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Hacking Growth book summary

Hacking Growth book cover

There are 2 parts to this book:

  1. The method
  2. The growth hacking playbook

Part 1 - The method

Building the team

  • The specific makeup of the team and the size will differ company to company, but generally speaking, they should comprise the following:
    • Growth lead
    • Product manager
    • Software engineers
    • Marketing
    • Data analysts
    • Product designers
  • The team should undergo a specific set of activities through rapid experimentation to find top performing ideas:
    • Data analysis and insight gathering
    • Idea generation
    • Experiment prioritisation
    • Running the experiments
    • Repeat
  • Growth cannot be a side project. A high level executive must be given responsibility of the team to enable them to cross the bounds of established departmental responsibilities.
  • Start small and growth hack the growth of the growth team!

Determining if your product is a must-have

  • Use the 2-part assessment to determine whether your product delivers the aha moment:
    1. The must-have survey: begins by asking how disappointed the customer would be if the product no longer existed tomorrow.
    2. Measuring retention rate: the number of people who continue to use your product over a given time
  • For the survey, you should have at least a few hundred responses to the first question for meaningful results
  • If both tests are passes, you can move into high-tempo experimentation for growth
  • If not, you need to talk to users on a deeper level to understand what the true barriers and objections are to your product's success. 3 key methods to use:
    • Additional customer surveying (interviews, getting out into the marketplace)
    • Efficient experimental testing for product changes and messaging
    • A deep plunge into analysis of your user data. What are active users doing?

Identifying your growth levers

  • In the early phase, you want to craft a strategy for running the experiments that will have the greatest impact on growth in the least amount of time
  • To do this, you need to understand which metrics matter most for growth. Craft your company's fundamental growth equation - a simple formula that represents all of the key factors that will combine to drive your growth. What are the actions that correlate most to users experiencing the core value of your product?
  • To narrow your focus, it's best to choose one key metric of ultimate success - the North Star metric or The One Metric That Matters. This should be the metric that most accurately captures the core value you create for your customers. This may change over time.
  • You need to pool data resources and tailor analytics to enable you to do more refined analysis of customer / user information and behavior
  • In addition to look at the quantitative data, you also need to talk to users to ask them why they behave in a certain way - qualitative probing.
  • Reporting the results of your data discovery in a simple and accessible way to the rest of the team is also necessary. Dashboards are useful to help focus attention and share findings that encourage more growth effort and behavior.
  • Think about using cohort analysis to identify certain types of behaviors or user actions

Testing at high tempo

  • The 4 stages to testing at high tempo are: (1) analyse, (2) ideate, (3) prioritse and (4) test
  • Stage 1: Analyse
    • Identify distinctive groups in current data and formulate questions to guide analysis
  • Stage 2: Ideate
    • Submit as many ideas as possible
    • Keep track of ideas in an idea pipeline (each idea should follow a preset template which includes hypothesis and metrics to be measured)
  • Stage 3: Prioritise
    • Use the ICE score system (Impact, Confidence, Ease)
    • ICE score is the average
  • Stage 4: Test
    • Each experiment comes at the expense of another. It is therefore important to select an idea well and ensure it is tested properly with statistically valid results.
  • Go back to Stage 1 - analysis and learning - once the testing is done. Try to ensure that all knowledge is saved in a knowledge base and shared with the rest of the company

Part 2 - The growth hacking playbook

  • I haven't read this part of the book as it's not really relevant to me right now

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