Asia Orangio: How to Design a Growth Plan that Works

What is your process for achieving growth? How do you uncover growth opportunities, troubleshoot growth, and reach your next growth milestones?

Most teams fly by the seat of their pants. Sometimes they get lucky and reach their goals, often they don’t. What’s worse – they operate in silos, despite the size or maturity of the organization. Predictable growth depends on how well your team functions, gets stuff out the door and adapts to the results you are getting. You cannot hire a bunch of people or simply obsess over KPIs to solve the problem of growth.

In this talk, Asia shares a framework and mapping tool that offers a simple framework for managing your growth operations. You will learn how to find gaps in your own growth operations and how to find the ‘growth flywheel’ everyone talks about but seldom finds.

You’ll also get exclusive access to a downloadable framework that will allow you to map your own growth operations and take the next steps to predictable growth.

Slides

Transcript

Asia Orangio: Oh, thank you. All right, okay, I want to start with a story. It’s a story that you actually might have seen or heard before, but just a quick show of hands. How many of you have been to BoS before, you’ve attended Business of Software in previous years? OK, awesome. Yes, all right, this story is going to be one that you’ve probably seen before, and it’s actually about these two gentlemen, Shane and Shawn. And I wanted to start with a story that all of you have probably heard of before in some kind of way. And if you haven’t heard of these two guys, these two gentlemen, the story that I’m going to share about them is actually their story that they shared at Business of Software in 2019 if I’m not mistaken. But these two guys, they are, I believe, the co founders, if not directly responsible for pdq.com they spoke at boss in 2019 and at the time, marketing and overall growth wasn’t so great. They were on the slow SaaS ramp of death. There were all kinds of shenanigans going on that were preventing them from ultimately achieving their goals. And what they talked about at BoS was how they did it. What did they go through to ultimately overcome this slow SaaS ramp of death?

Here’s what was going on before. What was going on before was they were lost on messaging and copy. They had read a bunch of content. They had heard a bunch of ideas about talking primarily about features, and then one day, they learned that: oh no, don’t talk about features. You should talk about benefits instead. And so they’re like: OK, we’re going to switch all of our messaging on the website to benefits. We’re going to only talk about benefits. They also had invested in a few different channels, not all of them super effective. This particular company, pdq.com, they at the time at least, they were targeting system engineers, and they were testing like Google ads and Facebook ads, like a bunch of different ads. But what were they realizing was that their audience actually didn’t really vibe too much with these channels. Marketing execution also wasn’t necessarily the greatest. So there was, I believe, like a pretty big content marketing effort, but the PDQ team in particular realized: oh my gosh, this content isn’t necessarily, like, the most amazing thing that we’ve ever done, but it was like, it was like the dirty secret, like no one was, like, really talking about it, in a way, until eventually they started to analyze what was going on from marketing perspective. The model was also somewhat limiting. And this, this, I believe, was in their talk also, but they talked a little bit about how the product was a little bit like, all over the place.

So this was before, and in this talk – that you can actually find on businessofsoftware.org – in this talk, they talked about what was going on, and then they discussed the changes that they made. These are like the specific tactics, like the things that they did. They first adjusted the copy to fit customer desires. They heard so much about hope, benefits, benefits, benefits, that they forgot about features, which is interesting, because system admin folks wanted to hear about features, so they combined them. They changed their messaging to focus on benefits and features. They also tested new channels, in addition to overhauling the current content marketing strategy, they started to acknowledge the fact that, oh man, our content isn’t really where we want it to be, but we know it’s something that is ultimately going to help accelerate growth. So they doubled down on it, overhauled the entire thing, did something completely net new. They also introduced freemium. They read this book about freemium, and it completely changed their world about how they thought about the model of their business, so much so that they questioned what their current existing model was. Should we introduce freemium? The answer might actually be yes. They introduced freemium. And then finally, they launched not just one, but two new products, and these two products were infinitely more focused based off of some of those strategic choices they had been making. And in this story, they went from 5 million to 20 million. This is actually, this is a, this is an excellent boss talk. I highly recommend watching it if you’ve not ever seen it before. But for those of you who have experienced this talk live, it was really extremely impressive stuff, inspiring. Stuff like, Yes, awesome.

It’s this exact process that I want to talk about that I would love to unpack for you, because there’s an in between. Usually, whenever we hear growth stories, we’re so inspired by them, and we’re like: oh yes, like, I can see what the problems were and what the action items were, and. What you like, actually did to get there. But how did we actually get there? What happens in the in between? And this is usually where founders can sometimes get lost, this even happens to me, actually, but this is where founders can get a little bit, like, lost in the sauce, a bit because they start thinking: oh, like, those were the tactics. Can I just, like, take those tactics and, like, chop them up into bits and, like, apply the bits to my business and see if it , does the growth thing. But the tricky part about that is without the right context, and also without the actual process of arriving at making these decisions, we can get lost. We can waste a lot of energy. We could waste time, money, resources, all of the really precious things that ultimately enable our businesses in the first place. And then, of course, when we talk about growth, we can’t we ultimately always end up talking about, yes, like the really amazing, awesome things that happen.

