case
Example: BitTorrent
BitTorrent, faced with stagnant PC software growth and without a mobile product, was left behind.
Organizational structure: The company uses a traditional silo structure with marketing, Product, engineering, and data science divisions. The product team and engineering team have teams working on different products, such as the Mac and Windows versions of the client and the nascent mobile version. As with all types of businesses, its data and marketing teams work for these product groups, and the product development process is completely separate from marketing. The product manager informs the marketing manager of the upcoming product or release, and the marketing team takes care of all the marketing, which means no product development people are involved at all.
What we see now: Focus on the top of the funnel, increase product awareness, and attract new users through brand building, advertising, and online marketing. There is no collaboration between the product/engineering team and the marketing people, each of them focusing on their own priorities.
❝
The different business units of a company are often silos isolated from each other, rarely communicating, sharing information or collaborating. This organizational structure has been widely criticized over the years. According to a McKinsey report, one of the deadliest problems with silo structures is that they slow the pace of corporate innovation and stifle growth.
❞
Research, data analysis: The most likely growth strategy is not just about expanding your user base, but maximizing the value of your existing users. Develop products in a data-driven manner.
❝
Growth teams must include people from different disciplines and departments
❞
Build a growth team
Cross-functional teams not only facilitate and accelerate collaboration among product, engineering, data, and marketing departments, but also motivate team members to learn more about and understand the perspectives of other team members and their work.
I. Personnel composition
Growth teams should include people with a deep understanding of strategy and goals, people who can do data analysis, and engineers who can programmatically test changes to a product’s design, functionality, or marketing.
1. Head of growth
Managing the team and being involved in the process of developing and testing ideas. The growth leader determines the flow and pace of trials and monitors whether the team is meeting its objectives.
The primary responsibility is to determine the core focus and the team’s goals and timeline.
All growth leaders should have some basic skills: proficiency in data analysis, proficiency in or familiarity with product management (the process of developing and launching a product), and an understanding of how to design and conduct experiments. Each growth leader must also be familiar with the methods of user growth and the use of the product or service the team is responsible for. Good leadership is also needed to keep the team focused on the target task, and the growth leader should be able to motivate the team to accelerate the pace of experimentation even in the face of repeated trial failures (which is perfectly normal).
2. Product manager
The product manager oversees the implementation of the product and its functionality. This role brings corporate decision-making as close as possible to the customer, making the product manager the internal communicator of customer concerns.
Software engineer
People who write code for product features, mobile interfaces, and web pages are the bulk of the growth team. The essence of growth hacking is the hacker spirit of software development and design, the use of new technologies to solve problems, and growth teams are not complete without the involvement of software engineers.
Marketing specialist
The involvement of a marketing specialist can help the team achieve optimal results. The collision of engineering and marketing can be a great catalyst for new ideas.
5. Data analyst
Another essential skill for a growth team is the ability to collect, organize, and analyze customer data in depth to draw inspiration from experiments.
The team’s data analyst needs to know how to ensure that trials are rigidly designed and statistically valid, how to take and combine customer and business data from different sources to analyze user behavior, and be able to quickly collate trial results and draw conclusions from them.
6. Product designer
In growth teams, the involvement of designers can increase the speed of trial execution. User experience designers can also provide important insights into user psychology, interface design, and user research techniques to help teams find ideas for experimentation.
Ii. Team size and scope of work
The composition and responsibilities of the growth team, including the size, organizational structure, and specific tasks and priorities of the team, must be consistent with the needs of the company.
Three, the work process
The growth hacking process provides a specific set of activities that teams should undertake, consisting of four main steps:
- Data analysis and insight collection;
- Idea generation;
- Schedule test priority;
- Test execution.
After the completion of step 4, return to the data analysis phase to evaluate the results and determine next steps. At this stage, the team identifies and refines experimental ideas that have yielded initial results, and dismisses those that haven’t. By pushing this process back and forth, the growth team will accumulate successes large and small, creating a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement.
Weekly meetings keep teams on track and focused, ensuring a high degree of coordination and communication to advance this fast-paced process.
Iv. Division of labor
Team members are responsible for what they are good at:
- Engineer: responsible for the programming work required by the experiment.
- Designer: Responsible for the design elements needed by the team.
- Data analyst: Responsible for selecting the user group to be covered by the experiment.
- Marketing staff: Responsible for conducting any experiments on marketing channels.
Fifth, necessary high-level support
The organizational reporting structure of the company must clearly define the growth team, that is, who the growth leader reports to. The team should be led by an executive to ensure that the team is empowered to work across established departmental boundaries. Growth should not exist as a fringe project, and without a clear and determined will from the top, the growth team will get bogged down in inefficient, rigid formalism and turf wars throughout the company.
6. Reporting structure
There are two common reporting structures for growth teams.
The first structure is called the functional model (or product department-led model), in which the growth team reports to an executive responsible for a product or several products in its area of work.
Another pattern is to create a separate team that no longer belongs to the existing product development team. The growth team leader reports to the VICE President of growth, who generally reports directly to the CEO or other senior executives.
Seven, how to resolve resistance
Most friction is caused by corporate culture. People in many departments, including marketing, product development, and software engineering, have an established understanding of what their teams should do and how they should do it.
Another cause of friction is that growth tests and the resources they require may interfere with or sacrifice time or resources needed to carry out existing projects and work.
Friction also arises because growth teams bring together a group of people from such diverse fields and backgrounds that it is expected that there will be times when they disagree, sometimes even when their positions and priorities clash.
Properly managed, growth teams can reduce these frictions if they provide sufficient incentives and incentives for the entire team to achieve their shared growth goals. Another way to mitigate conflicts is to ensure that trials are prioritised and their results are evaluated strictly on the basis of data, rather than mere guesswork.
Evolution of the team
As a company expands and employs more people, the composition and focus of the growth team will change over time. At this point, the growth team may recruit more people from specific divisions or new divisions, or it may be divided into different groups to work on more specific growth plans for different parts of the company.