Growth is a Mindset

The 7 Steps to Follow When Iterating Your Product for Growth

In a recent talk at Airbnb, Ivan Kirigin observed that while he worked at Facebook, almost all growth initiatives followed a similar pattern. The idea that growth can be broken down into a framework is absolutely on point.

Below, I have listed a 7 step framework to follow when considering product changes in regards to growth. They are inspired by some of the processes Ivan mentioned in his presentation and by my experiences in designing and growing Shout Photo Messenger.

1.) Pick a Goal

This seems like it should be an easy task, but it’s actually one of the most challenging. There are many different things that you can prioritize as a growth engineer but it’s important to pick 1 or 2 goals that are essential and define them clearly.

This could be achieving higher month over month retention or increasing referral based user acquisition. The point is to identify something that’s critical for your product and define it clearly to all stakeholders.

2.) Map Product to Goal

After you define your goal, you need to map the features and funnels of your product to the goal. It’s important to start high and then dive deep when doing this.

For instance, if you are working on getting more referrals through an invite system, you’ll want to understand the user flow involved in getting to the invite screen in your app. You may also consider what happens on the recipient side when they get an invite.

3.) Generate Ideas

After you have a good understanding of all the elements in your product that can affect your goal, it’s time to think about changes you can make to the product. You’ll want to brainstorm and come up with a wide variety of options.

It’s important to not get stuck in a local maxima — so try to go broad as well. During this process, it might be useful to get other people involved — other engineers, product people, and the marketing team.

4.) Prioritize Your Changes

After you generate your ideas, it’s time to triage them in terms of cost versus benefit. You’ll want to prioritize changes that are low in cost but will achieve the greatest affect in achieving your goal. This process keeps you honest so that you don’t pursue something simply because it’s cool or fun to work on. Remember, it’s all about getting to your goal as fast as possible.

5.) Instrument the Product

Now that you have picked what you are going to actually change, you should instrument your product so you can measure whether your change is effective or not. Don’t be constrained by the capabilities of your existing analytics platforms. Sometimes you might have to get the raw data and write scripts to parse out the information you need. I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to instrument the app — otherwise you are truly flying blind.

6.) Execute Experiments

After you make the necessary product changes, you’ll want to get them in front of customers. It’s important to run tests against a control with similar environmental factors so that you can see if the changes you made are causing the difference or if it’s another factor. Classic A/B testing best practices are useful in this process.

7.) Analyze Results

Finally, when your experiment has been running for a sufficient time, it’s time to look back and analyze the results. This is probably one of the hardest things to do for a startup, or a fast moving product group, because you’re always moving on to the next thing. But without actually evaluating your experiments, you won’t be able to improve your intuition for future changes.

Growth is a way of thinking. The framework above outlines systematic steps to follow when considering growth for any product. Download Shout Photo Messenger to see how we’re using this framework in practice at Kullect.