A Growth team is a cross-functional group of people that applies a scientific approach to improving KPIs. They can work on any part of the user journey and cover the entire AARRR funnel – their focus is defined by the set of KPIs that the organization would like to improve.
A Growth team will pick a problem to solve, then design and run a set of experiments to improve things. They look very much like their own organization, except that their mandate is to be a catalyst for other teams.
OKRs are particularly useful here as they'll help narrow down the scope of their work in any given quarter.
Example of Growth OKRs
You'll find below an example built around a fictitious company. Your OKRs should move from quarter to quarter and map to your company's reality – that's why we thought it's best to illustrate things as a case study that you can take inspiration from.
Scenario
Askawoof is a startup building a platform to help companies run customer satisfaction surveys. The Product team is busy doing core changes on the onboarding to reduce churn, but they know that this will take some time to pay off.
Askawoof still needs to increase usage, and they turn to the Growth team to improve the virality of the product.
General advice
Be mindful of large projects and long-running experiments. Growth teams are metrics-driven, and it's essential to measure progress every week if you want their work to be effective.
Split big initiatives into smaller tests. And don't forget to invest in having the right infrastructure to support the team. A good Growth team should operate in parallel with others without blocking or constraining the rest of the organization.
Their OKRs
We added some examples below, and you can find 10+ Growth OKRs templates in our library.
Accounts are expanding to a second user faster
New users inviting their team in the first week goes from 5% to 25%
40% of customers have set up the automated invites process.
Get 30% more organic visits to our NPS guide
Turn content into a lead-generation machine
Increase content click-through from 1,500 to 3000 clicks monthly
25% of our customers find us through content (vs 12% today)
More examples of OKR for Growth
OKR to build a solid growth engine
Create a solid growth engine
Increase weekly leads by 30%
Boost referral to get 1 lead/active customer/week
30% of new leads start a trial with us
OKR to increase community engagement
Ensure deep community engagement with existing members
60% of members are attending our meetups
No more than 10% churn rate of members cancelling their subscriptions
10 Slack posts per week from members
OKR to develop paid acquisition channels
Paid Marketing is a new channel for leads growth
20% of new leads come from paid acquisition
Generate $10K MRR from paid acquisition channels
Bring customer acquisition costs (CAC) down to $500
Tracking your OKRs
Knowing how to write good OKRs is critical, but without good tracking in place, the OKRs will fade away and focus will be lost.
It's not just us saying that:
- Peter Kappus writes that "check-ins are the most important part of OKRs".
- Felipe Castro cautions people not to let their OKRs turn into New Year's resolutions.
- Christina Wodtke tells us that "cadence is probably the single most important thing".
The easier it is for a team to have weekly discussions around the OKRs, the better they'll execute. Here are a few best practices for tracking OKRs.
1. Do weekly check-ins
Quarterly OKRs should be tracked every week to be effective. Without a continuous reflection on progress, your OKRs won't be much different from having KPIs.
The check-ins process can be automated with a platform like Tability that takes care of reminders, and distribute updates to the teams.
2. Keep track of your confidence
Good progress updates should help everyone understand how far we are from our goal, but also how confident we are in achieving it. You can use a simple red/yellow/green color coding to indicate your confidence.
3. Make trends easy to see
Lastly, it's important to look at trends to avoid false positives. It's not rare for a team to have a hot start and then slow down mid quarter. This will be hard to see unless you can look at progress trends for individual Key Results.
What other Growth metrics can you use?
Now that you've got good Objectives, it's time to pick some key results and finding good metrics that work for your team can be tricky. Lucky for you, we've laid out all the best success metrics for your teams to use.
Here are a few to get you started:
Backlinks
How many sites link back to your content?
Keyword rankings
Where do you rank on specific requests?
Domain Authority Score (DA)
Indicates how likely your website is to rank high in search results.
Content shares
How often your content is shared online.
Content per Acquisition (CPA)
Cost Per Acquisition is the cost of acquiring a non-paying user.
Traffic
How many people are visiting your website, and how often do they do it?
Engagement
How do people interact with your content (it can be anything, from visits to specific sections to conversations in Intercom…)
Click-through rate
Rate of engagement with specific actions.
Leads generated/Market Qualified Leads (MQL)
How many users end up being interested in what you have to offer (demos booked, signups)
Conversion rate
Similar to click-through, but generally associated with a tangible result (signup, purchase…)
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