LinkedIn Head of Growth Aatif Awan - Growth Hacking is Dead. Long Live Growth!

hi everyone my name is artem avant I lead growth team at LinkedIn I've been doing that for about four and a half years and I've seen the company and the team grow a lot in this process so what I hope to share today is what I've learned from this experience and give a simple framework about how to think about growth and when you you know like think about growth there are a lot of anecdotes and these two are one of the more popular ones and you've probably heard of that the first one being how hotmail when they started putting a simple signature of get your free email at the bottom of every email in 1997 their growth exploded they added 12 million members in just 18 months and this is 1997 so the entire internet was 70 million once you adjust for that in today's numbers it means 400 million members that's faster than any company that exists today so sounds pretty incredible and that's why this gets coated so often the other one is Airbnb when they started they figured out a way to cross post on Craigslist without having an API access and you know that helped them jumpstart their growth both are incredible examples but the question really is why not use these tactics to actually grow your product nobody really does that and the reason for that is it's not repeatable it worked for a very specific product at a very specific point in time and that was great but trying to use it today would be similar to using the discovery of penicillin to design the next generation antibiotic program it just won't work so what's happened today in the world of growth is that there are lots of anecdotes like this the lots of meth and around that there are a lot of tactics and theories that are propagated and that's what's you know generates a lot of hype and it's best epitomized in the term growth hacking and I don't like the term I'm not a fan of it and what I want to do is go through some of the theories today and quickly tell you why that's not how you should think about it and then jump to really talking about what growth is so there are a few interesting you know like funny fairy tale theories so first one is the pixie dust tree which is hey take a growth tactic and just sprinkle it on your existing product and boom you'll get growth out of that and I just I mentioned like those two tactics this doesn't work the second common theory is what I call the Wizard of Oz theory and that is hey go hire a growth hacker and they'll help you grow again there are some four thousand plus self proclaimed growth hackers on LinkedIn and you don't want to hire any of them actually because the best growth people don't use that title on the profiles and finally one of my favorites is the Jack in the Beanstalk theory of growth hacking and that's basically hey just keep doing stuff and somehow the other something is going to magically walk in you'll grown and again that doesn't work so what is needed instead is a scientific approach to thinking about growth asking the right questions and driving your growth strategy out of that now Elon Musk has talked about reasoning from first principles and that's a great framing I love it what happens is that most of us have evolved to think from analogy and that works you know we watch our parents do stuff our friends and family do stuff and that's good it's very efficient we just you know learn to do most things in life that way but it doesn't work when it comes to strategy and instead of doing that you need to really boil down the nature of your business and age of your product to the first principles then use those first principles to define your strategy so when we think about these first principles most of you are here are entrepreneurs you have a startup you have a product you want to grow what does success really look like so it's very simple for me startup success is three things its product its growth and its revenue so what is product product is just making something that people want it's as simple as that if you have something that people want you have a compelling product that you'll be able to sell to someone and then what is growth it's getting lots of people to actually use that product so that's where you're scaling it and then finally the revenue is getting somebody you know not necessarily your user but somebody to pay for your product or pay for access to the people using your product so those are the two you know like big ways of making money now some of you are probably thinking out but what about the profit because that's what we care about so profit is just you know doing this at a cost that's less than the money you are bringing again so that's that's we straight forward as well now when you think about product that has to come before growth so you have to create a good product first and then think about growth one of the biggest mistakes you can make is trying to grow a bad product because all you'll end up doing is killing it really fast if you have something bad you tell everybody about it they know that's a bad product they won't come back and won't use it and it can seem to work so that's why you'd say it's so obvious you know like why would anybody do it the problem is if you're not careful in how you define your metric how you're looking at growth you'll think about oh it's working initially so the graph on the right I have is this video sharing company from 2012 vide which was dubbed as the Instagram of video look like it was growing very well because you know you're looking at just your daily active users and that chart is going up into the right initially in the middle of that graph that's May 2012 but then because people are not sticking around it's not a good enough product that wears off and then pretty soon you'll see the graph undo itself when it's not just vide this has happened with countless companies countless products so you have to be very careful and first focus on the product then think about growth so when you think about a good product how do you know you have one good products lead to good retention that's it so again very basic if people are not coming back again and again to use your product you do not have retention you do not have a good product and nothing else matters so if you are seeing that in your business you have to really really just focus on that and the graph here you know this is hypothetical