On March 11th 2019, Xanthe Travlos (product manager at Hipcamp) and I (software engineer at Hipcamp) were put in charge of leading conversion efforts. We were tasked with creating a 60% YoY increase in our conversion rate of orders completed to people on the website in the month of July 2019.
I spent the next three months working on nothing but that goal. Here is what I learned about team dynamics.
Note: In this doc, there are learnings about team dynamics specifically. If you are interested in learnings about increasing conversion rate, see this post.
TLDR
Put smart people with a laser focus around moving a single metric and let them figure out how to win. Make your impact exponential by learning from the effectiveness of past tasks.
Focus
Give your team a single metric to move. This allows the team to have laser focus, and not get distracted by other tasks. Increasing conversion is all I thought about all day, every day for 3 months.
Be explicit about what success and failure looks like. If conversion went up, we won. If it went down, we failed. There was no hiding.
Put a single accountable person or team in charge of moving the metric. Partial focus from a person is not sufficient because you can always give the excuse that you were focused on something else.
Give your team space to dig into the data. Working on a single metric for an extended period of time increases the ROI for your team to dig into the data. If you will be quickly transferred to a new assignment, it may not be as “worth it” to find out what is really going on. The underlying dynamics really help you figure out the true problem to solve.
Start with a narrow purview. There were a lot of problems to fix with conversion, but we started out by focusing on webapp UX only. We were able to learn a great deal and expand from there. This meant explicitly excluding areas initially (e.g., search, discovery algorithm, mobile apps) to avoid being overwhelmed.
Ramping up
Develop the muscle of how to make a difference when beginning in a new area. Start slow, get the process right and then look to move fast.
Don’t take on too much at once to start. Everybody will have lots of ideas — that’s why you get assigned to a particular task. Don’t try to do them yet. Make sure you build that muscle and establish the process first.
Go for the low hanging fruit first. This sounds obvious, but it’s easy to get caught up in riskier ideas. Do what you know will work first, and then move to crazier ideas.
Use experts. At Hipcamp, we are fortunate enough to have Casey Winters and Evan Klimczak, both of whom have been at this for a long time. They helped me understand a lot of what is written above, and had helpful pointers of where to get started.
Move quickly once you have built that muscle. For me, setting up A/B experiments went from challenging to very easy, because of the time I spent up front understanding our framework.
Don’t be afraid to go for bigger wins once you have ramped up. You can get caught up in a local maximum, when there may be a bigger opportunity out there.
Innovation
Learn from the results of your previous tasks to come up with smarter, more effective new tasks. I learned from past experiments and specifically targeted areas of high sensitivity with winners from past projects. Each experiment has higher growth in impact than the last, allowing you to follow exponential growth over linear growth.
An important caveat is that you will start to see diminishing returns once you approach maximum impact for an area of focus.
Passionately solicit new ideas. Good ones come from all areas of the organization. Let people know exactly where to add their new ideas. If it is hard, people won’t do it.
Let your team figure out how to win. By not explicitly being handed down tasks, the team was encouraged to always be thinking of new ideas to work on. Anyone could come up with an idea and implement it — however, you must test it and report on the results. This creative space is incredibly valuable and creates a huge level of ownership for the team.
Let people know their ideas are being considered. You can’t work on every idea that comes to the team, but you can let people know that you heard every idea. This makes people feel like their ideas are not going into a black hole, and encourages them to give more ideas.
Brainstorm with a cross-functional team. The different lenses and experience of the team creates unique ideas.
Separate creativity and filtering. These use different parts of the brain. Be as creative as possible and generate lots of ideas, then later do the analytical portion to filter and prioritize.
Use a framework for prioritization, but don’t be dogmatic about it. We like to use RICE, which helps to make sure you are focusing on the right projects. Do the exercise, sort the highest scoring projects to the top and then use that as the basis (but not the answer) for picking which projects to work on.
Communication
Provide regular updates to keep the team apprised of what happened, what is coming up and blockers. I did daily ones in slack to the stakeholders involved in the day to day and weekly ones to the broader team that was interested in the output of the conversion team. Being proactive about communication eases the mind of the rest of the team.
Demo your wins, losses and learnings. We do posts in the #newfeature and #insights Slack channels, as well as in-person demos to the rest of the team. This helps get people excited about what you are doing and spreads your knowledge to the rest of the team.
Require everyone on the team to have a voice and an opinion, but make sure they get the appropriate context to be able to contribute.
Autonomy
Give your team autonomy to come up with ideas for prioritization. If they feel strongly, let them implement them and report on the results.
Encourage your team to learn about the problem you are trying to solve, in any way they see fit. This prompted us to discover new tools (e.g., fullstory) and customer empathy sessions (i.e., focus groups).
Focus on results, not hours. Your goal as a team is to move a metric, not spend the most time in the office. Create a culture around getting stuff done however each individual prefers. This has the added benefit of encouraging the team to work smarter instead of harder.
Trust, but verify. Check in with your team to make sure they are on track but give them the space to get there on their own.
Don’t lose sight of the broader business goals. For example, more people on our site actually hurts our goal (conversion). Recognize that is still a win for the broader team and business. Conversely, ensure you are not negatively impacting the goals of others outside your team. It can be tempting to only pay attention to the narrow scope of your team and not realize you are actually hurting the overall business.
Final Thoughts
Well-run teams can accomplish some truly amazing things. Put the right people with a clear focus on a single metric to move, and you will get outsized results. Ramp up slowly with the help of experts, but go for big wins once you are familiar with the process.
Once you’ve got a nice rhythm, look to achieve exponential impact by learning from the results of your previous tasks. Update the broader organization with your progress and learnings through demos and Slack posts. These tactics can make all the difference to achieving success as a team.
