Growth hacking provides a focus on process versus tactics
If you take away only one lesson, it should be this: Growth hacking is a process. Sustainable growth can come only from growing value for your customers on an ongoing basis. The growth process helps you understand where the strategic focus of your team’s growth efforts should be, which in turn produces ideas for you to test that lead to specific tactical decisions for your team to act on.Tactics, on their own and without the benefit of a strategy, are like a rudderless boat with no direction. You may find yourself running a lot of tests and maybe even generating a lot of wins, but without this focus, you’ll disperse your learning potential, which minimizes the impact you can have on your North Star Metric — leaving you with no clear way to move forward.
Here are two syndromes to be wary of when it comes to growth hacking tactics:- Copycat syndrome: The tactics you may have read about that worked spectacularly for others may not work as well (or at all) for you. Everyone’s products are different, the audiences are different, and the overall context is different. Too many variables are at play to take at face value all those online articles titled “X Ways We Increased Y by Z Percent.” It’s more important to understand why a company acted the way it did — its process, in other words — than what it did. Without that background understanding, you might take the wrong lessons from such content.
- Shareholder value syndrome: Worse are the tactics that are detrimental to the overall customer experience and deliver little to no value to them. These may be great at demonstrating how someone took advantage of a loophole in a system or exploited certain human biases, but if those tactics were more to benefit the business than the customers, you have to ask what the long-term impact of those tactics might be on the overall brand and perception of the company. When in doubt, err on the side of the customer’s gaining more from an interaction.
Growth hacking allows for cross-functional collaboration
The greatest benefit of implementing a growth process is its ability to break down silos — those artificial “walls” between different groups within the company. A North Star Metric gives everyone a single point of focus. The ability to test needs resources from across the organization, and getting them, requires key stakeholders (including the CEO) to buy into the process.Make no mistake: This is hard to do — and increasingly harder the more the culture of the organization is already set.
Having representation from key stakeholders in product, engineering, sales, creative, and analytics teams in the weekly growth meeting allows for a more holistic reality check for ideas that are proposed for testing.
A well-implemented growth process also democratizes where ideas come from and allows you to take advantage of insights from across the organization that you might otherwise not have been able to access.Growth hacking creates organizational alignment
A natural consequence of cross-functional collaboration is alignment across the company. A North Star Metric (NSM) allows everyone, irrespective of team status, to ask, “How is what I’m doing today helping move the needle on our NSM?” This is a powerful question for individuals to pose to themselves as well as managers to pose to their direct reports during meetings.If someone cannot articulate how their work will impact the NSM, it’s time to reprioritize tasks so that the person has a better response the next time this question is asked.
When an entire company is focused on growing the NSM, you have a company that is rowing the proverbial boat in sync.
Growth hacking enable data-informed decision-making
The biggest trap that many companies fall into is using feelings, opinions, and hearsay to inform major business decisions. The problem with such approaches goes beyond not being objective.Generally, only the people at the top of the organizational food chains can get away with statements along the lines of, “I think we should do this or that.” This fuels the wrong culture — one that’s more about satisfying egos or doing as you’re told because raising your hand, so to speak, will only cause more trouble.
Data takes all this conjecture out of the picture and rewards those hypotheses that are proven true. You’re telling everyone that no one gets to hijack growth and that everyone has a part to play.
By injecting data into the company’s DNA, you create transparency into what’s working and what’s not. This allows anyone in the company to ask clarifying questions of the growth team or to propose new ideas.
Growth hacking allows for improved customer focus
The beauty of the NSM is that it’s entirely customer focused. If you grow the value that you deliver to the customer, by definition you raise the odds of your own success. By having a number that everyone cares about be all about the customer, you're better able to mitigate any bickering about individual team metrics and priorities because now the customer-focused metric is the most important one.This isn’t to say that the numbers for which teams are held accountable aren’t important. If anything, they should all roll up to the NSM. But by having a common, customer-focused number that everyone cares about that supersedes every other number, you actively convey the message that everyone is in charge of delivering and growing customer value. This is no longer the job of only the onboarding, customer success, or retention team. It’s everyone’s job.
