Y Combinator Best Practices for Establishing a Growth Program

A Thought Leader Guest Post from  Anu Hariharan of Y Combinator:

Growth Guide: How to Set Up, Staff and Scale a Growth Program 

Advice from 25 preeminent growth experts at top startups

“Growth hacks,” like Hotmail’s inclusion of a signup link in its user’s default email signature, can be extremely helpful in driving viral growth early in a product’s path to product market fit (PMF). However, sustaining long-term growth and reaching hundreds of millions of users requires a scientific approach to growth. In fact, growth experts resoundingly say that “growth hacking” isn’t in their vocabulary or something they relate to their work.

“Hacking” implies a haphazard / gut-driven approach, and the reality is quite the opposite. Startups that have seen amazing growth have developed teams and processes that are intentional, exceedingly metrics-driven, and thrive on experimentation.

To foster a scientific approach to growth, we’ve recently seen many companies break away from a strictly functional organizational design (with product, engineering, marketing, etc.) to create a cross-functional growth team. Facebook is, by all accounts, the pioneer of the growth team. Its first growth team was formed a decade ago with 3 people whose impact was immediately evident. Facebook launched the growth team when it had ~50 million monthly active users (with roughly flat month-on-month growth). The growth team and its surrounding program became a key driver of Facebook’s rapid expansion to 2 billion monthly active users today, as well as the evolution of the core Facebook product. Following Facebook’s lead, most successful consumer startups have created growth teams. Interestingly, these teams have converged around many of the same best practices.

The Y Combinator Continuity team gets a lot of questions from founders on formalizing growth. Everyone is eager to understand when to hire their first dedicated growth product manager (PM), how to structure a growth team, and how to scale it over time.

So, we spent time with 25 growth experts, who have worked at companies (including Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Stitch Fix, Square, Slack and Instagram — full list below), to identify best practices for establishing a growth program.

Here are the topics covered in this guide:

• When to invest in growth

  • Check your retention (+ examples)
  • Good retention / bad retention

• Building your growth team

  • The most common makeup
  • The ideal PM candidate
  • The ideal engineer candidate
  • The ideal data scientist candidate
  • When to hire your initial growth team

• To Do: Your growth team’s first year

  • Set an absolute goal and define key metrics (+ examples)
  • Identify growth channels (+ examples)
  • Establish systems & tools
  • Establish user research
  • Continue to iterate

• Where should the growth team sit?

• Growth in your DNA

• Thanks

When to Invest in Growth

A great way to waste money, resources, and jeopardize the future of your company is to invest in a growth program before you’ve proven you can retain customers. In other words, it’s best not to...

Read the rest of this article at blog.ycombinator.com...

Thanks for this Guest Post to Anu Hariharan, a Partner with the YC Continuity Fund, of Y Combinator.

Image by kalhh from Pixabay.

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