How can growth hacking help you prioritize business goals?

The term 'hacking" has a negative connotation of some type of cyber hacking attack. However, in the competitive business market, I prefer to categorize the term as "taking advantage of your competitor's weaknesses". Taking accounts from competitors achieves two outcomes: 1) it reduces your competitor's ability to continue to operate at the same revenue level as before; 2) Even if it's a small account, it only improves your position as the dominant force in the industry. I have previously used this tactic by offering the customer a higher value of service, at a more competitive cost. This does not affect my bottom-line profits, because the larger accounts at higher margins, make up for the smaller accounts at lower margins.

Growth hacking is like a strategic shortcut in a business garden, guiding you to efficiently nurture and grow your customer base. Dropbox's referral program, rewarding users with extra storage for referrals, is a perfect example. This approach significantly expanded their user base without traditional advertising. For insights into such strategies, "Hacking Growth" by Sean Ellis is a must-read. Tools like Google Analytics and A/B testing platforms are instrumental in identifying impactful growth strategies. Websites like GrowthHackers.com offer a community for sharing growth hacking successes.

Growth hacking is a powerful approach for prioritizing business goals as it focuses on strategies that drive rapid growth. By leveraging data-driven experiments and innovative marketing techniques, growth hacking allows you to identify the most effective ways to increase your customer base and revenue. This method involves setting clear, measurable objectives and continually testing and iterating different strategies to achieve these goals. Prioritization becomes clearer as you analyze which tactics yield the best results. The iterative process of growth hacking ensures that resources are efficiently allocated to areas with the highest impact, thus aligning efforts directly with your business's growth objectives.

Coming from an industry where my company had 80% dominant share of the market, it was important to focus only on those opportunities that would increase our market share with the least amount of effort. I used our primary business development resources to target larger opportunities, which were too complex for smaller competitors to handle. Plus we were a global corporation, there were global resources that were available to increase the value of our service or product, which smaller competitors simply could not match.

It is widely believed that Sean Ellis, the CEO of GrowthHackers, is the inventor of the ICE Scoring Model 1. The ICE Scoring Model is an agile methodology that prioritizes features using data according to three components: impact, confidence, and ease of implementation 2. It was initially created to help companies expand and is now broadly used to prioritize projects, features, initiatives, and rollouts 2. The model is ideally suited for early-stage product development where there is a continuous flow of ideas and momentum must be maintained.

OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results. It is a goal-setting methodology consisting of Objectives (The Whats) and Key Results (The Hows). Objectives define the end goal you aim to achieve, while key results are the tangible steps and measures you will use to track progress toward that goal. They should be SMART-specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a simple but powerful goal-setting framework used in business. Objectives are clear, high-level goals that define what an organization wants to achieve. Key Results are specific, measurable outcomes that indicate progress toward those objectives. The key is to make these goals ambitious but achievable, focusing on what MATTERS.