In the heart of Silicon Valley, I attended a dinner with a group of seasoned entrepreneurs on the subject of growth product management. With a hint of jest, one of them said, “growth product managers are just regular product managers who are good at their jobs”.
The difference between traditional product managers and growth product managers is critical to understand to not elevate growth expertise beyond its abilities and discourage core product development. The distinguishing difference between growth product management and “typical” product management* is the goal. Growth focuses on influence; product focuses on resolutions.
A traditional product manager’s role is to advocate for the user in a problem resolution process, aka product development cycle. A growth product manager follows a similar cycle but with a different lens. A growth lens is designed to influence users to take an action or change their behavior that is advantageous to the business. Simply put, a growth lens is marketing oriented product development; product tactics combined with marketing objectives.
Focusing on influence leads a growth team to improve a metric that has systematic influence on the business. Access to a significant amount of data is typically good which makes it possible to rely on experimentation. A product team tends to focus on a user problem and utilizes a metric as a proxy to solve the problem. These user problems are fundamental to a product’s health, while growth features enhance an experience. Scope of work for a product team is more knowable than a growth team. A growth team’s experimentation velocity is the leading indicator of success. Productionization is a secondary concern versus learning about users. A product team relies more on user research and a growth team relies more on data research and experiments. The former is building brand new features, the latter is looking for improvements at a wholistic level.
As with most generalizations, there are exceptions to the rule. On occasion, growth teams will build larger or new features. These projects carry the title of “big bets”. Larger feature work blurs the line between a growth team and other product teams. These projects should be irregular. Growth teams are always better-suited augmenting velocity.
Some argue resolving user problems within a typical product management framework will drive growth. Yes and no. A growth product manager cannot be successful without a successful core product. Investing in core product supports growth product; however, solving user problems doesn’t necessarily increase business, it makes business possible. Solving user problems isn’t enough to gain traction.
Growth product management is a sub-set of product management. Not all product managers work on growth, but all growth product managers are product managers. The same goes for mobile product managers to infrastructure product managers. All specialities work together to form a strong product. Growth increases the reach and impact of product by adopting marketing goals and utilizing technology tactics, while core product allows for a growth team to exist in the first place.
Core product supports growth; growth builds the levers to tell others about product.
Anakin was not the most humble Jedi. The relationship between Anakin and Obi-Wan illuminated Anakin's’ major faults of limited experience alongside his vapid validation with his title as “The Chosen One”. Anakin wanted to take the reins without experience or wisdom - the knowledge to know what and when to do something. As the wiser and more experienced Jedi, Obi-Wan tried to temper Anakin’s self-centered ambition and quite terrible acting. He failed at both.
Demand for growth experts is the highest it has ever been, drawing in the experienced and inexperienced alike. Growth teams are now the norm and not the exception. Chilling adoption is the over-generalization and simplification of growth hackers and growth product managers to be MBA-like strategists, being higher than the nuts and bolts. Without the hard work experience and battle scars of failures, one misses the scrappiness that created the original growth hacker movement.
Back in the day (four years ago), only a handful of bloggers wrote about growth. They could all be named on one hand. Ironically, “growth hacking” and “growth” literally went viral. Today, growth resources are plentiful. There are conferences from Turkey to Singapore. Online courses covering Hotmail’s viral tricks to “Hacking SEO”. Going through the stages of rapid growth naturally sees a mass adoption with an unavoidable dearth of seasoned experts.
“I focus on strategy” and “we will hire someone to do that” is more commonly said than should be accepted. Good strategy is built on previous experience and an intellectual tick to tinker in the nitty-gritty details. Without a doubt, it is critical to be good at one of the three core pillars of growth - paid, product, and user insights.
Content has its inherent limitations at developing instinctual expertise. First, it simplifies and condenses a long development process into a five minute article. Unfortunately, a lot of details that otherwise would engender originality are left out in order to tell an easy-to-read story. Second, re-living the scenarios of another growth hacker can turn into a bland instruction manual rather than a fruitful learning experience. Judgement and the ability to discern is lost in translation.
Being good at growth comes from experience in the nasty weeds. The hard slog at user interviews, failed experiments, and engagement instrumentation are hardly press worthy but are critical foundations to be successful. Tactically, growth is a game of prioritizing high-impact experiments focused on moving an actionable metric. Prioritization is primarily based on heuristics and personal judgement. Without experience, experiments will not be focused nor disciplined. From a necessity of having no budget or limited time, it is second nature for growth experts to break down needle moving ideas into small, cheap experiments. These principles are hard to take to heart through written words.
Obi-Wan saw Anakin’s great potential for both good and evil, but Anakin’s pride sealed his fate - losing his arm to Count Dooku and switching to the dark side at the weak words of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine. Don’t end up like Anakin. Choose the Light side of the Force. As Yoda would say, “Be above the hard work and learning scrappiness, do not. Hmmmmm.”
The new year brings new hopes and goals for all of us, from losing weight to starting a company. The first week of January is the time of year for pundits to offer their predictions for what the new year holds.
Here are the trends I am watching in 2016.
Private Posting Overtakes Broadcast Posting - Built on headwinds against freedom of speech and open public discussion of ideas, broadcast social media (ex. Twitter) is becoming more and more stale over time. Tolerance is now intolerance. The ridicule police are on high alert to humiliate those they differ with. People now polish their public personas to such a high degree of fidelity that all of them look like a cold LinkedIn profile. Real conversation (therefore true engagement) will move to private and smaller networks. Ironically, publicly created “safe places” for dialogue secondarily caused more people to move conversation behind closed doors.
