Cohort Spotlight: Growth Architecture
Growing businesses from zero to launch
Building innovative ventures with the world’s leading companies takes a wide spectrum of skills, along with a spirit of collaboration and experimentation. At BCG Digital Ventures we cover all bases of venture building, from the initial idea to testing and validation to building the product, finding users, and launching it into the world.
This takes experts from all fields. In this series, we’re introducing you to each of our 8 venture-building cohorts, showcasing their approach, the role they play in building a venture, how they work together, and the skills that are required to succeed as we build businesses with groundbreaking impact. For this edition of the cohort series, we’re looking at Growth Architecture.
Transitioning a business concept from ideation and validation to product development and then to a successful, scalable company requires a broad skillset, including innovation, agility, and customer focus. Meet BCGDV’s Growth Architects. Through a hypothesis-driven, rapid test and learn approach, Growth Architects help bring our ventures to life with a variety of go-to-market activities to ensure target customer acquisition and retention. Bringing to the table a wide range of expertise in multiple industries, business types, and business building skills, Growth Architects are responsible for helping ventures bloom into successful businesses with a strong, dedicated customer base.
The role of a Growth Architect at BCGDV is as fluid and diverse as their skillset and expertise as the role they play in building a venture often changes throughout the process. Growth Architects are nimble and agile, enabling them to work across a wide array of industries (including consumer, finance, industrial goods, healthcare, automotive, and more) as well as business types (B2B, B2C, and multi-sided marketplaces). In addition to a breadth of industry expertise, Growth Architects also have a wide range of skills, enabling them to jump in at any stage of the business building process, from ideation to incubation to commercialization.
At the start of a venture, you’ll often find Growth Architects taking the research that might have been done by Strategic Designers and validating it through quantitative methods, perhaps by running tests through advertising platforms to understand the level of interest. This research not only lowers the level of risk in launching a venture, but informs product features, business model, and more. “It’s the first opportunity to gauge consumer appetite for the proposition (product or service) in the wild and to test financial viability,” says Amelia. “We constantly test from the first idea all the way through to launch and beyond — we’re constantly optimizing.”
Once the venture is ready for market, they often support the launch through customer acquisition activities and driving early stage growth. Growth Architects also regularly work with businesses that are already in the market to supercharge their marketing operations.
The work changes and adapts with each new challenge. “Most people are in growth because the process of building and growing a venture is so exciting,” says Giorgo.
“The work can take many different forms — some people have deep SEO expertise or are great at e-commerce, for example, but we like ‘all-rounders.’ Whatever it happens to be, we’re able to jump in and figure it out.” — Giorgo Paizanis, Growth Director, BCG Digital Ventures, Manhattan Beach.
While marketing agencies or in-house positions offer their own benefits, Growth Architects at BCGDV get the best of both worlds, combining variation with driving big impact. Amelia:
“The variety and momentum attracted me to the role of being a Growth Architect at DV. We get to build a startup from scratch but also have access to experts in every discipline and resources that would be difficult for a startup to come by. It’s a really powerful combination.” — Amelia Bengtsson, Senior Growth Architect, BCG Digital Ventures, London.
At BCGDV, ventures begin as a blank canvas and develop into a fully-fledged startup. Growth Architects play an important role in this journey, incubating growth thinking into our ventures at every stage, from ideation to customer adoption: taking each venture from zero to launch.
Interested in joining BCGDV? See our current vacancies.
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