Is growth work fundamentally about discovering company-specific information through experimentation, or can it be executed via established best-practice playbooks?

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

Growth experiments chosen from gut and prior-company experience rather than from data on the current business tend to fail

Every experiment he recommended on joining a new company based on past playbooks — affiliate marketing at Grubhub, internal linking SEO at Pinterest — failed to move the needle; data is the core of finding good ideas

Scope: based on his own track record

32:08 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Mike Duboe · Feb 15, 2023

Head of growth should be defined broadly as someone responsible for accelerating the company's pace of learning and engineering systems that give the company more control over its North Star metrics

The growth team should operate at a faster drumbeat than the rest of the company and feed those learnings back into core product

Scope: his preferred definition; acknowledges the title is used inconsistently

10:16 20Growth: Top Five Growth Lessons Scaling Stitchfix to IPO, How to Master the Art of Paid Marketing, Why CAC/LTV is a BS Metric & How To Use Payback Period as an Alternative to CAC/LTV with Mike Duboe, Partner @ Greylock

Adam Grenier · Mar 15, 2023

Uber's driver acquisition worked because the growth team had to invent and industrialize entirely new channels rather than copy a playbook

No one had ever onboarded hundreds of thousands to millions of drivers, so there was no case study; they took manual ops tactics like Craigslist postings and turned them into scaled channels, treating job boards like Google rather than classifieds

27:04 20Growth: The Inside Story to Uber's Hypergrowth Scaling; What Worked, What Did Not? | Spending a $1BN Budget at Uber and Why China was the Wild West for Uber | Why You Do Not Need a Growth Team with Adam Grenier

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Growth is mostly information discovery — figuring things out — rather than running playbooks or copying best practices

Knowing you can do SEO or ads is trivial; winning requires cracking details against incumbents who hold the top search results and win ad auctions because they have the best unit economics, smoothest funnels and most creative testing

6:08 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

The common mistake in growth is concluding that because a tactic worked at one company it works generally, instead of asking why it worked there and in which other contexts it would or wouldn't

Growth outcomes are highly context-specific — B2B SaaS versus marketplace versus consumer social differ, and underlying primitives like user intent determine what works

34:20 Welcome 20Growth: How To Hire a Head of Growth? What are Signs of World-Class Talent? How To Structure the Process? How To Onboard Growth Teams? The Relationship Between Head of Growth and CEO and more with Casey Winters, Chief Product Officer @ Eventbrit

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

The hardest obstacle to figuring things out in growth is hubris — teams don't realize they need to figure anything out

They arrive with best practices and what worked at their last job, overinvest in a product or campaign, and it doesn't survive first contact with the customer because they were certain they were right

6:59 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Casey Winters · Sep 22, 2021

The term 'growth hacking' should be retired because growth is team work requiring understanding of the business's growth model and constraints plus deep engineering, not just hacks and experiments

Hacks may play a part but scaling the business usually requires substantial engineering work

39:35 Growth hacking label is outdated real growth requires business model understanding plus deep engineering

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Growth is uniquely a discipline where knowledge of a tactic that worked at another company is transferable and replicable, unlike product, marketing, or engineering

Growth tactics work by tickling human psychology, and the humans at the next company are the same, whereas product success doesn't transfer between companies

25:12 Growth tactics are uniquely transferable across companies unlike product or marketing

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024

Growth differs from marketing, product and sales in three ways: there is no playbook, you are selling something nobody is looking for, and it cuts across disciplines

A CPG marketer moving between Unilever and P&G already knows 90% of the job, whereas a new product or category has no precedent, so you must discover who the customer is and where they look; and unlike finance you can't just stay in your lane

7:43 Growth differs from marketing product sales since it has no playbook sells unsought things and cuts across disciplines