What principles should Growth teams operate using?

Question

Ojus Padston · Accepted Answer

These 3 principles are presented in rank order, because each one only matters if the ones above it are following

1. Empowerment - Everyone on the team feels ownership, understanding the problem space and context to really make an impact. Without empowerment, the team will inevitably be risk-averse or overly deferential, which is the opposite of the motivated, go-getter attitude needed. This can occur either because the team is not staffed or scoped appropriately, limiting what bets they are able to take, or management is overbearing and doesn’t cultivate independent thinking.
 2. Rigor - Bets are thoughtfully taken, informed by data and strategic thinking into crisp hypothesis. They develop end-to-end solutions, thinking through the entire relevant customer experience. For a new feature, this spans presenting information to customers contextually in a compelling framing, providing easy actions that minimize cognitive load, and keeping the customer on a journey that remains compelling and relevant throughout. A team can be as empowered as they want, but if they take bets that are too small, just strategically don’t make sense, or they aren't resourced to cover the full user journey, their impact will be limited. Practice is the best teacher, but process accountability can accelerate this by making sure all initiatives have basic sizing (reach, impact, and effort) and execution risks (dependencies, order of operations) are planned out before work begins.
 3. Agility - The team is scrappy, making a surprising amount of progress in a short period of time. Speed to learning is of the essence. A team can be effective if they just have the top two principles, but they’ll move slowly without agility. Management can support this through pushing on speed without rushing. My favorite question is “How could you learn [x] even faster?”

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