Instagram Becomes Your Primary Identity - Facebook is increasingly becoming a portal over an identity platform. Users are moving from channel to channel, feature to feature within the Facebook universe. Photos are the core atomic unit of the Facebook platform. On Instagram, it is far easier to consume photos, understand differences between users, and excites a user’s visual perceptors. Overtime, Instagram will become people’s preferred choice for maintaining and growing their identity.
Online Continues To Degrade Content - The supply of content has far exceeded demand. The quality of content has generally improved over time, but content is also much shallower than before. Each new content type iteration drives towards the lowest-possible common denominator. Snaps, Vines, GIFS, Yos are all grunts compared to the columns at NY Times and WSJ. In today's market for attention, is the former or the latter suffering more? The content “tragedy of commons” will continue in 2016. I am not sure how much lower we can go.
Politics Turns Into Entertainment - With the rise of Trump and Sanders, politics will increasingly become more of a show than a serious policy discussion. With online content continuing to degrade the discussion and information spreading faster than ever before, voters will increasingly use other simple heuristics for voting. Emotion and social validation through entertainment channels will become more common. Broad disengagement and the highest distrust of public institutions of all time will accelerate this trend. People don’t trust what the “establishment” media and system says anymore, so the “pleasing” entertainment from likes of TMZ or EXTRA will provide suffice credulity.
Startup Employee Compensation Model Will Change - The IPO market is frosty and an economic winter is upon us. With startups taking longer and longer to go public, employee compensation for startups will change to be more generous and forgiving. Today most equity packages follow a standard model of a one year cliff, a four year vesting period, and a 90 day expiration period at the end of a contract. Add in preferred shares with lofty valuations and pre-IPO startup equity is hard to justify as more valuable than cash. The deck is stacked against employees earning their fair share of a startup’s success. Relying on the “learning more” rebuttal is pretty weak compared to the higher salary available at established players like Facebook and Google.
Traditional Marketing Has Its Moment (Again) - Marketing ROI is a function of demand and inventory. With “dumb” old school money being thrown into digital channels, the ROI for most advertisers is declining. As digital channels continue to grow in popularity with big brands with billion dollar budgets, traditional marketing channels (such as print, TV, billboards) will come back in style. New tools have modernized these “stogy” channels to have the resemblance of being data-driven. These classic marketing channels won’t return to their glory days, but marketers will be soon having a retro moment.
The Open Platform Era Ends - This is the most significant trend for growth hackers to pay attention too. Fewer and fewer social media platforms are opening their doors to third party developers. Snapchat has no resemblance of a public API, LinkedIn gutted their API program, and Instagram is under lock and key with mostly read-only access. Users are also moving away from broadcast posting back to private, small group discussions. This also means that new major social media play is teed up to transform the concept of open platforms all over again.
What is true and always important to remember that habits don’t change quickly. Raw human behavior is hard to change, but the vehicle of behavioral expression never stops changing.
Only 5% of all retail transacts online. Overwhelming, our online shopping habits are predefined offline in real world interactions at storefronts and retail establishments. Directionally more and more shoppers will go be ordering online over offline; however, one aspect of shopping offline hasn’t made it into the corpus of best practices in ecommerce: window shopping.
The human desire to browse without commitment hasn’t changed as we move from strip malls to smartphones. Like in a physical retail store, most ecommerce visitors fall into two buckets: they are either curious / browsing or know exactly what you want, which I call “directional shopping”. Most ecommerce companies focus only on the latter and not the former, despite the number of curious customers being a much larger visitor segment and a better reflection of how people shop offline.
Evidence shows that myopically focusing on same visit conversions misses the bigger picture. You can see the trees but miss the forest. For ecommerce companies, same-visit conversion rates are typically less than ~5% and hover around 1-2%. The other 95% to 98% aren’t directional shopping. For the travel market, users will take on average 38 visits before purchase. According to GE, it can take between 40 to 137 days of online research for customers to make a large purchase. Marketo’s rule of thumb is that 95% of your daily visitors are prospecting.
To capture this audience, ecommerce companies can look to the social media world. Companies like Twitter and Facebook are focused on capturing and creating consistent engagement. Social media companies measure success on a weekly or monthly basis. For example, a conversion rate is measured over the course of a week like Weekly Active Users (”DAU”). Visitors with multiple visits within a 7 day period are counted as one and multiple conversions within a 7 day period from a single user are counted as one.
If it takes most customers multiple visits to convert, it follows the best way to measure success is looking at key metrics denominated by a longer period of time than same-visit or same-day. Consider this problem: you send an experimental email to customers and it is quite successful on a same-visit conversion basis. You will probably deduce that the email should be sent on a regular basis. Looking at this strategy from a weekly or monthly view could show that these customers actually just need a certain number of sessions to commit. It just so happens that this particular email activated them at the right time.
This longer-time horizon for conversion reduces product complexity that hampers most ecommerce product design. Ecommerce is notoriously known for a "crowded” product UI and UX. Product design at social media companies is almost the exact opposite as it prides itself on focusing users on accomplishing a specific action. Social media companies don’t need or expect the user to accomplish or understand everything in a single visit. Nevertheless, ecommerce still tries to do it all in a single visit. If you have the advantage of time and consistent engagement, product design can be cleaner and much more targeted to what the user needs at that moment.
