Discovering Growth Strategies that Work for You

My name is Muthulakshmi. I’m a part of the APAC VWO team, and I’m very passionate about growth and content. So, you know, it is obviously the best medium for me and you can use the question box to ask us anything and it’ll appear there.

Does anyone want to try that, just to give it a shot? Anyone of the attendees can just post a question right now to see how it appears. And if it’s not possible, or if you’re facing any difficulty, either, like, email me or any of those work as well. Yes. I can see someone say, “Hi!”.

That’s amazing. Just anyone else just tries to follow Cheetna. Hi to Abhishek as well. I think we’re getting the hang of it. That’s great.

Now, by default, all of you will be on mute and you will not be able to unmute your mic because that is a functionality towards the end. I am planning on unmuting everybody. So after I enable that, you’ll be able to unmute your mics and interact with us. Let’s just give that a shot. I’m just going to unmute everyone.

Someone can say hi. Sign up. I can hear somebody. Hello.

Okay. Awesome. So I think everyone got the hang of it now.

I don’t want to keep you guys any further. I’m so happy to introduce everyone to Seshadri. You can join us as well now. Seshadri started as an engineer like many of us do, which means that he has a very deep empathy and appreciation for how products are built, how they can be, and what their true potential is in terms of growing them.

He’s worked across companies like MakeMyTrip and RacePay, and he’s recently joined Amazon. 

There you are. Hello. It’s an honor. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m not going to keep you guys any further since you can take it away. You’re on mute, I think. Try now.

Seshadri:

Hey, folks. Am I audible?

M:

Yes. Awesome.

SV:

Thank you. Cool. Great to kind of, like, interact with you all in this forum.

I know it’s a vast topic. So I’m gonna try my best to touch up on a few takeaways at least so that once you leave this session, you will have takeaways to use when you go about practicing growth at your jobs. So, let’s get started. The topic I want to touch on today is discovering growth strategies that work for you.

I will be drawing on my experience of doing this during my growth role at MakeMyTrip and Razorpay. And, I’ll be kind of touching on a lot of high-level topics. Let’s say, 40-odd minutes from now to run through the whole gist, then maybe leave a few minutes for questions towards the end. Feel free to question me on the breadth of the topic. Or if you want to double-check on any particular area, happy to do that within the context of the session.

And if you folks wanna connect offline too happy to help with that. So over the last few years, I think roughly 2010-ish, growth teams have come into work. Successful growth teams to the best of my knowledge and whatever I have read started with Facebook’s group team. The man that you see is called Chamath. For folks in the growth community, he’s kind of a hero. He is the founder of a company called Social Capital.

He helped Facebook take it from roughly 50,000,000 daily active users at one point to 1,00,00,00,000, which was kind of like an unthinkable barrier, before Facebook, because the space plateaued somewhere less than 100,000,000. So if you wanna see his work, I think, the best way to do that is, if you signed up for Facebook. You get this annoying notification that says, oh, do you know X? Do you know Y? Either on the news feed on Facebook, emails, or SMS.

He’s the person who essentially built that because his group team identified that if a person adds 10 friends in 7 days. In their first 7 days on Facebook, they are more likely to stick around on Facebook and be a long-term user. I think most of us in the call will testify that this was an incredibly successful strategy that, to the best of my knowledge, runs to date.

The other successful group team that I relied on is this gentleman here called Gustaf. Gustaf is currently a partner at Y Combinator and he scaled the Airbnb referral program. If folks can Google this guy and see some of the searches, it’s by far the best guide on scaling referral programs that I know.

Another successful example also includes MakeMyTrip’s group team. Advanced apologies for a bad way to introduce myself again, doing a shameless plug, but I am not putting myself in the league of these gentlemen. But telling you what I think about my work. I’d like to see it in the context of, you know, the kind of work the community is doing so far. 

It’s been a very short while. So, yeah. And, I think the thing that I’m most proud of and the reason it will help you folks with some of my insights as I am proud of scaling the referral program at metric. We were able to launch it from literally nothing in terms of just installs and transactions per day to close to 10% of daily transactions that happened on the MakeMyTrip mobile app through the referral program. So that’s kind of a meaningful number and something that I’m incredibly proud of. 

