Andrew Johns: Indispensable Growth Framework

What is a growth team?

A team with the responsibility to measure, understand and improve the flow of users in and out of the product and business. Finance owns the flow of cash in and out of a company. Growth owns the flow of customers in and out of a product.

The Three Mandatory Skills of a Growth Leader

• Building growth models.
• Developing experimentation models.
• Building ==customer acquisition channels==.

Basic growth frameworks

Sustainable Growth = multiplication of

• Top of Funnel (traffic, conversion rates)
• Magic Moment (create emotional response)
• Core Product Value (solves real problems)

e.g. amazon's growth = multiplication of

• vertical expansion
• product inventory per vertical
• traffic per product page
• conversion to purchase
• average purchase value
• repeat purchase behavior

Theoretical growth model should be tested with experiments

More than just A/B tests:

• How do you identify what part of the funnel to focus on?
• How do you identify the most valuable test to run out of a set of experiments?
• When do you run — and not run — that test?

Why does growth rate drops if no new optimization is made? It is because the prev optimization has converted its target cohort. There is always a limit and a S-curve in growth. People have to test out the potential new breakthroughs.

The larger the company, the larger the sample size, the less thoughtful the experiment can be. big companies like small optimizations

• Google engineers testing 40 different shades of blue in a particular sign up button

go deep in funnels and focus on critical points.

A Grabbag of Guidance on Growth

• You can’t sustainably grow something that sucks.
• You don’t need or want a "growth hacker" to lead. A "hacker" is just a "hacker" - they are just for small start-ups.
• Your growth lead needs to be a product person, which has deep understanding in the business, not just the growth.