Thank you to Casey Winters (CPO at Eventbrite), Kevin Kwok (Mystery Thinker), Darius Contractor (CPO at Vendr), Luc Levasque (VP Growth at Shopify), and Brian Hale (CGO at DoorDash) who all in some way informed this quick take.
It's easy to get lost in the weeds when you are operating day to day on something. I commonly find this in conversations with Reforge Members and Long Journey Ventures Founders. I find it helpful to have simple foundational tools to return to in order to reset and focus your thinking. For growth, that is:
Growth = System + Motivation
Let's break this down.
The System → Your Growth Model
Your growth system helps you:
Answer and align around "How does the product grow?"
Informs the metrics that you should measure.
Identify your biggest points of leverage
The asset that describes your system is your growth model (qualitative or quantitative).
Once you know how the system works, you have three choices:
Optimize the current system - Reduce friction or add good friction.
Expand the current system - Expanding one of your growth loops.
Create a whole new piece of the system - Adding an entirely new growth loop.
These are ordered from easiest, but least impactful, to hardest but more impactful.
Motivation → User Psych Map
But knowing how the system works isn't enough. Why? Because there are human actors (customers, partners, etc) behind each step in the system. That means you need to understand the psychology of what motivates those humans.
The asset that describes those motivations is what we call a user psych map, which describes the "why" of the actor behind each action in the system.
Once you know the motivations, you have two choices:
Increase the motivation
Layer on new motivations
Overall, moving motivation can be even harder than improving the system but also more impactful.
Related Links: Psych Framework
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