- Man, my hands are all red.
Those muscle-ups, man, they'll really tear your hands apart.
(upbeat music)
Ha, tempo tested!
To generate predictable results in your growth,
I am pumped today.
I don't know if you've ever been frustrated with your team's
kind of iteration around ideation of testing different
ideas and marketing, and you really don't feel like there's
a process or you're making any results,
and it just feels wasteful.
I want to show you a way that I learned.
I feel so lucky to have been exposed to this process,
where you create a very structured, very predictable,
very systematic way of creating predictable growth
in your startup.
I was lucky to meet guy named Sean Ellis, who is the creator
of the word growth hacking back in the day.
In 2008, I met Sean and we became friends,
and over the years, when I ran into issues,
I would always reach out to him.
He also created the customer development survey,
some incredible questions, the concepts of a must-have,
you know, asking somebody if they're very disappointed,
and all these other things.
But in regards to growth, this has probably been
the most impactful.
When I was building my company, Clarity, I remember
reaching out to Sean and talking about the results
of our surveys, but really, thinking about how do I
structure the team to be able to focus, on a sprint
by sprint basis, the growth of the company so that it wasn't
just arbitrary, but actually had structure
and systematization to it that followed a metric.
And that's when Sean talked to me about
the North Star Metric, or NSM.
So I'm gonna walk you through the pieces of a high-tempo
testing, how to execute it, so you're gonna want to
write this down, and how to monitor and improve your cycle.
So the first thing you're gonna need is a North Star Metric,
and the way I think about this is, it's value captured.
So whatever your product does, there needs to be some value
created to the user, and you need to figure out
what's the measurement, what's the heartbeat that,
no matter what department you're working in, from support
to sales to marketing, that that number, if it goes up
and to the right, is a positive outcome to how
the product's performing for your customer.
So, for example, daily active uses is what Facebook uses,
because if you have most of your users, I mean,
I think the number's 80% on a monthly basis,
80% of almost two billion people use Facebook
on a monthly basis. (imitating explosion)
That's crazy!
AirBnB uses bookings, how many bookings per night,
because every team, from support to the product team
to marketing to partnerships, all that stuff,
all pushed towards that number, growing.
For us at Clarity, the number we up with was
completed calls, because, same concepts as booking.
If we were a marketplace that allowed two entrepreneurs
to get on the phone to help kind of overcome their
challenges or achieve their goals, then the more
completed calls that were occurring on a daily basis,
we knew we were growing the business, right?
Word of mouth, product usage, revenue.
You need to figure out what your North Star Metric is,
and you put that up and to the right.
So that's what everybody's focused on.
What is our true North Star measurement out of all
the other metrics, and you could have dozens,
what is the one that we all agree, that captures the value
that we're creating for a customer?
So then we talk about the process of high-tempo testing.
There's four very specific stages of testing
and iteration around it.
The first one is ideation.
It's all about coming up with as many ideas for testing
as possible, and there's really two different types of test
that you're gonna want to focus on.
One is a discovery test and the other one
is an optimization test.
Discovery tests are focused on getting some data
or learning about the product, and it still has
the same concept of, I have a hypothesis, this is what
I think it is, and here's the result, so you still make it
a test, and then the optimization tests are,
okay, now that I have some data
and I know, directionally speaking,
kind of where we're at with that, it could be SEO,
it could be conversions in a funnel, it could be
email clickthroughs, the optimization is about,
I think we can improve our open rates,
or I think we can improve our SEO to signup metric,
or whatever it is in the product, and that is a test,
that idea is captured, and what you wanna do is have as many
people, when you're doing the ideation, in the room,
throwing up ideas,
focused on the North Star Metric.
So once you have that, then the second step
is to prioritize, and prioritize is really about rank
ordering, and this is why I call it growth stacking,
it's what do I do today versus tomorrow versus next week.
For teams that have a dedicated growth team,
you want to be running two to three experiments per week.
So how do you prioritize?
You use the ICE method, and the ICE method
is pretty simple and straightforward.
It stands for impact, so what do you think the impact's
gonna be on the core metric that you want to test.
The second thing is confidence.
I use a scale of one to five, so whatever the scale is,
one to five.
So, one to five confidence, do we know how to do this,
do we think it's gonna work?
Second is, impact, then confidence, so impact,
one to five, confidence, one to five, and then finally,
easy, question mark.
How easy is it for us to make this change?
Is it super easy?
Which is, like, I think it would be a five.
Or is it gonna be a one, meaning it's gonna be super hard.
So you want to measure it, because you want to tally up
the score so that you have the highest score at the top.
The highest impact, the highest confidence, and is it easy,
has the highest score for being easy.
That number, tallied up, will rank order your ideation
so that you know where to start.
So that ideation, prioritize, and then third step
is to run the test.
Now, the way to do that is, ideally, use an agile
development process, and you use sprints,
so you do a two-week sprint on this test.
Now, this is different than product development.
A lot of people confuse bug fixes, product development,
with the growth and high-tempo testing.
It's not, it's a separate team, ideally, or maybe
the existing team, but a very clear focus on moving
the North Star Metric up and to the right.
So, you run the test, two-weeks sprints.
And then what's cool, and most people forget this step,
is you want to report on the findings.
What did you learn?
And you want to save that in a knowledge base.
On the low level, you want to save that
in some kind of document.
On a higher-end process, you can use a tool,
there's many other incredible tools out there today
that you can use to capture and share that information
with your team, then you take that and you go back up.
Ideation step, prioritize using ICE, test it using sprints,
and then again, report and save that in the knowledge base.
That process is high-tempo testing,
moving your North Star Metric up and and to the right.
I know that, for many of you guys, you might feel like,
well, this is another thing I've got to do within my team,
but I just wanna challenge you to maybe look at
a new resource that's just focused on this.
It could be a part-time developer,
it could be an intern,
it could be taking 20% time, maybe every Friday,
you guys focus on just running experiments for growth,
and that's your rhythm.
But it's really important to have it on a weekly basis.
Some teams, some portion of your time, focused on growth,
not just building features.
So, as per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger
life and a bigger business, and I'll see you next Monday.
If you like this video, be sure to subscribe
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