Tracking conversion rates beyond a single day has its weaknesses. If your ecommerce product assumes users will purchase multiple times within a week (ex. Instacart), it may not be that helpful. Another weakness is if your customer base doesn’t browse and mainly directionally buys (ex. Amazon).
Same-visit conversion rates have a purpose and effectively measure your most valuable customers. Including another bucket of engagement based metrics will give you a window into how your customers think and approach buying your products. It will bring to light the mental pathway a user takes from browsing to buyer, probably one of the most valuable facts you can learn about your customers.
I was at a party and an early-stage entrepreneur inquisitively asked me how I would describe growth. In the midst of a bustling party, I knew I needed to keep it short. Despite being paleo, the immediate idea that came to mind was that growth is like a cake.
Cake is like the product.
Cake can be good enough by itself. Snacking on a plain vanilla cake may not make Zagat's best list, but it is certainly satisfying. You can get value out of a cake by itself without fancy icing. When you start making a cake, you usually start baking the cake first.
Like a cake, a product should be quite useful without ever exploring growth. It should stand on its own two feet. Users should be hearing about your product in some form of organic means. Press and bloggers in your target market should resonate with your message. Users should be posting about you on social channels. Growth hackers and experts need this sentiment and behavior to leverage for growth.
Icing is your growth strategies.
Icing is what makes people go "wow". Icing is what impresses and makes people want to tell their friends. Icing really seals the deal and the best icing is layered through out the cake.
This is what growth does to a product. It adds that extra kick that motivates users to tell their friends and stick around. It helps an already solid product scale even faster, but too much icing can make users sick.
Users leave products due to bad growth strategies. For example, Facebook experienced a ton of backlash from aggressive testing. In one sense, you can still make bad icing and a good product work. Just scrape off the bad icing and the cake is good again (just a bit plainer).
Bad cake cannot be covered up with good icing. Most of a cake is dough. Only a portion is icing. Even the best tasting icing cannot cover up a rotten cake.
Lots of products have attempted to scale before a solid foundation was put in place. One way this can happen is when a company is a feature of a broader eco-system or platform. The platform feeds in top-line acquisition but users don't stick around. Rapid top-line level growth can mask churn and poor retention if you don't look close enough.
Don't focus on growth too soon and take away resources from building an awesome core value proposition. Build a great foundation and then start exploring growth. Its the icing on the cake.
As the era of "open platforms" rides into the sunset, we are all looking for the next distribution channel to rise to the forefront. As major brands shift their budget online, the influx of money is hurting organic distribution for the sake of revenue for distribution platforms, like Facebook and Twitter.
The last few years has been difficult for those who believe in organic growth and distribution via social. The focus on monetization has nudged people to focus on paid over organic growth.
Despite the bearish attitude, large and untapped distribution channels are still alive and thriving but the state of each channel is changing quickly. There are three distribution channels I would bet on for growth in for 2015.
Despite fierce competition, the address book and text messaging remains relatively untapped. Conversion rates on text messages are 6X better than email. The notification center on phones are theorized to be the next "newsfeed", which offers one explanation why Facebook is breaking up its products.
Another huge strength of this channel is that there are no barriers between you and distribution, other than user preference. In the "open platform" phase a few years ago, Facebook and Twitter were always between you and distribution. With an address book, the barriers are low and dependent on lone user choice with no middle man.
2. Google - Google is doubling down to become the largest distribution platform in the world. They are heavily investing in a stellar Google+ login that seamlessly connects web and android devices (Facebook was quick to follow up). They are investing in deep linking from search and haven't stopped reinforcing very friendly developer policies.
Silicon Valley has criticized the Google+ effort has ill-thought through and a desperate effort to try another swing at social; however, the platform continues to grow and Google Hangouts is exploding in popularity. I don't expect the destination site of Google+ to be a huge draw, but the integration of Google+ into search, Android, Gmail, and other Google products will be a massive opportunity for growth.
3. Email - Email, the workhorse of the Internet, is a growing, persistent, and stable distribution channel. Email conversion rates are stable and haven't declined very much despite a rapid increase utilization. Email is continuing to be more and more engrained into our everyday life. Email reflects your true social and interest graph. Investing in an email is an almost certain win and wise investment. Just don't send bad emails or you will be locked away forever in Gmail's promotion tab.
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There are some products taking off that I did not list, such as Instagram, SnapChat, LINE, etc. These are growing and could be used for distribution but it remains to be seen how. Some of these products could be used for traditional marketing, but virality will probably be quite low. These products are not distribution platforms just yet and it is harder to see how integration with third party applications can benefit each respective product's user base.
Now for the elephant in the room: Facebook. Facebook is making very interesting moves. They are disrupting themselves to try and remain the largest social network in the world. Their future depends a lot on these movements.
Despite their reach, Facebook faces pressure to monetize their core interactions in the newsfeed that doesn't exist on Google. Most Google advertising dollars do not come from zero sum scenarios. With Facebook, the choice is either advertising, UGC, or content from Pages. However, one channel that is thriving on Facebook is their mobile ad products. In most cases, these are a useful and effective means for driving paid growth.
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If you have other channels that you see as a wise investment, write a comment and tell me about it.
If you follow me on Twitter or know my background, you probably noticed that I like politics. Anyone who follows politics long enough sees that issues that captivate the news cycle are often more complicated than a single pass can comprehend. Some of the backlash or shallow promotion of growth hacking looks a lot like political discussions on cable TV, inane premises and shallow argumentation.
