Lecture 3 out of 10. Work Growth Team (Growth Team)

How to start a process of continuous business growth through experimentation in practice?
hopox - the first project management service focused on growth, provides instructions for creating the Growth Team.


The first article “Experiment and Grow” showed that the rate of business growth is equal to the number of tested hypotheses per iteration.
What prevents focusing on business growth?
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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 failure, how much and what resources can be used, etc.
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 suggestions, have credibility in the company and leadership experience.
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 3-8 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 three fundamentally important features:

but. 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.

b. 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.

at. 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.
More detailed schedule of Growth Meeting at the end of this guide.

- 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.

Homework:

• Choose a Team Growth Leader.
• Designate Growth Team
• Hold a Growth Meeting this week using hopox .