Growth Program Management: Review

As I begin to round off my Growth Marketing course at CXL Institute, the teaching for the week was centered on a review on what growth marketing is. If you have been following my articles for the past ten weeks, thank you. It means a lot and I really hope you have been able to learn something.

In one of my articles, I spoke about the AARRR model which consists of Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral and Revenue. You see, these are levers for accelerating growth in a company. Acquisition sources and motivates people to try; it shows you their intent, Activation is when there is an “aha” moment, Retention is when your core value is clear and based on this, you users Refer your product or service to people which helps you to generate new users. Finally, the Revenue is the price your customer pays for the product which happens at the point of conversion. All these are responsible for different levels of growth.

If you cannot retain customers, you cannot grow your business. It is like this; if you keep replacing your customers each month then you do not exactly have permanent customers. You need to be able to retain customers as a business.

At the revenue stage, there is a term called “the North Star Metric” and companies getting their growth right such as Facebook are making effective use of it. This metric affects the value that users are getting. It wants to find out the aggregation of value over time and what drives retention and sustainable revenue. Whatever experiment you are undertaking should be tied to an objective and should translate to how it goes back to your north star metric. Once you understand your north star metric, testing helps you.

You test to discover; get an idea of where opportunities are and you test to optimize, this shows that there is a better way to do everything you are doing. If you test ten things, on of the tests would be better than the others. The more testing you do, the faster you tend to grow. When you are testing, find leverage within the business by studying the data of where you are losing people, focus on testing specific objectives and then have someone in your team own the project so that they are assigned to the objective, have a duration for the testing period, usually between 14 and 45 days, identify your primary metrics and focus your energy on the right plan.

Now, there is a growth process. An effective growth process engages the whole organization, leverages skills and insights to enhance growth for the customer, drives immediate growth through focused testing and ensures that this growth is sustainable.

Most companies that have a growth process analyze, ideate, prioritize, and test their objectives. 

When analyzing the situation, you want to find a high leverage of growth opportunities, create a situation, conduct your quantitative analysis, and get quantitative feedback then leverage on learnings from past testing’s. If people are not using a product, it is not really growth. The whole idea of testing is to learn. Every test you have done in the past, you should ensure you note the key learnings and make it part of your situational analysis.

When prioritizing in weekly growth meetings, allow your team to nominate what experiment they would like to start with and when a decision is taken, ensure there is someone assigned as the owner of the project. Once the test is run, analyze the test and report in the progress.

The more tests you run, the more you learn and the better you drive growth.

It is okay if your tests have negative impacts. Your tests would have both positive and negative impacts and you should be able to share these as you take your key learnings from the results.

When you are analyzing tests, you are more likely to get new ideas in the process. Ensure that these ideas are well collated because hey, creativity does not stop.

You should already know that you need a growth team that oversees the growth process. This team plans and executes growth process against the objectives of the organization and ensures that the objectives are met. It turns out there are two types of growth team models: Autonomous/independent and a Functional team model.

I have also highlighted companies that use these various growth methods as I was taught.

Who should be on your growth team? Simple. A growth master and with time, you can include a designer, copywriter and an engineer after the growth master has expressed need for these roles. Ensure that the people you are including in your team are dedicated to the team.

After establishing a growth process and you are in execution mode the next step is to tune your growth machine. With this, you can choose better experiments and increase the speed at which you are experimenting. There are two main ways to choose experiments and they are reliant on people.

1.      If shipping experiments is cross functional, find ways to organize how different teams can work together.

2.      Training your team to be better at shipping experiments faster.

Oh yes, there is an amazing concept called Tooling. This depends on the types of tools you are using for different experiments. Too many tools slow down the time it takes for you to ship experiments. If you choose the wrong tools, your experiment becomes inefficient.

Growth teams and marketers can lead with experimentation. This allows other teams to leverage on the growth team by benefitting from some of the experiments the have run. Growth teams have two main functions in the early stages which are acquisition and engagement. Acquisition is more important and should be done first. You should start your team growth team a generalist growth marketer then someone who specializes in acquisition and another in engagement. Although, engagement happens after there is significant growth in your results.

I have one more article to go concerning my journey at CXL institute.

See you next week.