Rick Kuwahara | Growth Marketer

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Rick Kuwahara | Growth Marketer

How We Run Growth at Paubox

Rick KuwaharaRick Kuwahara

It’s been said by a lot of people smarter than me that “Growth is a team sport.”

That means everyone needs to be involved in order for your company to “win.”

At Paubox, we failed at getting everyone involved early on, and it’s still tough.

Even though there’s only two of us in the marketing department, growth experiments and tests are run by everyone on the team including Customer Success.

But, as a startup that’s growing fast, there’s a lot of day-to-day tasks that divert attention from growth. Especially when it’s not part of the “core” job duties.

Trying to organize and manage how we log new ideas, prioritize what to test, and communicate learnings took a little while (and can still use improvement). But we’ve got a system in place now.

Here’s what we put together.

Putting together a framework

The first step we did was establish a framework of how we wanted to track everything.

I wrote a little more about how high-tempo testing works, and it was the commitment to getting out at least one new test a week that drove our need to organize everything.

While I had a log going before just for me, it wasn’t until we went through 500 Startups, that we got on the same page with experimentation and tracking. I combined their experiment log with the one I had going and come up with the below.

We chose to create a Google Sheet to track our experiments. We set up three tabs:

Let’s break down the tabs.

The Backlog tab

Our Backlog tab has 11 columns on it, each has a filter so we can quickly sort through the mess if needed. You may not need all of these, but here’s the columns we use.

Once an experiment is chosen to be tested, we highlight that column in green to make sure it’s not accidentally duplicated.

The Status tab

When we pick an experiment to test, the info gets transferred to our Status tab, which is where we can get a quick snapshot of how an experiment did and any general learnings.

Here’s the info we track:

Once a test is done, we color code the row so we can visually see if a test was successful or not.

The Status tab is a great way to get an overview of what’s worked in the past and what’s currently being tested. But where it fails is in giving any detail on the test itself.

If there’s any marketing collateral, screenshots, data insights, etc., there’s just not enough room on a Google Sheet.

So we create individual Experiment Docs for the more intense tests.

What’s an Experiment Doc?

We use an Experiment Doc as a way to document the details of how a test is setup and any collateral that is created for it.

You can track this in a Google Doc, Word, but we use Confluence to manage things.

The document is pretty simple, even though it can take awhile to complete because it requires a lot more detail than the spreadsheets we just covered.

Here’s the sections we use:

Enter Trello cards

trello growth hacking process marketing

These documents help with tracking experiments, but when you’re managing a team it helps to have a quick view of what everyone is working on.

Enter Trello for the win.

We have a Marketing Team board that helps us see what items we’ve got queued up and what experiments everyone is running at any one particular time.

First is a List that shows items in the backlog, then each person has a List that shows what they are working on.

When done they drag the card over to a final List that shows what was completed in the last 30 days.

As a bonus, if there’s little side projects or items that are non-growth related it’s tracked here too. It’s great to see how much is on your team’s plate to better prioritize and manage workloads.

Very simple and works for us.

Putting it all together

The last step is simply to put everything together.

We have weekly marketing team meetings on Friday where we run through the Trello board and any new experiments we want to run. Basically a what happened this past week and what’s up for next week.

On Sunday’s I put together a quick bullet point list of things that we’re working on for the upcoming week and put that in an email out to our whole team.

Monday’s we have a weekly all-hands meeting where I pull out highlights of the emailed list and go in depth on important topics.

If anything comes up mid week I send out a meeting with updates and a link to the Experiment Doc so everyone can see details and stay up to speed.

We’re still improving this process, but it’s been working for us lately and helped us keep a good cadence of experiments.

Let me know how you handle growth and leave a comment below.

Data informed, people driven growth marketer.

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