Four Ways Software Changed How Companies Grow
There have been four major market changes caused by the proliferation of software that have changed our approach to growing products.
The blurring of the line between marketing and product
Marketing’s expansion into technical and quantitative territory
The increased accessibility of data
The emergence of platforms and APIs (View Highlight)
The Emergence of Platforms and APIs
Every company is built on top of a larger pre-existing platform. There are three ways companies tap into these pre-existing platforms:
Buy - ads and placement within media
Partner - with other companies to leverage their platforms for distribution (eyeballs)
Build - integrations with other platforms (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Slack, etc.) via API’s, embedding, etc.
In the early 2000’s if you wanted to tap into one of the popular platforms (i.e. Yahoo at the time) you most likely had to partner or buy (via ads). Fast forward, and building has become much more popular with the proliferation of API’s and and open platforms. Today you can integrate your product into numerous platforms such as Facebook or Slack to not only help acquire users, but activate, retain, and monetize them. The goals of these integrations tend to align more with marketing, but yet require skill sets that align more with product/engineering. So where does it live? (View Highlight)
How Are Growth Teams Different From Marketing and Product Teams?
The most common questions with growth are:
How are growth teams different from marketing teams?
How are growth teams different from product teams?
Any team has three defining components (which will be explained in depth in later modules):
Goals - What are the primary objectives? How are they measured?
Team - What skill sets and roles are needed to achieve the goals?
Process - How does the team operate to achieve the goals? (View Highlight)
Growth teams pursue growth as a holistic system and goal. They deploy a fast, data driven process to figure out what works and what doesn’t. They use a cross functional team with product, engineering, marketing, and data skill sets to execute that process. (View Highlight)
