Product Growth: some learnings and stories
The second Product Stories event was all about Product Growth: from building a Growth team to analyzing experiments. We were lucky to have Maxime Berthelot up on stage with Christophe Pasquier to discuss his experience leading the Product Growth team at Buffer.
Here’s the full recording of the event and some of the most interesting takeaways for those of you who couldn’t make it:
#1 — Growth is all about experiments, and 9 out of 10 times, they’ll fail
Maxime warns about Product Growth: “You have to be ready to set yourself up for lots of failures for some big successes.” You can’t predict what’s going to make the needle move, so you need to be constantly experimenting.
A good example of this was when Maxime’s team changed an in-app CTA button from “Upgrade to Awesome” to “Upgrade for more features”. Their hypothesis was that more straightforward copy would lead to more conversions. It was a small impact but it bumped business conversions up 3%. Basically, you never know when the smallest things will have the most impact, and vice versa. The only solution is to keep experimenting!
#2 — Follow one specific metric
You’ll often hear Maxime say “Growth = process”. And a huge part of that process is to choose one, unique, metric to impact. Then, you brainstorm on all the different ways you can move that metric. Then, you score to prioritize. Then, you experiment.
#3 — Get everyone in the company to pitch growth ideas
At Buffer, growth is actually a company-wide effort: everyone can pitch growth ideas to the Product Growth team via a Trello board.
#4 — Intuition first, data second
“Intuition drives everything in growth.” The experiments you come up with and the way you score them is driven by the Product Growth team’s intuition. Then, you use the data to validate it, or not.
It’s a virtuous cycle: the more experiments you run, the better you’ll get at scoring them and analyzing their success. As Maxime said: “Running many experiments will build your team’s gut feeling.”
#5 — The quality of what you deliver matters
Product Growth ≠ Growth Hacking. When he started at Buffer, Maxime was in the mindset that experimenting means shipping fast, even if that means shipping a less than perfect feature.
He quickly learned that the quality of what you’re testing has a direct impact on its results. His team had developed a tracker bar at the on boarding to increase user activation. The UX and UI were poor and the tracker bar showed no result. Buffer’s CEO gently reminded him that product quality was one of Buffer’s main success drivers, encouraging him to revamp the tracker bar. Turns out the more beautiful, more interactive version of the bar made all the difference, resulting in 20% increase in activation.
#6 — Tooling musts
- Looker for monitoring analytics: they build dashboard in Looker for each experiment
- Hotjar & Fullstory to analyze the way users interact with experiments
Learn more about Product Growth:
- Brian Balfour
- Building a growth team, according to Y Combinator
- How Airbnb runs experiments
- How Not To Run an A/B Test — Evan Miller
- Pinterest VP growth presentations with dos and don’ts
Big thank you to everyone who came out! Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our community to stay in the loop about the next meet ups 👋
