I've been meaning to post this for quite a while but finally got around to it.
Working at Umba last summer leading the growth team was incredibly insightful. Here are my main takeaways:
- Brainstorming. Build out a robust brainstorming and ideation pipeline. It’s critical that you have a collection of ideas to draw from during backlog grooming.
- Iceboxing. Iceboxing is a good way to groom growth experiments and to gauge the scope and efficacy to decide on what growth experiments to conduct over the next sprint. After brainstorming, you prioritize what ideas to actually try out by analyzing them on 3 different axis: Impact, Cost and Effectiveness.
- What is growth? Define what "Growth" means and looks like for your company. Is it more business? Is it more users?
- Instrumentation. Instrumentation is key. A product is not done until you've built out your instrumentation. You need to be able to accurately measure progress and improvement.
- Organization mentality. Growth mentality throughout the entire org. Everyone should be building with growth in mind - this means engineers should be building instrumentation as a part of their development process.
- Low hanging fruit. Prioritize for things that compound and have low implementation cost.
- Compounding growth. Focus on growth loops (onboarding funnel and referrals) instead of one time boosts (raffles or giveaways).
- Focused KPIs. Have 1-2 key metrics per quarter (onboarding churn, daily downloads,etc) . This keeps things focused and allows you to quantitatively measure and prioritize growth tasks.
Thank you to Toni Gemayel, Charley Ma and Alex Mann for their guidance and support last summer! The above is an amalgamation of things I learned from them. If you have any questions or suggestions, my inbox is always open at vincentjtsong@gmail.com.