3.3. Experiments. Growth Teams

The concept of ‘growth hacking’ is relatively new and is basically about acquiring as many clients for the business as possible without spending a fortune. At first sight this seems impossible, right? But don’t get scared — a solution exists!

The Importance of Experiments

Growth hacking is a marketing strategy that with the help of innovative, out-of-the-box and often free solutions can greatly increase the company’s level of efficiency by constantly conducting systematic experiments. Jeff Bezos, the founder of the eCommerce giant Amazon, said that success of Amazon depends on the number of experiments they carry out on a yearly, monthly, weekly and even daily basis. Andrey Krivenko, the founder of Russia’s fastest growing food retail chain, also emphasised the importance of experiments saying they don’t require much time, money and effort, but can actually allow to check whether a new idea will work or fail. Accordingly, in order to conduct experiments and as a result attract more customers and investments and increase the company’s profitability, it’s necessary to create a special team — growth team — that would constantly generate hypotheses, carry out experiments, get data and knowledge, and use them for making the company grow and flourish.

What Is a Growth Team?

Every company has a certain organisational system, which refers to the assigning of roles and implementing activities to achieve company’s goals. There are usually different departments or single persons that have their own responsibilities and duties: product developers create new products and try to provide maximum value for the customer, marketers focus on how to get more customers, while sellers exchange the developed products for money. A perfect scenario is when all employers and employees are interested in the growth of their company, but in reality, when people sign an employment agreement, that agreement doesn’t actually have a word ‘growth’ in it.
It is believed that the concept of a ‘growth team’ was developed and eventually adopted by some leading companies over a decade ago. Nowadays, there is scarcely any company in the Silicon Valley that doesn’t have a growth team.
The growth team is usually placed in-between of the product and marketing teams. The main responsibility and duty of the mentioned team is the hacking of the growth of the company. Due to the fact that a growth team is mostly concerned with finding the most effective and powerful ways of quickly improving key metrics of the company without requiring additional funding, it usually processes and works with a lot of information and data through experimentation, hypotheses, testing and analysis.

As a matter of fact, all companies would gain something from having a growth team. Young startups can use the help of a growth team to develop a necessary and attractive product that will be bought, used and recommended; to construct a sales funnel, find channels of attraction and, as a result, grow and flourish. Big and established companies will also benefit from having a growth team by being able to greatly improve metrics and/or develop new products or offer new services, knowing in advance that those products or services will be of great interest to users.

I Need a Growth Team! Where Can I Find It?

There are many factors that influence your choice of forming a growth team, namely the size of your business, how much money you are ready to spend on growth, and what you want to achieve. Accordingly, there are two options to choose from: hire a team or create your own. At first sight it might seem that you don’t need to hire a separate team that will focus on growth; you can simply create additional responsibilities for the existing employees. That is actually not a good idea. Of course, it all depends on your financial situation, but if you have an opportunity to hire a team — do it. Firstly, nobody likes additional responsibilities and tasks (especially if the salary stays the same). Secondly and most importantly is that it’s likely that the employees will be still carrying out their everyday tasks and fulfilling direct duties, with no or very little time being left for hypotheses and experiments. For the owner of the company to solely take that obligation into one’s own hands is also risky, as there are other responsibilities on one’s shoulder as well as it might not be always possible to look at things objectively.
The best way is to hire a single person or a whole team, if that is possible. Such person(s) are professionals, they have a different mindset and way of thinking. If, for example, there’s a need to double the revenue, the product owner might think about the need to provide more value for customers, about finding even more customers, about changing something (without knowing what exactly), or reducing the price. Growth hackers are different. A growth hacker, after getting acquainted with data and carefully analysing everything, might decide to double the price or even 5 time. One may come up with an idea to increase the price 10 times and decrease 80% of customers. After testing and experimenting, that idea might prove to be the best solution ever.

Final Words

As all entrepreneurs are mainly interested in increasing sales of their products and making their business more profitable and successful, experiments are the best tool to check whether the chosen strategies will work out without spending a lot of money. The only question is who is going to be responsible for that. Depending on your financial situation, you can hire a growth team or, if you believe you and/or your employees have all what it takes, form your own team that will be responsible for the growth of your company’s seed so that it will bear rich fruit for many years to come.