I am not very interested in continuing to rehash whether growth hacking exists or not. It does. Look at the original growth community. Their track record speaks for itself. To me, a more interesting subject of discussion is why some are denying the growth hacking movement despite its palpable benefit to the startup and business community.
First, let’s accept the obvious: growth is not bad; it’s fantastic!
Growth is the circulation that drives the heart of capitalism. Growth is a sign you are making someone’s life better. Growth is important to small and big companies. Last Friday, Apple’s stock price stumbled over concerns of future growth. Twitter’s eye-watering P/E is built on the market’s assumption for future growth. The valuation of a company is based on growth.
What do I mean when I say “growth”? Most people isolate their understanding of growth to only user acquisition. Most criticism of growth hacking as a copycat of marketing highlights its user acquisition element; however, growth folks work on the entire funnel at a systematic level. Growth moves the core business forward and upward. Growth’s core operating principle is to build a product-centric mechanism for distribution. While marketers may claim to have holistic control of a product, they often do not. This is the unfortunate, but it is reality.
The tech community’s attitude towards marketing isn’t healthy or based on good evidence. Marketing in tech is usually under resourced, hampered by lazy hiring practices and limited integration into the core business. The salary for a marketer in tech suggests it’s only for young twenty-somethings. Simply put, most tech companies don’t value or know the impact of a good marketer.
Growth hacking has bridged the divide in the tech community where most marketers have failed. Growth hacking has created a new playing field of cooperation between product, data, marketing, and engineering. It is pretty amazing to see so many different stripes banding together to learn more about growth.
Growth hacking resonated with the tech community due to its approach. Growth tactics sound more like they are from product and engineering rather than marketing. Since the core of a tech company is product and engineering, growth speaks the same language as the rest of the company. From this, applying the growth mentality affects the whole company. As Suster noted, a company with a growth mentality feels and works very differently.
Marketers are benefiting from the growth hacking movement, despite the animosity coming from some parts of the marketing community. Engineers and product teams are listening and implementing marketing concepts into the product. Growth-product fit is seen as crucial. Companies are excited to resource distribution strategies.
While growth and marketing are not always one in the same, growth and marketing are close partners. For example, my team supports marketing and business development. We ship code for partnerships and support inbound marketing strategies. Before the concept of the growth team, these tasks would probably be marked P3’s for most product teams (a.k.a it will never happen).
Growth hacking deniers sound more like dictionary puritans or growth luddites. For those who are good marketers yet protest growth hacking under the premise “I have always done this stuff”, my response is maybe you are just a growth hacker. :) I digress.
I agree that the bandwagon feels quite heavy since 2010. From Sean’s defining post to Andrew’s new VP of Marketing to my growth hacking series on TechCrunch, the movement has taken on a life of its own. Growth hacking has spread all over the world. It has made a positive contribution to technology community. Small struggling startups all around the world feel emboldened to take on the world. To them, it doesn’t take a millions of dollars to leave a lasting mark. I hope more and more companies will devote resources to expand their reach. After all, aren’t you in the business of adoption? Don’t you want people to use your product? It would be selfish not too.
The motto of my growth team is “We make it as easy as possible for a new person to hear, to understand, and to value our product.”
That’s sounds like something we all can stand behind.
Philosophizing about “growth” and “growth hacking” is amble, but there is a dearth of practical tips on building a growing company. Implementing growth into an organization is a long slog and free of glamour.
Based on my experience, I’ve worked both as an individual contributor and leading a growth team. Outside of my writing on common organizational and cultural behaviors that hampers growth, I collected a few tips from my successes and failures on growing a product.
Time box iterations – Test after test can lead to what I call, “testing burnout”. Testing burnout happens when finding an answer to the hypothesis has a higher cost than the possible reward. The first sign of testing burnout appears when your team starts running out of reasonable ideas to test. At this point, a “winning” test isn’t worth it to your team and the probability of finding a positive test starts to diminish.
Low hanging fruit isn’t real – Be careful when addressing low hanging fruit (aka perceived easy wins). These fixes or features are low hanging fruit for a reason. These easy wins may not be worth fixing because users don’t care or they are superficially cheap tests. Low hanging fruit can drain resources and bog down velocity.
Team velocity is the primary goal – Velocity leads to growth and growth lives off of velocity. Momentum is essential to find growth. Every test is an opportunity to learn something new. Always remember to smallify as much as possible without degrading the explanation power of test results.
Layer testing risks wisely – Don’t bite off more much than you can chew. Since velocity is the pathway to success, big and expensive iterations can bog down a team. To keep things moving, blend big tests and small tests together within the same sprint to support the sense of momentum.
Solve for the null hypothesis – Don’t hold to your ideas as if they are law. For growth to be successful, ego must be left at the door. Expect most of your ideas to fail. Probably more than 80% of tests will run fail or baseline. Testing on growth should advance the company knowledge about the product and user base.
Customer support is your advocate – Once a validated and tested iteration goes to production, expect some users to send in complaints. Customer support can be one of the best advocates for a growth team. Use these user interactions as another opportunity to gather qualitative data and user feedback but put it in perspective. User feedback typically tilts negative.
Technical debt is a subtle killer – Every engineer is constantly creating new technical debt. It is impossible to avoid. Keep technical debt in control, as unmanaged technical debt will gradually choke velocity. Make sure iterations that fail are properly handled and don’t ship half built features for the sake of velocity.
Pareto product management – The growth team is best utilized in researching and developing distribution channels. A growth team should take products 80% of the way, which I define as the “good enough” state. “Good enough” means the feature works as expected and users will experience the value but is missing high quality finish users expect. The last 20% has a lower marginal impact compared to the first 80%. The last 20% quality work should be left to the core product team.
