A happy loquat.
A happy loquat.

Subscribe to loquat

Subscribe to loquat
Share Dialog
Share Dialog
<100 subscribers
<100 subscribers

I often hear that organizational support is the easiest way to build a user growth team, coordinate resources for growth projects, and achieve growth goals. This kind of thinking exposes a serious problem -- the organizational underpinning of user growth is often the most overlooked. "The only skill in the world that can't be broken is fast" is also true when it comes to user growth, especially in a highly competitive environment. The essence of user growth is to change subjective cognition into objective cognition through data-driven iterative testing and exchange the redundancy of testing for the certainty of growth. If rapid iterative testing is not possible, growth potential energy cannot be formed. It is impossible to achieve rapid iterative testing by raising demand, going ahead with production and research, and making large schedule. Therefore, this is also the basis for the organization to consider user growth. There are four common organizational forms for user growth.

First, one of the existing functional teams, such as the product team, operations team, or marketing team, will do user growth. The biggest problem with this type of organization is that teams are often limited by their own working perspective, which prevents them from maximizing the integration and utilization of all resources for user growth from a company-wide perspective. If the user growth team is not the product team, there will be a lot of challenges in scheduling growth projects, because the priorities of user growth work often conflict with the priorities of the product team, and this conflict will be reflected in the specific project scheduling. This is the only organization that doesn't require a dedicated user growth team. Second, establish a dedicated project growth team whose functions are primarily the responsibility of the growth project manager. His specific work includes: formulating growth strategies, proposing growth ideas and designing growth plans; at the same time, as the PMO (project management center), promoting project implementation and obtaining results, and being responsible for the growth results.

The advantage of this type of organization is that there are professional people responsible for user growth, but the difficulty of coordinating resources is often greater than in the first type of organization, because the team members may not come from any of the original departments and have no roots. Third, set up a special user growth team. The product, R&D, operation, marketing, PR (public relation, PR) and other teams will send BP (business partner) to support the user growth team. The performance of these BPS is determined by the head of the user growth team or primarily based on the input of the user growth team, resulting in a growth FT (functional team). Moreover, most of these BPS are dedicated to user growth. In contrast, teams like marketing or PR don't have the same intensity of demand for user growth projects as R&D, so these teams can invest in part through BP. Compared with the previous two organizational forms, this organizational form is a huge improvement, because it has formed a soft closed-loop, is more efficient in user growth project iteration, and brings more potential growth. Fourth, create a dedicated user growth team that spans its own product, R&D, operations and marketing functions to create a small hard closed loop. This form of organization is the fastest and least iterative. Because the establishment of such an organizational structure will often face various challenges, such as: how to solve the problem of team members' career development, how to establish the corresponding support system within the company, how to eliminate the dissatisfaction of other functional departments, etc. In general, it's entirely understandable that we want to build a user growth team in a way that has minimal impact on the existing organization. However, from the perspective of user growth efficiency, if user growth is not worth the big organizational changes we need to make to ensure growth efficiency, then it is not that important in our minds. It sounds incredible to do things in the same way or organization and expect different results, but that's what we do all the time!


I often hear that organizational support is the easiest way to build a user growth team, coordinate resources for growth projects, and achieve growth goals. This kind of thinking exposes a serious problem -- the organizational underpinning of user growth is often the most overlooked. "The only skill in the world that can't be broken is fast" is also true when it comes to user growth, especially in a highly competitive environment. The essence of user growth is to change subjective cognition into objective cognition through data-driven iterative testing and exchange the redundancy of testing for the certainty of growth. If rapid iterative testing is not possible, growth potential energy cannot be formed. It is impossible to achieve rapid iterative testing by raising demand, going ahead with production and research, and making large schedule. Therefore, this is also the basis for the organization to consider user growth. There are four common organizational forms for user growth.

First, one of the existing functional teams, such as the product team, operations team, or marketing team, will do user growth. The biggest problem with this type of organization is that teams are often limited by their own working perspective, which prevents them from maximizing the integration and utilization of all resources for user growth from a company-wide perspective. If the user growth team is not the product team, there will be a lot of challenges in scheduling growth projects, because the priorities of user growth work often conflict with the priorities of the product team, and this conflict will be reflected in the specific project scheduling. This is the only organization that doesn't require a dedicated user growth team. Second, establish a dedicated project growth team whose functions are primarily the responsibility of the growth project manager. His specific work includes: formulating growth strategies, proposing growth ideas and designing growth plans; at the same time, as the PMO (project management center), promoting project implementation and obtaining results, and being responsible for the growth results.

The advantage of this type of organization is that there are professional people responsible for user growth, but the difficulty of coordinating resources is often greater than in the first type of organization, because the team members may not come from any of the original departments and have no roots. Third, set up a special user growth team. The product, R&D, operation, marketing, PR (public relation, PR) and other teams will send BP (business partner) to support the user growth team. The performance of these BPS is determined by the head of the user growth team or primarily based on the input of the user growth team, resulting in a growth FT (functional team). Moreover, most of these BPS are dedicated to user growth. In contrast, teams like marketing or PR don't have the same intensity of demand for user growth projects as R&D, so these teams can invest in part through BP. Compared with the previous two organizational forms, this organizational form is a huge improvement, because it has formed a soft closed-loop, is more efficient in user growth project iteration, and brings more potential growth. Fourth, create a dedicated user growth team that spans its own product, R&D, operations and marketing functions to create a small hard closed loop. This form of organization is the fastest and least iterative. Because the establishment of such an organizational structure will often face various challenges, such as: how to solve the problem of team members' career development, how to establish the corresponding support system within the company, how to eliminate the dissatisfaction of other functional departments, etc. In general, it's entirely understandable that we want to build a user growth team in a way that has minimal impact on the existing organization. However, from the perspective of user growth efficiency, if user growth is not worth the big organizational changes we need to make to ensure growth efficiency, then it is not that important in our minds. It sounds incredible to do things in the same way or organization and expect different results, but that's what we do all the time!

No activity yet