This document provides 11 tips for creating a company-wide growth culture from Adobe Spark's Head of Growth. The tips are: 1) start with organic retention and product-market fit; 2) start small with early wins; 3) get executive sponsorship for a long-term growth strategy; 4) hire people with the right mindset over skills; 5) test value through third parties before building features; 6) differentiate your efforts from competitors; 7) form a growth squad of cross-functional engineers and PMs; 8) look for activation opportunities from data; 9) combine quantitative and qualitative research; 10) establish an experiment pipeline process; and 11) evangelize your growth team and process.

1. Actionable How-to:
Creating a Company-Wide
Growth Culture
Thibault Imbert
Head of Growth | Adobe Spark

2. What is Spark?
Adobe Spark

3. What is Spark?What is Spark?
Pros Market Expansion

4. Incubating Growth in Creative Cloud
Creative Cloud

5. 11 things we learnt

6. 1

7. It starts with organic retention
You can’t grow a crappy product

8. So if you don’t have product market fit
It is too early to think about Growth, solve a problem first

9. Are people using your product? (north star)
Beware of vanity metrics
For Spark: WAU (Weekly Active Publishers)

10. 2

11. Start small

12. You might not be given a team directly
Team up with one member or two
Look for low hanging fruits
Early wins are worth more than a pitch

13. 3

14. Get executive sponsorship

15. It is about a long term Growth strategy
It will be like running a marathon
You will never be done
It’s not about hacking
It’s just good marketing

16. 4

17. Find the right people

18. Mindset > Skills
Driven by results, not tech
Promote small experiments vs big projects
Customer empathy

19. 5

20. Buy before build

21. Test value before building
Go 3rd Party
After you hit the limitations, go homegrown

22. Chat

23. Chat Landing pages

24. Chat Landing pages Heatmap

25. 6

26. If everyone is doing it, no one really does

27. We all care about
Growth!
What we saw

28. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch

29. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!

30. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
Revenue
Activation
Retention
Acquisition

31. What we saw
We all care about
Growth!
Release/Launch
Dammit, let’s
ship this!
We all care about
Growth again!
Revenue
Activation
Retention
Acquisition

32. First attempt
Any ETA on the new
instrumentation?
PM/PMM
We have these
features for the June
release first
This will have to go on
the backlog
PM
EM
Product

33. 1.0 attempt

34. This just does not work

35. You need your own engineers

36. Growth Product
Second attempt
We have code ready
we need to checkin
We have this
experiment we would like
to run!
PM
Engineer
Who are you? Let me
see your code
Great! Do you
have resources to make it
happen?
PM
Engineer

37. Why are you in my code base?
Why do you get to take short cuts?
We are already planning on doing this!
That’s not how we work!

38. One word: Trust

39. 7

40. A squad, not a team

41. Engineers still part of the product team(s)
But on a Tour of duty
Easy org setup
Engineers familiar with product codebase

42. Squad composition
PM PD EM EngineersDS

43. Engineer Engineer
Growth Product
Hey Irina, can you
review my PR?
Sure, let me check!

44. 8

45. Don’t ideate, look for opportunities

46. Go back to the data
Focus on impact and ROI (ICE score)
If successful, what’s the projected impact?
Activation is a good place to start

47. Don’t bring more water to a leaky bucket
Improving Activation reduces CAC (Cost of Acquisition)
Better Activation drives retention and ultimately conversion to paid
When the right time, reinvest that money saved in Acquisition

48. 9

49. Never forget qualitative research

50. Queries and funnels provide directions
They don’t tell you the why
Power is in quant + qual

51. 10

52. Have a process

53. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)

54. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)

55. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)

56. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)

57. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)

58. Experiment Pipeline
(lever, hypothesis, ICE
prioritization)
Experiment Plan
(control vs variant, baseline,
metric)
Backlog
(sprint planning, link to
experiment)
Ship Meeting
(stakeholders signoff)
Ship
(soft launched)
Experiment
Results Review
(what did we learn)

59. 11

60. Sell your engine and process

61. Go on a tour to present your process
Show some early wins
Make people’s lives easier
Help other teams adopt it

62. Summary

63. Start with organic retention
It’s not about hacking
Hire the right people
Buy before build
Get your own engineers
A squad, not a team
Don’t ideate, look for opportunities
Never forget qualitative research
Have a process
Sell your team and process

64. 2 great books I recommend

66. Thank you!
Follow me at @thibault_imbert
for the slides.