This document provides 11 tips for creating a company-wide growth culture from Adobe Spark's Head of Growth. The tips are: 1) start with organic retention and product-market fit; 2) start small with early wins; 3) get executive sponsorship for a long-term growth strategy; 4) hire people with the right mindset over skills; 5) test value through third parties before building features; 6) differentiate your efforts from competitors; 7) form a growth squad of cross-functional engineers and PMs; 8) look for activation opportunities from data; 9) combine quantitative and qualitative research; 10) establish an experiment pipeline process; and 11) evangelize your growth team and process.
29. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
30. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
Revenue
Activation
Retention
Acquisition
31. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
We all care about
Growth again!
Revenue
Activation
Retention
Acquisition
32. First attempt
Any ETA on the new
instrumentation?
PM/PMM
We have these
features for the June
release first
This will have to go on
the backlog
PM
EM
Product
36. Growth Product
Second attempt
We have code ready
we need to checkin
We have this
experiment we would like
to run!
PM
Engineer
Who are you? Let me
see your code
Great! Do you
have resources to make it
happen?
PM
Engineer
37. Why are you in my code base?
Why do you get to take short cuts?
We are already planning on doing this!
That’s not how we work!
46. Go back to the data
Focus on impact and ROI (ICE score)
If successful, what’s the projected impact?
Activation is a good place to start
47. Don’t bring more water to a leaky bucket
Improving Activation reduces CAC (Cost of Acquisition)
Better Activation drives retention and ultimately conversion to paid
When the right time, reinvest that money saved in Acquisition
55. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
56. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
57. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)
58. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)
Experiment
Results Review
(what did we learn)
63. Start with organic retention
It’s not about hacking
Hire the right people
Buy before build
Get your own engineers
A squad, not a team
Don’t ideate, look for opportunities
Never forget qualitative research
Have a process
Sell your team and process