Of course, all of the tips above are just band-aids if you don’t follow the basic concepts of lean product development and agile software development. Don’t get wrapped up in the buzz. Good costing, shared product ownership, and diligence sprint planning will go a long way in moving the growth curve upward.
“We have grown rapidly with zero marketing!” And the crowd goes wild!
Rapid growth with “zero marketing” never fails to send a thrill up the spine of the tech bubble, from investors to journalists. Cash floods in and the Valley props up another contrarian on the way to tech startup hall of fame.
Washing away the hype, this praise masks a fundamental misunderstanding of how marketing works and appeals to a misplaced distaste for the marketing skillset that resides in the tech world.
The American Marketing Association defines “marketing” as simply the activities that are involved in making people aware of your products. There are several basic and common web practices when building a website that are considered marketing: building a landing page, creating a social media account, submitting your site to Google. These are standard web practices that allow your products to surface above the noise on the web, yet the statement “growth with zero marketing” isn’t referring to this type of investment. Those that claim “growth with zero marketing” don’t count these practices as marketing per se.
What people usually mean when they say "growth with zero marketing" is spending money on paid channels. To them, “marketing” is simply advertising. Teams that claim “growth with zero marketing” admit that they invested in basic marketing strategies, such as SEO, community management, seeding links in targeted communities, social media marketing, email blasting, etc. The truth is these strategies are marketing with cost, requiring man-hours and engineering time.
Marketing isn't sexy in the Valley. Its well known. It is a position of scorn, to be filled haphazardly with a recent college grad or someone that applied through your jobs page. Despite the distaste, the success of a startup depends a lot on marketing and growth.
VCs invest in growth first and cool technologies second. The factor that correlates highest with returns is growth and growth is an exercise and output of a marketing oriented mind. At the deepest level, all startups know their number one problem is battling the market for mind share and consumer attention, which is a marketing problem.
Even though the Valley is over-run with those who claim to be a marketer, hiring a good marketer is tougher than hiring a good engineer. One reason for the rise of the growth hacker is a growth hacker speaks the same lingo as a technical mind. Marketing and growth are not the same because the tactics are very different; however, growth and marketing usually have the meta-goals.
It is time to give marketing its due credit. You need both strong growth and marketing teams to successfully scale. Don’t be ashamed of marketing because the silly stigma that only exists in Silicon Valley. Go to LA, Miami, or Chicago and it’s a different story.
The world needs to know about your solution, so drop the stigma and start promoting. Hire a good marketing team and resource them properly with a growth team. I am the first to admit that a lot of marketers are not data-driven, don’t understand product, and aren’t iterative; however, your company, above all else, is probably trying solving a marketing problem before the money runs out.
The overarching goal of an employee should be to create lasting value for company that lives beyond their last day employment. This perspective and attitude of selflessness is forgotten among most startup folks, from founders to engineers. They work for themselves and it is understandable.
The pace of a typical startup working environment is beyond what most people can handle and the focus on speed above all else typically leaves a mess in its wake. Tomorrow is uncertain and not guaranteed; the goal is survival.
As a startup grows up, these once rational habits turn into bad habits. Product development processes at a very early stage company don't past mustard as a startup scales beyond a handful people. To break these habits of working in a silo and for yourself, I developed saying for my growth team at StumbleUpon: "Think about Steve."
Who is Steve? He isn't someone you know or might ever know, but he will know the product you work on very intimately. He may join your team or come along way after you are gone. This is Steve.
There are two truths about startup life: products change quickly and talent moves on to new opportunities quicker.
"Think about Steve" reminds product teams that someone will always be coming back through your work. Because the goal of an employee is to solve problems and not create more, teams must be considerate of those that follow up.
Some people claim that early stage culture is a reflection of real collaboration, but these individuals are usually working for themselves. Each member of an early stage company usually operates by themselves and has 100% ownership of a specific area of the business. There is little time or resources to spread more than one employee to each part of the business. Having 100% ownership on a specific area of business makes it difficult to see the presuppositions and assumptions in your workflow that will make it a challenge to anyone who joins your team.
Every person has been "Steve" at some point in their career. It is a frustrating experience and a huge time sink to try to read someone else's mind who chose not to document properly the "why" and the "what".
The key isn't the output or the "how" but the previous lessons that led a team to develop a hypothesis and test it. A company can go round and round, relearning the same lessons, if a team doesn't document properly. A company will get stuck in a holding pattern.
For engineers, thinking about Steve requires coders to be religious about commenting on their code, writing detailed post-mortems, creating deep architecture documents, and taking engineering on-boarding seriously. A good measurement to determine if you suck at thinking about Steve is how long it takes for new hires to propose a new and unheard product hypothesis. As a side note, there is a statue of limitations on the relevancy of lessons from the past.
For designers, thinking about Steve means creating a vast style guide to easily create templates, implementing a design review process, sticking to a common asset production nomenclature for readability, and documenting lessons from AB testing and user testing.
For product managers, Steve will need capacious documentation on the history of AB testing, task workflow, product development history, and the decision framework on what gets prioritize and what doesn't. The key is to make it easy for a PM who comes in behind you to understand why you made the decisions you did.
The above are just examples and it is not meant to be exhaustive.
