The team was encouraged to be proactive in removing roadblocks and creating workarounds whenever possible. We optimized for velocity - Working under the assumption that only 1 out of 10 tests will yield in positive results, increasing the number of experiments and learnings was one of our highest priorities. To facilitate this, the entire team attended and collaborated during design reviews and experiment result readouts. Ideas came from everyone - Everyone on the team is encouraged to contribute to the experiment ideation and actively give both visual and experiment design feedback. If you had a sense of curiosity, were self-motivated, proactive, and quick to come up with many varied solutions to solve a problem, you were sure to fit for our team. We hired for a growth mindset - Whether it was an engineer or designer, it was important that every team member had a problem solving mindset. Optimize for results, velocity, and learningĮveryone owns growth. Think big, think outside of the box, be audacious After chatting with colleagues and advisors at Facebook and Sequoia Capital, here are some of the principles we encouraged the team to embody:

When I become the Growth PM, we decided that if we wanted to truly focus on growth and make an impact on the metrics, we would have to build a healthy and effective team from the ground up. In general, no one was invested in the team or the mission outside of the PM. Although in theory this gave resources to focus on experimentation, none of the developers had much say in the experiments or cared to suggest new ones. To address this, there was an attempt to build a temporary team by requesting each platform team loan a developer towards growth projects every quarter. As a result, growth experiments were often deprioritized or delayed because other features stacked ranked higher on each platform team’s list.

Up until then, there had always been a PM dedicated to identifying areas of opportunities for growth experiments, however, no dedicated resources or teammates.

Evernote worked on growth for 3 or 4 years prior to the creation of our first growth team.

Evernote customer service manager