Growth OKRs - what is the goal of this team?
A growth team is a cross-functional team responsible for finding and implementing strategies to increase the growth of a company.
Growth includes, but is never limited to, the development of new products or features, optimizing marketing and sales efforts, and improving the user experience.
The goal of a growth team is to drive sustainable and scalable growth for the company. They may use data analysis, A/B testing, and other techniques to identify opportunities for growth and determine the effectiveness of their efforts.
A growth team works closely with other teams within the company, such as product management and marketing, to ensure that growth strategies are aligned with the overall goals of the organization.
Growth comes in many forms and it lives in many different teams inside companies. On this page, we’ll look at different growth OKR examples and divide them into different company types and team functions.
First, let’s define what growth is all about. This post will focus on growth in digital areas of businesses. The world of commerce and software has moved us online so we will focus our goals on these areas.
The backstory of the term "growth team"
The term “growth” has many definitions. It seems to originate from the term “growth hacking”. A term used years back about when companies like Dropbox, Uber & Airbnb really started experimenting with how they could “hack” the acquisition of new users.
From there, lots of people have misused the term or understood it incorrectly and suggested it’s about A/B testing button colors on landing pages. In reality, it’s a lot more sophisticated than that.
Growth teams often perform a wide variety of experiments that compare the performance of two or more variants of a thing. That thing can fx. be:
The experience you’re having when signing up for a service
The onboarding emails you’re sent when you haven’t started using the service or when you’ve left your cart in an ecommerce store
The personalized content you’re shown when opening an app
If you have previously worked in any of these areas, you know that running experiments like this is not an easy task. It requires substantial investments in technology that can empower teams to experiment with core aspects of the business.
Growth OKR Example
Let’s have a look at one of the better OKR examples for growth and discuss why it’s great:
Objective: Improve signup flow for hosts
Key Result: Increase signup completion rate from 20% to 25%
Now, let’s discuss the elements of this example that make it great.
The Key Elements To Growth OKR Examples
Overall, a great growth OKR should follow the SMART guidelines of being:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Results-oriented
Time-bound
1st Growth OKR Criteria: Specific
Your OKR should be specific enough so that when other people within the organization, that aren’t necessarily on your team, know what you’re working on. No one ever got punished for having an OKR that was a bit too long. Instead, writing fuzzy or unclear OKRs is a definite no-go.
2nd Growth OKR Criteria: Measurable
Because OKRs are usually working with specific metrics, it’s a lot easier to check the box that the OKR is measurable. We measure things that are relevant to progress within growth.
3rd Growth OKR Criteria: Achievable
It’s important to have achievable OKRs. They should always be ambitious, but nothing is more demotivating than unachievable goals. A rule of thumb is that the chance of achieving a Key Result should be around 50% from the start. If you reach 70% and above, it’s considered a success.
4th Growth OKR Criteria: Results-oriented
Being focused on results is a very important aspect of OKR. It’s so important, that we’ve dedicated an entire section to describing why you should focus on outcomes over outputs below.
5th Growth OKR Criteria: Time-bound
A key part of defining a goal is also defining when you’re expecting it to be met. For OKR, your goals are usually divided into different cycles and your goals should of course be reached within the end of the cycle.