Most people know that StumbleUpon has been around for several years. It is the gem of Silicon Valley that has survived two resurrections and I am working on its third. My team faces massive tech debt challenges and limited transfer of knowledge. I encourage my team to be an example and to put in the effort today for those who will come in after us tomorrow.
The most common request for help I receive is where can a company find a growth hacker to hire. Leaving aside the rampant confusion on what is and is not a growth hacker, here are some tips on how you can find and hire a growth hacker.
First, we need a reality check. Since growth is a developing field, only a handful of people are credible and respected in the space. There are a lot of young (by experience) growth hackers looking to learn and put some wins under their belt. I am not commenting on their qualifications or skills but the obvious fact of inexperience. Most experienced growth experts are in higher demand than software engineers.
WHAT TO DO
Ask other respected growth experts for referrals
The best way to find a growth hacker is through recommendations from other growth experts that have a great reputation in the community. Since there is a lot of noise in the space right now, well-regarded growth experts are one of the best methods to filter candidates. Introductions from well-regarded growth hackers to candidates are a solid way to get a meeting.
Recruit from established growth teams
A great pool of candidates already exist in large technology companies with established growth teams. Facebook, Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter have large growth teams. This method of hiring is common. Uber hired the venerable Ed Baker from Facebook. Elliott Shmukler jumped from LinkedIn to WealthFront. I was hired off the Romney 2012 Presidential campaign to join StumbleUpon.
Acquire a growing early stage company
Early stage companies are fighting for every inch of ground to grow. Successful early stage companies require hungry talent that has the same level of determination and myopic focus needed to be good at growth hacking. Hiring a thriving early stage company with the growth mindset could a great strategy to fill out a growth team, assuming you can retain the talent.
Create a growth hacker inside your company
There is no hocus-pocus or secret book for growth hacking. Growth is a relatively simple framework of understanding and breaking down problems. The growth mindset can be learned. The biggest misconception about growth is that it is a bunch of tactics ready to be copied. Growth comes from an attitude, not from platitudes.
Read their blog
Most growth people do some form of blogging. It is wise to read their thoughts and analysis about marketing and product. Read between the lines and parse out signals on their experience. Original ideas, deep analysis, and strong creativity are all marks of a good growth hacker. If most of their content is a rehash of the Chen’s AirBnb post or Hotmail’s dusty email signature tactic, pause and take a second look.
Meritocracy and ownership
A lot of growth people hesitate on joining a new company due to a past marked with promises that were never kept. Growth experts engender a positive attitude of meritocracy and opportunity towards product. Growth experts are not obsessed with their own name but helping the company and making an impact. At the end of the day, growth experts know their success comes from empowerment.
If a growth hacker does not feel empowered to execute and to move numbers, they will move on to other opportunities. After all, growth hackers are in the business of having a direct impact on the bottom line. When metrics don’t move and AB tests don’t get launched, we feel like we are not working.
WHAT NOT TO DO
Linkedin titles are not ground truth
Be wary of LinkedIn titles. There is a lot of demand for growth experts right now and a very small supply. Due to high demand, a handful of snake oil "growth hackers" appeared overnight to cash in on the irrationality of some. Be cautious and investigate recommendations and work history.
Growth teams are diverse
A growth team is made up of a wide range of talents and specialties. Not everyone on the growth team has the same level of knowledge or leadership to make an impact on growth alone. Typically, there is a single strong leader who guides the team forward on where to invest in the product for wins. It could be the tech lead, the PM, or VP of Product. It varies from company to company.
Hire for the mindset, not the toolset
Growth hacking is a mindset, not a toolset. Growth hackers that focus on tactics instead of the process to achieve outcomes and validate hypotheses will always be looking for the low beta wins. A strong growth hacker talks about the process of discovery and experimentation. Growth is not about ego but what works at the end of the day. Talking constantly about tactics aligns more in the spectrum of gut and ego, rather than data-driven and tested decisions.
Growth hacker ≠ growth team
Know what you want before you start looking.
A growth hacker is not the same as a Head of Growth or a growth PM. There are a handful of individuals who can operate in both worlds but a growth hacker as a greater emphasis on black-hat tricks and quick wins. A growth expert or growth PM is much more strategic and has a greater emphasis on empiricism. Growth PMs build a user base from a few million to hundreds of millions. Growth hackers tend to live and breathe the first million users.
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By the looks of my email box, recruiters and companies are definitely confused by the growth space. I have offers sitting in my Inbox for a community position, a direct-marketing position, and a data-science position. Even if your company is interesting and has legs to be a billion dollar business, starting the initial conversation with a job description that is obviously not growth focused will lead to an “I am not interested” quickly. Do the due diligence up front and learn the lingo.
In every product team, there is a debate on how much information and effort visitors should take in order to convert. A part of this debate is based on the question whether or not a visitor should be able to try a product before they register for it. The answer lies in a visitor's refer.
There are two main types of experiences visitors encounter in a product, explore mode or a walled-garden. Explore mode allows visitors to use or view a product's content. A walled-garden requires a visitor to signup or login before experiencing the product.
Visitors fall into two broad categories of traffic types, direct and indirect. Direct channels are branded based visitors. These visitors have some sense of the product and are interested in finding out more. Indirect visitors are arriving to the product via another user and are interested in utilizing the output of the core value proposition, such as a user generated photo or an article.
Let's see how some of the big players in the tech space approach visitor experiences.
Twitter
For direct traffic, Twitter's original landing page launched in 2006 focused on searching and discovering tweets. Visitor's were allowed to search the Twitter graph and explore the product. Registration was a secondary call-to-action.
