 Hi, I'm U1. I'm a product designer and facilitator, and in this video I'm going to show you how to run a remote workshop to create actionable growth hacking experiments in 90 minutes or less, even if you've never run a workshop before. Let's go. So what is growth hacking? Growth hacking is a marketing strategy primarily used by startups and small businesses. It focuses on rapid growth, and it's a term that was coined by author Sean Ellis back in 2010 when he wrote the book Hacking Growth. The book describes a process by which a company uses creative and low-cost strategies to gain as many customers or users as possible while spending as little as possible. Now growth hacking is not about traditional marketing strategies, instead it focuses on cross-functional teams working together, usually a blend of marketers, developers, engineers, and product people. They work together to experiment, innovate, and identify the most effective and efficient ways to grow their product and their business. So in traditional marketing this might mean this team puts together a cool campaign on social ads. That is not growth hacking. Growth hacking is essentially where you try to design and build your product to include features that incentivize users to promote the product itself. Some examples that make it a little bit easier to understand the concept and beyond the buzzword growth hacking. Dropbox for example, when they launched they designed their product in the sense that they offered more storage space if you promoted it and invited your friends to join Dropbox. If we go even further back, Hotmail, they did a cool thing when you used their product added at the end of each email you sent via Hotmail. It's said at the end, PSI love you, get your free email at Hotmail. That little line that you might recognize from the iPhone as well, it says send from my iPhone. Those are typical growth hacking tactics. That tactic essentially turned the product into its own marketing system. So way different than doing a campaign on social media for example. Some quick basics about this workshop. The time it takes to complete it is around 90 to 120 minutes. I recommend you schedule at least two hours so in the best case scenario you can give people back some time rather than trying to extend the workshop. The recommended amount of people to join would be around three up to 10 people. Bringing on more than 10 people will make you struggle with time management. And who should partake? Try to think cross-functional as much as possible. Obviously the team working on a product. That is usually a product owner, developer and designers. Maybe if you have a growth hacker on the team, data analysts and sometimes marketers. And what experience do you need? Essentially none. This video is aimed at you in a product team that is fairly unfamiliar with running a workshop, but would love to take a stab at it. Alright, so now we're in our workshop board. We're ready to get started with this growth hacking workshop. Almost. There's some prep to do first. I'm using Miro here. I'm going to assume that you're somewhat familiar with Miro already. If you're not, there are plenty of videos on the Adrian Smart channel to get acquainted. But anyway, you have some prep to do here. In this template you will find this little sticker here. Be the guide, not the hair sticker. And that little sticker highlights everywhere you need to do some preparation. And let's look at the first thing that I want to talk about. Pretty big step. The challenge at hand. So this is a problem solving workshop. You have a product problem probably. Maybe you're losing customers. Maybe your onboarding sucks. You have issues activating customers that signed up. There could be plenty of different problems. You need to have made some homework before inviting your participants to the workshop and define what your problem is. If you need more help doing that, there's a great video on our channel called a problem-framer workshop. So that step is not part of this workshop. We're assuming you've done that before. But what you need to do here is to frame that problem as a how might we question. The how might we question is a classic design thinking technique that helps you reframe problems into questions that help you generate ideas better. So an example reframing might be if many users are cancelling their paid plan, that might become how might we convince users that are cancelling to stay on the paid plan. I'll actually write that down here. How might we convince users cancelling to stay on a paid plan? Framing it like a question like this makes it a lot easier for us to ideate. The next step is actually copying that challenge and pasting it all across the board here. You see that we have this repeat blue stickies here. Everywhere you see that you copy and paste it. So the reason why we're doing this is that for example if someone is working all the way here down to the far right they don't have to scroll all the way back up here to remind themselves what was the challenge now again. What are we working on? Okay so step two is updating participant names and we have a bunch of boxes here where you see participant name, participant name. You double click that and write down the name of the user. These two we've paired together so they're next to each other. Then we have these voting tags and delete the ones you don't need. Also by the way don't forget to delete the be the guy not the hero sticker once you're done with the prep. You see here we have a decider. Now a decider is simply a person of this team that gets the role decider. It's just a function during the workshop that helps make a final call about which experiment we're actually gonna go for. We're all gonna vote but someone needs to make the final call if we end up in a tie in the voting and essentially someone that you know manages the resources. So the decider is usually the product owner or the team lead in some fashion. It doesn't have to be that's just commonly that's the person that ends up being the decider. So you obviously also have to prepare that person before joining the workshop that this step you're gonna have the decider role which just means that you'll make a final call a decision about what which experience we actually go for. So I'm gonna make Jacob the decider here so actually he doesn't vote he's gonna vote after everybody else. There we go. And one little nuance when doing a remote workshop is that you might