Growth Program Management
Hi everyone!
I’m excited to share yet another week’s learning with you. This week I covered the 6th track of the CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Mini Degree. The track, named Growth Program Management, contained lessons taught by Sean Ellis & John McBride. The track aimed at imparting knowledge of structuring and managing growth teams in scaling organizations. It also dealt with communicating experiment results with individuals and teams within the organization and how to achieve learning from those experiments.
Growth Master Training
This course was taught by Sean Ellis. He explained the levers for accelerating growth in an organization; Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral & Revenue. These levers deal with different parts of the customer journey and different teams within the organization are responsible for the performance of the aforementioned levers. The instructor then introduced the concept of the North Star Metric. This metric reflects aggregated value delivered to customers. North Star Metrics vary from one organization to another organization, Spotify captures the user’s “Time spent Listening”, Airbnb measures the “Number of nights booked” while Facebook uses “Monthly active users” to guide its strategy. Focusing on the North Star Metric ensures the customer centricity of the business and lets the organization align its efforts and synergies towards delivering superior value to the customers.
The instructor then went on to emphasize the importance of testing for growth in organizations. The instructor divided testing into two types, Testing to Discover (Pings) and Testing to Optimize (A vs. B). The former is to discover the user behavior while the later is aimed at reaching the most optimal form of a certain page of increase UI & UX features of an application so that conversion of users is maximized. The instructor went on to recommend focusing testing on specific objectives which include leverage, ownership, specificity, primary metric.
The growth process engages the entire organization to leverage insights of different people. It drives immediate growth results through focused high tempo testing & it also helps one learn how to drive sustainable results.
Prioritization of weekly meetings enables the growth & experimentation culture of an organization. It includes nominations, pitching, decisions and owner assignment.
The growth team has 2 models, each with their own set of pros and cons. A growth team can be either Autonomous or Functional. An autonomous growth team reports directly to the CEO and has greater speed and iterative ability. A functional growth team however reports into another team and User Experience targets are balanced with growth.
The instructor also shed some light on who should be part of the growth team. Growth Masters are the pivotal building block of growth teams, around whom the entire team is built. Growth teams should start with shared resources and add dedicated people to growth teams. Temporary contracts should also be extended to specialists.
Optimizing Growth Experiments
This course was taught my John McBride. In this course, the focus was on growth at an organizational level – how to make growth teams fully cross-functional and productive when it comes to experimentation.
The course started off with the instructor highlighting the importance of choosing the right experiments and speeding up the pace of experiments. This is essential for growth organizations as it determines the track and the trajectory of organizations. It also sets the culture of the organizations as employees begin to induce the experimentation culture to their minds.
Secondly, proper and thorough analysis of the experiments is necessary to do the right thing but also incorporate scalability to experimentation as the organization balloons in size. Inducing a culture of cross functionality in the organization allows the spread of the growth mindset in the entire organization.
This was a precis of this week’s learning in the CXL institute’s growth marketing Mini Degree. I’ll be back next week to share more about this fun journey.
Thank You!
