your control. Over time, that person either gets frustrated and leaves, or the company gets frustrated with them — and lets them go.

On the flip side, life as a winner isn’t easy either. The pace of change can be dizzying. Things are constantly breaking. The goals get more aggressive. And every level seemingly gets harder. In these environments, one of the biggest concerns is that your company outgrows you. They’ll either let you go, or hire someone to sit above you. Neither situation is great and can lead to imposter syndrome, work anxiety, and high stress.

Plus the concept of a growth team is still so new that it means different things to different people. So the head of growth role itself runs a big risk of misalignment between your intentions and others’ expectations.

I’m a former 2x head of growth. I led growth teams at Wistia and Postscript (and worked at HubSpot during the crazy early years). Now, I coach other members of the growth community.

Based on my experience, I’ve identified five common mistakes, or “landmines,” that all heads of growth should watch out for.

Being aware of these landmines can help you anticipate, avoid, and better navigate them, ultimately increasing your chances of success as a head of growth.

Landmine #1: being scared of making the “wrong” calls

Making data-driven decisions is a huge part of working in growth. And, it’s common to feel like you don’t have “enough” data to make the right choices. Especially at an early-stage company.

But here’s the truth… I’ve never met a head of growth who says they have enough data. Enough is elusive.

You always want more. More user touch-points to track. More product data to collect. More segments to explore. More ways to drill down and slice and dice the information. More spreadsheets to review.

In my career, I spent a lot of teams looking for that “needle in the haystack.” That small nugget of information would unlock everything.

Until one day, my manager thought I was taking too long to make a decision. They pulled me aside and asked, “What would you do differently tomorrow if you had this answer today?”

I started to give a long answer… “Well, if the data showed me x, I would want to know this next. But if the data showed me y, then I’d probably explore that next”

(I hear this type of answer all the time with my coaching clients too, just in case you find yourself nodding along.)

My manager waited patiently, then said “Andrew, we’re an early-stage company, speed is an important asset here. What’s the best decision you can make today with the information available?”

I gave my answer.

“Great,” He said. “Now, go do that.”

Feedback like this has helped my approach to data evolve over the years.

My viewpoint has shifted from “What data do I need to make the best decision?” to “What’s the best decision I can make with the data I do have?”

All choices have risks, pros, and cons. Eventually, spending more time searching for that perfect needle in the haystack has diminishing returns. Making a faster call is going to be way more valuable than continuing to search for it.

There are no perfect decisions anyways. So you might as well move quickly and adjust your plan later when you get new information.

Landmine #2: Assuming your stakeholders are aligned

As a head of growth, you must drive alignment across the company. Everyone needs to understand what growth is, what you’re working on, and why.

It’s one of the most important jobs — and the biggest potential landmines for these cross-functional roles. Especially at a fast-paced startup.

The growth capability is still relatively new and most people haven’t worked with a growth team before. They usually have different ideas and expectations about your role, which leads to misalignment and friction.

Creating and sharing your own growth operations manual can help address this.

A growth operations manual is a living, breathing document that outlines what the team is working on and how the team gets the work done.

It serves as a central location for important team information, operating principles, collaboration, ownership, etc. It can help to ensure that the team is able to operate effectively and achieve its goals.

It includes things like,

• Who’s on the team and how it fits together?
• Mission and vision
• Goals, objectives, and KPIs
• Operating principles (ie how the work gets done)
• Important procedures and processes
• How growth collaborates with other teams

Here’s a snippet of a blank RACI matrix. It’s a core piece of the operations manual.

But, it’s not enough to create this document. You’ll also need to get feedback on it from the leadership team. Give them space to review everything, ask questions, share concerns — then make adjustments based on their input.

Then, once you have buy-in— “launch” your operations manual with a presentation to your company. Treat it like a new internal feature release.

Moving forward, every time you present or share a project, tie it back to a piece of your operating system & strategy. In practice, it might sound like this:

“Hey everyone — in Q2, the growth team is focused on improving our new user activation rate. And as part of our operating system, we like to experiment before investing deeply. So today, I’m excited to share one of our latest onboarding experiments. Here it is…”

Clarity and repetition are your most important tools. Use every single project as an opportunity to stay aligned.

Landmine #3: not managing-up enough

At startups and scale-ups, heads of growth typically work directly with founders, which can be great for staying aligned and getting access to high-level thought partners.

But, working with founders can be tough. Especially first-time founders. You’ll probably feel like you’re micromanaged at times. Even if you have a ton of experience. And especially at an early-stage company.

It’s one of the reasons a head of growth leaves a new company under 12 mos. They get frustrated.

When this happens, it’s important to remember it’s not on purpose. Nobody wants to micromanage. Most don’t even know they’re doing it.

Your manager just wants to help, and without your guidance on what you need help with, and how they can help you — sometimes that urge to help comes out in unproductive ways.

Like them randomly checking on projects. Giving feedback on something seemingly out of the blue. Or disrupting your current priorities.

If you’re a head of growth, it’s important to remember that you’re in a leadership position. It’s on you to manage up!