But then also the flip side, we talk about, well, why does failure happen? You’ve seen this list before. You’ve probably seen it a million times. Why startups fail. There’s so many different studies about this, from CB insights and Wilbur labs and places like this, and they all say the same thing. The first two reasons are almost always: well, they ran out of cash and they couldn’t find investors, and that’s why it failed. But then there’s a bunch of other reasons. There’s: Well, there’s no business plan or model. They lost focus. There’s also: maybe they didn’t have the right team. They were out competed. But it’s this block right after running out of cash that I think is really interesting. These are interesting because if you look at this list, they’re actually all growth operations problems, no market needed losing focus, not the right team, like the UX was bad. All of these are actually growth operations problems. Growth operations, what is that?

Growth operations? I think the this is one of my absolute favorite definitions of this, but some define it as the alignment and orchestration of people, processes, systems and data. You’ve actually heard this in a couple of talks already. Tiffany Bova mentioned this. You heard Hana talk about this with regarding the Shopify journey, in a way, Chris actually also literally just stood on stage and talked about this as well, within, of course, the Wistia context. But it’s all about aligning people, processes and systems and data. You just smush them together and like it works, you do this to ultimately generate revenue. But this is actually where, as much as I love this definition, I think it’s missing something. Some people also call this revenue ops, just as a heads up. So if you hear rev ops or revenue ops, I say growth ops. That’s like the school that I’m from, but just so you know, you might also hear this defined differently, but this definition, I actually think that there’s something missing here. I love this definition of growth operations. Yes, people, processes, tools, data, et cetera. You bring them all together, you get all those things aligned, and then growth should happen, right? But here’s where I think it gets a little lost in the sauce, the overarching cycle that every single organization goes through, every single business, we all go through this. We also actually experience this in our own lives, day to day, we experience this exact cycle to achieve any particular outcome, but there’s no rushing cycle that happens. We start, almost always with strategy, then we move on to execution. We’re doing the thing, and then we understand performance. And we are constantly going through this cycle over and over again. Teams enter into different parts of the cycle. Some teams start with execution, and then they’re like: Oh crap, we’re executing with all the strategy. And then they go back to strategy, and then they’re like: Oh crap. How do we know what to like measure? And then they go to performance. There are some teams that start very hardcore with strategy, then move into execution, then performance, and then they continue the cycle as they go. There are some teams that don’t think about performance at all, and then they wonder: Oh my gosh, why is nothing working?

But we’re constantly in this cycle. I’m going to argue that we should actually combine these two. There is a cycle that we’re going through, strategy, execution and performance, but within that, there are people, there are processes, there are tools that are data within strategy alone. There are people who are responsible for thinking about the strategy. There’s processes to ultimately help you achieve or arrive at strategy. There’s tools that you’re going to need to enable this data. And the same thing is true for execution and the same thing is true for performance. So this is the breakdown that I actually want to do for you all today, when we combine these two things, this is actually, I think, a much more holistic approach. It’s not just about bringing people, processes, tools, data, together without this context of the cycle. I think it actually is all four of these things within this cycle.

Strategy

Okay, so let’s break down strategy. So strategy is one of those words where on the one hand, you’re like: OK, yeah, I know what that means. And on the other hand, it is a hot mess of a word, like: what does strategy really mean? The goal with defining strategy is actually really simple. We’ve got to make good enough decisions faster, and we also have to uncover clear paths to winning. That’s really what strategy is. One of my absolute favorite definitions of strategy is from a boy, Roger Martin. He wrote this incredible book called Playing to Win. And Playing to Win is all about how to ultimately go through the process of where to play. Where should your business ultimately play, and how does your business win? And what Roger says is strategy is really about making choices. It’s about making specific choices to win in the marketplace. Strategy is the process of making choices. Strategy is not a plan. Some of you might be feeling hashtag triggered when I say that, but if you ever, if you ever come to the table with: OK, I have a strategy. I’ve got a plan. That’s usually the first indicator that you might not actually have a strategy. Strategy is not a plan. It’s also not a vision. This is usually surprising for a lot of CEOs. Vision is certainly an attribute of strategy, but just a vision alone does not a strategy make. Strategy also isn’t optimization.

There are some folks that believe that strategy is just really a series of optimizations that you’ve got to make that strategy is to optimize, and then also this can throw some for a loop too. But strategy also isn’t just a set of best practices, the best practices that happen and occur in an industry. Our strategy is just to copy those best practices also not necessarily a strategy. It’s kind of like: OK, Asia, you’re like, taking away all of my decks here. So what is strategy? If that’s the case, strategy is decisions. It’s choices, it’s choices that you’re making. It’s: are we going to choose this channel or this channel? Are we going to go to market in this particular space or that space? Are we going to have Freemium or are we going to be like a demo model or a sales, sales led organization, with where we’re at today? Are we going to use customer led growth, product led growth? These are choices, decisions. And the interesting thing about strategy is that you’re actually constantly making decisions, whether you’re consciously aware of them, or unconsciously aware your team is also making decisions about strategy.

