Thabet Alfishawi, Product Manager on YouTube’s growth platform, gives Product Tank San Francisco a three by three for anyone starting a growth team or thinking of switching to a growth role:
- three things to get you started
- three tools for effective growth
- three mistakes to learn from
Get started
Begin with a deep understanding of all aspects of your product. There is a difference between the “painkiller” aspects of your product that provide immediate benefits to users and the “vitamin” aspects that deliver user benefits over time. You need to understand both when preparing for growth. Next, consider if your product is really ready for growth – remember your retention curves. Thirdly if you are really ready, define what you will measure, how and why. Make sure you know what you will move and remember to move something that really matters.
Effective growth
In the second section of his talk, Thabet gets tactical. To move the right variables you need to build a growth model. This will allow you to be more systematic and focus on smaller and faster experiments. When running those experiments it is critical to know your core loop and define your expected outcomes.
Lessons learned
To wrap up, Thabet looks back on lessons learned:
When experimenting, make smaller bets rather than larger ones.
Be skeptical. It’s good to trust the data, but in a fast-moving situation sometimes you need to take some extra steps to verify your successes.
Finally don’t forget to celebrate your failures, or as Thomas Edison said: “Find the 10,000 ways that didn’t work.” Most of what you do isn’t going to move the meter, but don’t forget to focus on the journey over the destination and keep up the team morale.