I’ve also done a very similar role at Razorpay, which was my last organization. We’ll also be drawing on some of the take-by at Razorpay, like, essentially organizations that are chalk and cheese.

So both ends of the spectrum, B2C and B2B, unregulated or heavy regulation, etc. That’s kind of the experience that I will rely on, as I kind of give you take away today.

I think I went to a B-school. I don’t know if most folks on the call are from B-school. I have the compulsive need to fit a full framework wherever I can. So this is my very, very creative triangle-to-circle mental model. But I hope it sticks with you. Essentially saying, you wanna set up a growth team, right? You need to have a lot of strategies.

The strategies are covered on the right-hand side and I will be talking about why growth essentially comes down to distribution, which is the reason why you see distribution at the center of the circle on the right-hand side. You will also know how to set up a group team so that you will be successful in what you do. It is covered on the left-hand side here, which is probably the first thing that we will start with today.

Here I make the case that there are two parts to a group team. There is a base layer and there is a cream layer, as I call it. Essentially, one is for sustenance and the other is for thriving.

Don’t fret, if this is a lot of information, like, stuff on this line. I want to start with this so that you folks place the context of what’s coming up in the coming slides in this diagram. I will reference this towards the end of the content so that there is continuity available to place you know, where I’m coming from. The base layer of what you see on the left-hand side triangle is really what I’m gonna cover. For a successful growth team, I make the case that I think I need to have sponsorship.

You need to have great alignment and alignment comes in a couple of flavors. You need to have sponsorship from the highest person in your organization. This team needs to directly report to that particular person. I’ll just give you a more practical example.

If you’re a growth product manager, I would urge your organization or the teams that you’re working a part of to have a conversation with the powers that be in your organization. Have the growth product manager report to either the CEO or the Chief Part Officer. If your company exists or if it’s a business decision-maker who calls the shots, make sure that you get the reporting done for that. The reason I make this case is because it allows you the ability to chase a problem single-mindedly without worrying about the boundaries, like, who is responsible for what. 

Oftentimes, we look at it towards the end as well. Group teams require a combination of teams coming together to pull something off. If you’re just stuck in a silo reporting to one person down the chain, who also does growth as one of the several things in their basket of things. Then that’s a sure short way for growth to not be successful in your organization.

I’ll draw back to my experience at MakeMyTrip, where I was a product manager, but my manager was reporting directly to the Chief Product Officer (CPO). Eventually, growth was this person’s responsibility. So that made it very clear that among the basket of things that my manager owns, I own only a single piece, and I had direct access, for example, to the CPO.

My manager was also responsible for growth. So this organization structure puts in place a good way to ensure that you’re successful. If it’s not happening, please make sure that you’re fighting for this and getting this alignment done within your organization. The second major alignment piece that you would need to have is on execution. You just can’t operate with traditional boundaries. I’m gonna drop a hypothetical example.

Let’s say ABC Corp or Acme Corp for that matter, right, as, you know it’s an e-commerce company selling shoes online. If you’re looking to grow in such a company, you can’t say that now the growth team is part of the mobile team. It’s part of the engagement slash growth team, etc.

If you stuff it that way and make sure that the execution boundaries are limited to, let’s say, the mobile app. You are imposing blinders on a team to make sure that they just think purely mobile.

By ensuring that alignment happens at the top level and that there are no execution boundaries, you’re freeing up this team to start thinking about different other parts of the business. Maybe it’s a unique relationship with a supplier who can give you materials that nobody else is using. Maybe it’s those kinds of initiatives that you have by default prevented by just drawing these artificial boundaries within. 

In the MakeMyTrip example, where we had a lot of wallet-related experiments, I think for an e-commerce company. it is the ability to influence pricing by putting something, putting money that’s valid only on that particular product into a user’s wallet. ? It’s a closed loop. We had a lot of experiments on these fronts to run, but the wallet team was different from the group team.

Now traditional organization boundaries mandated that we would just stick to one particular swim lane. But, the good thing that I believe that we did in retrospect is that we made sure that this particular team could cut across boundaries. A process would be followed. So code reviews, approvals, and all those mechanisms would be in place. But we would ensure that we could change anything, everything in the customer experience, from payment gateways to app wallets.

We could go and touch and make a piece of change in that particular code. I think it is an alignment that happens only if you go back to point number 1. That’s where you kind of like interlink.