Growth hacking gives you a better understanding of your customers
If growth hacking is all about growing the value you deliver to the customer, it behooves you to understand your customers' motivations so that you can help them achieve their goals. This is not to say that this is a one-time exercise.To help customers continue to derive value from your product, you have to understand at what frequency they need to use your product and where your product fits into the scheme of their lives. You’ll also find out why people stop using your product to learn. If you cannot determine who out there your product isn't a fit for or what was lacking from your end that caused them to give up your product, even if they found value from it, you've lost a growth opportunity.
Beyond that, though you may start off serving a specific kind of customer, over time you will encounter many different types of people, with their own reasons for using your product. You’ll (have to) learn how to serve all these people in the way they want to be served, if they’re going to keep using your product over the long term.
Again, the beauty of the NSM is that it’s explicit about quantifying value delivered so that, as you gain a better understanding of your customers, the NSM will lead you down paths to serve them better.
Growth hacking provides a better customer experience
If understanding your customers better is one side of the coin, the other side is all about delivering a better and more relevant experience for them. Your hard work in decoding their needs will produce a natural affinity for your product because few other products will have taken as much trouble to focus on their goals.Having the mentality “How else can we add value for you?” — where you’re constantly in touch with your customers — reveals new avenues to serve them. Here, too, you’ll find categories of customers who have similar needs that you can address in unique ways.
As you travel down this path, you’ll gain further insights that allow you to slice your customer segments into smaller and smaller pieces. The logical end point will appear like a hyperpersonalized experience for each customer.It’s a difficult path to travel, for sure, but if you use personalized customer experiences as a simple way to visualize how far you need to go to serve each and every customer, it has a natural impact on the kinds of activities you choose to engage in to deliver that value.
Growth hacking creates a state of constant curiosity
To uncover your customers’ needs, you have to be in constant detective mode. The mystery of how to deliver value has many layers. You can’t sit there happy with having found only a single insight. If you do, you’ll inevitably see the impact on your growth metrics — they'll move in the wrong direction.Finding insights that drive growth, however, is addicting. Whether that needle moves slowly or quickly, you’ll be on the hunt for that next key insight. This need infects everyone on the growth team.
So, whether its learning directly from customers or from external inspiration, if you’re looking to grow value, you’ll also be looking for a whole series of different ways to grow that value, perhaps in ways you (or your customers) never expected and that are in keeping with the ethos of growth hacking.
Growth hacking enables better product-development processes
For growth hacking to be successful, it’s strongly recommended that the product team be represented in growth meetings. Product managers, generally speaking, oversee the product features and how they’re brought to life.Their presence is vital to ensure that tests that have produced winners are incorporated into the product development cycle with as little disruption to existing plans as possible but also with an eye toward expediency.
The best product managers will either have a dedicated stream of work for incorporating winning tests into the process or, if this isn’t possible, build the need to do so into their existing plans. Having the ability to incorporate insights gained from ongoing testing into the planned product development process can only help amplify the impact of the product to your customers.
Growth hacking allows for greater control because of product-first growth
Channels are changing all the time. If your growth is highly dependent on external channels, you need to be careful: You have zero control over when these channels will change and whether such changes will negatively impact your growth. Because growth hacking focuses on the entire customer journey, the product itself plays a greater part in growth.Yes, you have to scale acquisition, but retention is the name of the game after you have someone’s attention. After someone has decided to check out your product, you are in charge. Every aspect of their experience, big and small, is in your hands, which means that you can test and learn far more effectively about what a great first experience looks like and what it will take to
- Inspire people to come back to experience that core value of your product
- Monetize the value your product delivers
- Make it easy for your customers to spread the word about you