choose to share your screen while doing all of these introduction stuff but I prefer to actually get people involved and being on the board in the mirror board as soon as possible. So then in mirror you can use the bring everyone to me feature when presenting stuff like this. So as the facilitator you can click your little avatar here and then there's this feature bring everyone to me that will make sure that everyone that's on the board their cursors will go and follow you automatically on the board and it's very helpful because people are inevitably gonna look around on the board and be like away all over the here and like sneak peeking on what's coming next and so on. So in order to keep them focused use that feature to help everyone follow along when you're demonstrating things as the facilitator. All right time for the first actual workshop exercise which is lightning demos. A lightning demo is a great and fun workshop method to generate tons of inspiration before going into the brainstorming and ideation mode. It helps people get their creative uses flowing before you try to come up with your own ideas. And lightning demos is essentially where you look at how other companies of products have solved similar challenges that you have and present them lightning fast to the rest of the team so that you get a chance to get some more inspiration essentially. In this section there's quite a lot of instructions to walk through and I usually make a point of again of course to bring everyone to me and I show them around the board here and I explain now we're gonna do lightning demos. This is an exercise where you are all tasked to capture one or two examples of inspiring examples of products that have solved the same challenge that we have and then I show the how might we question that we have how might be commits user cancelling to stay in a paid plan. The lightning demo format looks like this you explain the big idea that you found you place on screenshots and you write some stickies about what you like about this solution and if it's applicable you add a link to that example so you can refer back to it later. Let me show you an example and then I always scroll over to show the example showing the example is really important for the participants to understand what they're expected to produce you see in the blank template is usually not enough so always show an example so here's an example from the headway app that has this salvage offer they pull up when you try to unsubscribe from their plan here's what I like about it here's a link to it you can read more and in general the the big idea of it and a screenshot. Make sure that you stay focused on the how might we question that we have defined if you need more if you want to produce more than one example that's perfectly fine you have some backups down here and whilst doing this exercise it's perfectly fine to turn off your camera and mic we're going to spend at least 15 minutes doing this so that's perfectly fine and before you let them start also explain clearly that this is an exercise done together but alone we will be doing this exercise in complete silence there will be no discussion allowed you will go out on your own and do this work and they will return later and present a pitch to each other so for now for 15 minutes go online find inspiring examples put them on the board in complete silence and we'll return back here in 15 minutes do you have any questions and yeah once you've given them the instructions nobody has any questions they will have questions so answer those first but then set the timer for 15 minutes and they're likely so that many people are going to turn off their cameras and mics whilst doing this which is fine but remind them when you come back when the timer has run out to turn on their cameras again so that you can engage with them and make sure they're actually ready to listen to the next instruction so 15 minutes let's go 15 minutes have almost passed and your participants hopefully by now have produced at least two lightning demos per person if you notice that people aren't fully finished yet make sure they ask before the timer runs out does anyone need more time and you'll simply add another minute or two to the timer if not let the timer run out and it's time to introduce the next exercise which is heat mapping so heat mapping the purpose of this is primarily to get your participants to actually read and look through everyone else's lightning demo examples before we move on to actually picking a favorite and pitching that to the rest of the group so you simply ask the participants to first bring everyone to me and can be nice also to prepare people before you click that button i'm now going to bring everyone to me it can be quite jarring if you do that whilst people are still writing or doing something so give them a heads up click bring everyone to me and then give the instructions we're now going to create some heat places many dots as you wish on things you find interesting in the different lightning demos and there's no limit of the amount of dots you have per person just go nuts and place them on anything you find interesting and then i usually do it like this i make a copy instead of dragging it all the way like so and then i show the participants that yeah for example i find this interesting here there's these big numbers in the screenshots here i found that interesting put one one dot there i find this interesting still very easy to ignore anything that's cancelled no apparent dark patterns which feels like a responsible move by spotify find that really interesting and once you've shown that simply ask if the participants have any questions if not you're going to get 10 minutes to read through every single lightning demo place a heat map dot on anything you find interesting any questions no put the timer 10 minutes and let's go all right when the timer is up you should see something like this where you have a lot of sticky dots and you're seeing these kind of heat maps where people seem to be the most interested we can see there are obviously a lot of more dots here in the spotify example seems to be more heat on the grammarly example some less heat here so that just gives us some insight on what people seem to be most inspired by but again remember this heat mapping exercise is mostly to get all the participants reading every single lightning demo all right the next step is to pick a favorite so you bring