 Hey, I'm Jonathan, product strategist today, Jane Smart. And today I'm going to show you how to run a growth hacking workshop. This is going to combine hacking growth and sprint, bring them together into a one and a half hour workshop that's going to be really, really great if you're interested in growth design, growth hacking or running growth sprints yourself. Now, this video is not going to be going into a huge amount of detail about hacking growth. We'll make a separate video about that, which will go into detail and tell you what hacking growth is all about. This is going to be really about showing you how to bring a bunch of people together to run a growth workshop. And there's a couple of different names for this as well. Growth design is a common term in Silicon Valley at the moment. Hacking growth or growth hacking. So it really depends on what sort of business you're working in. Now, in a normally Jane Smart video, we would just go ahead and do every single step for you and show you how to do that in detail. But the great thing is we just came back from running a huge growth hacking workshop with over 70 people. We shot a lot of film there. So we're going to use the B-roll from that to show you how to run this workshop. And now you can really run this workshop for your own product teams internally, whether you're a product manager or designer or whatever it is. Or of course, you can run this for a large part of your company or multiple companies at the same time as we did. Now, without spending too much time giving you the background detail on what growth hacking is, I want to show you what the three most important growth metrics are that you're going to be using for the entire workshop. So from hacking growth, the three most important growth levers that you need to be watching out for in your company are acquisition, activation and retention. Now, there are other growth levers. There are other things that you can measure, for example, like engagement or reactivation, but these are the three core growth levers that are really just the best things to start tracking in the beginning and also the best frames for running this workshop. So in the very beginning of the workshop, it is important to explain to everybody what these three growth levers mean. And here's what they mean and you can screenshot this YouTube video if you just want to take these slides. We would make them available, but it's just going to be complicated to do that. So acquisition is really how do your potential customers find out about you or users, however you like to call it. When it's a product, it's more like users, but customers is a bit more universal if it's a B2B business. So how do they find you and how do they get in touch? Like how do they find your product? Where are they hearing about this thing? So the second thing is activation. So how do you turn those potential customers into paying customers or users? So when they find out about your product, how do you turn them into people who actually use your product then? Doesn't necessarily paying customers could also mean they're seeing the ads in your product. So it doesn't mean that they necessarily have to be paying. What's your conversion rate between the amount of people who come and see the product and become actual users? So that's activation. So you're activating the users and last but not least and something that's often ignored that is extremely important is retention. How do you keep them coming back? How do you keep them using the product over the long term? How do you make sure that they don't just drop off after a few weeks like most products and they never use it again? One thing that's really interesting is that retention is something that people don't talk about so often because it's not like super sexy. But as you can see here on this slide, there was a study by Bain and Company along with Earl Sasser at Harvard Business School and they found that a 5% increase in customer retention can increase profits between 25 and 95%. So retention is pretty important and it's something you definitely should not ignore. Now, once you've shown those three growth levers to the company or to whoever you're working with, you want to show them a little bit what the outcome of this workshop is going to be and the outcome of this workshop is essentially going to be simple growth experiments that can be executed within four to six weeks within your company. So we showed these slides at the start of the workshop because we wanted everyone in the room to have a clear understanding of these three growth levers and what they meant. And now we want to tell them about what the outcome of the workshop is. Where are we going to and where we're going to is that we want to have a couple of growth experiments. So this is all about the creation of growth experiments and growth experiments are essentially a four to six week genuine effort to test a theory about something that could spur growth. That's straight from the book and essentially what they look like in many cases is just like this a one pager with some detail on it, which we're going to show you the template for that in a while when we go through the workshop and essentially that's all that the company needs to come out with. So if you're having a workshop like this, what you're going to come out with is a couple of these one pagers and they're going to be put in order of priority of what needs to get executed first. And then these are basically the growth experiments that the team or the company is going to work on. They don't have to necessarily look like this week. I found a few images of growth experiments that we ran at AJ and Smart in the past. So this is an acquisition growth experiment. It was just adding the form to our website, which increased our inbound leads by up to 400%. It's crazy. Here is an SEO experiment we ran, which