How to use growth hacking to drive product growth & data based decisioning

Key Points:

• Identify your growth master
• Establish a dedicated team
• Immerse yourself in data
• Design your experiments
• Speed it up over time

Everyone seems to be talking about growth hacking in digital. It has become another one of digital’s many buzz words. Despite what you may have heard, it is not as confusing or intimidating as it seems. With the right skills and approach, your business can be off on a new accelerated growth path before you know it.

A growth hacker has a certain way of thinking and acting. They drive at a relentless pace. Grounded in reality and based on proof, everything tracked and measured. They are innovators but take a scientific approach to change.

This post provides a few tips to getting started and moving in the right direction.

Get the right growth hacking resources

To do growth well, you need someone with a growth mindset driving for you. In an ideal world, this would be a dedicated role. A growth master. A growth master must be analytical. They must also be strong willed and have influencing skills. They are the driver of this process and must motivate the team and keep them on target. The growth master should be entrepreneurial. They should drive the team towards an agreed North Star Metric.

Your growth team should be separate from your other teams. Their capacity kept outside of your standard delivery train. Their workload focused on experiments to drive growth. This will ensure that they are not dragged into support issues or thrown against the latest product release deadline. If you can’t start with a dedicated team, carve out capacity and time for this exercise although I strongly recommend the dedicated option.

The team should be cross functional and diverse. This means both a mix of skills and experiences. Your product owners need to either have the domain knowledge required or know how to access it on time. Your team should be appropriate for the systems that they are responsible for. A team that experiments with a website will need UX, Design, Development and Testing resource at the least.

Ensure your growth hacking processes are fit for purpose

Growth hacking requires an Agile development process. You need to have a backlog curated by your growth master, prioritised for execution. This is done in conjunction with the Product Manager, aligned to the changing growth priorities of the business. Again, this backlog should be separate from your main product backlog. The product function should still have oversight here and establish guidelines. This will keep you driving towards strategy, but don’t hold on too tight otherwise you will stifle innovation and mute results.

Agile works best when teams are co-located, and this is true for its application in growth hacking.

Create your backlog from a robust innovation process. Some believe that innovation is free and creative without constraints. This is not the case.

You can test the benefits of constraints in innovation by asking someone to make up and tell you a story on the spot. Often, they will struggle to think of a concept or at least will struggle to fill in the detail. Now try to give them a constraint, “tell me a story about a dog”. This tends to open up creativity despite the fact that you have limited their options for the story.

Processes like Design Thinking can be great for developing full products. When designing an experiment, you can still apply the logic of the stages, but do so on a smaller scale and faster. This is a mix of preparation and mindset. Shift through the stages as you consider an experiment and make sure you have considered it end to end.

Much of the analysis happens before you need to create your experiments. A good growth master is always busy working on mining data and customer feedback. Having these proof points is the key input for designing good experiments. Measure before and after the experiment, providing your evidence of success or failure.

Walk before you can run

Defining your North Star Metric is a good place to start. A North Star Metric is a single metric that is a proxy for success. As this metric improves, so too should your business. A great example is that of Facebook who use “Daily Active Users”. With this they can have a view of many powerful metrics in one such as Acquisition, Engagement, and Churn. This all helps to keep the team focused and driving towards a common goal without the noise of many data points.

Growth hacking is all about experimentation. It is important to learn that every experiment has a result. Whether the result is positive or negative you will learn fast not to be afraid of failures. As you run through your process you correct mistakes and double down on successes. This means that as time goes by you will move your trajectory in the right direction.

Start things off with a simple experiment. Landing pages are great to get used to the process. These by and large sit outside of the core technical architecture, so changes are easier.

Run as fast as you can

Now that you have the swing of it, speed it up.

We established earlier that every experiment yields a result. We also established that, over time, results will be more positive than negative with good people and processes in place.

So it stands to reason that more experiments will equate to more results. And more results will yield better returns!

Doing more experiments, at an increased speed will make you a true growth hacker. You will also see the runs on the board for your business.

Are you responsible for digital success in your business?

Interested in implementing a growth hacking approach?

Contact us to discuss how we can support your growth hacking aspirations today.

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