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

by Sean Ellis

product-led team, for example, might be dedicated entirely to growing the user base for the company’s mobile app, while another might be assigned to helping to drive readers of an online news service to upgrade to a paid subscription. In some cases the mandate of teams dedicated to a particular product will be limited to improving the performance of one aspect of the product, such as activating new users of an online learning software by optimizing the onboarding process, the term for orienting new users on how to use a product. At Pinterest, John Egan runs a growth team that is dedicated entirely to testing the frequency, content, and calls to action in the email messages and mobile push notifications aimed at getting users to come back more frequently. That scope might sound impossibly narrow, but this intense focus allows the team to really drill down on a key component of the company’s growth. For example, in one of their recent growth efforts, the team built Copytune, a highly sophisticated machine learning algorithm, which allowed them to rapidly test dozens of variants of notifications sent to users, across more than 30 languages, and have the software pick winning versions and tee up subsequent tests in search of even better performance. The results of the program have been extraordinary, adding additional people to the site’s monthly active user (MAU, pronounced “mao”) count.