How it works

How the Growth Process Works

Before starting any growth process the prequisites for success are:

  • Product/market fit – Learn more about this here
  • Customer Data Analysis – Learn more about this here
  • Set up of the Growth Model with Growth Metrics and NorthStar Metric

By understanding more about your customers and how they interact with your product, you will begin to identify opportunities for growth experiments.

Start by diving into the excisting users of your product. Separate the active users from the inactive ones.

By analyzing the data up front, you’ll go into the ideation step of the process armed with the data to create ideas for experimentation that have clear hypotheses and supporting evidence.

The rapid experimentation growth process is always focused on a very specific:
1. Customer Persona or Customer Segment.

2. Phase of the funnel or customer journey

3. Growth Metrics: North Star Metric and Growth levers

It’s a repetitive process. Please have a look at the video below where I explain how it works:

 

This process is very important, please read below, the description of every step of this process:

 

1. Ideation

Ideas are the leading input for growth. If you don’t have ideas going into the process, there’s a lesser chance your team will make an impact on growth because there’s less to test and learn.

There are many ways to generate new ideas. Look into what has worked or not worked in the past and ask yourself why?

There are several ways to generate ideas. 

  • Look at what has worked in the past. Why did it work or didn’t work?
  • Gather the team and start brainstorming ideas for every phase of the customer journey or sales funnel
  • Focus on a single problem, for example acquisition and ask your team: What are the ways to solve this problem?

2. Ranking the ideas

To identify the best ideas for a predefined growth objective, every team member will give their input based on a rankingsystem, so the overall score represents that input of the entire team. One of the common systems used for this is the ICE ranking system. Every team member will add their scores for Impact, Confidence and Ease

  • Impact: How much of an impact will this idea have if it’s successful?
    Confidence: How confident are you that this idea will work?
  • Ease: How easy is it to implement this idea, in terms of time and resources?
    The average of these three scores makes up the ICE score.

The ideas nominated that week are then presented by each person in the growth meeting. 

 

  1. Design the experiment

Once all ideas have been ranked and prioritized, with the ICE scoring method. There are “low hanging fruit” ideas that are likely to have a big impact on the key growth metric. The top ideas then move to the experiment stage. Then it’s time to design the experiment and back it up with data. 

A well designed experiment contains:

  1. Question-  problem it is trying to solve
  2. Hypothesis including a baseline and a target
  3. Observation
  4. Analysis

The experiments will be assigned to the different team members and include a deadline for delivery and the first observation.

  1. Run the experiment

In this step of the process, it’s time to execute the experiments. A notification will be sent around that these experiments are now running. The execution of the experiments is usually done in a cross-functional team with one experiment owner. The owner make sure that the execution is done in a timely manner and that the right resources are assigned.

The runtime per experiment may differ depending on the resources and the amount of data required to represent sufficient significance in the outcome.

5. Analyze the result

Each experiment should then be analyzed and measured against its hypothesis. After this, the analyst will need to report whether the idea worked, didn’t work, or was inconclusive. 

It is important that the lessons learned from both a qualitative perspective as well as from a quantitative perspective are being shared and documented. 

All completed experiments should be stored in knowledge base where everyone on the team can access at any time. 

After this step the process goes on. The Growth Process is an infinite loop. Depending on the outcome of the experiment, there are 3 options:

  1. Systemize 
  2. Iterate
  3. Abandon

It is ideal to keep running experiments in a high volume. The more experiments you will run, the more you will learn. It is important to know that many of the experiments will not have the expected outcomel. It’s about the learnings and the small wins ( marginal gains) that will eventually drive the highest growth rates. 

“Finding wins, both big and small, is, in other words, a number game.”