Building A growth machine

By Brian Balfour and special thanks to Lauren Bass for helping me produce this content. 

We now live in a world where distribution and growth has become the biggest risk to growing a large technology company. Product development have seen systems form such as Lean, but growth has still remained largely a mystery.  Through my experience of building/advising companies that have gone from nothing to millions in active users and annual revenue I've developed a step by step process to help you uncover growth for your company.  I originally debuted the basics of this process a couple years ago at 500 Startup's WMD conference.   Since then I've received hundreds of emails from small startups to public companies that have implemented their own versions.  This series will be released piece by piece, going to a level of depth that I never have before.  This system is always evolving, therefore, I will be constantly updating each step as I learn and improve it through my own implementations.  Enjoy!

[SUBSCRIBE TO GET EACH POST ON BUILDING A GROWTH MACHINE]

Table of Contents

AUTHENTIC GROWTH  |  GROWTH PRINCIPLES  |  GROWTH PROCESS OVERVIEW  |  ZOOM OUT  |  ZOOM IN  

INTEGRATING INTO YOUR COMPANY  |  OPTIMIZING THE PROCESS  |  BUILDING YOUR GROWTH TEAM

ABOUT BRIAN BALFOUR

How To Build A Growth Machine Video

WHY "GROWTH"  

The term "Growth" and implementation of "Growth Teams" has exploded in the past few years.  What has changed?  How is growth different from product and marketing? 

ALL GROWTH IS NOT CREATED EQUAL

All growth is not created equal.  With the plethora of bad "hacks" "tips" and "tricks" advice out there we need to take moment to talk about what type of growth this system is designed to create.  Hint...it's the type of growth that lasts. 

PRINCIPLES >> PROCESS >> TEAM >> TACTICS

One of the biggest mistakes I see in the implementation of growth teams is starting with tactics.  A growth team is not defined by tactics.  It is first defined by its principles, then its process, then its team, then finally the tactics.  Lets talk about why...

MAXIMIZE LEARNING

In growing any business we experience constant internal and external change that pushes us to respond and adapt.  Maybe a threatening competitor enters the market, one of our customer acquisition channels changes abruptly, or a new platform like mobile enters the market, changing how our users behave. There is one common thread through all of these changes. We can’t control any of them.  What we can control is how much we learn and how we apply those learnings.

SEEK IMPACT

Part of every team’s identity is how they measure success, and each team measures their success in different ways. Product teams might be measured by NPS, feature output, or possibly by metrics. An engineering team’s success may be measured by uptime and reliability among other things, and a design team’s success could be measured on usability. 

But measuring the success of the growth team is a tougher question. Every team from product, to marketing, to operations indirectly influences growth. This leads to some questions and challenges: “Why have a growth team? Doesn’t everyone own growth?” 

BALANCE ART + SCIENCE

Is growth an art or science?  Some praise the creativeness of new growth hacks.  Others praise the quantitative maneuvering of analytical growth geniuses.  That question has been debated.  But are we asking the right question?    

The creative juice brings new ideas around story telling, great copywriting, unique ad creative, and never tried before growth tactics.  But the quantitative science helps us measure the largest friction points, validate areas of opportunity, and understand how users behave at scale.    

It seems the better question is how do we balance both?  Truly brilliant growth teams are ones that figure out how to combine the nature of art and science to accelerate growth.  

EMBRACE CHANGE

The point is a critical one for any company and is the foundation for this growth principle. By nature, humans resist change because adapting can be hard and it’s usually a lot of work. We like to think of things as “done” so we can check them off our to-do list, and move on to the next thing.  

Any great growth team is ready for and responsive to change, nimble, and always, always adapting. They go beyond adapting, and truly embrace change building their team and process around it. Let's talk about why…

PROCESS BEFORE TACTICS

STEP BY STEP 30K FOOT VIEW

IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITY

DEFINING AND SETTING GOALS

UNDERSTDANING THE PROBLEM

ZOOM OUT SUMMARY

BRAINSTORM

PRIORITIZE

MINIMUM VIABLE TEST (MVT)

RUNNING A MVT

ANALYZE

SYSTEMIZE

APPLYING LEARNINGS

EVERY QUARTER

EVERY MONTH

EVERY WEEK

MANAGER'S GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING

INDIVIDUAL GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING

FRICTION WITH PRODUCT TEAMS

FRICTION WITH MARKETING TEAMS

EARLY TO MID TO LATE STAGE

MEASURING THE MACHINE

TOOLS AND INFRASTRUCTURE

PEOPLE AND TEAM

TUNING THE PROCESS

FROM TRACTION TO SCALE

SKILLSETS AND ROLES

HIRING FOR GROWTH TEAMS

GROWTH TEAM OWNERSHIP

TEAM AND ORG STRUCTURE