One way to do that… use the task-relevant maturity (TRM) framework. It’s outlined in Andy Grove’s classic book for managers and leaders, High Output Management.

TRM is traditionally used as a tool for managers to help their teams and direct reports. But it’s also a sneaky effective tool for managing up too.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

If you already have a lot of experience at something you’re working on (high maturity), proactively let your CEO know that you’ll reach out to them for help establishing success criteria, or if you get stuck.

Then, when working on a new problem (low maturity), let them know you’d love more of their input to help you get started.

Your manager wants to help. This framework proactively lets them know what initiatives you’d like their help on — and how to get the help you need.

You can bake this into your 1:1 and other docs — so it’s part of your weekly operating system.

Landmine #4: not prioritizing enough

If you work at a startup, smart people are constantly chucking new ideas your way. That buzz is what makes early-stage companies so fun. But without the right guardrails, it can also be your kryptonite too.

If you’re not careful, you may end up feeling overloaded and overwhelmed. Or worse, prioritizing the wrong initiatives because someone senior (or charismatic) suggested them.

At this level, working harder or longer isn’t the answer. There isn't enough time in the day to execute everything. Doing everything is a distraction from the most impactful work. You need a system to comb through ideas and decide which to prioritize.

If you’re looking for a starting point — I am a huge fan of the ICE framework Sean Ellis evangelized many years ago. It’s dead simple and extremely helpful.

Basically, each initiative gets evaluated by these three questions:

● “I” for its Potential Impact

Assuming the initiative is successful, would it have a big impact on your current team goals?

● “C” for your Confidence the Idea Will Work

Do you have prior experience, learnings, or other information that makes you confident the initiative will be successful?

● “E” for the Ease of Implementation

Is this a small initiative that can be executed quickly, or is it a big project that requires more resources?

I like keeping a backlog of growth ideas in Google Sheets, and ranking them on a scale of 1 to 5 for ICE . 1 being the smallest (impact, confidence, etc), and 5 being the largest.

Once a month, I reevaluate my rankings, re-prioritize my roadmap, and strengthen the prioritization muscle.

Landmine #5: not having a plan for the first 90 days

When you’re hired as head of growth, you’ve been brought on as an expert… and yet the scope and responsibilities for your role usually aren’t well defined. It’s your job to teach them what to do, and how to do it.

To prevent misalignment from happening, I recommend the book The First 90 Days. It was recommended to me by my own professional coach when I started as head of growth at Postscript, and it outlines how to plan for success during your first three months at a new job.

Here’s the quick and dirty version of the 90-day plan that I used:

Days 1 to 30

• Focused Learning — Create your own learning roadmap to help you learn about your customers, GTM strategy, conversion levers, core product value, and company OS.
• Connections/Alignment — Learn about colleagues and their experience with growth teams.
• Early Wins — Projects with immediate impact, like removing friction on the customer’s journey.

Days 31 to 60

• Strategy V1 — begin to develop the first version of your strategy
• Prep Operating System — Assess resources, budget, tools, RACI matrix, and more.
• Start to Ship — Get some of those resources and start down the path.

Days 61 to 90

• Growth Model — Use any additional insights you’ve gained to make progress on your model and set up applicable dashboards.
• Strategy V2 — Use what you’ve learned to revise your approach and refocus on the highest-leverage priorities.
• Growth Roadmap — Hone in on exactly what levers you’ll pull, and when.

Feel free to use whatever works for you from that plan, or download my entire plan if you need more guidance.

Keep growing

These aren’t the only landmines to look out for, but they’re the most common ones that I see.

Leading a growth team involves way more than just avoiding landmines, like creating your model, developing your strategy, running your team, effective experiments, and tracking processes, etc.

👉 Want more help leading your growth team? Swipe my head of growth guide. It’s free, ungated and designed to help you create your strategy, structure your team, and set-up high-impact habits & rituals.👈

I’ve coached 35 heads of growth over the past 2 years. These 5 challenges keep popping up. was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most employee incentives built in today’s companies are efficiency-focused. You execute at a certain level of productivity, hit your team or company KPIs and get rewards. For example:

• Reach a sales quota, and get a commission.
• Achieve a target stock price, and receive a bonus.
• Surpass a specific goal, earn a promotion…

A requirement for these incentives to work is a well-defined process: you have historical data to forecast future results, a documented step-by-step guide to follow, and a clear understanding of the mechanics of your tasks.

The incentive theory of motivation is a behavioral theory that suggests people are motivated by a drive for incentives and reinforcement. The incentive theory also proposes that people behave in a way they believe will result in a reward and avoid actions that may entail punishment.

According to a study conducted by the Gallup Organization, disengaged employees cost the American economy up to $350 billion a year due to lost productivity.

However, these types of incentive alignments fall short for growth teams. They cannot reverse engineer their challenges, mostly because they are chasing goals that are unvalidated and unproven. These teams are searching for new ways to solve old problems. They are trying to validate hypotheses and conduct experiments with unknown results. There are no playbooks.

