Growth Engines

The penchant for paid advertising in feeding your quest to acquire new users is a retrograde approach. If you're into product at either a startup org / an MNC, growth engines ought to be your default!

Success… Dear & Dearer!

Ask a schoolboy who has been through basic math for “the sole purpose that defines the existence of a business” whatever be the scale / vertical, the answer would be crisp and to the point, which is “profit” which intern correlates to business, growth going one level deeper.

But ask the same guy to define what “sustainable growth” is and how that is different from what he happens to understand by the term growth?

He may struggle to define that.

For that matter, it wouldn’t altogether be surprising to receive vague answers to that term even in some big tech organizations who have been around for decades now.

When success is dear to everyone, whatever the size of the organization – big & small, whatever the age of the cofounders, entrepreneurs – young & old, the fact that it comes at a price tag can’t at all be ignored. Well! If it is not a situation where one would have to cough up a lumpsum upfront, it does translate eventually to an effort & magnifying it as required to scale.

So, success is dear alright but could end up getting all the more dearer depending on the scale one has set sight over.

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Growth funnels, Flywheels & Sustainable Growth

Given today’s SaaS & AI-age of products, I could really venture to say that the days where products were envisioned and moved almost instantly from idea to build & then leading to the unceasing & unending expectation of adoption and growth are well behind us.

The modern day PLG (Product Led Growth) practices work totally differently to that where it evangelizes a stepwise process:

• tying the expectations to goals

• deriving success factors & defining the metrics that matter

• constantly motivating all teams & members towards moving the needle on the given metric

• eventually and over time turning all of it into a culture organization wide

01. The Growth Funnel / AARRR

When one talks of growth as linked to products, one can’t ignore the contribution of funnels, cohort analysis & the other similar techniques used.

And that’s perhaps where something like the AARRR - the pirate metrics framework that was considered pretty revolutionary came in handy using which product teams could really get to track the journey of the user across each of the stages right from:

• the first step that led to them discovering the product via online content

• clicking on the CTA that got them to the landing page

• signing up for a trial

• spending time with the product regularly across a given cohort – the number of times in a day, daily, weekly, monthly as applicable

• going beyond the trial & subscribing & paying to use the product

• continuing to use the product

• to finally leading to users spreading the word in their circle / the market in general

Image credits: Growth Rocks

The funnel aptly fits into the WebApps / SaaS way of life as the journey of the user on a digital medium such as the web is more transparent and easily traceable & trackable taking evasive action as soon as one sniffs something like say, “small bouts of friction somewhere in the workflow beginning to act as a hindrance over users completing a task online” before they could become a show-stopper.

The primary focus in this model is on one parameter which is “CONVERSION” in firstly getting there and then to improve that across each stage of funnel.

02. The Flywheel

When one talks of the AARRR it could also be perceived as AAARRR given the first A that expands to Awareness owing to the fact that one would certainly need to get the word out to the market about a product that they have built and how it solves a problem for the users and how it continuously happens to add value.

But, a small problem was the orientation of it all.

When conversion happens to be a goal-oriented and a very practical approach it doesn’t really cover the aspect of delighting the users. The internal teams would align over studying all analytics, defining metrics as derived out of the success factors and even go as far as to defining an NSM (north star metric) there is no sure way for them to determine whether the users are satisfied (actually beyond satisfied – “delighted”) with the product.

And, if there happens to be a scenario where the users aren’t really delighted over the usage of the product, that certainly could grow into a friction point if it isn’t one already, which again may not take too long to turn into one big problem - “CHURN”. So, in building that understanding of what delights the users, teams would also need to know whether everything is going right with the usage of the product in the first place, what they ought to do over unblocking the users, removing friction from their workflows if found so as to be able to nip it in the bud.

And, that was motivation enough for the birth of the Flywheel.

Image credits: Atlassian

The Flywheel shifts the focus from conversions across the stages on the funnel to charting out a proper action plan around the user’s journey in taking a step towards sustainable growth and it ought to happen over these steps:

• it starts from the time one is a total stranger to your product and doesn’t know anything at all about it

• the content floated to build awareness has to possess the ability to connect emotionally with the audience & that’s perhaps when one is going to be attracted to it

• once attracted, one may click on a certain link that gets them onto your landing page where one ought to spend some time engaging with your product & its features scoping around which again underpins the importance of maintaining the relevance to factors that attracted one in the first place at which stage mind you - “one is still a prospect”

• post spending time & getting a hang of the product and its features that have been built using best practices in making it more user-centric which ought to obviously lead to delighting which translates to paying up / subscribing to become your customer

• and that delight ought to be the driving force in the users taking to promote the product in their circles & getting to tell more people about it over, say public forums so as to get strangers engaged with it again

• the cycle ought to repeat

03. Sustainable Growth

With the tide turning towards sustainable growth especially over the latter half of the decade that just passed us, organizations have begun to get more serious about it and work tirelessly towards making products more efficient, independent & unbound from the environmental factors.

I personally have been big fan of organic growth that leads to establishing a degree of semblance converting to sustainable growth over time as opposed to paying to acquire users who onboard & churn after spending a brief time on the product as they don't connect with the central concept & fail to align with the vision.

But, what is it that makes your growth more sustainable?

Take a look at the model below.

Let’s get into deciphering that image now.

Part 1 (Bottom half):

1. The focus is on building a MARKET UNDERSTANDING.

2. To start with product teams would have to define the Customer Segments and flesh out their pain points in getting to a level of establishing their Underserved Needs. In doing so, teams ought to get into deeper research & discovery gaining a solid Market Understanding that could help reach the Depth of the Problem so as to reach some sort of a psychological safety level that could be termed a maximum, at least for the nonce.

3. And then product teams ought to strive to get to an arbitrary place in understanding the market in its entirety, a MAXIMUM Point of Delight (symbolically represented by the bottom-most point of the image) which ought to also tend to Infinity given how the needs & requirements keep stretching whilst also the quest to make the product offering better over its previous release.

4. Also, a special mention to the market understanding leading to identification of other newer customer segments with some other needs that could be underserved (represented by the thin red outer triangle) which could just be an opportunity yet to be explored, researched, discovered, naturally a part of DO LATER Roadmap.

Part 2 (Top half):

1. The focus here is on building what could be thought of as a BEST FIT SOLUTION to the problem on hand via a feature(s) in a product’s release.

2. The research & understanding ought to reflect in the Depth of Solutioning be an active input at each stage of solutioning starting off from the prioritized problem to solve for, UXR, Design, Development, UX, Testing & Release the result of which ought to be the first milestone - USER ADOPTION

3. The continual progression of which ought to convert to more solutioning, more features as totally relevant to the customer segments of a target market and then much later could be thought of leading to PMF (Product Market Fit) which again could tend to sometime in the future (whether that’s foreseeable or not could depend on various other external & internal factors).

4. Special mention here. PMF (Topmost point) could be thought of as being proportional to the Point of Delight (Bottommost point) in the sense that a best fit solution could lead to better than expected adoption over the same silo if the Market Understanding happens to really go deeper and beyond the current Understanding Levels (so as to be concentrated & confined to a particular problem only) and reach a farther point tending to the Point of Delight.

   This case could be a classic fit for a “Disruptive Strategy”.

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FAQs - Sustainable Growth

In getting to know what it really means to orient oneself towards sustainable growth as an organization in practice, here are a few FAQs.

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