Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success

by Sean Ellis

Rascoff has rallied the whole company around the growth mission by establishing a focus for growth efforts that he calls Zillow’s “Play,” a recurring nine-to-twelve-month growth initiative that the entire company aligns around. In 2008, for example, the company realized that it was losing traffic to a rival upstart, Trulia, largely due to Trulia’s smart use of search engine optimization to rank its home listing data higher than Zillow’s in Google search results. So the Zillow executive team decided that SEO would be that year’s Play, and every team in the company was mandated to make becoming world class at search a priority. This involved a major cultural shift, as the company had previously ignored SEO in favor of other tactics. But in the end every team managed to find ways to improve their SEO efforts, and as a result Zillow was able to catch and surpass Trulia, ultimately buying the competitor in 2015 for $3 billion.7