Diary of a growth team 0: Birth of the diary

If you read this article you’ll learn how I got myself into keeping a diary, and how this has succeeded in moving the needle. Warning: you may end up wanting to try.

The myth of the “must happen” feature

Look deeply inside yourself, and tell me if you don’t see plenty of cases in which you built something because it looked good, because the CEO said this, because this client must have it, because that influential guy thinks it’s a really good idea, and so on.

I submit to you that we choose to let this happen, even if deep down we know this is wrong, because we give in to social pressure.

So I thought “What would force me to do the right thing?”. The answer I came up with was extremely simple, yet effective: an even bigger opposite social pressure.

All I had to do was to find an even bigger social pressure. I found the best one inside myself: my ego. I realised that if I would cringe making a stand on doing something in a certain way, I would cringe even more at the idea of going in front of a community of product managers and telling them “This happened under my watch, and I let it happen because….”, and being unable to find a reasonable explanation. I can’t bear the thought of the look of commiseration in their eyes as they know exactly what happened, and they pat you on the back saying “don’t worry, it’s not your fault, we understand”.

So I started a diary.

The birth of the diary

When we set off on our journey of growth at Emoticast, we started with the usual trick:

• we agreed the key metric we wanted to move (in our case: Weekly Active Users, WAUs)
• we set an arbitrarily high number we wanted to reach that seemed like an almost impossible stretch but not completely unreasonable
• then we set off to think about everything we do in terms of “is that going to move that needle, and is it going to move it fast enough”.

Then I started the diary.

I was partly inspired by Zuck’s character in The Social Network movie, who writes a blog every time he ships a new feature, explaining why he’s building it and why he expects that to have a major impact (“Relationship status!”).

The idea is very simple: when you force yourself to write what you’re doing, as if it was going to stay there forever for the future generations to laugh at your incompetence, then you will force yourself to at least to give it your best shot.

So far I’ve been very happy with the results. We started moving the needle more and more. So I decided to share a few of our findings and see what happens. I don’t expect that to make me famous, I hope it will keep me true!

Interested in seeing what we came up with? Read the next chapter!

The journey continues, because growth is never done…