“What do I need to know when starting a growth experimentation process from scratch? How can I get more speed to the process? How should the team structure be?”
I had these and many other questions especially before starting but also along the way in my role as a growth marketing manager at a SaaS company called Aiven. I googled a lot but I didn’t actually find that many useful articles, videos or podcasts. There are lot of high level content on what is growth experimenting, but not that many when you want to go a bit deeper or get something tangible you can take to your daily work. Anyway, I had saved the best resources for myself to go back every now and then and then I realized, why not share these in a one place where someone else could also find these. So here you go!
🎧 You might also be interest in this podcast where I talked about Documentation and process in acquisition growth experimentation at Aiven
For the background: I had done some experimenting before and also Aiven had done some experiments before I joined so I can’t say I started from zero but I still had a lot to learn.
I consume content in different forms quite a lot because I want to have the latest information on the things I’m working on and even though I wouldn’t find anything new, I still might get a good reminder or get some confidence that I’m on a right track. I also want to try avoid the usual hurdles that companies/growth marketers face.
What is your challenge in growth experimenting?
I tried to divide these based on the challenge you might have. I hope it helps on finding the right one for your need. Every time I find a new great resource, I’ll add it to the list.
| Challenge/Topic | Favourite Quote | Brief review |
| Basics of Growth Experimenting | ||
| ARTICLE: How the Best Tech Companies Run Growth Experiments Kieran Flanagan | “A common mistake when forming your hypothesis is to state it as a prediction based on a metric you think will improve, something that fails to articulate what you believe to be true of your users.” | Doing the hypothesis correctly is one of the key things and this article answers to that very well. |
| Starting growth experimenting / Tuning the process | ||
| ARTICLE: Growth Experiments: Lessons From a Failed Attempt Vassilena Valchanova | “Major projects like this are like health habits – they are hard to follow unless you build consistency. That’s why you should aim to do regular prioritization meetings.” | Great resource especially about team structure and process. |
| ARTICLE: HubSpot’s Growth Process and How We Prioritize Experiments David Ly Khim | “Start digging into the data and running a handful of experiments. Be intentional but don’t bike-shed. Just start running experiments and learn.” | Great description of the process from A-Z. Also video, slides and lot’s of additional resources in the article. |
| VIDEO: Advice on Organizing and Running Growth Teams Dan Hockenmaier | “That was the mistake that we made, focusing on the onboarding for the homepage, because they’re like, well that has the biggest scale by a long shot, but it turned out that only like 10% of the people that come to the homepage actually have a booking in mind, and everybody else had something else in mind when they come to the Airbnb homepage for the fist time.” | In general a great video on organizing and running growth teams. It also has some great discussion about experimenting on 20:00 onwards. |
| How to build the growth experimentation culture to the company | ||
| ARTICLE: 6 Clever Nudges To Build a Culture of Experimentation Alex Birkett | “So for me, the most important first step is committing to a weekly experiment release schedule. Stick with it for at least a month. Sharing result will drive more company wide participation. Over time you’ll find that the whole process is pretty addictive. But it requires a commitment and perseverance in the beginning.” | Tips from experts to start and improve your process and get buy-in in your organization. |
| Documenting your experiment | ||
| ARTICLE: Why Would I Ever Write a Growth Experiment Doc? Tal Raviv | “An experiment doc is a set of short sections that force us to think through why we’re doing an experiment, what we think will happen, how we’re going to measure it, and whether it’s even worth doing.“ | If you are not documenting yet or properly, this is an excellent article for you to understand why it is so important and to steal Patreon’s experiment doc template ⭐😁 |
| Coming up with new growth experimenting ideas and prioritizing them | ||
| ARTICLE: How Pinterest Supercharged its Growth Team With Experiment Idea Review Jeff Chang & John Egan | “We’ve learned simple brainstorms tend to only be effective when the goal is to come up with solutions to very specific, scoped problems “ | Very useful article with hands on advice that I was able to apply to my work right away. |
| PODCAST/VIDEO: Andrew Anderson on SaaS Experiments Brian David Hall | “You’re not creating a winner, all you’re doing is discovering what the truth is” | Great ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ podcast/video on discovery-based optimization. But I recommend listening this only after you know the basics of experimenting and have possibly already done some yourself. |
| ARTICLE: 11 ways to generate evidence-based growth experiment ideas Spencer Lanoue | “There are no silver bullets. No one-off tactic is going to solve all your growth problems. The tactics that do produce explosive growth are usually the result of a combination of lessons learned from previous experiments.” | Good list of quantitative and qualitative data sources that you can think of for your experiments. |
Did you find these useful? Any other comments? 😍🤔 Let me know, let’s connect on LinkedIn.
If you liked this, please also share this with your network 🙏
Final note! Don’t bike shed 🚫😉
Petra Lylander 