So, if the growth team has this different nature from other departments, how can you create an incentive structure that motivates them while also matching the company’s needs?

Define the scope

• What problems is the growth leader trying to solve? Remove acquisition bottlenecks at the top of the funnel? Increase engagement or retention?
• Who in the organization is impacted? E.g. marketers, the product team, designers?
• What are the KPI(s) that define success for this objective? How long will it take to run all experiments and see results?
• Is the downside limited? Is the upside at least 10x?

Get an agreement to guarantee resources

• What resources will the growth leader need to run experiments and give them the best chance of success?:
• How much time is required to run all experiments?
• How much budget is needed?
• Will they need resources from other departments? If so, how much, how long, and when?
  This is particularly important when assigning designers, copywriters, data analysts, and engineers from core departments to growth tasks
• Does the leader have all the required skill sets at his or her disposal?

Measure success right

• Again, growth teams deal with uncertainty. They don’t know which experiments will work, and which won’t. They are not 100% sure of the outcome of their actions.
• So the process itself should maximize the chance of the best outcome.
• Measuring growth success singularly by an end goal may cause anxiety and demotivation in the team. Instead, try to measure how many experiments the team runs on a weekly basis and if such experiments are moving the needle of the main KPI they need to impact.
• And remember: experiments are means to an end. The end is the learning around which you get closer to achieving a main KPI — which should be clearly defined and agreed upon before any step gets taken.

Compensate appropriately

• What’s the reward once the objective is achieved? The motivation of each individual on your team will vary, and so should the incentive.
• To motivate idea suggestions: one must reward speaking up. There shouldn’t be any downsides in case an idea doesn’t work, but if it works, and eventually gets rolled out, whoever voices the idea may become the leader of that project.
• To motivate testing velocity: one must ensure that the primary KPI that measures success is the number of quality tests being executed, regardless of individual outcomes — trust the process.
• To motivate leaders: one must show that efficiency and validation are two opposite sides of a spectrum. While most operational teams are efficiency-driven, the growth team supplements their approach with their validation-driven experiments.

A few examples of company programs designed to incentivize the behaviors and actions required for a successful growth program are:

Amazon’s Just Do It Award: every year this award is given by the CEO and aims to recognize a select few employees who exemplify two of their core values: innovation and bias for action by creating an impact on their own outside of their day job.

Pfizer’s Dare to Try: a program created to incentivize experimentation and award those responsible for finding creative solutions to many of the difficulties and puzzles Pfizer encounters as a major organization.

Last note: when we think about founders, the ultimate success of the company is their highest incentive, which justifies their broad sense of ownership. But that’s not the same for other roles. Once you understand what drives and inspires their actions, it becomes easier to incentivize that behavior and mindset.

This article was brilliantly co-authored by our Master Growth Community member Steven Dupree — who was also former VP of Growth at LogMeIn, VP of Marketing at SoFi, member of the Reforge Collective, and EIR at 500startups, among so many other growth ventures.

Align Incentives for Growth Teams was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before we start, let's all agree on the fact that there are successful growth teams in all possible structures. There's no right or wrong team structure. There is, however, the most likely to work for your company for that specific moment in time.

The moment in time is a reflection of three main decisions:

1. The Stage of the product/project
   The same company can have different projects/products in completely different stages. To answer this, focus only on the project where the growth team will be involved.
   a) From zero to MVP (Minimum viable product)
   b) From MVP to PMF (Product-market-fit)
   c) From PMF to Scale and Traction
   d) Unlock Enterprise Value
   *Here's a breakdown of the differences between each
2. The Purpose or End-goal of the growth team
   a) Optimization
   b) Validation
   c) Innovation
3. The Maturity of your company
   In terms of growth culture, from 1–5, which level would you say your company is at? A few questions that can help you define that:
   a) Number of experiments a month
   b) The knowledge of the high-level executives in regard to growth
   c) Collaboration with other teams and departments
   d) Data-based decision-making process
   e) Ideation comes from every other team
   f) Growth strategy aligned with Company strategy
   *If you want to find out your maturity level, take this test.

Once you have done the homework to answer the questions above, it's time to decide on the structure that will help you maximize the chances of success for your growth initiative.

Cross-Functional

When launching a growth initiative in a company, you may face a lack of understanding from other executives and other departments. Growth has a singular dynamic, requires risk-taking, and focuses on learnings. Without support and shared resources, growth teams may create limited insights.

An initial growth team structure should be optimized for company-wide understanding and collaboration, even if that means sacrificing the potential deliveries and reach — at least in the very beginning. After all, there’s no way to get to the top of a mountain without climbing it.

Pro: The cross-functional structure allows the growth team to gather a team of internal early adopters while, at the same time, not disrupting other teams’ resources (people/time/budget). This gives the growth team the range of skillsets required to operate, and penetration to other departments’ knowledge all while spreading the word about its role.

Con: Since members are not exclusively dedicated to growth, the experimentation sprint might not be their top priority. The execution capacity of both sides (growth and the other department) may be compromised — or, at least, not maximized.