This is why, if you don’t have alignment around strategy, the wheels can fall off the bus very quickly, and suddenly the strategy becomes unclear. But strategy has choices. It’s a lot easier said than done. There’s, of course, many different aspects of of growth, but when we think about specifically strategy for growth, we have to make decisions about the people, the processes, the tools and the data, just within strategy. So when we look and we think about this particular framework or this model. Just want to highlight just focusing on strategy. Who are the people, processes, tools, data that align within this this is one of my absolute favorite tweets from someone I really respect and admire. Her name is Gia. I highly recommend that you follow her on Twitter if you tweet much. But let’s look at strategy, just looking at people, just within the context of growth strategy. Growth Strategy. So GIA tweeted, did it hurt when you paid for a marketing manager hoping that they were a CMO? This is a strategic challenge within hiring. There is also challenges when it comes to like the reverse, I hired a CMO, finding out later that they were a salesperson, another really awesome response from another really good friend, but also hurt when I paid for a CMO and I actually got a marketing manager. So clearly, there’s challenges when it comes to the strategic part of even just hiring people. I think the absolute favorite response, though, was was probably this one. If you can’t read this, the very top quadrant says: Behold, my marketing plan for the ages. Padme says: But you left out marketing, innovation and growth, or strategy, innovation and growth. Well, wait, you left out strategy, innovation and growth. So people challenges with even just defining growth strategy. Marketing is just one example.

But of course, there’s other departments then we get to process. This was a tweet by another previous boss speaker. But how much time does your CEO personally spend on innovation every week? 67% of people responded with zero to 10% innovation is a part of the strategic process, and yet CEOs are spending the least amount of time on it. According to Alex, CEOs actually need to be spending anywhere from 20 to 40% of their time on innovation, which is a pretty stark contrast, especially considering you. Uh, there’s a far smaller amount of people who actually spend that much time on it, but we have challenges when it comes to this as well.

Finally, I’m going to give you a data gap. The number one recommendation from founders on how to prevent startup failure was more research prior to launch. Research is data that you can leverage to inform your strategy. So easier said than done. So here’s what I want to offer you.There’s going to be a few of these moments throughout this talk, but if we want to really pause and think about: OK, am I actually aligned when it comes to is my organization actually aligned when it comes to strategy? Do I actually have all of the right things in place? The first question you’re going to ask yourself, and potentially also your team, do you and your team actually have the strategic capabilities internally, is that something that you actually have? Is there anyone that you need to hire for this? Is there anyone that you need to promote into this? It could also be this as well. What is your process internally for making decisions? So how does your team arrive at making choices and defining strategy? Specifically? Yes, it can be for the company, of course. But also, even more specifically, to growth, when you think about aligning everything towards growth. What is the actual process that you go through? What are the steps that you take? Are there any frame frameworks, tools that can support the strategic process? So one of my absolute favorite frameworks, or tools, I guess I should say, would be jobs theory, jobs to be done. But there’s other kinds of tools and frameworks that you can use, things like the Mom Test when it comes to defining or at least informing part of the strategy. There’s other, of course, tools, things like, of course, customer research is a huge piece of this. But there’s all kinds of different frameworks, tools, ways that you could think about enabling the strategic process.

And then finally, what data do you need to make better decisions? This can be, of course, historic performance data, but this can also be qualitative information that you hear from both the sales team, from customers, from the product team, et cetera.

Execution

Okay, next a path for execution. Execution is one of those things that I feel like most of us already, really understand, execution is doing the thing. The goal for execution in this part of the process is, first, we have to actually just do we have to actually just do things. First, we have to make sure that we’re able to do things. And then after that, we eventually do more fast. So how can we do things as fast as possible, and then eventually, preferably with less, doing more as fast as possible with less. That’s like, pretty sure that’s OE, like operational efficiency, like 101, but first we just have to feel pretty good about doing execution is ultimately just a set of actions. It’s the set of steps that you’re going to take. Another way to think about a set of actions is a plan, ah, which, if you’re like Asia, you said the P word, that’s plan. You’re right, yes, execution ultimately comes down to a plan. So whenever, as a strategist, whenever I hear the word plan, I think, oh, execution. We’re going to talk about execution now, probably not necessarily about strategy. That’s OK. We can usually get to strategy by asking a few questions. Usually, teams fall into one of two categories we find. Usually it’s either they’re able to do all the things. Teams have no hesitation about execution. They’re not particularly lost on it. They’re not stuck on it. They don’t necessarily this, I think, applies to founders and CEOs too. But when they think about executing, there’s not really anything blocking them. They just do the thing. Maybe they do a little bit of research to figure out how to do something, but for the most part, they feel good.

On the flip side, we get teams that may struggle a little bit and it’s actually very hard for them to execute, or they’re uncertain about how best to execute. Sometimes we also see there’s indecision. No one really knows, like, what the best execution is or should be. And teams go through this cycle over time. There are times where they’re able to do like, all the things, and there are times where they might get stuck, and that’s okay. It’s a very natural part of the execution cycle, for sure, the thing that we try to figure out whenever we work with any company is, which camp is the company in at any given time, are they very comfortable with executing and doing the thing? Is there very little fear, or is there a particular mindset that blocks them from this? And then, on the flip side, do they actually struggle a lot with execution? Is it something that they’re uncertain about? And so we kind of have to figure out, like, where is the team or the company at in any given moment?