was basically an acquisition experiment. Sometimes it's just posted. It can be really, really simple. This is a huge one for us. How might we get our sprint story on the GV blog? That turned out really, really well. But sometimes it's like even just like a one-sentence thing. But eventually we did start to sort of turn it into a template, which I'm going to show you in a while. So here's how the workshop actually runs and we're going to go back and forth between the B-roll to show you exactly how it works. Step one, we're going to get people warmed up a little bit and find the challenges that the company or the team has with acquisition, activation or retention. Now I would recommend seven people maximum running this workshop at the same time. So if you're doing this workshop in a room like this, it should just be seven people with one facilitator and one decider. It's super important that you designate one person in the room that can make some of the final decisions and this can be the most senior person in the room or a product manager or whoever you like. It's just got to be one person who has extra votes over everyone else and one person who facilitates. The shots you're about to see right now are from this very large workshop. So it might be a bit confusing, but when we redo this video in the future, we'll short, we'll sort of show you how that all works and run one room. But hopefully this video still kind of makes sense to you. Okay, first thing we're going to do is call the sailboat exercise. And what I asked everyone in the audience to do is first I want you to write about when we're thinking about acquisition, activation and retention. I want you to write about what's really pushing us forward, what's working well for us as a company. What are some things that are really, really good, right? And a couple of examples for this like and I'm just going to pick like some of the companies mentioned in hacking growth. Twitter is a company that's mentioned in hacking growth regularly. And if you were thinking about this, so in the shots, you can see everyone's just writing alone. So everyone basically writes a few posts that's on their own without discussing what are some things that are pushing us forward? What are some things that are helping us out in the company when it comes to these things? And some examples here would be, okay, what's moving us forward? Our blog posts seem to bring in a lot of new leads. Most of our leads turn into customers. Clients, our customers, our users stay with us for years. So these are some examples of what's moving us forward and everyone on the team should try to write a few of these examples for acquisition, activation and retention. With Twitter as an example of that, one of the things that is really popular for Twitter or really helpful for Twitter when it comes to acquisition is of course people on the outside of Twitter talking about Twitter or embedding tweets into articles. So then people find out about that. So what I would write then if I was on that team, if we were running this growth workshop at Twitter, I would probably say, okay, yeah, embeds work really well. So I would write that and I would have a couple of these posted. So now once that exercise is done and I usually give them about 10 minutes, everyone one by one in the team walks up to the board or walks up to the wall or walks up to the whiteboard and sticks these post-its on one by one, which you're going to see here. And they're going to explain and they're going to say the thing that they've actually stuck up there. So this gets actually a good mood in the room already pretty quickly because the company is like, wow, we really do have these things and we are good at this. Next, what we want to do is we're going to go and do some negatives. So we want to talk about what's holding us back, right? So again, everyone on the team writes alone creates as many post-its as they possibly can about what's holding us back when it comes to acquisition, activation and retention. These examples here are again actually a little bit more about B2B and service businesses, but you can use this for everything. So, you know, some bad things about acquisition is that we really rely pretty much all on word of mouth. You know, that's something dangerous for us where it's all word of mouth, but all ads would also be a bad way to, you know, that would be a dangerous business to have if all your acquisition relies only on ads as well. So the team is going to write down every single person is just going to individually write down what are the things that are holding them back and then instead, this time instead of presenting, they're going to stick up all of these post-its randomly. They're not going to talk to each other. They're not going to discuss. Now the facilitator in the team is going to give everybody a strip of dots. Usually I give them about 10 dots each person and they're going to spend the next 10 minutes voting on what they consider to be the biggest challenges that they feel they are having subjectively. So they don't need to talk to each other. They just start voting on. Yeah, I think that's a really big problem. We need to deal with that. Okay. So next what you have is essentially a lot of, you know, post-its with dots on them and now the facilitator is going to put these post-its into categories of acquisition, activation and retention. So just really quickly reordering them. Okay. These problems are more in activation, retention, acquisition and then really, really, really quickly, the facilitator is going to put them in order of votes. So within each category, but order of votes. So you can see within acquisition, what the most important ones are within activation, what the most important ones are and within retention, what the most important problems are. Next, what we're going to do is take all the