How we approached the shift from topline growth to efficiency

“From a product growth lens, the shift from topline growth to efficient growth means that you should be thinking about how much burn, how many engineers, and how much marketing is required to hit the milestones you want to reach. And the first questions to ask are often around marketing.” Andrew Chen Article

Laser focus on engaged, high LTV users

To drive efficiency we heavily focused on product and executing on the following 3 steps approach:

1. Continuous Discovery
2. Focused Priorities
3. Lean Experimentation

1. Discovery: A deep discovery process helps us to continuously get a closer understanding of the users' problems and needs. Listening and speaking to users helps us to find out what hurts them most in their current work. Based on these learnings we can then provide and double down on the true value, that we'd might have neglected when purely focusing on top line growth first. We implemented a continuous discovery process to stream in learnings from the user base consistently. We speak to users and often ask them for calls and feedback.

2. Priorities: Prioritizing is hard because it means to say no to many things and just do one - but often we want to do so many of them. We use standard prioritization frameworks and always try to get a good understanding of the impact on the metric that we want to improve. Mostly there is no guarantee for the right priorities and at the same time the number of test we can run is limited. It bounds so many resources. One test per week would “only” mean 52 iterations per year. So we needed a good alignment with the whole team to pull altogether on one string to quickly move on step by step.

3. Experiments: Once priorities are set up we design very simple and lean experiments to listen for early traction - then doubled down on what works. When designing experiments we try to find the most easy way to provide (a fraction of) the core value or functionality that we have in mind. This final designed experiment would be the outcome of successful discovery. We first focus on understanding the core value and then experimenting on how we could provide it. To illustrate an example for core value I always like to imagine WhatsApp without video calls - users would miss something but not the end of the world. WhatsApp without texting - probably no one would use the app anymore. Some tests can he hard, others can be easy. In the end, with enough creativity, there is always a way for lean experiments.

The 3 steps and the role of product in a PLG framework

What makes it special about a product-led business is that ultimately every team can follow or share these steps on quite a similar way because all teams leverage the product to hit their goals and milestones. This can provide good synergies between teams and makes it productive and fun working together.

Summary

Much of the last years have been focused on growth by any means. I know many founders that got advice like “ you must spend” painfully wasting tons of money. Now it turns much more into a “you must know how to spend” before driving topline growth again (which still is super important, on the right way). I feel that a good focus on quality and efficiency is asked that finally leads to building a healthy and sustainable company.

As product leaders we sometimes need to rethink our focus for this new environment that’s rapidly taking shape. That means we might need to take a step back, figure out new approaches, and build towards the next boom phase. This will drive us to reinvent product, growth and ultimately the industry that we are in - which makes it very exciting looking forward.

At Kittl we look for ambitious folks in product, growth and tech who are willing to reinvent together with us and to use this unique opportunity to engage with millions of users! If this is you or anyone you know who’d be interested, please share, leave a message or a comment. We’ll be super happy to be in touch. Thanks!