Of course, with execution, there’s also other parameters. We’ve got to think about scope, time and budget. It’s the Iron Triangle. You’ve heard of it. You’ve probably experienced it directly before. When we think about early stage companies, usually the biggest thing is they actually have a very. Big scope, but they have very little time, very little budget, so they have to figure out how to be scrappy, or they have to figure out how to prioritize as much as possible. And then on the flip side, with funded companies and also just more mature companies, we find that sometimes there’s not really a limit to the budget, there’s also potentially not even a limit to the time, but they have to make sure to figure out how to make this work as best as they possibly can with execution. The want to say that the biggest question here is, where does execution fall for you and your company? How do you currently think about execution, the literal actions and the steps that you’re taking that ultimately tear up into growth or are part of the growth strategy. And yet, not all execution is necessarily created equal. There’s some execution that, of course, like, yes, like, makes sense, very obvious. Let’s do the thing. But then there’s other execution that we kind of forget about. I want to give you an example. This is not necessarily a hard and fast rule, but I just want to give you an example.

So Patrick is actually speaking after our break today, and this is directly from profitwell. So thank you, Patrick, but there was an article from profitwell about this obsession with acquisition, and when we analyze how many blog posts there are about growth, specifically for SaaS and software, 70% of the blog posts are about acquisition. Very few are about monetization, and a little bit more about retention. 70% of all blog posts are about acquisition, which I think is pretty wild. So clearly, we’re obsessed with acquisition, makes a lot of sense. And yet, when doing the analysis, turns out that acquisition isn’t necessarily the most effective way to grow. If we were to improve acquisition, monetization or andor retention by 1% we would actually see a huge differential, 12.7% we see a higher lift in growth when we focus on monetization instead, just by improving it by 1% which is pretty wild, acquisition is actually the least effective way to grow a company, which is pretty, pretty wild, at least focusing on acquisition.

And then, of course, I have to give a caveat. If you’re very, very early stage, acquisition probably is going to be your best bet. But just to say, this is an example of not all execution is necessarily created equal. So with execution, it’s pretty it’s pretty critical that we are able to, of course, execute, but if we don’t execute without strategy or performance, we run the risk of making a bunch of mistakes potentially, but then also we run the risk of burning out because we’re not necessarily sure if things work. We’re necessarily sure if this is even the right direction. And I’ve actually seen this firsthand being on the board of Moz but then also reading the stories from Rand Fishkin and in his book, lost and founder, he actually talked about a scenario where they deployed a very big change, I believe, to if not their onboarding or to their overall product. And what happened was, after they deployed this huge change their product, they completely changed the UX, if not mistaken. And after they deployed it, customers hated it like it was. They had got a very big pushback. But what happened to the execution team? So the team that actually strategized and planned for this and executed, they they felt a little gun shy the next time that they had to make any changes to the product. And this, there’s a lot of reasons why, how this could have happened. But what’s interesting is that when we don’t have a very strong strategy, when we also don’t have a very clear process for execution, and also we don’t have a clear understanding of performance, execution can kind of like it can get to a place to where, even if you’re doing the thing, you might actually get shy later when it does happen. So that’s why we add strategy. So not just, of course, what are we executing, but why are we executing it? How does it actually help us get closer to the goal? And then finally, does it perform?

So questions to ask yourself when it comes to execution, do you and your team have the skills to actually execute? Is there anyone that you need to hire, is there anyone or anything that you gotta upskill? Is there are there any skills that you ultimately need to attain in order to best execute? What is the actual process for getting things done? This is actually the biggest gap that I see in early stage companies. A lot of them don’t actually really have a process for doing any kind of execution anyway, even when it comes to marketing and sometimes even product and engineering. The simplest, of course, process for execution, for engineering and product would be agile sprint, but there are some teams that operate even without this.

Performance

So if we think about the entire growth function, what are the processes for getting things done in the other areas? Yeah, what are the frameworks methodologies? I mentioned one already. But of course, there’s like actual like project management and process frameworks, things like agile sprint. But there’s also other ways to think about agile sprint, or excuse me, product and marketing and success as well, sales, et cetera. Other ways to think about applying process here. So what are some frameworks or tools that you can use to inform this part? And then also, what data do you actually need to get started? What is really actually blocking you from execution? Is it the people? Is it the processes, or is it actually you just don’t have the right information? So what do you need to actually kick off this part of the cycle? OK, the art of performance. Well, by the time that we get to performance, the goal here is, we want to retrospect and reflect in order to inform the next iteration.