top voted blue post-its. So all of the negative things and we're going to turn them into how might we ease. Now, how might we ease? This is something you, if you, if you know the design sprint, you'll know it well. If you know design thinking, you know it well. And essentially what you're doing is you're taking it problem or you're taking a negative thing and you're turning it into an opportunity. So let me show you a quick example that we have at AJ and smart just to, just to make it clear. So if you're how might we, if you're, if your challenge is that we rely on getting all our clients through recommendations and you feel like that's a negative thing, then the how might we of that would be how might we find alternative ways to find clients that are not only based on what recommendations and word of mouth. So it's basic. It's really basic. But what you're doing is you're turning the negative thing into an opportunity that we can actually work with in the next steps. So the facilitator is now going to turn all the top voted blue postage into how might we ease and that you can, it depends on really how many boats you have, but you can pretty much ignore everything that has one vote or less. You don't have to turn those into how might we ease but everything else you're going to turn into how might we, and you just leave it categorized under these activation, acquisition and retention categories. Okay. This is a lot of stuff. I know, but once you do this a few times, it's going to get very, very easy. Okay. Next, what we're going to do is we're going to really, really quickly put together a map of the company. So a map of the company is something pretty basic, but it is also something that people find relatively confusing. So essentially the map is a really, really basic simple overview of the product or the company that you're working at. And it's a super, super extremely zoomed out version of that. And all we're looking at is this, the funnel from acquisition to retention. So at the very start on the left side, we just have the user. And on the right side, we have sort of the goal of this company. And in this case, I'm just using Twitter again, just because the hacking growth book mentions it a couple of times. And on the far right, we have like, we want people to get through their first year. And on the left, we just have users. So you can see in the acquire side, we have, you know, word of mouth, ads, articles, TV news, celebrities in the middle. We have landing page sign up. We have the basically the activation funnel. And on the right, we have once the user is in, they're being retained now. So the facilitator is essentially going to spend the next 15 minutes working with the team to create this simple, simple, simple map. And really, it doesn't need to be perfect because we're going to be using it for something very specific in the next step. So on the next step, basically what you're going to do is the facilitator is going to stick all of the how might we's onto the map at the most relevant point of the map where they make sense. So for example, if one of the how might we's was related to acquisition, then you're going to stick it on the acquisition part of the map. And what this starts to do is help you to find out which parts of the map you have most of your problems in and you do start to seek sort of a cluster because the next step is going to be important where we're going to actually create a target area and this target area just means that for today, we're only going to focus on this one lever. So today in this example, we're only going to focus on acquisition or the acquire part of the funnel. So now what you've got is a target area that your team is going to work on for this workshop. But what's really interesting is that you can leave that map up there for the next time or if you have more time in the same day to work on it, you can also come back to it. But I would really recommend just working on one growth lever at a time because there's still quite a few exercises to come and people will get a little bit tired. Okay, next thing we have is now we have our growth. Now we have our target area. We're going to go and do another exercise. So the next exercise is actually kind of fun and it's called lightning demos. Now remember the facilitator should remind the team that we're talking about one specific growth lever. In this case, we're just talking about acquisition or acquire. So what the team is going to do now and this is this is an exercise straight from the sprint book. So if you want more detail, you can check that out there or check our other videos around lightning demos, but essentially each team member is going to spend 15 minutes on their own, take out their phone or take out their laptop and look for other interesting examples of how other companies have solved similar problems to what we have when it comes to acquisition. So every person on the team is going to be searching for two to three examples and then alone, remember you're not talking to each other. And when you find an example, when the team member finds an example, all they got to do is write the product name on the top and the big idea like what's the big reason that you're showing this thing and just a few extra bits underneath. So click funnels is here an example that I like. The big idea is that it's got this custom content based industry vertical on the home page where you can kind of fill out who you are, which I think increases acquisition, but whatever, that's not really important. But essentially you write those on post-its and what happens next is after the 15 minutes is done, each member will individually present to the rest of the team and they have like two to three minutes to present in total and they just tell the team, here's what I found, here's why I find it's interesting and here's why I think it could be