Either way, this structure helps to demystify some of the early misconceptions other members usually have about growth and it’s a great opportunity to get others on your side.

Recommendation: having at least one team member fully dedicated to growth creates ownership and helps ensuring the process will remain in a continuous and permanent manner.

Mixed Structure

Once you get a better understanding from members of other areas in all hierarchical levels of what they can expect from growth and how they can collaborate, it’s time to expand.

At this point, you should be receiving collaboration from other areas, like suggestions for testing ideas or data points to backup tests. You also have more freedom to execute experiments, take more risks and fail (learn). As well as increasing the reach across the board, reaching more growth levers beside the ones where you started.

Pro: the growth leader will ensure the process and the projects are not deprioritized. This person can build cross-department bridges, ensure that the growth strategy is well aligned with the company strategy as well as play one of the most important roles at this stage: promote the wins.

Cons: without full understanding and comprehension, there may still be some counter-resistance in terms of resource allocation from other departments. It’s important to align bandwidth and time allocation and guarantee there won’t be surprises along the way.

Recommendation: as Nicholas Garofalo, one of the growth leaders at Automattic uses to say: “the most underrated skill of a growth leader is: cheerleading”. Don’t forget to promote your wins (and all learnings) as much as you can, not only for your direct reports, but also for the benefit of other leaders.

Independent

At this point, growth is already considered part of the company culture. Experimentation, risk-taking, and hypothesis validation became part of the daily routine. Testing everything out and making decisions based on data is part of the DNA.

With a VP of growth sitting side by side with other VPs, growth is now institutionalized. You already have a well-documented process, you are executing dozens of experiments per week. Your teams have their own management tool where you follow all experiments and connect results to learnings. Team members have no other KPIs to deliver besides the ones attached to the growth process.

Pros: that’s the stage where growth achieves its optimal operational capacity — which usually means the execution of the largest amount of experiments possible, at least a thousand or more per year. You can clearly recognize that incrementing the number of experiments makes the growth needle move up, for the entire business.

Cons: if the growth leaders don’t have strong relationship skills with other executives, growth might become siloed and the impact it brings company-wide may suffer. Ideally, growth will be focusing wherever the biggest opportunity is at the moment. However, without access to all departments’ insights and data, this may not happen.

Recommendation: whenever possible, at this stage, prioritize promoting internally over hiring externally for the growth team. It may take some time for new hires to become fully integrated, learn how to navigate company policies and procedures as well as understand who are the decision makers from other departments and what’s key for their success — which can influence how fast they start contributing to impactful experiments.

Keeping your learning board updated or finding an automated solution for collaboration at this point is paramount. The growth team tends to have a faster turnover than any other department, so speeding up new members' onboarding can save you a huge amount of time.

It’s important to note that there’s no right or wrong, nor one-size fits all model that you can copy and paste. While our opinion is based on the implementation of hundreds of growth teams, they are not an unbreakable rule — you may start with an independent growth structure from day one, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

This article is based on a larger live presentation hosted by the Growth Masters Community — the new invite-only community focused on enterprise growth leaders' collaboration. To apply for a spot and participate in all future events, click here.

Figuring out the best growth team structure. was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As far as credentials go, Sid Apaya has a storied trajectory: worked as an Enterprise Transformation Lead at Nestlé, Brand Manager at Kraft Foods, General Manager at JM Smucker Co., Partner in Venture Accelerator EVA, and Global Director of Innovation at TerraCycle.

Such experiences building and growing businesses have taught Sid timeless lessons on business innovation, growth strategies, and experiments that we had the pleasure to listen to (and learn from) during a fireside chat with our community members.

Here are some highlights that every business looking to successfully adopt growth/innovation/experimentation as their roadmap should keep in mind:

1. What's innovation or growth all about?

While there are many variables to consider, innovation is, fundamentally, a process. It's an iterative framework that never stops at any stage of a business, with the aim of creating measurable long-term value for the organization through the improvement of existing business lines, and optimization of new revenue streams.

2. Is it the same for every stage?

Sid breaks down four main different buckets of innovation:

I) From zero to MVP (Minimum viable product);
II) From MVP to PMF (Product-market-fit);
III) From PMF to Scale and Traction;
IV) Unlock Enterprise Value;

Each of these stages will offer different challenges and require different processes, but, the element that is fundamental to them all is experimentation!
To unlock huge transformational value, experimentation is needed and the biggest challenge to companies embracing experimentation is human bias.
Even if they learn the methodology, human bias, and leadership support is currently the biggest challenge for innovation to succeed.

3. How to unlock innovation & growth potential in an organization?

The first thing is to start with a pilot group and expand from there. Bring like-minded curious people to that pilot team and make sure you focus on low-hanging fruit to achieve quick wins at first, before moving to more audacious projects.

If there's no buy-in from the leaders at the top, growth, and innovation will not succeed. The C-level must be onboard.

