Currently, we hear about Growth all the time. On the Internet, lectures, and events. But why has this term become so popular? To better understand, we will show first what has been practiced in the market.

When it comes to technological development, the digital product must be on continuous evolution and improvement. So that firstly, it continues to attract and retain users, secondly, it is used more often and for longer, which means being more useful, and thirdly, it offers a great experience.

Growth Hacking

Most famous and most talked-about term. It became known through Sean Ellis when he described what he did when he had to put a person in his place to continue his work. This work consisted of finding opportunities/loopholes (hacks) to create specific strategies aimed at rapid results for the growth of the company. If you want to know more about it, we indicate the book “Hacking Growth” which was written by Sean Ellis himself and Morgan Brown.

Product-Led Growth (PLG)

Product-Led Growth is an evolution in the customer acquisition process, where the product itself is used to acquire and retain users. PLG analyzes the user’s behavior to find the time when users are most conducive to making a purchase. If the product does not generate a specific revenue but was created – for example – to lower an operating cost, you can use it to better understand why users have given up using this product and work to retain them or bring this user back.

For a product to be able to promote itself, we can implement Growth actions more daringly. The main requirement is to cause a sensational user experience, without this, the product can have a reverse effect and instead of growing positively, it can increase the number of people who speak badly and negatively affect the company’s brand. To understand PLG better, Wes Bush describes in his book “Product-Led Growth” a very interesting way of creating a product that sells itself.

Growth-Driven Design (GDD)

Making a translation closer to the term, Growth-Driven Design is a growth-oriented development methodology. The goal is to shorten delivery times to focus on what will cause the greatest impact on the customer.

To start working with these small actions it is important to point out that the Product needs to have found the Market Fit, that is, the product has been received by the market in a positive way, the product meets a need, and people want it and need it.

Once the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is in production, the GDD will set a series of small deliveries. This will allow you to try a strategy to leverage your product, either from a feature that is in production or from a feature that is still in the backlog. It is necessary to make sure that it is worth investing in its development, creating, and testing an experiment on your product.

In GDD everything becomes an experiment, and, for this, it is necessary to measure to see if it worked or not. If an experiment is invalidated, the idea is to learn from the result and thus have a constant process of improvement.

Data-driven

What Growth, in everything we have seen above, has in common with is that we are looking at data all the time. The growth of a digital product cannot be directed from opinions or good practices, but rather on arguments based on solid information. Sometimes we believe so much in something, that we let our perceptions influence our decision-making and focus on what will not generate value and impact the growth of the company. In Growth, any discovery becomes a hypothesis to be validated and we obtain the answers by measuring the data.

Data Examples:

• User behavior data
• Service data
• Support data
• User search data
• Market data, what the market is doing again, what technologies

Use your digital product to leverage company indicators

Every digital product is created with a purpose, either to increase the company’s revenue or to lower an operational cost, there is always a business indicator that guides the reason why that product has been launched. Therefore, Growth has become so popular; it is possible to further enhance these indicators.

A funnel that helps us pursue these indicators is an adaptation of Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics (AARRR); in it, we analyze the customer lifecycle through its conversion. The acronym AARRR comes from Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Reference/Recommendation, and Revenue.

Each product can use a part of this funnel or it complete. An example of this is to focus on growing the number of users of the product. This, consequently, generates an increase in revenue, average ticket, profitability, etc., and retention and engagement, because the more users use the digital product and solve themselves, the less the users (customers) will cost the company.

Other business indicators that we can leverage with Growth:

• Increased productivity, capacity, quality
• Increased customer satisfaction and NPS
• Increased saving – decrease in operational cost, expenses, contact rate

New approach 

We can see that in the coming years the way digital products are developed will be changed. The development time spent will be focused even more on what really makes sense and meets a real market need. The change will begin in the way we develop the new features and improvements, using the experiments to test the strategies created. Finally, most importantly, decisions will be made through data to drive digital product growth in a way that significantly affects the business.

By Ana Cristine Veneziani, Head of Growth.