Performance is it’s one of my favorite phases, but it’s often overlooked and or condensed into really just looking at KPIs and that’s it. But I actually want to tell you a story, another story about a gentleman named Quentin Tarantino. And Quentin, at one point, released one of the greatest films that we know, and that’s Kill Bill. And in the movie Kill Bill, there is a character Hattori Hanzo and Hanzo San. He is a master swordsman. He crafts swords. And in the movie, the character asks for a sword, and he’s like, no, go away. Not gonna make you a sword. And she’s like, What if I use this sword to kill both of our enemies? And he was like, actually, yes, gonna make you a sword. So he makes the sword, and he presents the sword. And the sword is just, it’s absolutely stunning. It’s beautiful. But he says, this is the finest sword I’ve ever made. I can tell you, with no ego, this is my finest sword. If you come across God, God will be cut. I just want to pause here, because, like, can you imagine making a sword so powerful, so sharp, it cuts God? What it cuts a deity. That’s That’s insane. But I also want you to think about how Hatori Hanzo got here. He probably spent like decades making a lot of really shitty swords. Like, there’s no way that this sword was like, like his fourth sword. It had to have been his 100th sword, probably his, I don’t know, a 1,000th probably tons and tons and tons of swords that he’s, like, forged and like, Oh, this is crap. Got to make another sword. By the time that he actually gets to, you know, Bing and Quentin Tarantino’s film, he’s probably contributed tons and tons and tons of swords, not all of them amazing, not all of them great. But by the time that he gets to this point, he’s created one so incredible, so sharp, it can cut. God, it’s wild. We are all making swords in our lives with everything that we do every day. And I would actually argue, too that our businesses, in some way, are our swords.

But what I think is important about this process, about the performance process, is that this story is really something. It’s a story about someone using what they’ve known, what they’ve learned, from strategy, executing, and now they are performing. Now we are. We have taken everything that we’ve learned and now we’re applying it to this finest sword performance. I think at the end of the day is it’s how we know something brought us closer to our goals or it didn’t.

Performance informs the strategy and the choices that we may make. Hattori hazo probably made different choices after making a whole lot of really bad swords, until he started making really good swords, until he started making excellent swords. And then finally, execution on how we may execute differently. This is what performance is for. And if we forget about performance, we’re going to keep making really shitty swords. But we don’t want to keep making shitty swords. We want to make, like, really amazing swords, and then eventually, like, make some other cool stuff. I want to encourage everyone not to think of performance as binary. I really want to encourage iterative thinking. When it comes to performance, it’s really dangerous to think of performance as being only binary. What I mean by that is we say it like, I know, like we marketers will say a lot of things about like, oh, it either worked or it didn’t. And I think that that’s true. You should certainly listen to that advice. But I want to encourage is that there’s actually degrees, there’s shades to there’s degrees to which certain things performed. Because here’s the tricky part, if you didn’t execute very well, it’s actually really hard to know if it, if it performed or not if you launch a Google ads campaign, but you made a lot of shitty swords when you did it, it it’s definitely not going to work, but it’s going to make you think that maybe Google Ads doesn’t work, which is the really tricky cycle you want to make sure that you don’t get caught in.

So all that to say, I just want to encourage not to assume that performance is always binary, to think of it as an iterative part of the process. Use what you’ve learned create a much better campaign next time. Yeah. Use what you’ve learned formulate a completely better function or team or department or whatever next time, use it to inform what you’re doing. And when it’s really clear you got to cut something off, you’ll be able to trust it, because you made a really awesome sword, and it still didn’t work, which is how you know probably wasn’t the thing. So whenever we think about performance, we always start with the obvious. It’s the data. It’s the analysis part. We’re measuring MRR, we’re measuring conversion rates, we’re measuring traffic, we’re measuring all the different things that we’re collecting with data, et cetera. And we go through a part of our process where, of course, we sit down and we look at it and we stare at it, and we’re like, Okay, what happened?

There’s another part of this though. What we notice about growth teams, about teams that come together and achieve the great thing, achieve the great goals. It’s usually because they also have a part of their performance process that includes reflection. They actually get together, they discuss what went wrong, what they would start doing and stop doing. They actually reflect. And yes, there’s data. There’s always like a data piece of this, but it’s the reflection part that a lot of teams miss, and it’s part of why by the time that they get to performance, they’re not actually taking the insights that they need and applying it back to strategy and execution. And this is where a lot of teams can get stuck. Teams can get stuck and or continue executing without actually ever learning. So reflection is critical. I encourage all of you to add it to your processes. Most teams are pretty obsessed, of course, with the analysis piece, but far fewer teams include reflection as part of their performance process.

I want to tell a quick story about performance really doing its job and working. OK, so how many of you have ever heard of the North Star metric? Awesome. Ok, won’t spend a lot of time here, but North Star metric, it’s it’s a concept coined by Sean Ellis, but the North Star metric is the single most metric that ultimately indicates or captures that customer has achieved value in some kind of way from using your product. North Star metric, very powerful. KPI, super popular. You also might have heard of value metrics similar, but the North Star metric, it’s a KPI that, of course, I wish more teams would leverage. But absolutely we can obsess over this. We can focus entirely on the rest of our KPI, and like, you know, get tunnel vision.