everyone to you again and show them this section here it's time to pick favorite and you tell the participants ask yourself which one do i find the most inspiring and i want to present as a good inspiration of how we might solve our challenge you simply pick your name and put it on the example you like the most so for me my name is you one i'm gonna cut that one and i liked the spotify example here from jonathan the best so i want to present that i just put my name tag here like so but tell the participants that if they notice that two or three people already have put their names on one of the lightning demos maybe it's a good idea to actually choose one of the other ones to present ask them also to prepare a short pitch with like a one or two bullet points of what you find interesting about this example in particular and how they think it might help solve your challenge since they already have spent a lot of time looking through these picking a favorite they should already have an idea what they think is the best one and so you're just gonna put three minutes on the clock again ask them if they have questions if not three minutes on the clock pick your favorite now when the three-minute timer has run out or you notice that everyone has already put their names out you can just stop the timer and move on to pitching so pitching is very easy you just instruct people to take one minute maximum per person to just present their bullet points and their ideas of why they liked that example in particular and as the facilitator of course you will direct who gets to talk first and who gets to talk next i usually go from top left to right and move downwards i keep makes it easier and make sure i don't lose track of who has spoken and who has not spoken yet i see here that top left that's jonathan so i'll just tell jonathan jonathan please take one minute and pitch why you like this youtube premium example i'll put one minute on the clock and ask him to start speaking if jonathan runs out over time that's okay let him continue finish up his thought but if he continues if a person continues more than like 30 seconds maybe like gently ask them to try wrapping up we need to make sure that we have time to get everyone to present while people are speaking here's facilitator trick try to capture their thoughts using sticky notes so that everyone sees and gets this you know gets the discussion visualized which is a great practice every time you run a workshop so jonathan starts talking here about youtube premium so as the facilitator just add add stickies that summarizes the discussion points by the person pitching when the timer's up you simply say thank you jonathan great input now jacob go ahead present when the timer is out you move on to the next person essentially and just ask them to repeat one minute on the clock and present why you find this example inspiring and when everyone is done we're ready to move on to the most exciting part generating new ideas for new experiments now your team is probably brimming with ideas they'd like to share with the team and the beauty of this next exercise is that even participants that would describe themselves maybe as uncreative they can contribute a lot here because we're using a template now to produce an experiment a growth hack experiment and this template here helps people produce concepts with a lot of clarity and more structure and as you might have guessed you as the facilitator you're gonna start off this section with giving some instructions per usual bring everyone to you and click your avatar bring everyone to me so they'll follow along and tell them now it's time for you to formulate a growth experiment your task is to produce one idea that you want to pursue and turn it into an experiment that we can try in the following next weeks i'm going to show you an example first you show them this first of all give your an experiment a catchy name i named this one upgrade buttons utopia you move on to populate your idea your general idea and your hypothesis meaning what you expect is going to happen if this idea is realized then be granular and write down the actions that needed to implement and test this idea and some success criteria is obviously important when we're doing actual experiments here how will we know that this idea or growth hack experiment actually worked or not for example here uh we want to add a simply an upgrade button to this bank at this is actually a screenshot from the bank here revolute and i found that you know maybe we can try that in our own app just an upgrade button in the profile screen and i for example thought success criteria might be 5% increase of account upgrades after release of the experiment you don't have to go into this much detail going through the example let the participants look through them themselves but after you've shown the example show all the participants that they have their own area to work in here and that remind them again that we have this how might we question that supposed to focus our ideas this is a solution or an experiment that should help solving this challenge ask them if they have any questions and if not set the timer for 15 minutes and let your participants go nuts you might also notice here that we only have one idea template per person it is of course okay to produce more than one idea and you can highlight for the participants that you have duplicates here below which they can you drag up and populate but at least one experiment per person is what is expected from them all right if they don't have any more questions put the timer again on 15 minutes and let them go crazy all right time is up and hopefully your team now has produced a bunch of experiments that you can implement but of course we can't really run with all of them this is a team of five we have five experiments probably unlikely that your team has bandwidth to run and produce all five of these at the same time so we're gonna actually vote and pick our top three you might choose in your team to actually vote for just top one or top five i don't know it depends on your preference but i'd recommend just going no more than three and the the ideas that you leave behind that you do not vote for of course they can be picked up and tested later when you have the bandwidth to do them and one thing i forgot to mention before going into voting here this is a good time to introduce a break give your participants five minutes to stretch their