What it takes to grow?
This edition tackles how to accelerate product growth by managing execution bottlenecks.
Growth is feedback
I spend large swathes of time thinking about how we grow our product as its manager. Sometimes, this can lead to living too long in my head.
This post is yours truly coming to terms with what accelerating growth means and what it entails.
Progress which I wrote in a previous issue pertains to change in state. While growth is the positive difference in between two changed states.
In simple terms, a salary bump is growth in career. Similarly, larger revenues is growth in business.
Growth unlike progress is not imminent. It needs to be cultivated and sustained with multiple efforts.
A lot of it comes down to 4 points in an execution funnel. To accelerate growth, we need to increase the rate of flow of the funnel.
If a product is in the B2C space, distribution is key. Very few users from the people who signup end up sticking to the product. Since the churn rate is high in B2C, the conversion of new users to regular is low. So targeting larger sets of people and converting a sliver of them to regular users becomes the play.
In B2B segment it’s different. Convincing the customer to increase their volume becomes a bottleneck. Even when we target the right set of prospects and convert through value establishment, we will hit the limit from process status quo(they like how things were). Effective change management will remove the bottleneck and increases the throughput to final stage of the funnel.
For a product to grow, more customer should pass from the top to the bottom of the funnel. Increasing the flow rate is what increases the growth rate of the product.
The above scenarios play out in post product market fit stages. For 0-1, typically the bottlenecks are present in distribution or value establishment stages.
At Subjimandi.app, we really struggled with value establishment at the buyer side till we launched Pune. Value establishment was no longer an issue since customers saw value immediately. Growth rate was exponential. Sometime going a stage back which for us was figuring out distribution (launching Pune ) may be the solution to the bottleneck.
1 step back to take 2 steps forward is why product growth specialist are so sought after.
Round up
I am setting up all the illustration I do to untangle my brain with a short explanation on my blog.
This one covers the funnel and defines each stage a little.
Links that resonated
This is an old one but still holds legs since it talks about the nature a building a network based on data.
Mohit Satyanand who featured previously on this newsletter talks about not feeling excited but showcasing earnestness.
Sign off
Until revisiting my notes and lessons learnt. I was stiff about making step change to our execution processes to accelerate growth rate.
Unlike startup days, I don’t have the direct influence to make sweeping changes. Instead, I am running continuous improvement process enhancements to move the growth rate.
If I succeed this year, you will be definitely reading about it over here.
Signing off till next time,
Vivek , unclogging bottlenecks of my brain