But here’s an example of a KPI being put into a process that actually enables growth. So one of my absolute favorite stories to tell is one from breather, the CEO of breather, Julian Smith, at the time, was at a place with breather, where I think it was several years ago. I think they had like six months left to live. They had six months of runway, and it wasn’t looking real cool, and I can only imagine the stress that Julian was under at the time. So what he did was he took a bunch of meetings with different CEOs. And every CEO that he talked to, he was like: Okay, here’s what’s going on. Like, here are my constraints. What would you do? And there was one particular CEO that he talked to, and that CEO said, Julian, I think, was like, Okay, I was like, at a bar, and he was like, with the CEO, and the CEO just said, just pick a number and grow it 8% week over week. And then Julian’s like, Okay, well, like, is it really that easy? Like, how do I actually go the number? And that’s when the CEO said, You’ll figure it out. And what I love about this is, this is actually the growth operations process that’s happening in a really quick conversation. But what the CEO is saying, pick a number, pick a performance KPI that matters the most, and then use strategy and execution to grow that number the figuring it out, like, oh, he’ll figure it out. That’s the strategic part of the process that’s using performance strategy. And then from there, once, he came up with a strategy, executing it, and then using that to inform the cycle over and over again, till eventually he did figure it out, and eventually, breather survived and overcame their challenges. But this is an example of where performance is absolutely critical, and if you skip this step, or if you’re not leveraging the absolute best KPIs that you could be, then you could be missing out on a very powerful part of the growth process.

For those who are curious, breather’s North Star KPI at the time was the number of booked hours. It was physically impossible for breather to not grow if customers like booked a bunch of hours, if customers booked hours, they were growing. And that direct correlation between customer behavior and therefore customer value and growth at the end of the day. So questions to ask yourselves when it comes to the performance step. Who actually owns reporting on performance? And if you have several teams who on each team, who decides the case? KPIs. How do we decide, collectively as a team, what KPIs we’re going to look at and measure and use to understand performance from there, what is our process? When are we going to report how often? How when are we going to actually reflect on performance, including the discussion around KPIs? And then what tools or andor methodologies are we going to leverage? So do we need a mixed panel or an amplitude, or do we need to implement OKRs? This is part of our process.

And finally, what KPIs do we use? What data do we need to understand about performance? So if you’re kind of thinking, OK, this is, this is interesting, but I’m curious how this actually applies to my business. I actually want to give you a link to a framework. To this framework, actually, I’m going to give you the canvas, the growth operations canvas, and inside of this spreadsheet, you’re going to see there’s strategy, execution and performance, and along people, processes, tools and data, there’s going to be questions in each of these sections for you to really think about, to answer and eventually to apply to your own organization. So you can click this link, get this link, and there is going to also be a tab that has a completed example.

So there’s going to be an example for you to take a look at, to leverage internally. And when you complete this, there’s a couple of things I just want to make sure that you take away from this part of the process. First, I think CEOs and founders, you should all take a stab at just doing this on your own, see how much you know about your organization. But then also when you actually, like, pause for a minute and just really think, do I actually have a process for deciding what our strategy is going to be? Do I actually have the data that I need to really understand performance, et cetera, et cetera? And then, if you have a team, send it to your team members and see how the canvases compare, see what the gaps are, and then finally, reconvene as a team, discuss all of your different canvases and have the oh shit moment whenever I do this for companies, whenever we work with early stage startups and also growth stage companies, the first thing I’m doing is I’m actually doing A very pretty much this exact spreadsheet every single time. And my job is to understand where are the gaps, what’s blocking them from growth? Because nine times out of 10 there’s a huge swath of something missing, and or it’s unclear, and because of the lacking clarity, we got to have a conversation about it. And usually what comes out of that is the next steps to take to unblock growth. All right, that’s all I got for y’all thanks.

Mark Littlewood: Smashing, amazing. Thank you. Right. Questions yo.u Wow. Hey, sure, does anybody know this guy’s name? 123, Ray.

Audience member: Thank you for a wonderful talk. In the same spirit of performance, I was wondering if we could turn the lens back on you, right, and your practice and what you’ve seen work and not work over the course of last little while. What do you know now? What is it you think about this framework and the intercept of strategy, execution, performance today that you didn’t think, I don’t know two years ago.

Asia Orangio: Interesting. Okay, okay, when it comes to performance, specifically, the what I find to be really challenging for a lot of early teams is that OKRs is, like a very popular methodology. It’s a very popular process for understanding performance. I find a lot of teens get really stuck on it early stage, specifically early stage teens, they get really stuck. There is a new do I even call it a framework? There is a new way of thinking about performance that I actually really appreciate, that I was introduced to by another team, and they call it wigs, wildly important goals. It’s basically just real simple. There’s like, three to four goals that are wildly important across the entire organization, and pretty much every team has to not quite like OKRs, and that there’s like, key results and things to care about there, but it’s insane focus, and I think that that’s extremely helpful for earlier stage, leaner teams, and that changed my mind actually, a lot about OKRs in the earlier days.

There’s really two other places when it comes to the strategic process. Teams that convene and discuss and decide together are usually teams that are just infinitely more aligned, and also can therefore move. When there is, like, usually we’re coming in and that’s like, one of the very first things we’re looking at is like, Okay, how does this team make choices? What are the choices are they making? How are they deciding? And if there’s, if it’s kind of like, willy nilly, and like, all over the place, I know we’re going to have, we’re going to have that come. Conversation at some point, and usually that’s like, Oh, I didn’t realize that. Like, I didn’t have my arms wrapped around this. And then, you know, part of our process actually to help do that.

