I've been reading some books on growth recently, and I happened to come across this part of content. Fortunately, I excerpted it and talked about this with you all.

First, let’s look at the steps to achieve user growth :

1. Determine the growth goals at each stage based on the company's strategy;
2. Combined with industry characteristics, in-depth thinking, working backwards from the goal to the realization path and corresponding growth projects;
3. Think about organizational support based on the project, set up a closed-loop team or a tightly coupled functional team (FT) that breaks down departmental walls;
4. Take into account long-term growth goals and think ahead about how to cross the growth curve to avoid falling into the "manager's dilemma";
5. Design and execute specific growth projects under the assumption that individual growth projects will likely fail;

01 Determine the growth goals

This is actually quite easy to understand. Before doing anything, we should first determine what the goal of doing this thing is.

If we don’t have a goal, on the one hand, we will lack judgment and grasp of the key points of the whole thing, so in the process of execution, we will often forget why we started in the first place, which can easily lead to confusion and dislocation of execution; on the other hand, only with a goal can we better measure the process and results of what we do, whether it is good or bad, what is good about it, and what is bad about it.

When it comes to user growth, the phased goal is actually a concept similar to the "North Star Indicator". That is, before we start to grow, we still need to first determine what the current North Star Indicator of the product is. Only by establishing the North Star Indicator can we know more clearly what we should and should not do, and better allocate limited resources to more useful places.

02 Identify growth projects

Once the growth target is established, the next thing to think about is working backwards from the target to the path to achieve it, which actually involves breaking down the core target.

I take the growth of public account readings as an example. If we want to achieve growth in public account readings, in fact, if we break it down in general, it can be divided into on-site (within the public account) readings and off-site (outside the public account) readings.

The essence of on-site reading is the number of fans of your official account multiplied by the article opening rate, while off-site reading includes more channels, such as WeChat channels (WeChat friends/groups, Moments, Kanyikan, search, etc.), and also includes channels outside WeChat (such as some third-party platforms, such as Toutiao, Bilibili, Jianshu and some vertical media).

This gives us the formula shown below:

Once we get such a formula, we actually have the direction and ideas for specific growth projects. For example, if I want to increase my on-site reading, I may have to find ways to increase the number of fans of my official account and the article opening rate.

03 Growth Organizational Guarantee

In my previous experience in growth, there was actually no separate growth team to provide support. Most of the growth projects were either initiated spontaneously by the product or by the operations side.

Although the entire implementation process was not very smooth and successful, basic growth iterations were still guaranteed.

I believe that many people have the same idea as me: organizational support is the easiest. Isn’t it just to set up a user growth team, coordinate various resources to carry out growth projects, and then achieve growth goals! This kind of thinking exposes a serious problem - the organizational guarantees for achieving user growth are often the easiest to overlook.

Recently, I have become more and more concerned about the organizational guarantee of growth. The reason is that I have found that sometimes our growth projects cannot achieve rapid iterative testing. Since our development resources are limited, most of the development resources have been scheduled to meet other functional requirements, and the resources allocated to growth are relatively scarce.

Growth itself requires rapid iteration to trial and error and discover opportunities. If rapid iteration and testing cannot be achieved, then growth potential cannot be formed.

Therefore, if conditions permit, it is best to set up a dedicated user growth team, so that rapid iterative testing of product growth can also have a better effect.

04 Growth curve crossover

When it comes to user growth, if you just keep following the same growth curve, you will eventually hit a dead end and fail to achieve sustained growth. Essentially, this is a topic that explores the second growth curve.

That is, when the first growth curve has not yet reached its end, we need to explore and find new business growth points in advance. Before the main business declines, the new business will have already emerged and even bring certain profits to the company. Only in this way can we better avoid falling into the "manager's dilemma."

I don't have much experience on this topic, so I won't go into details here.

05 Growth project design and execution

What is quite interesting here is that the author divides growth projects into several types: funnel growth, functional growth, strategic growth, and integrated growth.

What is funnel growth? In essence, it is a related growth project that is carried out by improving the conversion rate of the core funnel of the product.

The AARRR model may be the most basic methodology in funnel-type growth. It systematically explains how to achieve user growth from the aspects of acquiring users, stimulating activity, improving retention, increasing revenue, and viral transmission. For example, what we usually do, such as improving registration conversion rate, increasing order conversion rate, etc., all fall into the category of funnel growth.

Functional growth is more product-driven, hoping to achieve growth in certain indicators by adding new product features. For example, many tool products, such as WiFi Master Key, will add content modules to their products. This is actually hoping to increase user stay time through content to achieve better commercial monetization.

However, functional growth itself is not so easy to achieve. Generally speaking, it consumes more development resources, and whether it can bring growth is also a big unknown. Therefore, functional growth is best done together with strategic growth.

So what is strategic growth? The author also made a very vivid metaphor. For example, functional growth is like a heavy machine gun, which is not easy to be moved to other places. After it is built and placed at a certain location, if there is no enemy at this location, then the weapon that we have worked so hard to build will be wasted. It is a bit like the Maginot Line. However, if functional growth is combined with strategic growth, it is like installing a heavy machine gun on an off-road vehicle. It will instantly become a powerful weapon for user growth.

A mobile "Maginot Line", we can imagine how powerful it would be!

For example, the product's push system is a typical example of combining strategic growth with functional growth. The development of push itself is a background function. Our goal is to increase product activity and retention through push, but the development of push alone may not necessarily achieve our goals.

Different users within the product have different preferences for content, and the probability of opening content at different times is also different. Is it possible to form certain user tags or portraits through certain strategies and label the content accordingly? Will the push be more targeted? Then, through continuous testing and iteration, we can achieve the best push strategy.

Integrated growth, the author focuses on the integration of online and offline resources. Based on my own understanding, I have a new understanding of "integrated growth". I think it is to integrate all resources that can be integrated to achieve our growth goals.

The integration of all resources that can be integrated here includes online, offline, within the department, outside the department, inside the company, outside the company... Any resources that help achieve the goal, if we have the ability to reach and integrate them, we should carry out corresponding integration.

The reason why we need to do integrated growth is that the growth projects we mentioned are likely to fail. In order to deal with this problem, we must constantly look for various methods and resources to increase the probability of project success. We must consider that each link may not develop as we expected.

Author: Yi Baidu

Source: Retrograde