This is the “growth sprint” -- and here's how to do it

Growth is a natural goal and desire for most companies. But how do you know that the decisions and actions taken actually lead to growth? You can, of course, follow your gut feeling and cross your fingers that it works, or go more scientifically -with growth experiments.

Data-Driven Decisions

Growth experiment, like most experiments, is about testing a hypothesis. The goal is to identify concrete, scalable initiatives that you can verify that works. This allows you to make informed decisions based on data, not just intuition.

Growth sprint is used to arrive at growth experiment.

Growth Sprint Content

Here is an overview of the different exercises that we go through — from start to finish.

1. Expert Interview: The one in the company who knows the most about the relevant growth area tells the team what they want to achieve and what are the challenges. The goal is to align the growth team around different challenges related to growing.
2. How can we: The team listens to the expert and formulates challenges in “How can we?” shape.
3. User Journey Map: The team selects a relevant user journey with a realistic start and an optimal end. Then the “how can we” questions move into the map. The goal is to get an overview of how the user uses the current service or product — and with that to find out where in the user journey there is the greatest need for improvement, in other words, experiment.
4. What works and what is challenging: Then follow exercises where the team writes down What works, what's challenging — and how challenges can be turned into opportunities. Once they have done so, participants write down possible solutions and these are sorted and voted on. Participants find and present cases from other products or companies that have successfully solved the challenge, or similar challenge.
5. Growth experiments: Then we're ready to do the experiments. Each participant writes at least one experiment for the selected area — based on a priority solution, preferably inspired by the presented cases. The experiments consist of a hypothesis, To-Do Tasks and Measurable success criteria. It is important that someone be put in charge of conducting the experiment.
6. Prioritization of the experiments: Here it is about get the most effect for the effort, then feel free to place them in an effect/effort matrix. It's important to be honest with yourself -- you don't want too many or too time-consuming experiments.

And that's how simple it is. In one effective day, you're left with scalable growth experiments.

When conducting the experiments, you will be left with data that gives you a well basis for decision what steps you should take and/or scale up.

There is, of course, variation in the length of the different growth experiments that one comes up with. Some can be completed and provide data in a matter of hours, while others again need several months before providing a good data base. It also means that it is possible to run multiple experiments in parallel.

If you have questions or want to conduct a growth experiment, please get in touch.

Course in Growth

We also run courses for conducting growth sprint and growth experiment. In the course we look at:

• how to put together good growth teams
• how to anchor growth efforts in management
• how to work to find the market need for your product or service

Next, we will start with a workshop part, where you;

• Get an introduction to the method
• Learn how to do good experiments
• Learn how to prioritize your experiments to get started.
• working with us on various growth areas

Effect after 4 weeks

It is important that a growth sprint and growth experimentation are entrenched as a strategy at management. In this way, the growth group has a safe framework to trial and error. Once you learn the methodology, it takes no more than 2—3 hours to complete a growth sprint. The result you are left with is at least as many experiments as there are participants in the team.

Of these, a handful will be experiments you can initiate immediately -- and see the effect off after just a few weeks.

Let the growth begin!

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