Product growth and experimentation

Product growth is one of six foundational skills/services I leverage in my work in investment analysis. I also do product growth projects stand-alone or bundled with other services:

A product growth practice is using the scientific method to drive step-shift improvements in business key performance indicators (KPIs). It requires product-market fit, and is the underlying system for increasing core metrics (e.g. revenue, acquisition, retention, engagement, etc).

Why a growth practice?

You cannot make 10x or 100x improvements in KPIs through optimizing–you have to make big swings and possibly reinvent parts of your product. In addition, all marketing tactics decay over time, and scale works against you in paid marketing through competition, saturation, and reversion to the mean.

Many of the best and fastest growing B2B and consumer companies have built dedicated growth teams, including Linkedin, Uber, Tesla, Airbnb, Slack, Surveymonkey, Atlassian and Pinterest.

How does a growth practice work?

A growth practice is a loop with the following stages:

Hypotheses: developing targeted ideas
Prioritize: decide which ideas to execute
Experiment: execute the ideas you’ve chosen
Analysis: learn from your tests to improve the next set of ideas

Growth practices can focus on marketing, sales or product oriented tactics. My area of expertise is product.

Product growth toolkit

The levers in a product focused growth practice typically relate to new UX, viral/referral mechanics or sharing. Tactics include:

Signup Funnel A/B Testing
Drip Email Campaigns
Optimizing notification delivery
Testing cohort curves
Product integrations (i.e. drafting behind an 18 wheeler)
Sidecar apps (mobile, web, other)

What is my experience with product growth?

I grew 3jam to millions of users by engineering virality into the user experience. 3jam messages included signup links and a call-to-action that we A/B tested and refined in an iterative process until every user signing up caused on average more than one additional user to sign up (meaning a k factor > 1) and causing user growth to become exponential.

At Zvents, I managed an events SAAS platform that serviced 75 million unique users per year. The metric we were focused on was revenue. Through a site re-design, I increased the buy tickets click-through rate from 6% to 9% of premium listing visits, with a proportional increase in revenues.

If you'd like to know more about how I can help your organization, please send me a message. I would love to talk.