data but basically it's a very simple plot so all you have to do is define some measure of activity it could be just people who are using your product but they have to get value out of that so if you're messaging up it's better to use sense if you are a photo sharing app it's better to look at that feature and look at the feature usage rather than just somebody visiting and then plot that on a cohort basis of saying since number of they sign up what percentage of those members have visited and just see what that looks like over the first month second month and see if that line flattens and if it does you have a viable product you have a viable business you can start thinking about growth but if it is that second line the green line then you don't have good retention and that means sooner or later that line crosses zero so basically the people you guard that's what happened to it e the people you got early on none of them will come back again so you'll have to continuously keep acquiring these people but you run out of that and that's why you know you won't be able to grow so how do you improve the tension you can do that so if you are in a situation where you your part looks like that green line and you need to change something there are three things you can do so first one is you can change your product so you have to really listen to your users collect feedback understand what they like about the product what are the D track actors there are several methodologies here you can pick the one that works but really boil it down to the basics and say what do I need to do more of and what are the things that I need to take away from and what is that core use case that users really value and just focus on that and then get another set of users after you made those improvements plot your attention again and see how it is doing and repeat this cycle until you have good retention so that's the most common strategy and that's what you'll end up doing but in some cases what you'll find is as you dig deep that maybe you're going after too broad of a user base and in that case a better strategy is to find the segments that really cares about your product and has good retention and once you've identified that tailor your product to just that segment and try to achieve product market fit for that segment because that will ensure good retention and as long as that segment is large enough you can grow that and finally you know like even if you have your retention you can always improve it and basically that again comes back to what is the core value that your product offers and how do you get your users to experience that as soon as possible and as early as possible so a LinkedIn one of the core values people get out of is by building their network and what we have seen is that that the first incremental connection that you get is a huge predictor of longer-term retention and it's even better if it is an incoming connection request so it's one thing if I have to go find in people but if I just join and I get connection requests from somebody I know and I see the value of linking through that that is super valuable so once we realize that we basically came up with initiatives to drive more of that behavior and that led to improvements in the retention of ongoing our new members and similarly you know like it's not just for new members you can look at the people coming back and make sure they are experiencing that value on a repeat basis so we covered attention let's say you have good retention and now you want to grow the next step you know again this is where a lot of people would just look at what others are doing and try to replicate somebody else's fratty but what you really want to do is you want to think about your top metric first and that is extremely important you want to have one top metric you can have other metrics and you should and you should track that but you should have one top metric that is aligned with your business and it is aligned with the value that users receive so it's measuring some sort of value it can't be just a business metric because that won't work so a great example of this is YouTube in the early days YouTube's top metric was number of videos watched and that sort of aligns with the business you know like more videos people watch more ads YouTube can say the more money they can make it can be successful the problem with that is that doesn't measure user value accurately and that let their elements algorithms to optimize towards shorter and shorter videos and even people who would watch a video for 30 seconds and drop off because they didn't like it counted as success so they looked at that and they realized it and they change the metric to minutes watched and now that's an awesome metric because the more time people are spending on YouTube compared to TV or Facebook like that's a true measure of them finding value and that aligns very well with business as well so think what that metric is for your business and then as the founders as the CEOs as the leads of the growth teams you are championing that metric and once you clarify that then the energy of your entire company and your entire teams can be focused towards that so that's why you want it to be a single metric there's one more criteria that I like to see in this metric that it should be summable what I mean by Somerville is that you can have one team which is maybe focusing on just international expansion work completely independently you can have another team that is working on just a new user onboarding and they there can be another team that's working on grinding vital growth and they can work very separately but they can come up with targets that add up to that single metric and that allows you to operate much more efficiently so after you have a metric you want to figure out what are the best channels you need to focus on to drive growth and rather than just you know like go with a list of channel and go after the biggest one really the thing to do here is start thinking about your product and ask some very basic questions do people use search to find a solution that your product is relevant to if so then it makes sense to look at SEO and SEM as the strategies so for LinkedIn that's true people search is one of the top search categories and you know because LinkedIn is about people in the professional profiles that made SEO really big channel for us