As the brand matured and Twitter's growth team focused on their activation problem, Twitter gradually moved away from search and exploration. Twitter now requires login or registration for its direct traffic.
For indirect traffic, visitors can view content created by specific users but are blocked from continuing explore beyond one user profile.
Pinterest
Pinterest's visitor landing page became famous for their tiled consumption model. Since their launch, Pinterest's landing page was completely exploration driven with a prominent sign up and sign in banner.
Interestingly, Pinterest changed their direct traffic landing page and dropped the tiles model a few months ago. Direct visitors can no longer explore Pinterest's content without logging in or registering.
For indirect traffic, Pinterest continues to support their old method of conversion with a top registration and login banner.
Tumblr
Tumblr's strategy for converting direct traffic has floated between explore mode and a walled-garden. In 2011, Tumblr's landing page was a walled-garden.
In 2012, Tumblr switched to an explore mode which showcased the main navigation model.
A few months ago, Tumblr dropped explore and move backed to a hybrid walled-garden strategy. A direct visitor can still explore Tumblr by clicking the user's profile link bottom-right.
This link appears to be a compromise to include an element of the previous model; however, the number of visitors who choose to explore is probably insignificant.
For indirect traffic, Tumblr continues to support a version of their previous explore mode. Since Tumblr is a micro-blogging platform, allowing visitors to explore the product is essential for growth for indirect traffic.
For direct and branded-based traffic, the best landing page strategy is a walled-garden. There is no need to have motivated visitors explore the product before signing up as they are highly engaged. Direct traffic is primed with an existing assumption about the product that is positive. Extending the length of time before registration results in a lower number of registrations and low activation rate compared to requiring registration on page 1.
The following graph shows the results of implementing either a explore mode and a walled-garden flow.
It is clear in the results why a walled-garden approach is a better strategy for converting users than explore mode. The math is blunt on the weakness of an explore model. The funnel for explore model is too long to have an impact on registration given a set number of visitors. For 100 visitors, the number of registrations in explore mode was 0.12 users versus 6 users in a walled-garden flow.
If you layer an activation analysis on the graph above, the disparity between both of the flows is even clearer. In the walled-garden scenario, the product has a mechanism for a reengagement strategy. In explore mode, there is no method for reconnecting with visitors. Explore mode will rely on delivering such a memorable experience to a visitor that he or she will prompt a self-motivated return. If a product has this type of pull, it is set for life.
Product teams should lamentably opt for explore mode. For indirect traffic, there is usually no other reasonable and rational visitor experience that will drive sharing and virality. Conversion rates are less important than the very top of the funnel and the size of traffic for a given flow. Explore mode needs a large number of visitors to be effective.
At StumbleUpon, we have tried both methods. For visitors via SEO or social referral, we utilize an explore mode hybrid, while our direct visitors are shown a walled-garden.
We applied the theories for direct vs indirect traffic / explorer and walled-garden to our visitor stumbling experience (shown below). Visitors arrive to visitor stumbling via a user originated share. We AB tested limiting the ability of a visitor to explore more than the share that initiated the visit. The default case allowed visitors to stumble three times before being forced to view our registration page.
When the test finished, the results were strong. Logins doubled and registrations increased over 80% over the default.
An Exception
An exception to these rules are if a user account does not deliver significant value or a user account is unnecessary to utilize the product. One example is a transaction based product, such as e-commerce sites. Having a user account is not needed to experience the core product; the transaction is the product.
Product teams often spin their wheels trying to answer the question on behalf of visitors, "How do I know what I am signing up for?". Visitors don't ask themselves this question. Most visitors convert based on the result of the internal calculation of perceived reward minus perceived effort. Effort is typically time spent. Thus, educating a visitor adds time and mental effort. This increases the cost of conversion which lowers the probability of success. The easiest way to increase conversions is to reduce the front-end investment visitors have to make to accomplish the task they desire.
Email is one of the most underrated and underutilized distribution channels. Many have speculated whether or not email is dead. A new trend in paid growth channels are showing signs that email is making a comeback. Most paid channels are valued based on a click or an impression, but Google and Twitter are experimenting with email collection as an advertisement over the traditional click-based interaction model.
This past May Twitter introduced a new advertising option called the Lead Generation Card. The Twitter card contains a one-click action that passes your email to an advertiser. This is move for advertisers appears to be contradictory to the rest of Twitter's platform. Twitter is infamously known for not giving access to a user's email in their OAuth permission while other popular OAuth's allow access.
Google is also testing a new search ad that allows advertisers to promote subscribing/lead generation over a click. If you are logged into your Google account, your gmail address is auto-filled in.
Both of these new advertising channels are powerful and create new opportunities to find arbitrage. The user effort compared traditional click-focused ads is the same, but receiving a prospects email is far more valuable than a visit. By eliminating one step in the lead gen funnel, the number of emails captured will increase; however, be careful.
Lead generation is not always about the quantity of leads. If there is too much noise in your leads, qualifying the leads may become uneconomical. This will lower lifetime value and increase costs for conversion. Always take the funnel from the top to the very, very bottom.
Keep an eye out on how these paid channels are being utilized in the coming. Receiving an email at the moment of interest over a click changes how you evaluate an advertising channel's value.
For three years, I have been a loyal customer of Virgin America. Every time I need to book a flight, my search starts and ends at viriginamerica.com. The flight experience is amazing and the flight attendants are enjoyably attentive to their passengers, but there is one thing about Virgin America that is frustrating: the first step to book a flight on virginamerica.com.