Only if you have, let’s say, a Chief Product Officer, Chief Executive Officer, or somebody who’s batting for this company, who’s willing to make sure that these boundaries, these you know, these artificial boundaries are not imposed on your growth initiative, and that’s, I think, step number 1 is to get the alignment. 

Step number 2 is to get the right kind of people. Let’s say when you’re staffing and you’re starting a growth team, this is often counterintuitive advice. I think most folks on the call, I’m assuming, are product managers slash engineers slash analytics professionals. So, in most of these job functions, if you look at the interview process that happens, they just check for functional competencies, which means, Can you write a good PRD? Can you think about, like, how good you are at understanding your users? How good is your user empathy scale? and so on.

There are several functional areas that each of these can demonstrate your competency on. But ultimately, growth is a role that attitude is more important. You need somebody to come in and make sure that they’re putting their 100% every day. So you need people with a little bit of passion. You need people with the ability to figure out things even if they don’t know the answer. I have generally, in all the teams that I’ve been a part of, I’ve had the chance to set up. 

Argued that attitude is a very key component to growth. It’s a trait. It’s a behavioral trait, but those are things that you can test for. It’s not your gut feeling, so I’m not implying that you just go by gut. There are things that you need to test for.

So when you hire the team, make sure that you have people who exhibit that trade and you are checking for it with somebody else inside the company. It might be a product manager. It might be an engineer. Might be a design guy or a person or it could be anybody else from any area. Just make sure that you get them to kind of, like, check for some of these things and, a ton of, like, behavioral materials available online if you wanna appear in the interview process that way, but I make the case that you should do it. The second one is to give internal folks a shot.

You’ll be surprised by the number of good product managers who come up, especially on growth teams. These are essentially people who are misfits in their particular roles. 

You can have a great marketing person who’s running campaigns, and wanting to do product, and growth is a great transition function for them to get into product. You can have an engineer, who’s showing all of these traits and who’s asking these tough questions about users and business growth. This person has an interest in getting into the product, but then the product has these high wall entry barriers saying, we have a 6-round interview process.

I would say, you know, it’s a piece of contradictory advice, but, I would say it’s worked very well for me, and I would urge you folks to try it out if it makes sense. The other major point on inputs, on people, is, you know, reward for inputs. If you’re a growth product manager/engineer/designer/ analytics folk working on the team at the ground level. Those individual contributors/builders, as I call them. should be rewarded for inputs. If that input can just be a very strong effort, it can be, you know, a metric that they move, which is an input metric and not necessarily the output metric or the outcome for a business.

But I think it’s important to do that because it sets people free. They’re not worried about whether their bonuses are going to get paid out, or whether the promotions are on the line. If this flops, it reduces risk-taking and all of that. So, I would always argue for the builders on a growth function to grow the team to start with getting rewarded for their input.

While the accountability starts at the management layer, anyone who is a people manager in some of these teams, depending upon how senior in the organization you get, should be rewarded for either an output or an outcome. I’ll just maybe give you a very quick example of what outcomes, outputs, and inputs are. 

Let’s say that I’m in Acme Park and want to sell shoes online. Growing sales is the outcome that the business cares about. If that means, you know, the output could just be that, or if we increase the final conversion rate for people who are starting to search to do a payout, that’s output. But essentially, an input to that would be people who are coming in, opening the app daily, and checking out daily, monthly, weekly, yearly, you name it. Those are, I think, an odd number of new users who land on the mobile app or the website every day. That’s a good example of an input. So make sure that the builders on the team are rewarded for the inputs and slowly increase outcomes as the level progresses. This is a super important example of great companies online that have done this.

Google is a great example of this. I think if I’m not wrong, Viv was a product, I can’t even remember the name. It was such a good product.

It was some of their weird interplay between email and social networks, whatever. Well, it bombed. But, again, the folks who worked on it just because they broke new ground on the tech front.

We’re generally interested in trying to make it work. Got rewarded and moved to better promotions. If you read some of the books about Google, Eric Schmidt, and some of the folks, who’ve lived in being a part of that journey. You will see how they take pride in rewarding such people by the leaders in the Organization, essentially, who are the ones who are taking responsibility for the outcomes not coming in.

