(2021-11-09) Verna Six Rules Of Hiring For Growth

Elena Verna: Six rules of hiring for growth. Do you have strong product-market fit and feel ready to ramp up your investment in growth by hiring your first full-time growth person?

Unfortunately, some of the first set of decisions that founders make when embarking on this journey are flawed. The most common mistakes they make are:

Today I want to offer a step-by-step framework for how to go about building a successful growth team.

Rule 1: Growth model before growth

Great products have incredible product-market fit—they have correctly proved a compelling value hypothesis that describes why a customer is likely to use the product. Great companies, on the other hand, have product-market fit coupled with a strong growth model—predictable, sustainable, and defensible strategies that help achieve maximum distribution in the market.

A growth model is made up of two parts

Growth levers describe ways to impact your business’s revenue growth by making changes to your customers’ journey.

Every growth lever is leveraged through a growth motion. A growth motion describes which team or tactic is accountable for a successful outcome in the growth lever. There are many fantastic, established growth motions to apply to each growth lever, such as product-led (product-led growth), sales/success-led, marketing-led, support-led, community-led, etc.

So what is your most critical growth lever right now and most likely growth motion to apply against it?

Rule 2: Invest in the data

Understanding customer progression through a data lens will help you identify not only which growth lever you should prioritize, but where you should focus your efforts to yield the biggest short- or long-term impact.

you can think of your data as a company organizational chart:

Revenue is the “CEO” (it’s an outcome metric).

“Chief of staff” is your North Star metric, which keeps close tabs on the “CEO,” working behind the scenes as a predictor to revenue success.

Rule 3: Create the first growth model yourself

This is where you do not hire the Head of Growth. It is up to the core leadership team to figure out the first version of your growth model

why is it a bad idea to outsource the first growth-model creation exercise to the Head of Growth?

Tasking a new Head of Growth hire with the creation of the growth model will likely result in a copy-paste solution from their past. It takes many months, if not years, to understand the true DNA of the product and market

Switching a company’s mindset from building great products (product-market fit) to growing a fantastic business (growth model) is an evolution that every business has to embark on during its scaling journey.

It is important to understand that the initial growth model is a hypothesis with assumptions that are yet to be proven. Your team’s first order of business will be to learn about the validity of the assumptions.

Rule 4: Hire a builder

In growth, there exist three types of profiles:

Innovators: Enjoy thinking big.

Builders: Generalists who will help you build out your existing growth model hypotheses

Optimizers: Hold deep functional knowledge

If your growth model hypothesis was wrong and you are not seeing the expected impact, then move to Innovators next

Rule 5: Prioritize homegrown talent

The growth function has been around for only a decade, generally speaking—there are not enough people out there who have “been there, done that.”

Growth leaders need internal support. Many of the best ones will run fast-paced and sometimes controversial experiments to help you prove out and evolve your growth model.

Most successful growth leaders came from other departments

So who are the people within the analytics, product, marketing, engineering, or even financial planning and analysis team to take on the first builder/innovator roles?

Rule 6: Let your growth model dictate growth org placement

Step 1: Start by prioritizing the growth lever you need to drive the most improvement for

Most companies start with acquisition or retention (specifically onboarding), followed by monetization.

Step 2: Next, your growth model should indicate what growth motion you either need to build out, optimize, or introduce: marketing-led, product-led, sales-led, etc

Avoid hiring a growth marketer to solve your product-led motion

Lastly, companies often wonder whether they should embed growth within an existing team or create a stand-alone function. Most companies end up going through cycles of centralization and functional distribution of the growth teams because both models have their strengths and weaknesses.

I would recommend always starting with the embedded model.