Second, the challenge that limits growth or innovation in the majority
of organizations is the lack of decentralized experimentation at scale.
You only have to look to Booking.com, Amazon, and Haier to see the
significant enterprise value they have unlocked in a short period of
time. While much has been written about Amazon or Booking.com,
very few people know about Haier. The $35 Billion appliance maker
has grown by 23% a year and has created more than $ 2 billion in
revenue from new enterprises. You can read more about how they
unlocked enterprise value through experimentation and bias avoidance
here.

4. What's a common trait among failed innovation projects?

One of the things that hold innovation back the most is bureaucracy. And traditional or family businesses may have a lot of that. In order to innovate with success, they must overcome that challenge first, giving the innovation/growth team the flexibility to test, experiment, to try — that's the only way they will figure out the (current) unknown. To bypass this, a few elements should be addressed:

• Team: focus on building a separate team that can execute as a stand-alone and not dependent on the rest of the organization's rules.
• Incentive System: innovation and growth teams are not focused on performance or efficiency, they are focused on long-term results, they are dealing with uncertainty, and your incentive structure should be aligned with that.
• Process: the step-by-step framework that will guarantee the best outcome out of their actions
• Goal: innovation is measurable and success should be defined early on. There will be failures along the way, that's why it's important to define the promised land before starting sailing.

Example: Amazon STT (single-threaded teams). When Bezos wanted to create their digital arm, he asked Andy Jassy to be the owner of the project and to work with 10 other members in a separate environment with a clear success KPI.
AWS eventually became one of the most lucrative areas of the business and Jassy went on to succeed Bezos as CEO.

5. Is there a wrong way to do innovation?

The wrong way is to do it without being result-oriented.
At first, the project won't have all the KPIs and Dashboards and Metrics in place. But having a measurement of success is fundamental. That's what will help integrate that innovation project into the rest of the company once they succeed — that's what guarantees alignment between the innovation labs and the efficiency-focused departments of the business.

6. On Culture and Failure?

There are two kinds of failure: the failure of the project, which is usually the result of the lack of support from the executive team or the lack of a clear success KPI, and the failure of the experiment, which is simply part of the process. Since the team will be facing the unknown, some failures will certainly happen.
As the innovation/growth teams mature, together with the rest of the company, they will approach the learning curve in a different way, and understand that predictions are never 100% certain.

Culture is critical to growth. Being open about lessons learned and
taking the time to share learnings is one aspect of a good culture. The
others are speed to market and an experimentative culture.
Surprisingly many startups and enterprises do not necessarily apply
these critical aspects of their overall approach to growth need to
consider this in order to become successful.

Growth is not about post-its, it's about results! was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You read that growth study with the charts going up and to the right and it seems like it's working for everyone but you.
You talk with a growth colleague and they tell you about the amazing program they created that 2x'ed their conversion rates in a week, but yours is still the same.
You watch that growth series and it seems like all the experiments worked but yours.

You start to blame the team for the lack of brilliance, you blame your boss for the lack of resources, you blame the company for the lack of ideas, you blame your audience for the lack of knowledge, you blame marketing for the lack of visibility, you blame the product team for the slow execution.

While all of it may be influencing the final result, the root cause is none of the above.

The root cause is that you don't have a growth system in place.

Having a growth system means your company is not dependent on how smart a single person is, how brilliant is one idea, how motivated is the team, or how many resources you have available. Instead, it means that the process itself is the most important piece of the puzzle and, regardless of who’s running it, the system will ensure the best outcome. Let's break down the components of an effective growth system:

• Culture: you may have the brightest minds by your side in your team, but without proper support, you will likely not maximize the potential of your deliveries.
  Having a growth culture in place means your reports understand the way the system works. They embrace risk-taking in a controlled environment. They recognize that a failed experiment is a much-needed part of the process. They evaluate your success by the achievement of an objective. They provide their own resources (data, people, money) to the growth team to succeed. They engage in ideas suggestions and problem-solving.
  You likely won't have all of that from day 1, but you should start nurturing and creating that mindset as early as possible.
• Strategy and KPIs: if you get 5% improvement in every direction, the perception of everyone who's not on your team will be that you are still in the same place. Having a growth strategy means your actions are well aligned with the direction your company is heading and the most important problems they are trying to solve. Having clear KPIs in place makes it easier for everyone to understand what you are doing and what the end result should be. Having a strategy in place makes it easier for you to decide what to say yes and no to. Having well-defined KPIs helps better allocate resources and capital to the most important problems.
• People and roles: almost no growth team started out with all the skillsets they wanted. In an ideal scenario, you will have data scientists, designers, programmers, marketers, and a manager in place. In reality, you will likely start with a mixed structure, using resources from other departments, borrowing people (often volunteers) from different departments, and starting smaller than you wish. But don't worry — data and results speak louder than words. It's your chance to prove the value of a growth team and help others understand what's your role in the company, meaning: how they can use growth as their swiss knife, to validate stuff they haven't tried before, to test things they have no resources to, to explore opportunities that they can't. Use this time to get buy-in and company-wide understanding from key stakeholders.
  I'd go even further and say that your first growth person should be promoted internally instead of hired externally. Knowing precisely which buttons to press and which person to push is the kind of knowledge that takes time to build — and someone with some years of in-house experience already has.
• Process and meetings: growth is the result of having a constant and conscious process of experimentation that you scale as you go. Constant because you should ALWAYS be running experiments — there are no shortcuts. The amount of experiments you run is inversely proportional to the time it will take for you to get to your desired result — the more, the faster. Conscious because they are not random aleatory experiments, they are always connected with your strategy and KPIs. If the result of an experiment doesn't get you closer to your objective, you shouldn't be prioritizing it for now.
  Running effective growth meetings ensures your team is always with a backlog of tests to execute as well as they are focusing on the right things at the right time — zoom out and look a the results of your objectives, zoom in and look at the results of your experiments.
• Technology and Tools: are useless without the prior listed items, but essential once you've checked those boxes. Tools allow teams to operationalize frameworks in a consistent and cohesive way. Growth teams will be dealing with a large number always changing tools — since their focus will invariably fluctuate across all departments and steps of the customer journey — so, having instruments in place to connect it all and keep the process how it should be is not only a facilitator, it's a must.

