Getting Started with Growth Management Part 2

Getting Started with Growth Management Part 2

In Part 1, we covered the foundational concepts of growth management: defining your North Star Metric, building a growth model, and establishing the basic team structure. In this second installment, we focus on building the processes and systems that turn growth from an ad hoc activity into a reliable, scalable function. The difference between companies that get sporadic results from growth experiments and those that achieve consistent, compounding growth almost always comes down to process discipline.

The Growth Sprint

Successful growth teams operate in sprints, typically one or two weeks long. Each sprint follows a consistent rhythm that creates accountability and momentum. The weekly cadence looks like this:

1. Review results from the previous sprint's experiments. Document findings and extract key learnings.
2. Analyze data to identify new opportunities and refine understanding of what drives your North Star Metric.
3. Prioritize the next set of experiments using your ICE scoring framework.
4. Assign responsibilities and set clear deadlines for each experiment.
5. Execute the experiments and collect data throughout the sprint.

This rhythm ensures that the team is always learning, always testing, and never stagnating. The cadence itself creates momentum. Even when individual experiments fail, the consistent process of testing and learning keeps the team moving forward.

Building Your Experiment Backlog

The experiment backlog is the engine of your growth process. It is a centralized repository of experiment ideas that anyone on the team can contribute to. A healthy backlog contains far more ideas than the team can execute, ensuring there is always a pipeline of high-priority experiments ready to run.

• Maintain a centralized backlog in a shared tool (spreadsheet, project management tool, or dedicated growth platform) that anyone on the team can contribute to.
• Score each idea using the ICE prioritization framework. Be rigorous about scoring, and update scores as new data becomes available.
• Review and re-score the backlog regularly as new data and insights emerge from completed experiments.
• Keep the backlog organized by growth lever (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral) to ensure balanced coverage across the funnel.
• Include a brief description, hypothesis, expected metric impact, and resource requirements for each idea to enable fast decision-making during sprint planning.

Experiment Design Best Practices

Well-designed experiments produce clear, actionable results. Poorly designed experiments waste time and resources without generating useful insights. Follow these principles when designing growth experiments:

Start with a clear, falsifiable hypothesis. "I believe that [change] will cause [metric] to improve by [amount] because [reason]." This structure forces clarity about what you expect to happen and why, making it easy to evaluate whether the experiment succeeded or failed.

Define your success criteria before running the experiment, not after. Decide in advance what level of improvement would justify scaling the change, and what sample size and duration are needed to reach statistical significance. This prevents the temptation to cherry-pick results or extend experiments indefinitely looking for a positive signal.

Documentation and Learning

Every experiment should be documented in a standardized format that captures the hypothesis, setup, results, and key learnings. This documentation serves two critical purposes: it prevents the team from repeating failed experiments, and it creates an institutional knowledge base that compounds over time.

As your experiment library grows, patterns emerge that guide future strategy and accelerate learning. After 50 experiments, you start to see which types of changes consistently produce results and which do not. After 100, you have a rich database of insights about your customers, your product, and your market that no competitor can replicate. This accumulated knowledge becomes one of your most valuable strategic assets. Part 3 of this series covers the organizational and cultural elements that make this process sustainable.