Growth Levers and How to Find Them

As you move right across the customer journey map, the number of prospects at each stage decreases logarithmically. For example, 90% fewer people are actively researching than are only problem-aware. And 90% fewer people are trying a solution than are researching solutions.

To find your NSM, ask: “If customers absolutely loved our product, how would they naturally behave? How many of them are behaving like this?”

“When you bought our product, do you remember what you were hoping it would enable you to do?” and “Why was doing that so important to you?”

Here are a few questions to help you decide which key drivers to prioritize: If it works, can it be really big? Or will it only ever cause incremental growth? How good or bad is your metric compared to relevant benchmarks? Will working on it help us learn something important? Does it cause growth or merely correlate with it? Does it take advantage

Discussing your product: Above all, remember this is not a conversation about your product. Instead, you are trying to understand, with pixel-level detail, the journey that led this person to your product. The interviewee will want to talk about your product features, and you might like hearing that, but it shifts attention away from the customer’s

That’s why when we train people, we always have them conduct their first practice interviews with somebody else’s product. We just ask for a volunteer from the group who recently bought something big: a spin bike, a vintage typewriter, or three months of Lindy Hop dance lessons. Anything but the interviewer’s product. That way, they’re not attached

Divide up the interview transcripts among the team. Ideally, each person reads at least three interviews, and each interview is read by at least two people who didn’t conduct that interview.

You can stress test your NSM with this checklist: Aligned incentives: Does it increment when you deliver value to your customer? And if you succeed in moving it, will your company earn money and grow? Full funnel: Does it represent the results of optimizing your entire customer journey from first contact through retention / churn? Or are parts of y

If you look back at the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried. Some famous examples:

Which of these, if it works, could have the biggest impact?