If it belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
If it tackles every problem, it solves no problem.
If it runs occasionally, it never really runs.

The assembly line to create a system varies a lot from company to company. While some of them are born with a more risk-taking approach in a rapid-changing industry they may already have some of such components in their DNA — so it comes down to actually operationalizing it. Others, in another hand, weren't necessarily born after the tech boom, in a conservative industry, with mindset restraints — so the growth framework helps create a clear line of thought to connect all dots.

There's no single way to assemble all components together, and it's not a one-time job, but it is vital for achieving a long-term sustainable growth process.

Extra tips:

• Growth.Software is a platform built and designed for growth teams. From strategy mapping (setting up KPIs, Northstar metric, objectives, metrics repository) to execution (ideation, prioritization, test, and analysis).
  Ideally, growth teams would be managed separately from operations — since it has their own nature. More about managing growth here.
• From an execution standpoint, and to assure autonomy and sustainability of the system, the growth team should meet regularly (weekly or bi-weekly) to assess the ins and outs.
  This means checking the progress of your success metrics as well as deciding what goes into production in your next sprint.
  Even when resources are scarce, meeting religiously helps to highlight the importance and significance of the team/project. More about growth meetings here.

Last but not least, the amount of experiments being run is directly proportional to the results you get. The process itself should be your best and most reliable lever — it is what guarantees the best outcome. The more tests, the better!

Growth Systems and its Components was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Enough with the alphabet soup, it’s that time of the year when companies are projecting goals, planning strategies, and aligning teams toward a unique mission for the next year. But, how can one combine something apparently uncertain like growth KPIs with the precision demanded by performance management methodologies, such as OKRs?

Let’s start by setting the stage:

Company OKRs: OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is a management framework designed to encourage companies to set, communicate and monitor organizational performance. It’s a framework used by organizations worldwide to set clear and measurable goals for their teams, broken down to the department level, which is then broken down to the individual level. The end result is a measurable roadmap where everyone in the company knows their personal contribution to the end target.

Growth KPIs: the metrics shared by c-level and growth teams start with the NorthStar Metric, which is then broken down into Objectives and Success Metrics, which inspire and guide the execution of ideas, hypotheses, and experiments. The end result is a clear roadmap of the opportunities the growth team will be focusing on, as well as how to measure success in a way that is aligned with the company’s OKR.

The problem starts when we realize that OKRs are usually built based on historical data and performance averages of output metrics — those numbers that tell a story of what’s in the past. For example, the acquisition teams might know that for every ad dollar spent, they get .5 visitors to the website, which is then converted into .25 leads, which is then converted into .1 sales calls, which is then converted into .01 customers. Since this has been true for the past two quarters, the sales leaders are confident when building their plans based on past results.

Common issues with the Growth team’s OKRs:

• The growth KPIs might not have historical data to be built upon.
• Growth KPIs are usually changing. If the biggest opportunity right now is in acquisition, that’s the KPI of importance now. If the biggest opportunity is in retention, that’s the KPI of importance now.
• Growth KPIs are not output-based metrics, they are input-based. These are numbers that indicate the future — for example, the actions your users are taking that are good indicators of success to drive forward your output metrics.

In opposition to that, growth is usually challenging the assumptions around historical data and the future forecast. What if we are able to improve the effectiveness of our ad dollars from .5 to .9, how would that affect the end result of our pipeline?

While it is possible to connect the growth strategy and most performance methodologies, many have a hard time setting up both in harmony. So, how can you do this?

• Company NorthStar Metric -> Company Objective and Key Result

These metrics are not mutually exclusive, they are complementary. While the North Star Metric and following objectives should guide the operation and future market impact, allowing for fast experimentation and quick decision-making, the OKRs will serve as a common representation of said impact, translated to business metrics and results...

OKRs are set by the company’s internal point-of-view, translated by how the market perceives success from that specific business, with metrics like revenue, customer base size, or profit.

