Forbes: For growth hacking to be successful, you need the right people
Heikki Väänänen | Founder, Exec. VP of Growth
My most recent Forbes article looks at how organizations must approach growth from within. By means of an internal reshuffle, organizations have the power at their fingertips to create a diverse team whose job is to focus solely on the growth of the business.
Create a Team of ‘Builders’
The first step involves putting together a team that can ensure that the organization’s growth is efficiently managed. But, when building out a growth team, it’s important to have in mind that you want to create a culture spearheaded by builders.
- Responsibilities of the growth team can include anything from conversion optimization, product retention, SEO, email marketing, and even pricing. As a result, agility within the team is key.
- Many businesses aren’t in a position to hire entire teams purely to manage growth. Instead, many organizations can – and should – look within the business to find people who might be interested in stepping up to the challenge.
- Often, businesses will find that there are plenty of people, with a vast array of skillsets, that would be happy to volunteer to join a growth team, enabling each to also contribute new insights into various other aspects of the organization.
Variety is Key
Though traditionally many organizations choose to hire a ‘Head of Growth’ or ‘VP of Growth’ to manage and oversee the growth hacking process, the team of ‘builders’ should ideally be composed of a mixture of different job roles.
- The VP of growth will obviously need management experience, but also a good understanding of what it takes to build a tech stack, in addition to a strong understanding of marketing principles, and a fine-tuned ability to analyze data.
- Technical marketers need to have the skills required to discover new ways to reach new and existing customers. They must also be able to use both intuition and data to uncover new channels
- Product marketers are the people that drive the experimentation roadmap and make sure everything stays on track, so strategic planning and problem-solving is key in order to ensure success.
- Engineers are key to ensuring the correct data can be gathered, translated, stored and viewed in order to keep the ball rolling and the experiments flowing smoothly.
- Data analysts parse through all the growth team’s data to identity patterns and trends, as well as any anomalies, to identify new opportunities for growth and recommend what future actions to take and how experiments can be improved. For this role, you want to hire people with strong mathematical acumen and the ability to model and interpret data.