Growth Team Resources

Hi, my name is Will Laurance and I am a growth software engineer at CreativeLive. CreativeLive offers over 1500 class in photography, graphic design, crafting, business, and entrepreneurship. The current growth team started roughly a year ago in February 2017.

This post serves as an index of resources I've found helpful and thought provoking.

It's a work in progress. So check back for updates.

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Growth Team Culture

Building a Culture of Growth by Julie Zhou

I enjoyed this talk by Julie Zhou because it breaks down building a growth culture into three simple steps.

Step 1 is all about proving your salt. Getting a quick win by digging through data. Julie dug through the data and found there were users who didn't need help using Yik Yak at all. They came back five to seven days a week. But there was a significant number of users who only used the app one day a week. She worked with an engineer and hacked together a tool that sent a push notification to a cohort of once a week users of the app. She compared against a control group and found that the notification did increase retention.

Step 2 is about getting your growth foundation in order. It was very difficult for Julie to get that one notification sent. She needed a system for sending notifications to users. She needed the proper infrastructure to iterate faster on growth experiments. They built their own AB testing platform. It worked like a configuration engine. Rather than making a third party analytic tool fit into the product, they built a flexible tool. With a flexible tool they worked on growth experiments. Not making a third party tool work for them.

Step 3 is taking the foundation and letting the rest of the company use these tools. It's helping and assisting the other teams in your company meet their goals. Once everyone is in a growth mindset and aren't limited by the tools I think amazing things can happen.

Growth Team Overview

What Are Growth Teams For, and What Do They Work On? by Casey Winters

Article.

Growth Office Hours with Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer

Growth Office Hours: Round 2 (Anu Hariharan and Gustaf Alstromer)

Five Tenets of a Successful Growth Team by Adam Fishman

This is a great article by Adam. Our Growth PM at CreativeLive showed us this article. We discussed amongst our team members. Our key take away is to run one experiment per week. They targeted at least 3 experiments, but outnumber our staff 3 to 1.

My key take away was focus. And specifically, taking time to reflect and see if we are focusing on the things that will move the needle.

Give it a read and let me know your thoughts! https://medium.com/@fish/five-tenets-of-a-successful-growth-team-1ee76ac4ca74.