interesting to us. And at the very end of that session, all of these post-its just get stuck up on the board because later we're going to be able to come back and refer to them again. But what Lightning Demos does is just opens us up to different industries, different ideas and things that other people in the team maybe didn't really realize. Finally though, in Lightning Demos, you can also show things that your company has tried before, but you think didn't get executed well because many times there are growth experiments within the company that just didn't get executed, which may have a big effect. So if it is an internal experiment, same thing just write it on the post-it, present it back to the team. Okay, now that Lightning Demos is done, we're getting closer and closer to creating our first experiment. So let's move on. So now we're going to create our experiment. And before we create our experiment, I just want everyone on the team to spend 20 minutes with a clipboard, with a plain piece of paper on it, just walking around, looking at the stuff we've created so far, looking at the map, looking at the how-might-wees, looking at the Lightning Demos and just scribbling down some ideas. Nothing that they're going to show anyone else just really brainstorming by themselves, just to recuperate and remember everything we talked about over the last hour or so. And now, once they're finished that 20 minutes, I'm going to show them how to create a growth experiment. And a growth experiment looks pretty simple. And again, you should, if you want a lot more detail, you know, check out Hacking Growth because in there, they go into like a lot of really granular detail. But this is really just like in a workshop style. And this is just sort of our recommendation as AJ and SMART. So what worked well, first of all, remembering that these growth experiments are only four to six-week long experiments, these are not things that should go on an entire year. And how the experiments should look is essentially like this. So you just give it a name, you explain why you think it will work and what it's about. So it's like your hypothesis. You explain how it will be executed. Then you're going to show how we know it worked. And then at the end, you're going to decide on how long the experiment should run. So let me show you an example here. Or let me, let me just fill this out. So the experiment name can be something silly, the vertical content machine, the explanation plus hypothesis. We create custom landing pages for our top three customer types and use AdWords to drive those customers to those pages. Each page will have a contact form. I believe this will reduce confusion about what services we provide an increased lead generation. So that's just an example, action steps, decide on which segments to target, create simple landing pages for these segments, create AdWords for each segment, success criteria. How will we know if this worked? 10% more leads overall and the experiment length six weeks. Okay, so that's just an example of how simple the experiments are supposed to be. So now what's going to happen over the next 45 minutes is that each member of the team is going to individually create one experiment, something that they believe would increase acquisition, something they believe would be super useful for the company. And they can remind themselves about the lightning demos again. They can remind themselves about what are the challenges that happened on this board, looking at the how might we's again, just looking at what it is we want to solve here. And at the end of that 45 minutes, we're going to be able to vote on what's the most interesting experiments to bring to the next step. So now that we have all our experiments, we're just going to stick them up in a line on the wall and the next step is we're going to vote and see which experiments should get to the next step. Now how this is going to work is a straw poll vote. Again, straw poll vote is something from the sprint book and how this works is each member of the team is simply going to read all of the experiments. So everyone comes together and read the experiments without talking to each other without voting without doing anything and just in their own head. So this happens over the space of 15 minutes in their own head decide on which one experiment they think would be the best experiment to try for the problems that we're looking at in acquisition. Now at the end of the 15 minutes, each member gets a big dot or a post it or whatever and they write their initials on it. So mine would be JC and at the very end, the facilitator does a little bit of a countdown and everyone votes at the exact same time. Now what's going to happen next is we remove all experiments which have no votes immediately. So we already reduced the amount of experiments that we're talking about. So we remove all experiments which have no votes and leave all the experiments which have votes on the wall. Next step is pretty simple. The facilitator is going to ask each member of the team to explain why they voted. This is a great way just to kind of get the information out into the room about why they made these decisions and about what the most interesting experiments really are and that's a great way just for everyone to kind of align around. Okay, that's why that's more interesting than I thought without it having to be one big discussion. Okay, so now what we have is a handful of experiments on the wall, a couple of experiments that have just been relegated and kicked out. And now what we need to do is figure out which experiments are we going to execute first and which experiments sort of go into a backlog. So what we want to find out which experiments are the most important. Okay, let's go. How we're going to do that is step one. We're going to turn each experiment just into a blue post it. So