Rise Of The Growth Master: How A Newer Industry Position Will Make It All Work For You - A REVIEW
I have friends that have earned a Doctorate degree. People call them doctors. I have earned a Master’s degree. No one calls me master.
I recently completed the minidegree on Growth Marketing available through CXL Institute. It was an outstanding experience. Within the coursework, I was introduced to Sean Ellis, founder of GrowthHackers and one renowned in the marketing industry. His CXL course is a Growth Master Training Workshop. I successfully passed his course, but I still doubt I can get anyone to address me as “master.” It’s okay. Call me Joe.
Growth
The hiring of Growth Masters is increasing. More companies are recognizing that growth is a full company effort that works across all the stages of the customer journey, incorporating
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Revenue
- Retention
- Referral
The customer often experiences a company through external channels leading to a product promise, first experience and ongoing experiences. Multiple business silos are involved along the way, from business development and marketing early on, to customer support and success to product and development.
Growth marketing is often portrayed as being in the intersection of marketing and product; it is data-driven and results oriented.
The Growth Master
The Growth Master role is to execute the cross-functional growth process. (S)he gets all the parts working together to drive growth.
A key component for the Growth Master is to help the growth team define a common success metric, referred to as the North Star Metric (NSM).
The NSM reflects the aggregate value delivered to users. Value drives retention. The NSM serves as the lens for evaluating tests and monitoring progress. For example, the NSM of Aribnb is connecting people who need a place with people who can host. The valuable experience drives usage.
The growth master works with their team to drive the growth of this metric through testing. Tests are run to:
- Discover: Try something never done to see if it works
- Optimize: Test to find a better way to do something.
Testing incorporates four components:
- Leverage: to use data and quantifiable research to find highest leveraged opportunity for growth
- Owner: person assigned to the objective
- Specify key objectives over the next 14-45 days
- Identify the primary metric: baseline, goal and timeline
The Growth Process
An effective growth process engages the entire organization in leveraging their insights skills and authority. It drives immediate growth results through high-tempo testing, and it helps you learn how to achieve sustainable results.
The growth testing process is a series of events around the objective.
- Analyze: find the high leverage growth opportunity and create three situation documents - a quantitative analysis, qualitative feedback and post-test learning.
- Ideation: creative problem solving, brainstorming and encouraging ideas from anyone at any time.
- Prioritized: Ideas are nominated in meetings, pitched, decided upon and then assigned an owner.
- Tested: The launch owner determines the minimum viable test, schedules the resources for executing the test and ensures that success metrics are defined and tracked. The process comes full circle as the test is analyzed on the hypothesis and the impact shared with the team. Analysis keeps the objective top of mind, and leads to new ideas.
The Growth Team
The growth team plans and executes cross-functional growth testing against high-leverage objectives.
Generally, there are two common growth team models:
- Autonomous: reports to the CEO. Benefit of the autonomous team is typically greater speed and iteration.
- Functional: reports to another team (such as VP of Product). Benefit is greater trust that user experience will be balanced with growth.
The makeup of the team consists of the Growth Master, also known as Head of Growth. Also, team members consist of shared resources such as design, marketing, analysts and such. Dedicated people are added in order to hit high tempo testing, and temporary specialists may be contracted.
The Growth Master is best served by one who is:
- Entrepreneurial: willing to take on the risk and accountability for a difficult job
- Disciplined to follow a process
- Continuously improving with a mindset of self-growth
- Analytical: looks for proof in the data
- Leading with skills to keep a team motivated and focused.
In relationship to the team, the role of the Growth Master is to analyze data to find high-leverage opportunities, to help the team focus on generating ideas that impact the key objectives, and to run the weekly growth meeting.
The Growth Meeting
The growth team meets each week. Its purpose is four-fold.
- Focus the team on achieving the growth objectives
- Accountability to a weekly growth-testing rhythm
- Optimize the growth process to hit growth targets
- Review the overall key performance indicators
The Growth Master prepares for the meeting throughout the week by assessing the implementation progress of planned tests and by helping with obstacles that are confronted.
Days before the meeting, the Growth Master updates the key performance indicators for the growth review, and reminds the team to nominate ideas.
Qualified ideas include research, hypothesis and the growth area it moves forward. Ideas are scored on the ICE grid: Impact, Confidence and Ease of the test.
Each team member nominates two ideas.
The growth meeting is attended by the Growth Master, the growth team, and often, the V.P. of Product or the CTO. The CEO is invited to attend as well, though there participation naturally varies.
It is critical in the meeting to maintain a sense of urgency. Given the executive participants, it is an expensive meeting to run. It’s critical in the meeting to stick to a regularly scheduled time and to keep on track.
A typical agenda:
- 15 minutes: review the North Star Metric and other key performance indicators
- 15 minutes: review progress on objectives and note key learnings
- 10 minutes: review tests launched and planned
- 20 minutes: taking nominations and making decisions
After the meeting, the Growth Master addresses blockers from the previous week. (S)he also works with project managers to prepare a plan for implementation of their tests, and helps them to stay on track.
In general, the Growth Master role is to observe and report, not to micromanage. The key is to keep the team focused on the objective, to champion the process and to bring recognition to the entire team.
I found the entire CXL Institute experience to be beneficial and extremely valuable for my work. In particular, I enjoyed discovering the increasingly perceived value of growth marketing as a key business strategy. Watch for the rise of the Growth Masters: Coming soon to a company near you.