Dec 6, 2022
Back in 2018 at 500px, we were making a bigger push for user growth. I decided to request a temporary move off of mobile products to join the growth crew because I love small projects that move the needle quickly. Growth assignments just light a fire for me. If you make a big impact, it's visible to everyone in your organization. Our team was small, consisting of only three people but everyone had the same energy. We had some great ways of making it such a fun team to be a part of and I'll share them.
Part of working on growth projects is tracking your impact closely. It's a game of should we keep going or should we kill it and you have to make decisions fast as a small group. We created dashboards for the projects we were working on that would monitor signups, membership conversion, engagement activity, and of course many more. Every time we saw those numbers go up, it was an incredible motivator for us to keep going. And if they went down, at least we had a way to make informed decisions, especially the tough ones.
One project we worked on targeted our first touch points of the platform. We wanted to see if we could increase our user signups so we focused our attention on identifying drop off areas and looked for improvements. I would make harmless bets with our head of growth. If I could increase our user signups by a given number in a set time window, he would buy me lunch. I would do the same for him if I didn't hit that goal. The bets were all in good fun and it made for a great motivator.
Growth can be exhausting. You kill more things than you keep. When you do well, you have to celebrate it as a group. Team lunches, after work dinner, an offsite activity. Whatever it is, you do it to remind your team that you appreciate them and all of the hard work that they do.