another example is do people already share your product with word-of-mouth and if that's happening you have to you know like go all in or why dollar do you think about referral programs like do everything you can to make that process of sharing that product very easy are people getting more people on the system does that improve the experience for everyone are the network effects if that's the case you know like again what other team makes sense so these are just this is not an exhaustive list by any means but this is to give an idea of what kind of questions you asked so you can identify the top channels and for most products you'll you know like find one channel that's a really big drive and you continue experimenting with others now once you have identified a channel you really need to think about what are the levels so let's say if you identified vitality as a channel then you have to think about what percentage of your existing members in white others how many people do they invite on average and when people were invited what's their conversion rate and so on so you can identify those lowers if it's SEO you can think about the top of funnel and you know like what's how much traffic you're getting or what kind of conversions again like all those details about the channels there is tons of information on that you know like you can easily construct that but the really important thing is to pick the right channel identify the lovers together with the team and then growth really requires this continuous prioritization in learning and feed by feedback cycle so you come up with the unit of execution which could be you know like a couple of weeks it's a pretty good cadence and you could have larger for your quarterly planning as well but for each you know like cycle you are doing reprioritizing you're saying okay this cycle we want to focus on just the conversion optimization this cycle I want to do focus on driving the top of funnel and prioritize your channels and lovers as the first step in there and then you want to brainstorm hypotheses as the second step so what are the things like why are people why do people invite others so I think like asking those questions is really important what is just trying to say or I'll change the color of a button or I'll test a bunch of different copy and use that to drive some hypotheses about what would make people share more in the virality example and have a list of these hypotheses and ideas and at the brainstorming stage you don't care about impact it's just about let's you know get some creativity going it get as many ideas as possible and the next step is assessing impact so for each of the ideas you want to look at your growth model and say oh this will move this lever this much which indirectly feeds into my top metric and it will move it by this much so you have a good sense of what are the biggest ideas and you want to do this even before you think about whether an idea is how expensive an idea is which is going to be the next step because you know like you want to not even invest energy and having your engineering team prioritize if all of those ideas yet so once you have identified a set of top ideas you go and you prioritize you prioritize you know you can look at you have to look at three sides of this equation so there is the impact that you already did there is a likelihood of those material materializing so what's your confidence level in that idea and that's a really good filter when you start off you know like working out these things your batting averages so you're like oh maybe in one in three ideas it's and it gets better over time you develop an intuition so you kind of baked that in as a probability of that idea actually having an impact that you thought it would and then finally there is the engineering effort and you know you can use those three things to come up with a very specific prioritized backlog that you can always be adding to and the next step is just building it experimenting learning from that and that's really crucial like when you're small just you know you don't need an strong experimentation framework but just make it scientific just have a control group in a treatment group when early days of length then we did not have an experimentation framework what we were doing was looking at the member ID and we were just saying oh if it is you know last day you just ate put them in this treatment is last year seven put them in this treatment so that's how basic it gets and you can all do that but today we have a very sophisticated experimentation platform that's both in-house we do you know like hundreds of experiments every week and that is really really key and from those experiments you learn and you come back to the beginning of the cycle and now you have learned something else so that helps you with prioritization and that helps you with hypothesis generation and so on so so that continuous process is really important so I'll wrap up with two things so hiding is really important and you have to really think about who are the people you want to be on your growth team Jack Walsh says that it's much more important to get the right people in the right jobs then what your strategy is and I've internalized that over experience as well that you want the right people in the team because strategies will change it's much harder for your teams to change and evolve it's much harder to correct a bad hiding mistake so the things we look for and things you should think about our one you know like people on the growth team or people who are responsible for growth have to be extremely analytical they have to be comfortable with data they have to be able to analyze trends they have to be able to use those patterns and trends in the data to actually draw conclusions but by themselves they should know how to get done that's the most underrated thing but it's really really important you know like a lot of people would know how to talk the talk but they cannot get stuff done and with growth the faster you move the more experiments you've done the more stuff you get out there the faster you learn and more competitive advantage you have so this is super important they have to be curious right so just don't take something of the fact because you heard from someone they have to ask why why our users acting a certain way why are people not getting our product why do the drop of so quickly