Growth Levers and How to Find Them

A business operates in discovery mode when its fundamental ins and outs aren’t well understood. The imperative isn’t to optimize well-known operations, but to discover those operations—to create a new system, not run an existing system more efficiently. It’s not yet possible to begin optimizing because you don’t know what the right processes are. Y

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

What’s the difference between an “experiment” and “just do it?” The difference is only about 5 minutes, but it’s an incredibly valuable 5 minutes. That’s the time it takes to write a hypothesis and make a prediction. Documenting your prediction helps clarify your thinking and eliminate hindsight bias. That way, no matter if your experiment succeeds

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.

Here are some clever MVTs: Landing page test: Before you build the product, create a landing page, buy some qualified traffic to it, and see if anyone clicks “buy” or “sign up.” (If they do, apologize that your product isn’t ready and add them to your waiting list.)

Will we learn something important about our business or our customers? (Will this resolve an internal debate we’ve been having?)

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

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

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