legs go grab a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom it's very recommended to introduce at least one break in a two hour session when you're doing it remotely because remote sessions can be very energy draining anyway assuming people are back from their break or their production of an experiment it's now time to vote again we bring everyone to us bring everyone to me and you can hear again mentioned similar things i just said to the participants we're gonna vote on experiments we want to try first and we can't pick them all right now so that's why we're making a decision you all get three dots each to vote with you can put these voting dots on all the ideas here you can vote on your own you can put all three dots on just one idea or you can spread them out on three different ideas it's your call after we've done that the decider which is yokub so once we voted it's time to yokub to do to make the final decision and to pick our top three experiments to actually go for and finally ask if anyone has any questions if they don't put 10 minutes on a timer and tell people go vote all right so 10 minutes of voting is starting to run out you can of course pause the timer if people seem to have finished before you run out of the 10 minutes time but other than that it should look something like this people have voted on the the whole idea here it's not like lightning demos where you put your voting dots on different parts here or screenshots or you vote on the entire experiment essentially this is actually a quite common scenario here where you can see that we actually have top vote three votes here three votes here two two and two we don't actually have a very clear top three experiments here which is perfectly fine because we are now going to defer to our decider to make that final voting in this case this is yokub in the this fictional team uh he is going to be the decider and he's going to make a choice using these stars using three experiments to go for the way I usually introduce this exercise is I tell the team okay team great job voting we now have some very nice experiment candidates to pursue but we can't go for them all we have to make a choice of three of them the ones we don't choose now we can go for later don't worry about it but our decider yokub will now make the final call of which three to go for so yokub it's time for you to place your votes and while you do this please think out loud and ask the team what they are thinking and tell them why you choose the way you do discussion is actually encouraged in this part does anyone have any questions if not I will set the timer for five minutes and we'll go ahead that's usually how I introduce it and put the timer in five minutes and our decider will make the final call and it might look like this yokub he actually goes for this one he goes for that one the feature highlighter and then he talks to the team a little bit and makes the final call that actually the cancellation feedback loop idea where we are going to capture input on why people are quitting our app is a good experiment to test all right that's our top three decided as the facilitator you might also as a final step make a copy of that move over here click with your cursor paste you'll have your top voted experiment number one over here putting the top voted concepts over here makes it a little bit more clean when you return to this board here to when you start implementing the ideas essentially it makes it very clear for people that weren't part of the workshop it gets a link to this mirror board to also find it and see okay these are the top three experiments we're going for and also if you had time left on the clock on the workshop you might take some time to further discuss some of the action steps here or how we're actually going to implement and do these experiments so you can of course use the practice of visualizing discussions and take notes when people are talking so that you don't go around the loops and talk about stuff you've already talked about anyway that is the end of the workshop you have three hopefully cool experiments to test you know what to do you know how to implement them you know how to test them and what makes them successful or not all right the next part welcomes next the momentum the following up like it's really important that after you've completed this workshop that you instantly schedule some time to get it with the relevant people start doing all of the activities that are proposed in the action steps so keep the momentum going and make sure these ideas and experiments actually get implemented now depending on your team structure in this workshop and how many people that participate there are probably a few people that aren't going to be fully involved in designing and implementing all of these experiments so make sure also that you are following up and sending information to the participants that were part of this about how the experiments are progressing now wrapping up hopefully this workshop will run somewhat smoothly for you but don't worry if it doesn't every workshop is bound to have some hiccups on obstacles regardless if you're a pro seasoned professional or a complete newbie the key mindset here is to be comfortable with improvisation and speaking of improvisation this format here this template i should say is providing you a pretty rigid structure to follow but if you have less time on your hands you can compress it even more you can completely kill the lightning demo section which makes the workshop a little bit less fun and you won't have as much you know width of ideas when you go into ideation instantly but it can work you can also trim down the heat mapping and the pitching of the different lightning demos if you prefer to remove a little bit there there are different ways of transforming this workshop so that if it's you and your requirements and there you have it now you know how to run a remote growth hacking workshop so you can help your team create more actionable growth hacking experiments i hope this video was helpful for you and if you want to see more videos like this make sure to subscribe and hit the bell and if you want to learn more about facilitation and workshops make sure to join our free facilitation community over there you'll find thousands of facilitators sharing their experiences resources and tips and the link to that community is in the description below thanks for watching and see you next time