At the
Epic Growth Conference product marketing
conference, Andrey Husid, CEO of RealtimeBoard, shared how the team structure was transformed in accordance with changes in the company's product strategy.
Watch the video and read the notes under the cut.
In the venture capital industry, rapid growth is an increase of 300% from year to year. And RealtimeBoard is growing at exactly 300% per year. Today we are laying out the tools and mechanisms that will provide the same rapid grocery growth in the future.
RealtimeBoard is a visual collaborative platform for teams to work together on ideas and projects. The product entered the top SaaS team tools for the version of Forbes. The team is located on four different continents, and the product is used by tens of thousands of users around the world. But far from always we grew as we grow now. At the end of 2012, we released an alpha version of the product. Until the beginning of 2015, we practically did not grow, but after the transformation of the structure of our team, everything changed.
Initially, there were three people in the team: an analyst, a product manager, and I as the project manager and CEO of the company. Accordingly, the three of us thought about the ideas that need to be built in the product and about the problems that the product should solve. We also thought about experiments that will help attract more users.
At the first stage, the key things the team dealt with are the search for the Product Market fit. We investigated persons, user cases, visualized a funnel, pirated "Acquisition Activation Retention Referral Revenue) metrics in order to understand what the funnel looks like inside the product.
If you do not have a Product Market fit, it makes no sense to invest in experiments and growth
Determining the key audience of the product was not easy, because we introduced a horizontal product to the market. Horizontal products are, for example, Google documents that absolutely anyone can use. We introduced a product that could be used by both teachers and development managers who make PI-planning.
Only after we found the core of the audience, we started experimenting with funnel improvements. The backlog of experiments that we wanted to conduct was continuously growing, and there simply wasn’t enough resources for implementation. At that moment, we realized that we need to select a separate engineering team.
Transformation Team RealtimeBoard
We rebuilt the structure in the team, or rather created a dedicated team that was engaged in product growth. The growth team has a leader, while other product managers with their developers have been creating user value. This allowed us to start a continuous process of experiments.
The team was only three and a half people. Limited resources forced to focus on specific parts of the funnel: onboarding and on the adoption of the product. Our task was to explain as much as possible the value of those who just came to the product. Activation of users depends on it.
The product grew and there appeared more opportunities and potential for improvement: and therefore conditions for the transformation of the team.
It was necessary to build a process that allowed us to continuously and quickly iterate, because, unlike the creation of a basic product, the growth team needs the speed and number of experiments that you do. Not all experiments will be successful; the more experiments you can do, the more likely you are to achieve the result.
At the beginning of this year, we again changed the structure in accordance with changes in the product strategy. One of the prerequisites for transformation was the fact that customers began to come from different segments. Initially, we were a business for teams. But recently B2B sales have increased. We restructured to allow us to monetize both segments: small medium business and enterprise business.
Processes and roles in the growth team
1. It is important that your growth-team solve problems that are validated by analysis and data. It is difficult to find new levers of improvement inside the funnel, if you generate ideas without checking at the data level.
2. Any experiments should predict what changes they will bring to the business. This allows for better prioritization of tasks.
3. Team interaction with company goals. For example, RealtimeBoard has the objectives key results framework within which we set goals. The growth team shares corporate goals and iterates around them. This works in the format of an infinite loop, where an important step is the formulation and analysis of the experience that the team gets in the process. The analysis and key findings of each experiment will save you time and money, because you will not run unnecessary and repetitive experiments. Here it must also be said that unsuccessful experiments sometimes bring interesting insights, which subsequently lay successful experiments.
We have a separate team that deals with the key value of the product, and there are teams that monetize this product. There is a self-service team that works on improving metrics, that is, activating Retention Referral Revenue. As well as High Touch is a team that already in manual mode does both sales and customer success, that is, the adoption of a product. All growth-processes are focused on the self-service team, which we subsequently scale.
At each stage of the funnel, there are dedicated teams that conduct an unlimited number of experiments and iterate as fast as possible to find new levers for the rapid growth of the product.
Tips on how and when to build a growth-team:
- While your product does not have a product market fit, it makes no sense to run experiments and create a team. First, find your market and the value that the product brings;
“Once you have found the product market fit, it’s important to start implementing technologies and processes that digitize and collect key metrics around the product. Find your focus and value metrics;
- Collecting results and tests will teach you to predict how experiments will affect a business. Accordingly, it is very important that you learn to prioritize experiments;
- And in the end - this is building your own culture of growth at the level of the whole company, attracting people with a growth mindset to the team.
Epic Growth Conference is a product marketing conference organized by
Mobio ,
Getloyal and
Appsflyer with the support of
myTarget ,
Appnext .
Read the full
transcript of the speech on VC.
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