Jukka Jokelainen from Lumoa:

Growth is Everyone’s Business

How to establish a solid foundation on which to build a culture where growth can flourish? We sat down with Lumoa’s newly-joined Head of Growth, Jukka Jokelainen, to find out the answer to that, as well as discuss what fuelled his transition from the corporate world back to early-stage startups.

“It’s all about open communication and transparency”, says Jukka when asked about building a culture for growth. Jukka joined Lumoa three months ago and has already fuelled some fantastic results when it comes to the company’s growth and culture. Jukka’s background is a great mix of startups and working in a large corporation; before joining Lumoa, Jukka worked as a Data Analyst at Finland’s largest media house and before that, he has founded startups, worked with startups and been an active member of the team organizing Slush.

Growth is everyone’s business

As a Head of Growth, Jukka is working closely with the whole company and with every single function from product development to sales.

“Growth is everyone’s business; as a Head of Growth I collaborate with everyone through teams and functions,” says Jukka. “In order for the collaboration to work, one must share and pass on knowledge and educate people,” he continues. It can be very challenging to work with people and gain their trust if they have no clue what you’re doing or what you’re talking about. Jukka has tackled this by organizing weekly knowledge sharing sessions, ‘Metrics Mondays’, where he talks about the metrics, tools and methods. “The idea is that everyone understands what is possible and what is not and can also give input to the growth function.”

In addition to the ‘Metric Mondays’, Jukka also organizes a bi-weekly growth session where growth efforts are shared with the entire team. “These bi-weekly sessions are basically like Scrum retro meetings where I go through what was done during the past two weeks and also talk about what the next two weeks will look like.” When working in an early-stage startup, you have to be able to adapt to changes and be agile in your work. “I always aim to leave some room when planning the two-week sprints so that if for example, a sales team has something they’d like me to contribute to, I can allocate my time to it.”

Culture of openness

“First and foremost my role is to facilitate and enable. Being a Head of Growth doesn’t mean I alone work for the company to grow, it’s a collective effort and my job is to lay the groundwork for that.”

Before Jukka joined Lumoa, the company didn’t have an existing growth function, meaning that the past few months Jukka has been building a foundation for growth. “It was very easy to get a mandate and buy-in for the growth function, partly thanks to Icebreaker who had sold the idea to Lumoa’s decision-makers.”

A concept that popped up a number of times in our discussion was the culture of openness; in order to gain the trust of the rest of the team, you have to over-communicate, share every bit of learning and success and most importantly, share every mistake. Jukka’s way of working is extremely transparent, “I have no secret spreadsheets or Trello boards; everything is open to everyone in the company and I have invited the whole team to participate; contribute their ideas and give feedback.”

These past three months Jukka has heavily focused on promoting openness and collaboration. “First and foremost my role is to facilitate and enable. Being a Head of Growth doesn’t mean that I alone work for the company to grow, it’s a collective effort and my job is to lay the groundwork for that.”

From the corporate world back to startups

“I learned a great deal about the value of communication, the importance of processes, strategy and systematicity. As an analyst I got to play with a huge amount of data — an amount that wouldn’t be possible in an early-stage startup.”

We also talked about Jukka’s background and how it has prepared him for this role and what fuelled the transition from the corporate world back to startups. Jukka has spent the past 5 years at Sanoma as a Data Analyst and is very happy about his experience there.

“The experience I gained from working at Sanoma has been extremely valuable and eye-opening. I learned a great deal about the value of communication, the importance of processes, strategy and systematicity. As an analyst I got to play with a huge amount of data — an amount that wouldn’t be possible in an early-stage startup. Moreover, it’s not a secret that the pay and benefits in a large organization are on another level than in a small startup. Yes, the environment and culture in a big corporation like Sanoma is rigid, hierarchical and bureaucratic, but only because it has to be that way for the organization to succeed.”

On the other hand, working in a large corporation also has its downsides. “When working in an organization with thousands of emplooyees, inevitably you feel like a small cog in a big wheel — and that’s what you basically are. It’s also very hard if not impossible to make a change of any kind or feel that you have a real contribution to the bigger picture. That being said, I really enjoyed working at Sanoma and wouldn’t change anything. In the startup scene, I’ve witnessed a lot of unnecessary criticism towards large corporations, I believe both worlds have their pros and cons and there is room for both”.

What then made Jukka take this ‘leap of faith’ and jump from Sanoma to Lumoa?

“I could have easily stayed with Sanoma for the next 30 years or so and been just fine there. However, I aim to continuously develop myself and go forward in my career and that’s something a big corporation couldn’t offer — I feel like I learnt everything there is to learn during that 5 years and it was time to move on.”

Because of his background, returning to startups was a very organic transition to Jukka, but how did he end up at Lumoa?

“Joining an early-stage startup wasn’t a complete jump to the unknown for me; I have worked in and with startups for several years and have been involved in organising Slush through 2011–2015. When it comes to Lumoa, I was immediately sold by the interesting product, strong team and the stage they are in — it’s not like starting from zero but it’s still very much in its early stages. Lumoa operates in a fast-growing industry and there is definitely potential for a growth story. Overall, it seemed like a very interesting opportunity.”

Jukka’s top tips for building a foundation for growth

Finally, for a key take away from the discussion with Jukka, here are his top tips when building a growth function and culture from scratch.

1 Promote culture of openness and trust

• One of Jukka’s key learnings has been to actively ask questions to get others to also ask questions. There are no stupid questions and even if there were, ask those as well.
• Ask feedback and encourage people to participate — effective working relationships can only be achieved through open and active interaction.

2 Don’t be afraid of mistakes

• Transparency requires being okay with making mistakes. This doesn’t come naturally to everyone but by leading with an example it is possible to get everyone to start embracing mistakes and turning them into wins.

3 Maximize the learning curve

• In his work Jukka relies on a scientific approach: hypothesis — experiment — analysis — documentation.
• In other words, build, measure, learn. Especially the measure part; measure everything and at all times. Moreover, only do things that can be measured.

4 Build processes through successes (and failures)

• When something works, leverage that and build it into a process.
• Growth is all about creating the processes that will form the foundation for sustainable growth. This is why documentation is essential — so we know what and how we should operate in order to go forward.

5 Focus

• Rome was not built in a day — in the same way it’s impossible to make growth miracles in a month or two.
• Jukka is very mindful of setting his own limits and keeping his focus where it should be. Getting things forward piece by piece makes much more sense than trying to do everything at the same time. This is where strong prioritization skills come in handy.

6 Sharing is caring

• Share knowledge, learn from each other. Make time for having internal sessions and conversations where everyone’s input is valued and where everyone can ask questions about anything. These sessions are a perfect breeding ground for new ideas and inspiration as well.

About Lumoa:
Founded in 2016, Lumoa enables enterprises to gain control of their customer experience. Lumoa helps companies to get fast customer insights across 60+ languages and focus on improvements instead of data.