So that’s my second kind of advice or view on the people front. The third major part and just to recap where we are, we are in the triangle part, where the base you’re saying is that you know the essential base attributes of a group team. The north star metric is, I think, super important to have, to establish a metric cadence. ?

If you just go back to what I just talked about for the ACME Corps sales. It had an outcome. It had an output, and it had an input. So whatever your line of work is or whatever your business requires. Make sure that you create this mental model.

As simple and as obvious as it seems, you’d be surprised by the number of companies that don’t do this. Despite having routines, which I’ve been running for, like, like, a couple of years, for example. This is kind of, like, very funny because this team essentially ends up being a typical thing that nobody cares about in the yard. The moment you start tying yourself to the outcome, OKRs are one way to do this.

The moment you start tying yourself to an outcome, you will have a pretty solid, you know, way to ensure that whatever work your growth team does has a business impact. That leads me to the next point saying once your work has a business impact, talk to leadership about the outcomes. Do not talk to leadership about inputs. 

One of the things that I’ve learned over the years as a manager is that leaders/people managers generally come in with much less context, 10% of the context, right, that you have as people who are working on this problem statement. They’re, you know, coming into a meeting, just browsing through a dock, eyeballing it, asking for a few minutes to look at, and then make a decision. So start with the outcome.

Give them a big picture and then drill down and make sure of this advice, I would say it’s not just for group teams. I would say this is for teams all around. So make sure that you’re kind of, like, communicating and we’ll look we’ll talk about more examples on the road. So, I think the key essential parts that make up great teams, and I’ll just start with them again just to give you a recap or alignment and metric. 

You have this base perspective and this is all very hard to accomplish. I know I jumped over in about 10 minutes. but each of these will take your time. It will take you many months of effort depending upon your role. But once you make this investment, that is super helpful for you all or to kind of like land in a good place. But once you do this, it doesn’t mean that your organization and road team are going to thrive or excel. It just means that they’re able to ship something relevant, and that makes sense for you. I am a big proponent of, some of these, areas, right, like, spearing a very strong subculture within the group team That is distinct in flavor, from the rest of the Organization. One of the pieces of advice I’ve got over the years has stuck with me and it’s so deeply relevant here. All great teams have three things in common, a ritual, a symbol, and a belief. 

A metric installs a belief. A ritual is really what I’m talking about here where you start celebrating some of the wins, etc. Symbols are visual identifiers and queues, give your team a different name, or a different logo. Facebook notoriously, for example, had a pirate flag for just a group team. as a way of creating a smaller subculture and identity.

That is super important to make sure that people just feel as I’ve heard. They’re part of a little small group trying to change the world. So I’m a big proponent of some of these things and I grow teams generally like hunters and not like farmers.

I mean, they’re not growing stuff. They’re going out in the wild with nothing but a spear and then trying to take down a wild animal. So these people need to kind of like, you know, have a strong sense of belonging. And so some of these are the tools that you set up as a leader on the team, like encouraging small wins, appreciating people for good effort, or just the passion that they bring to the table. It is super important and, part of, like, creating a great culture within the team. Don’t do it for the optics. Which is the completely wrong incentive, sets the bad incentive. Because you’re essentially attracting people who are posters or people who are just out to kind of say, I’m the guy with the chip on my shoulder, and I have a part of this great team and throw it. 

You go around. You don’t wanna encourage or even set a precedent that that kind of behavior is okay or acceptable. This is just to ensure that you know, the team feels it is one, right, and not for the rest of the team sitting on a pedestal. 

So make sure that you kind of, like, invest in some of these. And if there are questions on a deeper topic and something that I’m very passionate about, I’m happy to kind of get into the road questions. And finally, right, the narrative, right, which is super, super important. 

I’ll give you a practical example of this, right, I think, okay, I’ll come to the theory and then the example after that. The theory is that if you own the narrative. You’re ensuring that the long-term sustenance of the group organization is on firm footing. The people who are working on that particular initiative who’ve taken that bet and tried to do something that is upstream or against the norm, have good careers at the end of the day. You need to control that because it all goes through ups and downs.

Just in the last 6-8 months, the business sentiment around a lot of startups and new businesses has changed. If you’re running a growth team, in that world and you’re not on the narrative when you move to this world, which is inevitable, where, you know, people are rationalizing their spends and and thinking about whether some of these choices make sense or not, right, is our group team super flawless and all of that. If you own the narrative you make sure that the rest of the leadership group in your company gets the message of the value that it is bringing.