Mark Littlewood: Thank you. If you’ve got questions, put your hands up so I can get the microphones moving. Alison, isn’t it at the back microphone? Yes, you do.

Audience member: I’m curious. Asia, you said something early on. You said CEOs should be spending 20 to 40% of their time on innovation. I wondered if you could give an explanation, like, I’m not a technical co founder of, you know, innovation, in what way, sure I’d be spending my 20 to 40% of my time on that?

Asia Orangio: So that stat was actually from Alex Osterwalder. He is, he’s like, like, one of the greatest strategists that I know. But when he was talking about the innovation process, innovation is really a creative process. It’s, it’s creativity, it’s, it’s seeing what’s out there in the world, seeing what’s in your own business, seeing what’s going on with the team, and identifying opportunities and things to build, design, to execute that might not have been considered before it’s I would think of innovation as a new way to think about things. It’s the it’s the age old example of innovation, but it’s, I mean, I would think of the Steve Jobs coming out into the market with the very first iPod. We had never even imagined, like our brains just couldn’t conceive of the iPod before we had ever seen it, but we were familiar with mp three players. But then the iPod came out, and it introduced a very different way of thinking about it. So that kind of innovation process, it’s a creative process. And yet so few of us, especially in the CEO space, so few of us actually spend time in that, in that creative space. But of course, you know, there’s always, there’s always things knocking on the CEO’s door. But hopefully that that explains a little bit about innovation product lens.

And it’s not just that. Yeah, actually, I’m going to use Chris. Chris’s example of the, like, the different types of content that he was testing out, like he could have done, like a, really, like, I guess, like basic, normal podcast. But he decided to instead say, no, wait, there’s tons of podcasts. How am I going to make this like, you know, you know, very authentic to us, but also different. So there’s a little bit of innovation, creativity there. And innovation doesn’t have to be large scale, like you don’t have to be the next Steve Jobs. It could actually just be as simple as we’re going to try this campaign a different way. Yes, we’re going to leverage best practices, but we’re also going to innovate a little bit. Innovation kind of flies in the face of best practice.

Mark Littlewood: So I have a question about when growth frameworks are most valuable, and is it at that startup piece, or is it when you’re in a much bigger organization, and what’s the differences? And I’ve kind of planted a microphone somewhere over, oh, with Hana at Shopify, plus, who might have some things to say, but curious on both of your perspectives, actually?

Asia Orangio: Oh, sure. So, okay, it’s the question is, is the framework like, how does the framework change, or is it as useful like for earlier stage versus larger stage, or more mature? So what’s interesting about this is this particular Canvas when it’s when it’s a small team, so just like a team of, like four to five, it’s actually, it’s it’s very simple to create, but I think that there’s beauty in that simplicity. It’s very, very easy and simple to actually complete this and to really, like, sit and ask yourself these questions. And what I get out of it for me, because I basically complete a similar version of this for every new client that we’re working with, what I get out of it for me is, what questions do I need to go and ask the CEO, the team, et cetera, to make sure that we are overturning every single stone and that there’s nothing that’s missed or that got lost in translation, and is therefore going to block our growth operation, which is happens very, very frequently, and it’s actually shocking how quickly that can happen with larger teams. I would imagine that having executive level, manager level folks also complete something similar, would give the CEO and other leadership insight, in addition to creating a tool to have the conversation of, is there anything blocking out growth? Because if there is, we got to know now before we try to, like, do the thing and get stuck. So I would say it’s there probably is, like an enterprise limit to this where does framework probably falls apart very fast. But at least for early stage to growth stage, it can be particularly useful.

Mark Littlewood: So is there an enterprise frame, enterprise scale?

Asia Orangio: I mean, the dirty little secret is, everything is chaos. No. I mean, I think so. First of all, great talk, and a lot of this resonated with me. I think I. When I looked sort of over the history of Shopify, when I joined early on, Shopify was tinier. It’s like 1200 people, which is not tiny, but it’s also not, you know, the 10 12,000 people it is today. We were just starting to play around with OKRs at that stage, just barely starting to play around with OKRs. And actually, the plus team was probably the first team to introduce the concept of an OKR. And to your point, everyone got tripped up over it, right? It is like, but what is an objective, and is this actually a key result? And like, it’s a bit tricky to get initially, but as a company grew and scaled, it got really, really gnarly. OKRs kind of started to spread across the rest of Shopify. And then we introduced this whole process called investment planning that happened kind of like in a really big way once a year, but then you do, like a mid year check in along this investment plan. And the first couple of years, it was bad. But we got to a point actually, where through the investment planning process, each area of the business or team, or however you want to look at it, would actually pull together their own version of OKRs. And sometimes they wouldn’t actually be OKRs. But then the most valuable piece was actually the interlock meetings that happened across the different groups and functions as they were also building up their own sort of strategies and plans, and those interlock meetings are really where we identified, you know, what are the dependencies? What is the required level of investment? And a lot of the questions that you’re asking here are actually the questions that would come up in those interlock meetings, like, have we actually checked all of those boxes, and are we moving in lockstep? And that usually happened kind of at the executive level. So we started, started to get it last couple of years, awesome. Yeah,

Mark Littlewood: Who should a head of growth report to?