if the experiment name is the vertical content machine, the facilitator should just turn that into a post that that says vertical content machine. Next step, we're going to create an effort impact scale. This is a really, really simple way to figure out which experiments we want to run first because many of the experiments might actually be a little bit too big to actually fit within this four to six week period and you're going to see how that works right now. So on the effort impact scale, we're going to try to place the post that's on there and how we're going to do that. It's pretty simple. The facilitator is going to stand in the middle of the effort impact, put the post each posted in the middle of the effort impact scale and ask the team impact in terms of acquisition. How much of an impact do we think this experiment will have on the company higher or lower? So they're just moving it up and down until the team sort of comes to a conclusion. That's where it should be. The second posted how much of an impact do we think this is going to have on the business higher or lower? Of course you're doing effort as well higher or lower. So the basic point is just to get a general idea of where the effort impact of each of these ideas fits on a scale like this. Again, you can watch our lightning decision jam video for way more detail on how to run that exercise. If you're if you're interested, this is just a quick overview at the end. What you do is you have all of your post that's on there and now let's show you what they mean. Anything that fits in the top left do it now. These are the experiments we want to execute immediately. These are the experiments that we should take from this workshop and execute right now and assign to people. So we need to assign these to individual people on the team and say within the next four to six weeks, these experiments need to be finished and we're going to have a meeting in four to six weeks. We're going to check on how those results were on the right hand side on the top right. These are things that are interesting, but we're not going to do them quite yet, right? We're going to try the experiments on the top left first, see how they affect acquisition and then everything on the top right. We're going to say this is something that's a little bit bigger. It's actually a project. It's something that we would really need to put a lot of company effort behind. So we're going to put that basically over here for a minute and we're going to think about pulling a team together for it, but it's not something we're going to do immediately. We're going to wait and see a little bit. So bottom left, we're going to try to just make this a task that falls into the backlog. It's something that we may never do. It's something that's very low on priority, but we just want to remember it so we just record it. Bottom right, forget everything here for now. And at AJ and SMART, what we do is we literally just throw these ones away, even though you can feel pretty precious about it. So that's basically the workshop and now one thing that's kind of missing from all of this is like, how do you record and track these experiments? Now that's something that every company does a little bit differently. There are a couple of different apps that you can use to like write these things up, stick them in and then track them within that app. There's a product called North Star, which actually Sean Ellis from Hacking Growth has created. We'll link that down in the description. We're not getting any money for recommending that. We actually use Google Sheets and we'll eventually talk about exactly how we record it, but you don't need to worry about that right now. Your recording system is not as important immediately as just being able to create these experiments on a basic level, but use whatever you do right now just to create a backlog. Use whatever your company uses, whether it's Trello, whether it's Asana, whatever it is. All you need to do is create these experiments, prioritize them and then execute these things. Now, one question you might have is why did we have a decider in this workshop when there was no specific decisions having to happen? Well, what might happen in the workshop at this point is that people in the team start to not really agree with the priority of where these things sit on the effort impact scale. And that's the point where the facilitator can say, Decider, what do you think? And the decider says, I think it should go there. So it's just a way to break any ties that sort of come up within the team and it's a great way just to make sure you don't get stuck. So essentially that is the workshop and hopefully this video, hopefully this quick overview helps you to understand how to run your own growth hacking workshop or your own growth design workshop or your own growth sprint, as we called it in this case. Again, this is our first video on this topic. We're just trying it out and we hope it sort of makes sense. Like I said, there is another video called Lightning Decision Jam, which we'll link here, which goes into a lot of these exercises in a lot more detail because we're taking a lot of the exercises from that. And I hope you like this. I hope it helps you a little bit to give you a view inside one of our new workshops that we're going to be trying out in 2019 can definitely recommend reading hacking growth. Of course, I can recommend reading sprint. If you like this video, please give it a like. Please subscribe and do let us know in the comments what you'd like to hear more of when it comes to this growth hacking thing, what you'd like to know more about and how you felt about this video and if you're going to try it. So thanks so much and have a great one. Bye bye. So if you're interested in. No, no, no, no, don't touch me. Next step is pretty simple. The facilitator is going to