How to build a Growth team from scratch.

1. How To Build a Growth
Team From Scratch
Thibault Imbert
Head of Growth | Adobe Spark

2. What is Spark?
Adobe Spark

3. What is Spark?
Pros Market Expansion

4. What is Spark?
Creative Cloud

5. If everyone is doing it, no one really does

6. We all care about
Growth!
What we saw

7. We all care about
Growth!
What we saw
Release/Launch

8. We all care about
Growth!
What we saw
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!

9. We all care about
Growth!
What we saw
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
Revenue
Activation
Retention
Acquisition
We all care about
Growth again!

10. Any ETA on the new
instrumentation?
PM/PMM
We have these
features for the June
release first
This will have to go on
the backlog
EM
Product
First attempt

11. First attempt

12. This just does not work

13. How do you create a Growth team?

14. 1

15. It starts with organic retention
You can’t grow a crappy product

16. So if you don’t have product market fit
It is too early to think about Growth, solve a problem first

17. Are people using your product?
Don’t be prisoner of the north star metric
Beware of vanity metrics (Downloads, Signups, MAUs)
Look at 1-mo RR

18. 2

19. Start small

20. You probably won’t be given a team directly
Team up with one member or two
Look for low hanging fruits
Early wins are worth more than a pitch

21. 3

22. Get executive sponsorship

23. “A demo is worth a thousand meetings”

24. The same applies to Growth

25. It is about a long term Growth strategy
It will be like running a marathon
You will never be done
It’s not about hacking
It’s just good marketing

26. If an experiment fails, you are still learning
Inconclusive result is not learning

27. 4

28. Find the right people

29. Mindset > Skills
Driven by results, not tech
Promote small experiments vs big projects
Customer empathy
Be colocated

30. 5

31. Buy before build

32. Test value before building
Go 3rd Party
After you hit the limitations, go homegrown

33. Chat

34. Chat Landing pages

35. Chat Landing pages Heatmap

36. 6

37. You need your own engineers

38. Growth Product
We have code ready
we need to checkin
We have this
experiment we would like
to run!
PM
Engineer
Who are you? Let me
see your code
Great! Do you
have resources to make it
happen?
PM
Engineer
Second attempt

39. Why are you in my code base?
Why do you get to take short cuts?
We are already planning on doing this!
That’s not how we work!

40. One word: Trust

41. 7

42. A squad, not a team

44. Engineers still part of the product team(s)
But on a Tour of duty
Easy org setup
Engineers familiar with product codebase

45. Squad composition
PM PD EM EngineersDS

46. Engineer Engineer
Growth Product
Hey Irina, can you
review my PR?
Sure, let me check!

47. 8

48. Don’t ideate, look for opportunities

49. Go back to the data
Focus on impact and ROI (ICE score)
If successful, what’s the projected impact?
Conversion, open rates,
notifications are good candidates

50. 9

51. Then you will hit the ceiling (local maximum)

52. Changes need to be made inside the product
Don’t bring more water to a leaky bucket
Improving Activation reduces CAC (Cost of Acquisition)
Better Activation drives retention and ultimately conversion to paid
When the right time, reinvest that money saved in Acquisition

53. 10

54. Now it’s time to own the entire funnel

55. The Growth team now needs to focus on the entire funnel (ARRR)
Acquisition, Retention, Referral, Revenue
Split into mini-squads focused on each lever
90 day sprint focused on one metric to move

56. 11

57. Never forget qualitative research

58. Queries and funnels provide directions
They don’t tell you the why
Power is in quant + qual

59. 12

60. Have a process

61. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)

62. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)

63. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)

64. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)

65. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)

66. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)
Experiment
Results Review
(what did we learn)

67. 2 experiments examples

68. Background:
We have a secret Facebook Group called Spark Insiders, we have had a challenge recruiting users easily and
most importantly truly active users.
Hypothesis:
We believe that by elevating our most active users to Spark Insiders we can build an automated system to
recruit users automatically. This will result in higher quality users with higher engagement on the FB group. We
also believe that making these users Insiders will boost their return use and we can learn what are the traits of
an engaged user.
KPIs: # New Spark Insiders, Group activity/engagement
iOS: Spark Insiders Recruitment

69. iOS: Spark Insiders Recruitment

70. Custom landing page for opt-in

71. Custom landing page for opt-in

72. VIP email

73. Secret group with community of engaged users

74. Engagement, before and after the recruitment campaign
Before
After

75. 0.76 shares per user/day 0.97 shares per user/day
27% increase
iOS: Spark Insiders - Impact on shares, last 60 days

76. Understanding power users
What features do they use in the first week?
How often do they open the app?
What time of day do they use the app and on which days?
What sources were they acquired from?
Was it an ad, a promotional email to the chain’s customer base, or some other place?
What devices do they use?
What is their demographic background, including age, income, and more?
What other apps do they use?

77. Emails collected used as Facebook Lookalikes Audiences
A Lookalike Audience is a way to reach new people on
FB who are likely to be interested in your business
because they're similar to your best existing customers.
Ads for acquisition can be created targeting audiences
“similar” to the power users you collected from within
the app.
http://bit.ly/2shVlzf

78. Background:
Our current M1 retention is 25%, we have to learn from users not returning enough on what we can do better
for them.
Hypothesis:
We believe that we can retarget lapsed users and ask them what we can improve to make Spark better for them.
We tried to do that manually, we now want to automate this to see if we can get feedback automatically
without any manual work.
KPIs: # Surveys completed, Quality of feedback provided
Spark Web: Lapsed User(Has not returned in the past 14 days)

79. Spark Web: Lapsed User(Has not returned in the past 14 days)

80. Top 1: Users are happy with the
product, just not using the product at
the cadence we expect.
Top 2: More product features.
Top 3: More control/flexibility/variety.
Top 4: Performance issues.
Top 5: Android.
Spark Web: Lapsed User(Has not returned in the past 14 days) : Results

81. “There are tons of platforms and sites out there vying for attention. How
can you stay top of mind for me? Online events like chats, featuring
more user content and alerting them, etc. Haven't used you only
because I forgot about you.”
Key quotes: Marketing

82. “Is this free if I own the Adobe Suite? Is there an educator discount? Do
you love people that need your awesome program to make the world a
better place? Do you offer affiliate programs so that I can work the cost
of it off by making more awesome videos and telling people to use the
program because it is the best. Bottomline I like the product just unable
to afford it right now. Thank you”
Key quotes: Awareness

83. Web: Lapsed User - Impact on shares, last 60 days
0.22 shares per user/day 0.22 shares per user/day
No impact
Control Treatment

84. Summary

85. Start with organic retention
It’s not about hacking
Hire the right people
Buy before build
A squad, not a team
Focus on one thing first
Move to product changes
Own the full funnel (ARRR)
Data does not tell you why
Have a process

86. 2 great books I recommend

88. Thank you!
Follow me at @thibault_imbert
for the slides.