You’re giving air cover for your team, and that is super, super important. I faced this, at both Razorpay and MakeMyTrip. At MakeMyTrip, it was super important for us to keep circling back on every small win that we would do. And I’ll tell you nothing is trivial in this. It would just, for example, if you had booked a hotel with us, we would send you a notification that says, oh, why don’t you book a flight with us if you’re going to, you know, Bombay. or Mumbai. 

It’s a very trivial piece of work at the end of the day. However, it led to a certain number of transactions getting added daily, which is an outcome that the business cared about. Conventional product things could say that, oh, this isn’t meaty enough. But for me to go and put my own horn or even, like, you know, promote the work my team has been doing. 

We’ve been doing far more technically complex and cutting-edge product work. Let’s talk about that not required because the narrative simply dictates that the business cares about an outcome, which is transactions in the world of travel. And we achieved it.

It’s important to communicate that message to the rest of the leadership in your company so that it’s super important for you to, you know, give folks in your team a great career. With that, let me just pause, for a moment. We’ve just run through the 5 parts of, like, the essential base work or kind of stuff that you need to do to set up a group team. I’ve spent time on this part because this is super important before you go down any strategy.

If you’re not doing this, no amount of strategy, no amount of, like, creative investment in intellectual progress will help you to go anywhere. 

So if there are questions, feel free to go ahead and post them on the chat right now. I can take a few questions. Or if you folks want to reserve it, let me keep running through the material. I will keep reading questions as I cannot keep presenting, if you feel like you have questions, feel free to put it out there, and then we’ll take it.

M:

Yeah. And, typically, there is a bit of a lag from the time you post an instance also. So go ahead and do it whenever we have a minute, we can take it. Otherwise, again, we can just enable the mic like we did earlier during the practice, and we can do it later.

SV:

Sure. I’m gonna jump to the next part, right, which is essentially, the core real growth strategies and frameworks, and there are tons of this online. A simple Google search will give you way more frameworks, and I can cover it possibly in an hour. But from my experience, I’ll tell you this, right? Growth essentially comes down to, you know, having, like, amazing distribution. This is a very different viewpoint. I don’t see a lot of this online, but my experience has told me that you need to have a unique way to kind of like put your product out on a channel on a path, where people can get access to it, which is very different/some competitive advantages. 

So through this framework, right, to the circle framework, and I’m just gonna jump a couple of slides back here.

I’m going make this case that essentially growth comes down to packing distribution from these four sources. If you look at it,  there are these four parts.

Yeah. Distribution growth comes down to cracking distribution. and I make the case that distribution can be cracked through some of these four ways. 

I’ll start with the top one which is having a unique relationship with a supplier or a partner and that is super important. A bunch of companies have done this, and I talk about a few examples as I get there. It comes from a unique tech advantage that only your product or business has. It could come from a unique product attribute or it could come from an ecosystem that you’re a part of where you can leverage trends.

So with this, let me start by going deeper into each of these examples. Then start with distribution from suppliers and partners. The classic example and the easiest way to go through some of these is to make sure that, you know, you have examples in mind.

So, as you might notice in the coming slides, WhatsApp essentially ticks all of these boxes. For example, it has unique advantages from a supplier or partner which can help grow faster. WhatsApp, if you have bought some of these phones at, like, a 5000 rupee price point or a 6000 rupee price point. WhatsApp comes pre-installed. You don’t have to go to the Play Store and get it. Now that’s a distribution. That’s a growth strategy, which requires a certain kind of changes to the core product offering, not a fundamental change, but just a few enhancements to make sure that this is supported. Stuff like app updates, what do you do if the device is running on 4 or 5 versions behind stuff that is not technically complicated, but that’s important to get done? But if you do that, it is possible to reinstall it unless you buy the phone, well, WhatsApp is available there.

WhatsApp also does an incredible amount of work on making sure that notification delivery rates are awesome. So when was the last time you ever heard anyone say that, oh, I sent you a message on WhatsApp, and it didn’t pop up on your notification drive. ?

Never. Rarely. Folks within WhatsApp, for example, track this number to be 99.999993%.