Growth metrics take the customer’s point of view and measure the increase in usage and value delivered. These metrics tend to be less standard and more connected to the specific value proposition of the business, and we can see representations of customer actions that translate the exact moment of value delivered, like the number of messages sent, time spent watching, weekly active accounts, and more.

As we can see, Growth KPIs and OKRs can be both great measurement systems to express how healthy your business is, and they are complementary in the sense that you are looking from a founder/investor/board point of view, as well as a customer perspective.

• Validation or Operation

A growth team may take many different forms, and the scope of its actions can be hugely amplified when rightfully applied. So, it is important to define the nature of your growth team before deciding how to incorporate it into your company’s strategic plan. To simplify, let’s break it down into two buckets:

> Optimization: in this case, your growth team will be focusing on initiatives that are already part of your operation and mostly trying to improve its performance.

Ex: Conversion rate optimization of a landing page. New paid campaigns for performance marketing on paid channels. A different cadence for your outbound machine. Improving the adoption of an existing feature.

> Validation: in this case, your growth team will be focusing on projects that have never been done before, they are not part of your operation and you are not quite sure how they will play out.

Ex: A new acquisition channel that’s not part of your current strategy. A new product tier for a different market. The launch of a new feature.

• Success is not a validated hypothesis

Success is the achievement of an end goal, the reach of your target metric. Hypothesis, tests, and experiments are means to an end. Once one of your tests works, you should amplify it to a bigger scale, until you reach a point where you can confidently (and statistically) affirm this is how things would work.

Where does your team need to get = Objective and Key Result

How will your team get there = Tests, Ideas, Experiments, Hypothesis

The most successful teams are the ones failing the most. This means they might run an experiment that didn’t work, and most of the time, they find which experiments worked and made them reach the target.

How to connect the methodologies

1. Build a North Star Metric: identify the moment your customers get the result they came in for. For AirBnB it can be when a traveler books a night in one of the places listed in their marketplace (same moment for homeowners)...

2. Based on the company’s strategy, build the main OKR around the North Star Metric and pull the goals of all individuals and teams to set the main KPIs (3 to 5 are more than enough, according to the OKR methodology). That way, all team’s efforts are aligned with the question: “how do we impact the creation of value for the end-user?”. After that, all other OKRs can be based on a three-layer cadence of KPIs connected to the growth strategy. Remember not to put all eggs in the same basket and measure success by one single test.

3. Assuming your target is 70% of the OKRs, then…

Optimization-oriented growth teams can be the additional 30% that gets you the extra mile. So their metrics are incorporated into other departments’ OKRs.

Validation-oriented growth teams should be separated from the rest, having their own OKR. They have a higher failure rate and you shouldn’t be planning OKR for operational excellence based on hypothesis but on certainty.

Either way, combining the efforts of the growth strategy with the discipline and clarity provided by a performance methodology like OKRs and others can transform the focus and impact of the whole company, creating the much-needed customer-centricity business all over the globe that are hoping to acquire for their next year strategies.

This piece was produced in collaboration with Emília Chagas!

Growth KPIs & Company OKRs: combining the two was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As we approach the end of Q3, many companies are starting to plan their next year — even without taking their eyes out of Q4. A company's result is the sum of the performance of all its moving parts, ensuring all of them are synched towards one common direction, and a clear goal is your best chance to achieve the expected outcome.

While for most departments, this basically means analyzing historical data, reverse engineering results, gathering learnings and scaling what's already known inside their scope of actuation... it's totally different for a growth team.

The growth team is always doing something new, such as improving conversions, validating a new channel, optimizing a step of the funnel, testing new pricing plans, experimenting with a new bundle/packaging, and improving retention with a completely new approach.

It’s hard to plan the future based on no past. So what should they do then?

The W Framework

The growth team succeeds once there is vertical and horizontal integration inside the organization.

- Vertically: means the team includes both higher-level executives and lower-level employees in the program.
- Horizontally: means the team includes all growth levels in their scope of actuation: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral.

Even though the responsibility for the results always falls on the growth team's shoulders, aggregating everything (areas) and everyone (people) in some steps of the process ensures alignment, collaboration, the flow of information, and understanding.

So, the W framework is a 4-step process created by Lenny Rachitsky, ex-growth at Airbnb and Eventbrite.

1. Context: Leadership shares a high-level strategy with Teams
2. Plans: Teams respond with proposed plans
3. Integration: Leadership integrates into a single plan and shares with Teams
4. Buy-in: Teams make final tweaks, confirm buy-in, and get rolling

So let's break it all down…

Context

This comes from above. The board of directors, the C-level, the founders, and VPs need to decide where the company needs to be 12 months from now, what resources will be at the team's disposal, what are the main threads ahead, and how the macro-economic environment might impact the sector as a whole.

Example 1: the company might be going through a fundraising moment, and the metric that will guide the entire narrative is expansion, so this should become the highest priority for everyone.