and so on and they have to be able to find new ways to do things so also ask why not in addition to asking why and a great example from just this month and our team was where we have you know I mentioned SEO is important for us so we have this public profile where you know like it's searchable in Google and other search engines and that's tied to you another product within the company and that meant we had to release only once every two to three weeks and the team wanted to move much faster and they questioned that assumption of you know like those being tied and asked why not just separate that and it's not obvious you know in hindsight it's like oh that was great but most people won't ask them like oh three weeks that's what it is and we decoupled it now you can launch anytime but not only that really nice side benefit of that is that as part of decoupling pages are much more lighter weight so we actually improved our site speed and performance for that by 30 percent and that usually means better conversions and higher growth so so that's that's where you know like challenging assumptions and coming up with new ways to doing things that's really important and the final point here is prior growth experiences optional so you don't have to go looking for people who you know like have done growth I think there are very few people who have done that and meaningful scale and it's it's hard to hire them as long as you are looking for those traits you can build this like even at LinkedIn you like I think a majority of my team I have hired people have not done growth experience they've turned out to be really really amazing people and add growth so you know like that's a very common mistake people do but just be more open about it and there are certain backgrounds that are very useful to search and advertising that you know require that kind of analytical work so look for evidence of that skillset but not necessarily prior growth experience so this is just an example of how LinkedIn scrotum is structured when you are small you know you're as a founder you have to think about the growth itself at some point you scale enough to maybe hire a growth product manager and another point is it's not just one person who has to be the marketer and data scientist and programmer and have this you know like mythical growth hacker like it's a team effort so think about what skill sets your team has what you need generally speaking like growth strategy is really important so hiding your first try at having that as a p.m. I believe is important and that's the team scale so LinkedIn team right now growth team it is north of hundred and ten people and we divided in these four groups so we have the SEO team which is focusing on all the public content making it discoverable to search and conversion optimization we have the network growth team which includes products like people you may know how to get people to build their networks and connect with others we have the onboarding team which is really really important when I talked about the aha moment this is the team kind of focuses on that and makes your juices up set up for success on LinkedIn and understand the value of LinkedIn and then finally we have a team dedicated to driving engagement through email and post channel and focusing on bringing back dormant members so that's just to give an idea of how big a growth team can get over time and how meaningful impact it can continue to have across across your business finally culture so culture is really really important you have to instill as you grow and as you bring on new people onto the growth team but also generally in the company you have to really keep some values fresh and make sure people are really driving by those so the top ones for us you know are setting ambitious goals is really important you'll reach only as high as the goals you set up for yourself so very important that you continuously push the team and the rest of the company to come up with large goals and then find ways to achieve them moving fast very very important and I think like you have to make that a cultural value and make sure that your investments you know are you are continuously investing and actually making the team move fast it's okay if as part of that you know like you make mistakes you learn from them and move on data Trump's opinion very important I think a lot of the time people get into these endless debates about oh but I think this is true or now I think this is why users doing you should just look at you know like get your experimentation cost down juice so much and get your cost of answering these questions from data you already have down so much that you don't have to waste any time on those opinions you should be able to get the data and that's a much better way of learning about your users than just thinking thinking about it continuous learning again I reiterate it in the cycle but that's we treat that as a value we're always you know like we do ask when we are coming up with ideas like what will we learn from that and that's an important thing I like to emphasize and then finally celebrate your wins so at LinkedIn you know like from the very early day as we've celebrated member milestones I think that's instilled you know like sense of pride in in growth and across the company and we've done that you know when we were 100,000 and you know like members and just a small employee side to the last milestone of 300 million we're just the people in Bay Area were about a couple thousand but we always get together in our courtyard do this awesome picture with how many members we have and then we go and you know celebrate afterwards and now that we're international company actually people are taking this tradition and we're getting pictures from all our international offices which is really awesome to see as well so to sum up I hope that I have shared some questions and you know like a framework that allows you to think for yourself versus just looking at what others are doing and hopefully you know that sets you up to think about your products and grow them and be more successful thank you

Channel: Traction - A Community for Innovators

Views: 16,937

Keywords: growth hacking, growth, linkedin, aatif awan, growth marketing, marketing, startup, entrepreneur, saas

Id: bqNP0ZGLddc

Length: 27min 21sec (1641 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 23 2016