They consider it as a, you know, business outage if you drop by point, not 1% there. Because at their scale, that’s a few thousand users who are impacted. So they tracked this very closely.

They can do a bunch of stuff, by, for example, consuming your battery very aggressively. 

That’s a choice that the product has made because they had clarity in their growth strategy and the users are fine with it because, well, messaging is a great foundational part of what defines your phone experience.

WhatsApp, for example, isn’t if you folks are familiar with the mobile paradigm, WhatsApp, even though it goes into the background, always has a connection with some server going on which ensures that the message delivery happens. So stuff like this is what I’m talking about, whether it’s clarity and growth strategy leading to product strategy leading to a unique distribution advantage.

Booking.com is a marketplace and it’s a very MakeMyTrip kind of company, which is e-commerce travel. They have a very unique relationship with the hoteliers, coming from that world. Generally, hoteliers or people who run these hotel establishments appear to take relationships or take orders from a website like booking.com more than a lot of other players. The reason is that they don’t treat them as transactional as some of the other players do. So they feel like, oh, if I build a relationship with booking.com that is good for my business, both at a transaction level and when things are not great, Booking.com looks after me and makes sure that you know, my business is growing along with this. 

I can talk about a host of things that Booking.com did to make sure that this is possible. Let’s talk with you about a tech advantage. Again, WhatsApp has a unique tech advantage where not only does it have partnerships with phone manufacturers or OEMs, but It also has its notification delivery system, which is bleeding edge. Nobody else has that kind of a success rate.

And so it, growth strategy influenced the product strategy, which influenced the tech strategy to kinda get distribution done and get business outcomes done. At my last organization Razorpay, a payment gateway having incredibly high success rates. And you rewind 5-6 years ago, a bunch of companies started trying to do payment gateways, but essentially very few are standing today and very few are standing as tall as a database.

One of the reasons I argue is that the success rates across a variety of pay modes, especially the big ones, are as high as they can be. So if you’re a business, at the end of the day, you care about getting close to 100% success rates for payment acceptance. So you don’t lose a hard-acquired business. That is super important. 

It came because Razorpay invested in making sure their tech stack was superior to a lot of existing players out there incumbents plus some of the start-ups. They got an advantage, and they invested not just in the core capabilities, but even the allied capabilities like documentation, etc. to make sure this was possible. 

So, the classic example of this is, again, WhatsApp, but I’m not gonna use that example because I think you folks get the message. Think of something like Zoom, Slack, or Teams. Essentially, these are, like, Slack and Teams are a new bit of companies that leveraged SaaS. Typically to use the messaging product at work, you need to get approvals from a finance person, from an IT officer, etcetera, etcetera.

Slack and Zoom inherently leveraged the fact that their core product offering is a multi-player offering. It’s not a single-player offering. There’s no fun in using Zoom or Slack as one person. It makes sense when you get somebody on board.

So once you get that first person inside, the company can get another person in, right, the product has a chance. Now how do you build some of those workflows? To ensure that you know, you are going deeper, within a particular team to start with inside the company, then switch across teams, then switch across different business units inside the organization and then subsequently grow, to kind of, like, ensure that once you’re ready, feel that this business is ready to monetize, you just will land up and your sales team lands up and says, oh, by the way, you know, 50% of your organization is already using my product. I can give you these few additional features that will help you. I am compliant and all of the things that you want me to do. So that’s a way to do that.

What happens if your product is not a multiplayer product? For example, I look at the MakeMyTrip referral program. A referral program generally adds the multiplayer nature onto any particular product, which means that you are taking a single-player product and making it a multiplayer product by incentivizing people, which leads them to kind of, like, talk about it and, their commute, their network, their friends, or, you know, our family groups.

There’s an organizational way to do this, which is what a company like Apple does when products are just generally beautifully designed and you feel like it’s an experience. That is great, but it is just the experience that converts a product from being a single-player product to a multiplayer product in case you don’t have the Apple kind of experience. And to be fair, that’s not something that, like, that a lot of companies can get. 

There are other ways. to kind of make sure that your product becomes a multiplayer product. And finally, to make the case that your ecosystem can also be a significant growth driver. For example, if you folks are familiar with the Instagram story in the Facebook ecosystem, and they were, like, if I’m not wrong, about 5,000,000 DAUs. Like, today, Instagram is through the roof.

