As reported on Growth Hackers – Medium:
“The Benefits of a Growth Team
Growth is a relatively new role in larger companies but what is it? In most cases, a growth team is focused on growing the business against a key KPI such as users, revenue, usage/adoption, or retention. While the Growth team is typically responsible for improving one or more KPIs, the Growth team can provide other benefits such as providing insight and learning or helping to validate product market fit.
Grow the Business Against Specific KPIs
The growth team is best-known for intensely focusing on and improving your key KPIs. The growth team will understand the numbers of the business (i.e. customer acquisition, activation, revenue, retention) and they will build and execute plans while working cross-functionally to improve those numbers to achieve the stated growth goal.
Growth teams have skills in product management, marketing, development, data and analytics, and agile processes. They will apply these skills to rapidly test and improve their focus-KPI using data-driven decision making. While the growth team should have deep expertise in the numbers of your business and what levers will move them the best, it is critical to note that they are not a reporting function.
Provide Insight and Learning
A good growth team will spend a lot of time digging into the most critical numbers to understand what is happening in the business and begin the iterative process of experimentation to improve the numbers. The net effect of all this data-driven experimentation is that they, perhaps more than any other team, start to deeply understand what drives business outcomes and what doesn’t.
The knowledge about what moves the numbers is when they become a powerful asset and producing two benefits for the organization:
· The first benefit is that they can educate the broader business about what is and is not working; therefore, generally improving decision making for the broader team.
· Using the knowledge about what does and does not work, or their ability to drive an experimental approach, they can help you reduce risk in transformational projects with validated, data-driven learning
Quite simply, some organizations launch large transformational efforts with little validation as to whether they are on the correct track. In some cases, this is the right approach; however, in most cases, a few simple tests can help you understand the dynamics and guide your decisions on the larger effort with lower risk.
Validate and/or Find Product Market Fit
Most would argue that a growth team is not responsible for product market fit. Product market fit should be the role of the Product Management function. I agree with this, but I also believe that the growth team cannot function if there is no product market fit. You cannot grow and scale a business that is fundamentally broken.
Before the growth team can really get to work, there must be some validation that there is product market fit. If the product management function is doing its job properly of finding product market fit, then the growth team can help to confirm and validate it through benchmarking of KPIs and improving those KPIs.
On the other hand, if you have not achieved product market fit, or have made some missteps, you may need to get to work with the product team on the fundamentals before you can start your growth efforts. The Growth team can assist in this regard by testing against key KPIs that would help understand where the product and market fit issues are and can work collaboratively to fix the issues before getting into scaling activities.
Build your growth team
Are you looking to build a growth team and do not know where to start? Look no further. Download the Enterprise Growth Playbook and get practical advice on everything from creating a growth culture to how to build your experiment backlog.
The Benefits of a Growth Team was originally published in Growth Hackers on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
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Source: Growth Hackers – Medium
Author: Andy Boyd
Date: 2020 06 03
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