Setting the Battle Rhythm of a Growth Team
This is a quick atomic essay I’ve created as part of the ship30 writing workshop.
Let's talk about the cadence of rituals to set up your growth team for success a.k.a. the battle rhythm.
Growth is chaotic. You are executing a hypothesis>test>learn loop on repeat. A predictable system of rituals provides order to chaos and helps you move faster.
Unfortunately, many teams don't think through their system and experiment haphazardly.
Operational challenges faced by growth teams
Ensuring the team understands the behavioral data
Ensuring the team can design good experiments with clear metrics
Managing executive/stakeholder expectations and anxiety
A good battle rhythm can help solve this. Here's mine:
Quarterly
Set Objectives and key results (OKRs),
Update growth model and re-forecast against KPIs
Ideate, review and decide on big rocks
Monthly/every 6 weeks
Check-in. Update OKRs, forecasts or roadmap based on learnings.
Weekly
Metrics review - core team collectively review dashboards and discuss insights.
Experiment review - Look through backlog of experiment ideas, design of proposed experiments and results and learnings from live experiments.
Product review - Review the high level strategy for large bets. Typically these are working sessions where you shape what the solution or test might look like. Suited for larger teams (multiple PMs).
Update email - Recap KPI progress against forecast, progress from the previous week and upcoming milestones. Sent to the core team, executive team and other stakeholders in the company. This is an accountability device, helps manage stakeholder expectations and contains churn by pre-empting pet ideas getting thrown into the roadmap.
I've found weekly works best for these - it helps reinforce the velocity that growth teams need to operate with.
Daily
Standup (sync or async) for blocking and tackling.
By creating clear rituals around the essential growth activities, this battle rhythm will dramatically streamline your execution. It may not make sense for every company, But if growth is a priority and you have 3+ people working on it, you might find it more useful than not.