How to test hypotheses and multiply grow? Theory. Practice. Tool

How to restart the marketing department in 7 days and get the first significant growth in 30 days?
The service of fold growth hopox will allow you to adjust the work of the Growth Team and test growth hypotheses continuously.
In the article, theory, practice and instrumentation are collected in a single technology of multiple growth.

So what is the secret to the rapid growth of Twitter, Facebook, Amazon?

Perhaps they originally had a brilliant idea? Or crazy investments allowed to hire expensive marketers? Perhaps just lucky?
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I will immediately say the answer: in fact, they were not afraid to experiment, make mistakes, and did it often and quickly. The location of buttons on Facebook, the mechanics of retaining users on Twitter, forcing to buy at Amazon or Booking through a chain of letters, retargeting or discounts - is the result of a huge number of experiments.



All big companies do it. The Facebook mobile app constantly requires updates, Amazon changes the code on the site on average every 11 seconds, and the vice president of product Twitter admitted that significant growth began when they began to test ten hypotheses a week, and not one in two weeks.

Number of experiments per week = growth rate of the company.

Any marketing actions, even changing the code on the site, can be interpreted as an experiment. But feel the difference between “just selling” on the phone or selling a lot, if the processes are built, the staff is trained, the CRM system is implemented. The difference between the craft and production, is not it?

In this article, the process of multiple growth is described as a technology. Theoretical and practical aspects of the work are given, a tool for hopox teamwork is presented . Use this material to make growth in your company cease to be a spontaneous phenomenon. Now growth is a streamlined, manageable process that can be measured and influenced.

Theory of multiple growth
The described growth technology is only suitable if you already have a product in which users feel happy and pay for it. In this case, multiple growth is achieved with the help of - continuous search for bottlenecks, reduction of costs and increase in the number and value of customers due to rapid experiments based on data.



Experiments can be in the channels of attraction, in the sales funnel, in monetization, in the algorithm of acquaintance and product use, in ways of recommending the product to friends, in retention mechanisms of active clients and resurrection of abandoned clients, etc. You can divide the field of experimentation using ”Dave McClure: Attraction, Activation, Retention, Virality, Income. These five steps describe the path of the user who is able to give maximum value to the business.

However, within each field of experimentation there are several more funnels that should be optimized. For example, virality may contain a mechanism for inviting friends and contain several steps.



For example, in this example, connecting the user's address book to quickly send invitations allowed to increase the virality by 2.5 times.

So, how to conduct experiments to improve each indicator?

In the book “Business from scratch,” Eric Rees described the scientific approach to bringing new products and services to the market with minimal resources using constant experiments and feedback from customers. Here are some key principles you need to use to systematize the process of experimentation:
- Any marketing initiatives should be taken only as assumptions. To quickly test the assumptions formulate them in the form of a hypothesis indicating the predicted effect in numbers.

The tasks are formulated as hypotheses: “If <action>, then <result in numbers>”

- Any idea, functionality, product can be tested by creating a Minimally Viable Product (MVP) to get feedback from the client and understand what product is really needed.
- You can not build long-term plans. Having a long-term vision, divide the plan into short iterations for a period of one or two weeks and do only what you can quickly get a response from the client.
- Start the process of continuous learning in the Build-Measure-Learn cycle. This cycle connects the experiment, the receipt of feedback from the client in numbers and the awareness of the experiment results into a single process.



The HADI methodology (Hypothesis - Action - Data - Insights) is the simplest algorithm for the cyclical testing of ideas - from hypothesis, through action to data and conclusions.

The management cycle begins with the formulation of a hypothesis (Hypothesis) on the principle of "if", "then". At the second stage, it is necessary to carry out a series of works to launch an experiment (Action), then collect data for a given period (Data) and finally make an unambiguous conclusion whether the hypothesis was successful, what can be improved by running the next Insights cycle.

Is this all the theoretical knowledge necessary for multiple growth?

Not. But it is important to understand that each product is unique, each audience is capricious, and what works in one company may not work in another. Multiple advantage is possible when you do not copy someone else's model, but create your own, unique one. It is about how to find it - described in this article.

Practice of multiple growth
In practice, it is not so easy to start the process of continuous experimentation in the company through the Build-Measure-Learn or HADI cycles. First, the current routine does not focus on growth and company growth often becomes a secondary task. Secondly, it is not clear how to set up a working process within a team: who is responsible for growth, how risky decisions are made, who is responsible for failures, how much and what resources can be used, and most importantly - where does the HADI cycle come from?

Below are instructions for creating a Growth Team from existing employees of the company and what they should do for the first 30 days in order to establish a sustainable process of experimentation and find the first points of growth for the company.

1. Choose a growth team leader.
First of all, it is necessary to determine the person who will be responsible for the growth of the company. It is advisable to assign him a position containing the word growth or growth, for example: Growth Marketer (Growth Manager), Director of Development / Growth (VP of Growth). The position can initially be virtual and combined with the main post of CEO, CMO, CTO, PM, web analyst, lead marketer.

The leader of the Growth Team will defend the ideas before the leadership, create a favorable atmosphere for experimentation and encourage the team to move forward.

The requirements for a leader are typical for a manager: be well versed in the product and have a helihopter view of the business, be open to proposals, have credibility in the company and experience in leadership.

Mandatory conditions of his work:
- The presence of a mandate for non-standard solutions and errors. In order to develop, it is necessary to resort to unconventional methods and solutions. Which often differ with existing company policies. The task of a growth leader is to provide a platform for free experimentation;
- Material interest in the growth of the company.

2. Assemble Growth Team
Now you need to select up to 8 employees in the Growth Team. Initially, it may not have a strict outline, structural separation and be dynamic, since the team’s task is to discuss growth hypotheses weekly and execute them in parallel with current activities. But about the work of the Growth Department a little later.

