On Growth
“Growth” on a tear — as a role, an expertise, a profession. There’s one slight problem: many people are adopting the term, and trying to use it mean many very different things[1].
People are labeling pretty much anything that benefits the business “Growth” — but the owner of the email marketing or SEO function shouldn’t be labeled just growth, unless part of a sub-team operating within a growth organization. Facebook does just this — since they have more than 150 folks in their Growth org!
I’m one of the founders of Greylock Partner’s Growth Community, one of the largest private groups of professionals in the Bay Area — and being surrounded by some of the best in the business (folks from Facebook, Pinterest and Dropbox, to name a few), I’ve got a view on what is (and what isn’t) pure Growth.
Here’s how I break down the different activity:
1) Paid Marketing
This is old as dirt. In the 60’s and 70’s, the challenge was different: what can you say to excite potential customers about their toothpaste selection? Lots of incredible books exist about this. Today this has many forms, but the new world (and organizational uncertainty), is around how to measure, track, and spend across many new properties.
For many young companies not yet at full scale, this exercise is predominantly about buying ads on Facebook[2].
2) A/B Testing
Let me reassure you: not everyone is testing button colors. Many levers to pull — yet so easy to work on areas that may not yield fundamental improvement. But the basics here are good: let’s try new ways to sell to our customers and find more buyers.
3) Fixing Broken Products
Too many companies, who have yet to attain product-market-fit, are using growth as a Band-Aid for the problem. 2X-ing your conversion rate ain’t gonna do it.
4) Subdomains
“SEO” and “B2B demand generation” are tried and true. The first is a tactic (that might be part of a growth team at a company with large scale) and the second is a business function. Calling either “growth” just makes everything more confusing.
Similarly, a great reengagemnet push notification campaign will (ideally) cause great growth in product usage or company revenue — but this is a tactic of growth, v.s. growth as a function.
5) Product Features & New Users Flow
Aha! Now were are getting somewhere. A growth team that sizes opportunities — part tactics, part product, part iteration. By example — when a Dropbox user shared a file with you, you used to just view the raw PDF document. Now the document opens in a Dropbox viewer — with various prompts to create your own Dropbox account. Product activity that is connected to new users growth…and eventually ROI.
Growth — as practiced in Silcon Valley — is actually pretty simple:
The leader of a Growth team owns the most important thing for a fast-growing technology company — taking the baton directly from the CEO[3]. This isn’t about optimizing spend or coaxing a product to life. This is the person and team that goes to bat for the company’s core KPI — while engineering is doing their job (“we need to rebuild this internal system for stability!”), product is doing their job (“version 2.0 will change everything!”) and everyone else between.
Growth didn’t use to matter as much when the question was “how many boxes of widgets did we sell via a distributer?” — only now when products are a living, breating thing that we can quickly adapt. The Growth leader keeps the company’s true north.
When Growth professionals gather, there’s plenty discussion of tactics, vendors, and what is (often quietly) working.
But the most important dialogue is always about how best to
- Guide the company.
- Find harmony (and engineering time) with counterparts.
- Make the metrics that matter go up and to the right.
…
Notes
[0] I’ve omitted any mention of BI, which sometimes gets mixed in as “growth.” Dashboards help visibility, but they may not focus on the right metrics. I’ve often worked with companies that have a great view into metrics — metrics that won’t take them to the next level. Or worse, all metrics sliced into pieces — a sea of data with no information. A good growth team will be quantitative, but dashboards and reporting are just tools.
[1] For our purposes today, I’m going to focus on B2C companies — companies selling in some degree of volume. Mailchimp or a mass B2B might qualify, but the world of enterprise technology marketing is a completely different exercise than growth. I shan’t attempt to give it due focus here.
[2] Many folks will protest and talk about the many channels that work for them. This is great — but for the average fast growing company that wants to experiment with paid media, Facebook would be 90% of people’s first recommendation.
[3] Pre-product-market-fit or small companies shouldn’t have anyone with the title Growth. That’s the CEO’s job. And if it’s not — you might just want to hire a demand gen manager for a lifestyle company.
Thanks
Jay Weintraub and his team at Grow.co — for the conversation inspired this piece.