Example 2: a new company was recently acquired, the product has been integrated into the suite, and now it's time to reorganize, restructure, and re-educate all members towards this new reality.

Example 3: the company is on the final road to an IPO; the bank advisors already reported the main KPIs investors would be considering when deciding to participate or not — so this should become the prime concern for all teams.

Plans

While the context will come from above, the plan will come from below. First, team leaders must unite with leaders from other departments and listen to their problems, gather all information they can, all the inputs, insights, observations, and data, and aggregated them all into a detailed plan of action.

For a growth team, this means deciding what focus (or Objectives and Success Metrics) they will tackle for the next four quarters. It's unparallel that this is made with the participation of other areas (break down the silos).

Example: considering the expansion demand listed above, the growth team has talked with the VP of Customer Service, the Chief Revenue Officer, and the Onboarding team and mapped out three key expansion opportunities that, although they have never been done before, if validated, could change the rules of the game.

Objective 1: Upsell to the x-cohort of users who are using feature X;
KPI 1: Increase upsell of x-cohort in X%

Objective 2: Cross-sell to the y-cohort of users when they do Y.
KPI 2: Increase cross-sell to y-cohort in Y%

Objective 3: Test the upgrade pricing for enterprise users
KPI3: Increase revenue per account of enterprise users in Z%

Integration

Even though the growth team is unsure which experiments will work and which won't, they have a ballpark of the number of resources they will need to test things out. So we are back to the top-down, where executives will approve the plan, budget, resources, and the team needed to execute it.

In reality, this might look like from the 6 objectives you shared, 3 bets were approved.

Example: after analyzing all of the growth teams’ recommendations, the C-suite asked a few follow-up questions to ensure the problems and challenges you are setting up to tackle are indeed high-leverage opportunities for the company. After a brainstorming session with an advisor, they realized that two of your proposals were already being covered by a new product launch schedule for the near future. So they requested you to postpone that for the time being.

Buy In

While the high-level executives are the go-to for WHERE, the lower-level employees are the go-to for HOW.

After all, your sales team is the one talking to potential customers all day long, your customer service reps are the ones dealing with final customers on a daily basis — they are the best source of testing ideas you can find. Of course, you can still supplement your backlog with benchmarks from the market, but inside insights usually have a higher chance of working out.

This is also the step in which you get 'approval' from all other leaders and members of different teams.

Example: to successfully improve the completion rate of the onboarding process, the growth team is planning to run an X-amount of tests over the next few months. To do this, they will need the design team to help with the final touches and the product team to run a code review before things go online. That's where you guarantee you will get their support.

Vertical and horizontal integration for strategy building is definitely the ultimate success factor for every growth strategy. When you hear about breaking down siloes, this doesn't refer exclusively to the execution of the strategy but also to the planning stage.

This will not only ensure your growth strategy is heading in the same direction that the company expects but also nurture understanding and collaboration from your peers from every angle (top-down and bottom-up).

If you want help defining your growth journey and implementing a successful experimentation program, reach out to us — we are here to help you!

Using the W Framework to build your growth strategy was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Regardless of which methodology description you choose, all of them are basically systematized frameworks intended to organize a team around a specific goal, facilitate its productivity, its tracking, execution, and management.

However, when to apply each may not be crystal clear at first sight so we will break it all down the similarities, differences, and when each methodology should be applied.

The waterfall method: is a linear or sequential approach to project management and works based on fixed dates, requirements, and outcomes.

The growth method: is a non-linear approach to project management based on validating the hypothesis through a consistent process of testing and experimentation.

So, before deciding which of these methods best suits your next project, you should be asking yourself the following questions:

What does the final delivery look like?

If the final delivery of your project is something that you clearly know how it's going to look like, stop here and go with the waterfall. You know precisely what resources this will consume, the time you will need, and the resources it will demand, there are no shifts along the project nor any iteration needed — it's an outcome-based project.
If you are not 100% sure what the final delivery will look like, nor the number of iterations and resources and tests you will have to execute, then, it's an output-based project and the growth methodology will best suit you.

Are all the steps clearly defined?

In the waterfall methodology, the next stage of development only starts when the previous one has ended — it's a linear approach.
In the growth methodology, multiple tests can be developed all at once, the more the better. The only limitation is that one does not affect the result of the other — it's a non-linear approach.
While the former requires the team to have well-defined deadlines and specs before getting started, the latter is based on constant iteration, feedback loops, and changes in the course of the project are expected and encouraged.

Are the clients in the equation?

When you get a third-party involved into the project, you end up adding an unstable variables into the process, which doesn't sit well with the clearly defined scope of the waterfall.
If all the dependencies of the project are internal (team members participating, deliveries, deadlines, resources required), the waterfall can be used. If there are external dependencies (traffic, users, customers, events), the growth methodology will be better suited.

The methodologies are not exclusionary. One company can (and probably should) have teams working on different projects using different methodologies. For example, the waterfall could be used for product development, for example, while the growth team could be working on improving the adoption or conversion of new features.

Growth or Waterfall — which methodology to use and when? was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.