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Webinar

Discovering Growth Strategies that Work for You

Duration - 45 minutes

Tune in to learn more about:

  • Building a strong team culture: It's crucial to create a sense of belonging within your team. Encourage small wins, appreciate good effort, and recognize the passion that team members bring to the table. This should be done genuinely, not for optics, to avoid attracting people who are just posturing.
  • The role of a growth team: Growth teams are like hunters, not farmers. They venture into the wild and take risks, which requires a strong sense of belonging and support within the team.
  • Owning the narrative: If you control the narrative, you ensure the long-term sustainability of the team. This involves communicating the value your team brings to the rest of the leadership group in your company and providing 'air cover' for your team.
  • Celebrating small wins: Even trivial achievements can lead to significant outcomes. Regularly circle back on every small win, as this can lead to a boost in transactions and other outcomes that the business cares about.
  • Adapting to changing business sentiments: The business sentiment around startups and new ventures can change rapidly. If you're running a growth team, it's important to adapt to these changes and ensure your team's value is communicated effectively to the rest of the company.

Summary of the session

The webinar, led by Seshadri (Sesh) Vyas, a seasoned engineer with experience at MakeMyTrip, Razorpay, and Amazon, focused on the importance of growth strategies and the essential groundwork required to set up a growth team. Sesh emphasized the importance of having clear conversations about the team’s key metrics and setting realistic expectations about growth. He suggested starting small, being hands-on, and not overpromising.

Sesh also highlighted the need to find allies within the company who can drive growth, even if they are not traditionally associated with product tech design analytics-type functions. The session was interactive, with attendees encouraged to ask questions throughout. The host, a member of the APAC VWO team, also explained the functionality of the webinar platform and ensured a smooth flow of the session.

Webinar Video

Top questions asked by the audience

  • How do you set up the runway for a group team? There won't always be success.

    Yeah. That's a good question. I'm just gonna take the liberty to show you, folks, one of the slides that I felt might not be relevant, but I think it's super important to answer this question. I'm ...just gonna try and escape this. I hope you can read this. It generally starts with the same. What is this growth thing? And then a lot of curiosity in the organization of the business, and then you say, you know, who can do it for us? Then they jump into why can't it be like other teams. Why do you ask for some of these, like, crazy stuff, like, autonomy, like, do not respect additional boundaries, etcetera? Then there is dissonance where it says, why can't you just make it rain? Then it goes through this disillusionment phase again saying, you know, this is not working. Should we just kill this initiative? So eventually, it leads to, you know, a stop or a resume decision point where, okay, something is working, but the ROA is just not worth it. It should be invested in this. And finally, you lead to a survival state where you say, okay. This works this time. Let's keep giving this a shot, and then you prove your success in the 2nd iteration, and so on. So, the direct answer to that question is, is this right? Why can't you just make it rain?? If you have an environment where that's the expectation, then I don't think that's a great kind of, like, a place to be in, where you just say that, you know, why can't you make it? I also make the case that if your order expects you to know, you deliver a magic bullet, or a silver bullet, as I call it in my wallet, right, where there's this one little thing that will tip everything for your business. If there are those kinds of expectations, I think that's a clear red flag to not go down the path of, you know, setting up a growth team. I would argue that as a growth product manager, you should make sure that your arm does not have great dependency at least to start with on your growth strategies or predictability as I call it. If you predictably need to deliver something, then, business outcome, and growth is not exactly the way to go. You are better off suited with some more conventional customer acquisition and distribution channels. On top of each one, those things have stabilized. It makes sense to do a growth initiative. Cool. any other questions, Muthu, that I'm gonna take?
  • What according to you should be the first step towards making your current team?

    Don't start with your current team, convert them into a group team. Step number 1, I think, for the reason that we talked about earlier, right, and I'm gonna just jump to that part of the slide. You n ...eed the right kind of people to make your routine successful, and you will have, like, different kinds of problems. A good growth team isn't exactly functioning like a growth team, which is kind of a bad state to be in. The reason why I say this is because you need people who have a slightly different nonlinear mindset and who are willing to jump through the hoops to make something work. So yeah make sure that you don't get that. But if your question is more broadly in the direction of saying, how do you make it work, how do you set it up? I think the first three steps that we covered, right, in this model, where you look at the base. Make sure that you get the right alignment. Make sure you get the right people. Make sure that you have a very clear and tough conversation on what your north star metric is, for this particular team. I think that's the place where you would start. You should start from my view.
  • How would you approach developing and growing your growth team when you have dev resources that are currently allocated to a pre-existing roadmap? So you need to juggle, you know, defining how you envision the growth process with limited development resources. What approach would you take for that?

