12 Steps to Build a Growth Function in Your Company

In my three previous articles on growth I covered the marketing eras, how to hire and train growth marketers, and 25 growth hacks to try this week. In this article, I will go over the key steps to building a new growth function in your company.

Growth is new, so not that many people are practicing the discipline yet. LinkedIn lists about 1,200,000 people in the US with marketing in their title. I estimate 10% of those workers in the US in LinkedIn are in tech or 120,000. Of those, I estimate fewer than 5% or 6,000 are tech growth marketers, but growth hackers also come from engineering and product. This article describes a path to increasing that number by leading the definition and deployment of the function in your company.

Launching a Growth Function

Of all the things you will propose as a marketer, increasing growth will get better support than anything else you can suggest. It's a natural extension of data-driven and demand marketing and lifecycle marketing. Here are my recommended steps:

#1 Change someone's title to include the word growth. This helps them pivot to what is actually a new discipline for the company. They most likely will be the growth leader.

#2 Break down traditional gaps between marketing, product, engineering, sales, and post-sales. This often requires executive support and some recalibrating of the goals in each division to increase alignment.

#3 Identify at least 3 people in 3 departments and make a cross-functional team. Set up a weekly growth meeting. Make a growth charter or manifesto, add it to the recurring meeting appointment, and read it out every other meeting.

#4 Create an experiments backlog in a shared doc and catalog all the ideas the growth team has about acquisition, activation, retention, and advocacy. Test headlines, subject lines, messages, calls-to-action and product usage. Learn what helps the customers understand the value of the product.

#5 Run experiments every week. Test the home page, the lead page, the welcome emails, and the activation emails. If you do not run experiments, you are not a growth hacker.

#6 Connect the growth team's efforts to the product and the product roadmap. Without this integration, the growth impact and permanence will be limited. If you do not give input into the product, you are not a growth hacker.

#7 Develop reporting that tracks the performance of the experiments on the weekly or monthly cohorts of new users. If you do not have tracking for impact on engagement, you are not a growth hacker.

#8 Look for the aha moment breakthroughs where users get the product, how it creates value for them, and it becomes sticky.

#9 Wind down functions that are not impacting acquisition, activation, and retention. They are pleasantly siphoning attention and resources.

#10 Report your results and evangelize successes. In addition to the sophisticated cohort analysis, be sure to include reporting with big headlines and big animal pictures to communicate progress easily.

#11 Automate processes that have tested as engaging for customers and move on to new hypotheses and experiments.

#12 Do it all again and create additional growth pods working on different personas or product tracks.

As you can see, growth hacking relies mostly on sweat equity and hardly at all on budget. That is probably the main difference between it and traditional marketing demand generation.