I don’t even know. I’m pretty sure it crossed the billion mark or came at least close to that number. It’s perhaps possible because, you know, in the early days, a lot of us who used Instagram then it sounded very spooky that, oh, my Facebook friend’s graph is essentially appearing on my Instagram as well.

Instagram’s kind of like, I’m not getting into the privacy aspect of it because I’m sure what’s happened, Instagram and Facebook can address that, but I’m just getting into the fact that being a part of that ecosystem gave Instagram, like, like, a turbo boost. It takes credit cards, for example. It’s not surprising that most credit cards are part of a bank’s portfolio.

If you look at a bank, it’s a classic ecosystem play. You were to open a bank account today, you know, it’s a positive cat product, where the business incurs a lot of costs in acquiring you first. And then it pays out 3%, 5%, some savings rate interest to open a savings account. So they give you money if you put their money with them.

On top of the reason why they find it and yet you find the likes of, like, tons of, like, very successful banks in India and across the world, they’re still successful because, down the road, the savings account is an early part of an ecosystem of products that the bank started offering. It starts with a debit card, then it starts with a credit card, then it starts with a loan. It makes it possible for a business to offer something and offer something in perpetuity, right, and still make money and build a great business just because of the nature of the incentives and how much you pay for it across the other parts of the ecosystem.

That’s a very good example of just being a part of an ecosystem. So your ideal growth strategy, I think, could generally come with a combination of some of these, and it should be your intelligence and your discussion to figure some of these broad pointers out and make sure that you experimented with some of these and then you know, figure out what works for your business. 

Cool. I see a couple of questions on chat, so I’m gonna start with them. I see the first one

“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?

M:

Two of them are done, I think. Like, the second one also?

SV:

Yeah. Can you just read out the second question, if you don’t mind? Yeah.

M:

Sure. Hi, Sesh. I would like to ask what according to you should be the first step towards making your current team growth-oriented.

SV:

Hey. So, for your current team to become growth-oriented, what do you exactly mean by that? Are you suggesting that your team of people who are working on customer acquisition morphs into a group team? It’s okay if you can just unmute yourself and ask this question. Might be easier.

M:

I have unmuted you. You should be able to unmute yourself also. Not able to quit you can use the question chat as well. You are on mute.

Sure.

SVi:

I’ll take a chat based on what I understand. Yeah.

M:

Yeah. I will unmute everybody. I mean, anyway, Q and A at this point. Yeah. Everyone’s unmuted. You should be able to unmute your mics. Sesh will now answer this question, and we can continue. Yeah.

SV:

Yeah. 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 need 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.

M:

And if I may add, like, a small thing based on what you mentioned also, I think if you’re trying to make it work with the current team according to Sesh, the first question would be, like, expectations, I think, kind of gather on and discuss what growth means to you. And if it can even be achieved in the setup that you have, currently, then that’s where it should start. If you don’t want to hire a whole new team. 

Joe: 

Can I ask a question?

You hear me. ? Okay. 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?

SV:

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.

M:

I have a couple of more questions from people. Next comes Ankit. 

“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.”

SV:

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 in 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.

M:

I think we have one question. It’s gonna be 4. So this would be the last one. This comes from an amazing session, which it was. It was great.

“What could be the best practices of frameworks concerning choosing the right growth motion for distribution to increase the probability of success?”

SV:

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 reforged 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.

M:

I believe that summarizes the topic quite well. The key takeaway for me was that it’s not a plug-and-play situation. Unfortunately, my biggest takeaway personally was the importance of setting expectations for the audience. Sometimes, it’s easy to assume something didn’t work because the initial expectations weren’t clear, or the right criteria for success weren’t defined. I appreciated that aspect of the session. Overall, I want to express my gratitude for your time and effort in conducting this session.

Everyone else, if you have questions, you can please send them by email to me. My email is with everybody as a part of the invite. I can follow up with you and Sesh as well. Otherwise, again, once again, thank you so much for joining. and I hope to see everyone in another session to read up on you.

SV:

Oh, thanks for taking the time, folks in the middle of the work day. I’m relatively easy to find online. It’s the advantage of having a rather unique name. Not many people have this name. So hit me up if you have questions online and happy to help when I can. And thanks for putting this session together.

M:

Thank you so much.

SV:

Thanks. Bye.