Growth hacking your way to a culture of experimentation

It’s applicable to companies of various sizes and types that struggle with silos, growth and scaling. Growth hacking isn’t just looking for a silver bullet – it’s about creating a company-wide growth culture that gets the big wins in the long run.

Creating change in a company’s culture is never an easy task. Like a difficult puzzle, it has to be built piece by piece, but this time you can’t start with the corners. Culture is built from within by the people, and to influence that we need a systematic approach and some effective empowering.

Growth hacking as a change agent

The key benefit of growth hacking in the non-startup world is silo-breaking. By building a process that incentivizes testing everything, we find ourselves in a place where we need to get everyone involved. That is where growth hacking really shines – it forces ideation, optimization and debate throughout the organization.

There are often several stakeholders to understand, silos to break and systems to build. Experimentation is not a system or a service you can buy, it’s a mindset and a guiding light. Testing everything means questioning everything. And questioning ourselves and our colleagues requires a whole lot of trust, and trust can’t be forced. Discussion and validation build trust, growth hacking creates discussion and validation.

Growth hacking is like Batman. Not the hero we think we need, but the hero we deserve.

How to get sh*t done every day

Here’s where it goes a bit start-uppy. Start-ups have a built-in need to grow fast. Don’t get frightened here: growth hacking doesn’t force uncontrollable short-term growth. I’d like to believe that most larger companies do conversion rate optimization. To me, growth hacking is mostly just smart, systematic CRO.

Usually to get the ball rolling we need to start by focusing on learning and sharing as much and as fast as possible. Sharing proven results validates opinions. Sharing builds trust. That’s where a team composed of people from different competences both within and outside the company is extremely effective. To define issues and opportunities effectively, we need people from the outside looking in and vice versa.

Einstein is often credited with saying “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing but expecting different results”. When silos define our company, we are in a place where not much organic innovation can happen. That is why we should always look for systems that break the status quo.

When we have a process of trying, learning and adopting set up, it’s easy to see things as opportunities instead of “this is how it’s always been”. We don’t have to live with these issues. We are empowered to get sh*t done every day.

Break your rules before someone else does

Your competitors don’t really care about your rules. That’s why you shouldn’t hang on to them either. If you’re looking for that outsider to shake things up, build bridges between departments and help you create future-proof optimization systems, we can help. Drop us a line.