Fast track and Master Growth with effective meetings and Project Management <> Review

This is Part 11 /12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.

In growth marketing, you come up with many ideas to make your product work. But, how do you manage them? how do you know that this one is going to be the most profitable idea ever? Even if you start implementing, there can be bottlenecks every Saturday and Sunday, also how do you manage resources and avoid spending extra on the things that are not important? Keep reading to find out.

Project Management for Marketers

So How does the cluster of Disaster happens when you manage the project?

Three things will happen if you have poor project management backbone.

• Resource Issues:

People: Basically its your whole team, they are too busy with something that doesn’t work instead of focusing on the golden opportunities. Hence they waste a lot of time means you pay them for nothing in return? Lack of desirable output is the main culprit, plus by any chance can we blame this on Monday?

• Scope Issues:

Commitment: As a freelancer, I can relate to this. Sometimes, I over-commit the stuff that I can do within a week and many times I simply finish it within 2–3 days and then I have nothing left to do, that’s under-committing. And then comes procrastination, or to put it gently, scope creep. Here we push deadlines to basically new deadlines. Honestly, it’s all Monday’s fault.

• Attribution Issues:

Goal Setting: You know what, by the time I wake-up, that is tomorrow morning, let whole country know there’s a new product in town. That is known as a vague goal. Quite broad, and almost unachievable. But, somehow you followed that goal and did everything you could, print ads in news papers, magazines, ran television ads whole night, did social media ads and even hired a dozen influencers but then next day was monday and you were not sure which marketing trick gave the most output. Here you didn’t track the relevant KPI’s, and there’s no actionable learning outcome from such a campaign.

So a lot of bad things happen if you don’t have project management in place.

No, Let’s see how project management can bring happiness and prosperity.

What can we achieve through a solid project management?

It aligns People, Priority, and Processes to achieve one objective.

It’s about deciding what is truly important and focusing resources and action on that objective. It is hard because focusing on one thing slights another. “ — Richard Rumelt, Author of Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

So how does it manage people?

One thing that I can be sure while taking a CXL course is that there’s a framework for everything. Yes even for managing people. So here it goes.

You need,

Driver: A person who keeps track of everything and makes sure that people are aware of their deadlines and are working towards achieving the common discussed goal.

Approver: Solely responsible for not throwing blame on Mondays for a project failure. Basically this person will have a say in everything, and he is like the umpire whose decisions are not to be questioned.

Contributors: These are the people, experts who know what to do in a project. Directly responsible for projects success. Also make sure to keep them happy.

Informed: Just a guy who you keep in loop of what’s happening around so that they know about something that is going on.

By keeping all these roles aligned, you can form a strong pillar that will lead to success of your campaign.

People Management? Check! Next comes priorities. Hold this framework.

First Step is to Look Back: See what worked previously. What new things you can do to make it better? Can we include X because last we did X was not there and we were about to mess up, consider all the tricky parts and then point-out the stuff that can be used in such situations.

Deep Dive: Here you have to score all the ideas you have based on urgency, feasibility, and effort. So you rank those ideas and choose to implement the one that fits your goals. As a growth marketer you don’t have whole year to do slow paced things.

Set OKRs: Identify your objective and a clearly defined result such as We need 10% increase in revenue in 3rd quarter by doing an X change, or something like that. Point is, be specific.

Date Mapping: Basically it is a timeline where you need to put all your marketing ideas, and follow that timeline.

Now there’s a implementation framework!

“Lurking beneath every goal are dangerous assumptions. The longer those assumptions remain unexamined, the greater the risk.” -Jake Knapp, Author of Sprint: How To Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just 5 days

So the process of implementation consists of five different phase.

1. Map:

Here you research the idea that you are about to implement. One way to do this is by hot-jar polls, you ask question to check if the idea f implementing something aligns with your customers.

Next, you can even do industry interviews and gain more information. Now comes the part where you set targets. Here, take all the information that you have and then apply it. The map phase is to take research and set measurable and actionable goals.

2. Sketch:

It’s a team effort. Here everyone pitch ideas to attain the goal you set. Now you have a lot of ideas, so everyone votes for those ideas and the one with highest vote wins.

Do not forget to use all the micro frameworks before hand in each step of the procedure. It’s all about coming up with creative ways to hit your goal.

3. Decide:

It’s decision time. Here you create your overall plan. This phase is quick, usually we include this to make sure that we don’t set any arbitrary timeliness or miss anything.

4. Prototype:

In this phase, make workable prototype of the service. It doesn’t necessarily needs to be good looking, just needs to be workable so that you can test in in the next phase.

5. Test:

This is the final part of the framework. Here you test the product or service on real customers. Take feedback and move on to the first phase to make sure that you were not just doing something based on assumptions. Take a lot of interviews, check their reaction is it positive or negative, get the feedback and start all over again to make what you just build a better product.

The more you follow through the process and complete the cycles, more conclusions will pop on the way and that way you will always make data driven decisions for the betterment of the product.

Next week I am completing my mini-degree. I will lay everything I liked, how I tackled the problems and all the stuff that I missed in the previous articles. So stay tuned!

Read: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10