Growth isn’t about magical tactics and platform hacks

What we learned from Joanna Lord’s talk at Turing Fest 2017

Turing Fest tips from Joanna Lord from ClassPass: How to operationalise growth and drive revenue

By Elise Hilditch

Edinburgh’s International and Fringe Festivals hit an epic milestone this year with their 70th Anniversary being celebrated with an explosion of arts, culture and entertainment. Rapidly becoming as well known, at least in the global tech community, is Turing Fest. Featuring speakers from the top internet economy companies, Turing Fest is fast becoming a go-to event for the latest approaches to developing your business in the tech sector from full stack marketing to strategy, engineering, product and even helping you shout about your business for funding rounds via their NextGen funding and networking session.

Skyscanner was proud to have Gareth Williams (CEO) and Bryan Dove (CTO) speaking at the event on Skyscanner. I attended the Full-Stack Marketing Day and with speakers such as Rand Fishkin (Moz), Oli Gardner (Unbounce), Juan Felipe Rincon (Google) and Edinburgh’s very own Mike McGrail (Velocity Digital), there were many highlights from the day.

Top take-aways from Joanna Lord, ClassPass

We are always looking for new ways to work more efficiently and effectively in our squad so this presentation on how to structure and focus growth teams by ClassPass’s Chief Marketing Officer Joanna Lord really resonated with me. Here are our top takeaways from her Turing Fest talk on How to Operationalize for Growth & Drive Revenue.

What Growth is and isn’t
  1. Invest in the things that matter — don’t waste time reporting on useless things. Identify areas where you’re not growing so you can fix them, consider full funnel views, understand your cohorts and attribution model and your growth mix so you’re investing at the right time in the right things.
  2. Growth as a decentralized responsibility — Growth is the responsibility of multiple teams across Growth and Product and each should have relevant growth KPIs. Silo teams don’t care about each other’s KPIs and end up cannibalising each other and slowing growth. Structure your teams around your focus for the next six months and accept that less important tasks are not going to get done and this is OK.
  3. Realize nothing is precious — don’t hold on to a product or feature that doesn’t add value and is holding your company back. Make the hard decisions. Be ruthless on product prioritisation and don’t lose yourself in partnerships.
  4. Play to your advantages — don’t spread yourself thinly across multiple channels if you can win by going deep in a few that play to your strengths. Do this first before expanding into a broader portfolio.
  5. Evergreen testing to make your case — work in partnership with your product and engineering teams and make strong business cases through testing to feed into their product roadmaps. Plan in advance and get your testing done so you can feed in when Product are doing their planning.

You can find Joanna Lord’s full slide deck from Turing Fest 2017 below or on Slideshare. We’ve covered more full stack marketing, product and engineering takeaways from Turing Fest 2017, which we’ll be publishing soon here on Skyscanner and on Skyscanner Code Voyagers.

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Some of our Growth Tribe attending Full Stack Marketing at Turing Fest this year.

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Want to work for an amazing company that embraces the Growth Mindset and offers lots of perks and fantastic offices to work in across the globe? Take a leap and look at our current Skyscanner Marketing, Design and Developer roles within our Growth Tribe across our different offices.

About the author

My name is Elise Hilditch and I’m the Growth Marketing Manager for the UK and Ireland at Skyscanner. I originally came from a very traditional marketing background and at Skyscanner I’ve been able to take these learnings, turn them upside down and build on them by applying lean and agile principles to really create growth and value in marketing.

Elise Hilditch, Skyscanner
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Skyscanner Marketing

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Tales from the marketing team at the company changing how the world travels. Visit https://www.skyscanner.net and share the passion.

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