How to build a Growth Team and what qualities should it have?

In general, team members must be greedy for new knowledge, prone to taking risks and acting aggressively, always based on data. But there are several fundamentally important features:

Openness
This characteristic plays the primary role, because the best ideas are illogical, counter-intuitive. The greatest effect is achieved when the craziest hypotheses are tested. Openness, above all, is a key feature of PM and Tech Leads - people who are empowered to “kill” ideas. One person who is extremely pessimistic can sabotage, paralyze the work of the whole team. Typically, these people are just not ready for change and all are hostile. Do not include them in the growth team.

Personal opinion
Large companies are not rarely faced with false claims or directive management emanating from executives. Each member of the growth team should have a tendency to healthy skepticism, to verify what is actually “right”, based only on the tests and data, and, if necessary, go against the principles adopted by the company to test their beliefs.

Ability to learn quickly
Each member of the growth team must be able to learn quickly. Marketing tasks will constantly change from paid attraction, to SEO and mailing notifications. You will need people who can adapt and learn as soon as possible, read many articles and books at the moment when you really need it.

Growth team principles:

• The data never lie, but they don't say everything
• Focusing always beats generalization.
• Spend time only on genuine, honest growth.
• Most hypotheses will fail. Humble yourself
• Celebrate every successful hypothesis
• No limit to growth

3. Line up the process
So you have a leader and up to 8 employees in a growth team. Now it is necessary to start a continuous process of testing hypotheses, for example, using HADI cycles. The process of experimentation is a flexible methodology, adapted for marketing tasks, so much in the process of the growth team will resemble the work of the development department, but there are still fundamental differences.

How to build a process?

- Approve the Growth Meeting weekly meetings for no more than an hour before the development department meetings, since tasks from the growth team along with tasks from the support department and other departments should be included in the sprint back-log.
- Hold weekly growth department meetings with the following schedule: discussing the results of testing the hypotheses of the previous iteration, generating new hypotheses for selected key metrics, choosing the most effective hypotheses that require minimal resources for testing, distributing tasks for testing hypotheses between departments and employees.

A more detailed schedule of the Growth Meeting and a hypothesis creation guide in the Multiple Growth Technology Guide after registration.
- After the meeting, throughout the entire iteration, the leader of the Growth Team should monitor the progress of the tasks and the start of data collection for each hypothesis.

The scheme of the growth team's work on testing the hypothesis through the HADI cycles:



In order to achieve success in the first month, focus the team around one, maximum two key product metrics (new subscribers, number of nights booked, monthly profit, etc.). This greatly simplifies the prioritization of growth and directs the team to the path on which everyone is able to generate ideas.

Celebrating each victory is especially important for the first month, for example, beating in the bell, so that the entire office knows that a successful hypothesis has been tested and growth has occurred.

A few months later, you will realize that growth points are literally everywhere. By publishing a new post, creating a new letter, placing the presentation in the public domain, you can grow, each time improving the effectiveness of such simple, routine actions. Multiple growth technology is easily scaled from the Growth Team to the entire marketing department. It is based on only two principles: to commensurate their actions with analytical data on customer behavior and to constantly learn, improving after each action.

As a result, all marketing decisions and actions will be based on data about users and their behavior. This is called Data-Driven Marketing. But about this in another article.

Multiple growth tools
Once you get some short-term results, you will discover the importance of the tools you use to conduct in-depth analysis and conduct quick experiments.

On the one hand, the growth team needs analytics tools like Google Analytics, KissMetrics and marketing tools: contextual advertising, sending emails, widgets to the site, social. networks, etc., which give analytical data, at least, about the number of transitions.

The main enemies of productivity are weak data on customer behavior and lack of tools.

On the other hand, a team work tool where you can systematize and distribute tasks (now hypotheses), for example: Trello, Asana, etc. Since the process of experimentation is based on flexible methodologies, it is better to use a kan-ban board (agile board) service for teamwork.



hopox
hopox is a specialized service for the growth team, based on a hypothesis board, where the user pre-sets the success metrics of the task, and the result of the execution analyzes the service, loading data from various third-party tools.



hopox is imbued with the ideology of Lean Startup and flexible methodologies. The path of the hypothesis on the board goes through four statuses, according to the HADI cycles:
Hypothesis Create new hypotheses and sort them in this column. Write here even the most daring hypotheses, and those that have decided to test - move to the next bar.
Action In this section, list and distribute the tasks to the employees you need to complete in order to run the test, and also set up metrics for data collection. The hypothesis can be moved further if all tasks are completed and the metrics of the success of the hypothesis are indicated.
Data collection . hopox will automatically start collecting data from specified sources, for example, Google Analytics, Yandex Metrica, Facebook, VK, MailChimp, KissMetrics and many others. As the data collection period ends, the hypotheses will move to the last bar.
Conclusions . hopox will make an unambiguous conclusion about the success of the hypothesis, based on the established success criteria and the data collected. You will only have to write a conclusion about the results of the hypotheses in order to wise up and not forget.

The result of work in hopox:
Growth Focus
Finally, the opportunity to focus on development. The hopox methodology for creating growth teams allows us to separate current routine activities from the growth process and breathe new life into the daily work of the company.

Systemic growth
The hopox workspace is a growth control panel. Here ideas are born and sorted, ideas are tested for durability, the entire Growth Team works here, knowledge about the reasons for success and failure is accumulated here.

Natural growth
The main reason for growth is constant learning and improvement of the team. Do not rely on the purchase of traffic, one competitive advantage of the product. Your competitive advantage is the Growth Team, in which a culture of experimentation is grafted.

Infinite growth
Check? Sign up at www.hopox.com