Asia Orangio: There’s so many schools of thoughts on this. I’m actually really curious to hear your answer. Anna on this. Okay, so from what I’ve seen if, if it is not the CEO directly, it’s usually marketing, sometimes, I’ve also seen structures where the C or the growth reports of CEO, but then sales and marketing report to growth. Seen this as well. I’ve also seen structure. I don’t think there’s a very common pattern, at least that I know of, but I’ve also seen structures where growth product and marketing report to the CEO as well.

Mark Littlewood: I think you answered a slightly different question. I did not ask, who does a growth head of growth report to I asked, Who Should a head of growth report to

Asia Orangio: Interesting. That’s a tough one.

Mark Littlewood: Well, you’re not gonna get easy ones at BoS , right?

Asia Orangio: Yeah. I mean, it’s, I’m gonna have to say, if it’s not the CEO, it’s, it’s, it’s potentially marketing. That’s just my two cents. But I’m curious if what your take is. I think I generally agree, but I do think it really depends on the type of company in the business model. I think in some cases, growth should report to product if the product is the driver of growth. So like, for example, if we’re talking about, I don’t know, booking.com right? Where, like the product and the thing facing the customer is also the thing that’s driving growth, then I can see growth reporting into product. But I think otherwise, agree. I think this is CMO or CEO,

Mark Littlewood: What’s the biggest mistake that a founder makes when they appoint someone as their growth, person.

Asia Orangio: That they don’t understand what growth actually is.

Mark Littlewood: Is this the head of growth or the founder?

Asia Orangio: The founder. Yeah, like, what like, what the growth function actually like, what, what that means. And a lot of a lot of founders think, you know, the head of growth is, like, really, they want, like a marketing person, but they’re like, Oh, but I want the marketing person to be focused on revenue. And so to them, that translates to growth. It’s a very, very common, very common guess, like, Pitfall,

Mark Littlewood: So if you’re in a at a relatively early stage where founders kind of doing everything, and I don’t know a founder that hasn’t been in this situation, you start to kind of departmentalize, get more people. And I know having a conversation with Chris, he’s like, Oh, I’ll get in a big ass cmo from some great company, and it’ll all be sorted. And it’s actually not as simple as that. How do you prioritize as a founder, who your kind of senior hires are? Would you take a head of growth before, ahead of marketing?

Asia Orangio: So there’s a, there’s a there’s a school of thought on this when there’s runway, so scope, time, budget, of course, but when there’s runway and early stage. Huge and maybe the product market fit isn’t as strong. Many founders will opt to hire ahead of growth, the implication being that the growth person is kind of like the liaison between marketing and product and growth can kind of operate between both of those functions and then, therefore help support the product market fit process, and then, while also growing the company from like a marketing acquisition perspective, acquisition perspective, there’s other functions of growth, though, where for more mature stage companies, yes, like, they can absolutely report to product and really focus on experiments, and they’re really, like, very Die Hard, like experimentation within that product field. So it can kind of look, can kind of look in either camp, but I do think it ultimately depends on where the organization is at in their growth journey. Overall, I have recommended heads of growth in very specific scenarios. I’ve also recommended heads of marketing or VPs of marketing, and also really specific contexts, and usually it has to do with how much runway do they have? What is their old ultimate level of product market fit? And like, what is the actual type of growth that they need the most of? And also a little bit of, like, what is their current go to market strategy today, if they’re more product led, and they have, like, they want to be product led, potentially ahead of growth, and then on the flip side, it could very well be that maybe they’re product led, but acquisition is just the number one problem. Awareness building is the number one problem, and it’s going to be for a while, then potentially a head of marketing.

Mark Littlewood: Great. Any further questions? You’ve run out. Oh, go on. Dominic, then very quickly, yes, this is the last one, though. Wow, it’s Usain Brooke Williams, there he is. Yep,

Audience member: Thank you. So my question would be, what’s the difference between head of Grove and CRO in?

Asia Orangio: Oh, man, whoever’s watching online in the future is going to be like, What? No, I’m just kidding. Okay, you know. So when you say CRO or are you, do you mean, like, Chief Revenue Officer, yeah. Okay, so this kind of goes a little bit to, like, growth operations, revenue operations, like, I don’t know there, I’m sure there probably is a very specific line between like these two functions, and like who they are, and like what they do, what the roles are. I’ve seen I’ve seen both. I will say every CRO I’ve ever worked with are known. They’ve usually overseen sales and marketing, and less so on the product side. Is that a hard and fast rule? Probably not. There’s going to be outliers. That’s an excellent question now, so kudos,

Mark Littlewood: Awesome. You’re going to be around till the end of days so you can go and pick Asia’s Brains. But Asia, thank you. That was brilliant. Thank you.

Asia Orangio

Asia and the DemandMaven team help founders makes sense of marketing and focus on things that count.

Asia first came to BoS as a scholar before founding DemandMaven and was sure paying attention in the sessions. DemandMaven helps SaaS companies and startups reach and exceed their growth milestones-from the first 100 customers to the first 1,000.

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