Starting a search to book a flight is easy. The initial form is exposed on page load and the first step in the form is simple and clean.
The form starts with the final destination which is less likely based upon the search results. Customers far more likely to alter dates based upon price than destination. A best practice to keep visitors in the purchase funnel is to start the flow with data points that are least likely to change based upon product interactions. If a customer consistently has to go back to step one, conversion rates will be low.
Once I select my destination, I expect the form to continue, but nothing happens. Completing the first step in the form causes no new interaction.
The behavior I expect is for the rest of the form to appear after I select my final destination. The complete form only appears by clicking the link "Expand" at the bottom right.
I do not understand why Virgin America decided to build the form with this choppy flow. Based my experience, each additional step in the funnel loses 5%-10% of visitors.
Removing this step in the funnel bends the funnel outward. Small optimizations like this can have large downstream impacts. For example if we assume the average price of a ticket is $250 and the overall conversion rate to purchase from a visit is 2%, this simple optimization can translate to $25,000 to $50,000 additional revenue a day.
Luckily, I am a loyal Virgin America customer. I am a highly motivated visitor and I will likely complete the form regardless of the pain. Don't count on other flyers to have the same patience. Have you seen what people act like when they deplane?
A product dies from a lack of clarity, not for a lack of effort.
When I started building products, I started from the same blue sky mentality that plagues most entrepreneurs: we can build everything under the sun, instantly.
Resource scarcity always brings it back down to earth. In the real world, hard decisions have to be made on what projects should be funded and what will be left for another day.
How a team decides what to work determines a company's life or death. Increasing usage should be the focus and the primary reason a project gets worked on.
The argument for framing all resource allocation under the lens of increasing usage is:
Without users, no one see your visual design.
Without users, no one will utilize your new feature.
Without users, there is no traffic for ops to manage.
Without users, there is no need for an API.
Usage is the currency for the life of a product. Increasing usage allows a team to continue to invest and grow. The above argument holds that a team should first invest in projects that move the needle. Anything that falls outside this paradigm is done when you have the time.
Focusing resources first on increasing usage does not mean design, infrastructure, operations, marketing, sales, etc are not important or should not be resourced. For example, your infrastructure needs to support the ability for a quick iteration cycle to improve usage. Down-time translates into zero active users.
Most product teams build feature after feature without going back and supporting the basics of what made the product successful in the first place. The most important point for a user is the pre-conversion experience (the visitor experience); however, these pages and product flows are often considered "boring" and "old news" by engineers, designers, and product managers. Despite the lack of enthusiasm, these projects tend to have the highest ROI.
All projects should be framed with the question, "How much will this increase usage?". Usage should be translated into a metric, such as "number of new users" or "improving session length".
Be very firm on quantifying the phrase "moving the needle". Predict what number will move and why. Compare the time horizon of each project and when you will see results. The longer you wait, the more users you are losing.
The primary motivating factor of everything you do should be to increase usage. If usage is low, you are doing the world a disservice. You are short-changing the world on the value you deliver.
Company culture is the most undervalued strategy but significant dependency for success in developing a growth centric company. Technical talent and strategic focus are important to the success but skills and strategy can only take a company so far. A company must culturally reward growth.
When I meet with companies for growth advice, I like to ask the following questions and listen to what a company says and doesn't say.
What do you value?
Typically: Growth.
Most companies say that they value growth. As Paul Graham says, "Startups = growth". Growth is a tale-tell sign to spectators that what you are making is wanted. Growth shows signs of market opportunity and product-market fit.
How do you decide what to work on?
Typically: A mix of emotion, personal bias, and company lore.
Product planning is often driven by ego and lore rather than focusing on "mvp" driven development and predicting outcomes of iterations. Metrics should be known and adopted before any work gets started. The "why" needs to be set and smaller teams should figure out "how" and "what".
Most companies focus on everything but growth. This outcome is caused by the fact that companies typically overcomplicate growth. Executives don't believe that growth can be as simple as focusing on the registration page (as Andy Johns says, "growth is not sexy"). Companies tend to add unnecessary complexity to their product and strategy as they grow believing it contributes to their success.
How do you solve problems?
Typically: "The Founder tells the company and panic ensues."
When there is a separation in vision between the top to the bottom of a company, problem solving, from bug fixes to product challenges, is driven by the top and creates a culture without personal responsibility. In this scenario, the bottom does not feel empowered to take action.
How do you hold people accountable?
Typically: "How the founder or executive feels about the person."
One of the most undervalued drivers for growth is evaluating employee performance. How an employee performs is where culture and strategy meet. How leadership reacts to employee performance is a signal on what it values. Every good leader knows that the team is always watching and judging consciously and subconsciously.
How do you know if you are successful?
Typically: "Another round of funding or press."
Companies often look to others to confirm their success. Funding rounds and press are easier ways to validate your work than looking at metrics. For evidence on how the press usually never has the whole story, take your neighborhood VC out for drinks and ask about their portfolio. You will be surprised to hear the difference between what is said in to the press and what is said in the board room.
Don't by into the Silicon Valley false sense of security. The public square would like to make all of us believe that every other company other than our own is doing great. The press always reads as if "Everyone is doing awesome!"
If you find any of these growth inhibiting norms in your company, clean house and reset your company. Here are some resources that can help you build a good growth minded culture.
John Kotter - The Key To Changing Culture
Harvard Business School - The 10 Must Reads on Change Management
Michael Marquandt - Building the Learning Organization