    - by Joe
    Yeah. and that's a good question, and it's a very practical question. So, organizations don't have a lot of resources and they are more often resource-constrained than they are given time or money ...-constrained. ? I think if your business fundamentally cares about finding a nonlinear way to group. Start small, if you have that thread existing within your company where your leaders essentially are saying, 10% like a quarter on quarter isn't great. We need to find a way to get 50% somehow. That person invariably apologies for that. That person invariably becomes the sponsor, right, or somebody, who can be willing to drive, like, growth within your company. So I think that's your first ally. so get hold of that person and then build your, like, group team around that person's needs. It is not somebody who's traditionally associated with product tech design analytics type functions, could be a business that could be a sales head, could be an offset for all, you know. A person cares and has stability in the hierarchy within your auto. So start there. The second point, start small. I think this is something that's, like, I would say, like, definitely tough for your ego. Most product managers tend to kind of say that, you know, the number of engineers, the scope of what I do, is super important. And if the scope is very small, and if I am shrinking it myself, that's a bad thing. As an inherent assistance that I've also faced in the past, it's, I think, super important to start small by saying I'll keep it just to, you know, one engineer, one front and one back end engineer. ? I'll do the analytics myself. Be scrappy. Be hands-on. and just make sure that you're kind of setting it up. Like, start taking very small measured steps. And the third thing is don't promise the moon. Just promise that you will run, like, or set the expectations that you will deliver on a few tough-to-move metrics moving by a small baseline, right, that your business cares about. If it's just increasing, let's say, shoppers for ACME parts and store business, improve shoppers from, I don't know, right, from a particular different kind of a campaign by 5%, week over week. And just go to folks saying, I know this is not transactions, this is the starting point of what could be transactions with just two people you're able to do this. Can I get 10 more people or x number of more people to proportionally scale up? So start small, set small expectations on inputs, and then kinda work your way up is how I go about it.
  • Where does a growth team sit in an e-commerce company? Commerce companies have revenue teams structured by channels like D2C marketplace, etcetera. So in this structure, according to you, we are visible.

    - by Ankit
    Yeah. Good question. In an e-commerce business, growth teams are generally the most successful if they work directly with a business head or product head. ? And, this is not a category head. Keep i ...n mind the organizational structure I have in mind. There is a CEO who is also the founder. Then, there are functional heads such as the Chief Technology Officer, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Business Officer, and so on. Under the Chief Business Officer, there may be several category heads. I'm not referring to these categories explicitly. They should fall under the business head because the business head is at the executive level. Success is not limited to a single category. It's the entire business. So it gives you the ability to think more broadly and come up with unique ideas. So depending upon, you know, the product functions maturity in your company, it could be either the Chief Product Officer or it could be the Chief Business Officer. For any of those functions, take the call.
  • What could be the best practices of frameworks concerning choosing the right growth motion for distribution to increase the probability of success?

    Yeah. See, Then again, like I said, right? You have a ton of these, you know, like frameworks online. I think by far, the best I would recommend is if you folks are up for the growth content that refo ...rged us and a whole bunch of other folks. right? It's just a great summary of practical lessons from work practitioners, who've been the host and built very similar, pretty amazing kinds of growth programs. So if you're looking for a resource, a framework, I'll probably point you there. ? But if you're looking to increase your probability of success, keep in mind that just exposing yourself to a framework does not maximize your chance of success. A framework is usually like a clutch. Something that helps you get something. It's the other things that you do in terms of how you set it up, what goal structures you have, reporting structures, and artificial boundaries that you're able to remove for the team with the right people. In addition to that, you can, you know, you know, find ways to hack distribution through some of these mechanisms from the right-hand side, on this other slide that is being shown. That is, gonna be pretty, That's pretty helpful, and that'll improve your odds of success. ? Keep in mind that you have to keep experimenting. I'll rely on my experience again. I've tried all of these, right, as experiments in the growth roles that I have done before. What worked for one, the instinct was to say, oh, it worked for Rx. Something similar should work for Ry and you put it there. It doesn't work because the context has changed. So, you know, make sure that you're, experimenting with it in smaller parts, then kinda growing it and building up your growth momentum.

Transcription

Disclaimer- Please be aware that the content below is computer-generated, so kindly disregard any potential errors or shortcomings.

Muthulakshmi: Hello, everyone. The last webinar of the series. Thank you so much for joining all of us. Before we begin, I just need a minute or two because I thought I’d take you over how the webinar works. So you ...