Episode 16 – Disrupt, innovate, iterate – Yousuf Bhaijee – Growth Advisor, Ex-Disney, Zynga, Eaze

In this episode:

Matt Widdoes
Welcome to Growth at Scale. I’m your host, Matt Widdoes. This is a podcast for leaders who want to bring sustainable, predictable, scalable growth to their businesses. Every episode I sit down with world -class growth experts across product, marketing, finance, operations, you name it. The hope is that these conversations will give you real, actionable advice for building and sustaining company growth. Welcome back to another episode of Growth at Scale. Joining us today is Yousuf Bhaijee, former VP of Growth at Ease, Zynga, Disney, and Reforge. Yousuf, welcome.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Hey, how’s it going?

Matt Widdoes
I’m doing great. I’m excited to have you today. For people who don’t know you, tell us who are you, where have you been, and what do you do?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, sure. The short answer is I’ve been a growth operator for about 15 years. I’ve done that building out growth teams at high growth startups, typically in emerging industries. Starting in the pandemic, I made a switch from being a full -time growth operator to a growth advisor. What does that mean? That means I work with two to three startups only at a time on really interesting problems with the founders and the heads of function on building out sustainable growth, more or less.

Matt Widdoes
Cool. Growth as a function over the years and even today means different things to different people. I’m curious, how would you describe growth as a function today?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, I’d say functionally, it can fall into one of three structures, and then there’s a commonality that goes across it, across any structure you create. The structures you typically see are a growth marketing team, one, a growth product team, two, or three, a centralized growth function. That’s typically how teams or companies organize a function. They’re meant to still be cross -functional, and that centralized growth team is typically the one that’s most cross -functional in nature. Now, if you were to zoom out and look at this more broadly over time, there’s, I think, one, there’s been one commonality in terms of what is a growth function. And I think this came from it was it was most aptly described for me by Scott Koenigsberg, who is currently the chief product officer at Zynga. But when I was interviewing when I was talking to him, he said, Hey, I don’t know what this role is. I just want to get someone who’s smart to come in to figure out the big shit we’re not doing figure out a way to do it. And I think that encapsulates sort of the ambiguity around growth and what people are looking for. And you’re really an organization and a function. You’re trying to figure out what is the best way to pull that out to build kind of that growth, the DNA, whether it’s, you know, concentrated in marketing product or if it’s a central growth team distributed. You’re trying to get that DNA distributed across the company.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. Well, and there’s always, it’s like so many functions that feed into it. Even legal teams, you know, if you can at scale, if you can get red lines out faster than your competitors, you can ink deals faster than competitors. That all adds up over time and, you know, ignoring whatever your marketing and product teams are doing. And there’s this temptation to want to do everything, right? So, and the challenge is if you talk to somebody, say you’re mid or early stage, you talk to somebody who specializes in SEO. They’re going to come up with a hundred thousand dollar a month program for you and back linking and all these other things because that’s all they know, right? And that’s like what they sell. Or you talk to somebody who’s in life cycle and they’re going to want to build out this like super complex life cycle program that may or may not suit the needs of the business today. And so it’s really a big piece for me is like, how do we rein that in? Think about the sequence at which these things, because we can do anything, but like, what is the sequence at which these things need to be turned on and at what depth and speed? And then all of that breaks if teams aren’t speaking to each other. And so I think, you know, one philosophy on my side is that really growth as a function is everybody’s function. Now, granted, you may not sit in a traditional marketing or product or sales related role or revenue quote revenue generating role. But, you know, everybody all the way down to the engineers with better naming conventions or better, you know, kind of systems and processes can lead to faster development, etc. So it kind of boils down to, you know, really more of a philosophy than necessary a function in my mind. And, you know, you’ve been in growth a long time, really kind of going all the way back to the beginning of what we in like modern times call growth functions, you know, and lots of people talk about what has changed. I’m curious to kind of hear your high level of maybe what’s changed over the last three to five years. And we think about, you know, maybe, you know, 2018 forward, but I’d really like to dive into some of the stuff that stayed the same because I think not a lot of people have, you know, it’s very easy to point at all the changes, but there are some fundamentals that haven’t really changed that much. So I’m curious to hear your perspective on both of those.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, absolutely. What’s changed over that time? period, I think there is this natural cycle in growth as a discipline, as a function, where you go through periods of disruption followed by periods of saturation. And those disruption periods are where either new industries, big industries or verticals emerge or new platform shifts occur or new customer experiences emerge. And those give you opportunities to fundamentally change the way you acquire and retain users. Some examples of this is like when mobile became a thing, users went from migrating and spending most of their time on desktop and laptops to these mobile devices, completely different consumer experience and completely different way to acquire and retain and engage users. And then that’s followed by and so then there’s innovation that happens there by growth people. Typically they come in from different backgrounds, more generalist backgrounds, and they almost disrupt functions like marketing, or product in many ways. They, new playbooks are created, new levers are discovered, or refined, all of that. That happens. And then there’s a period of saturation where these playbooks, this knowledge becomes more broadly adopted by other companies, by their functions, et cetera. And you’re in this point of like saturation where, Hey, these things aren’t as much of a competitive advantage anymore. People are searching for what’s new. The unit economics become less favorable for stuff like paid acquisition, as an example. And then you get to another, then the cycle starts again. You go to another moment of disruption. What’s changed is really, I think we’re at, we’ve gone through that entire cycle and we’re now at the point of disruption again. And it’s going to be around a lot of like what’s happening in AI, and generative AI more specifically. Now, again, what stayed the same is you have these cycles where at the beginning of the next cycle, but like the tools and the principles that you would use in growth to, you know, really be successful, really scale a startup, really accelerate your career are the same. Those are the same tools, processes and principles.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. And I think like some of the underlying fundamentals around data and naming and, you know, just basic blocking and tackling on things like lifecycle and paid and creative, those don’t really change. It’s like where the focus goes. It used to be, I mean, there was a point, you know, call it 2016, 2018 where you could just hammer Facebook and, you know, with audiences and segmentation stuff and actually drive growth in and of itself. But I look back at some of those days and think, you know, what if some of those teams had been more integrated across the funnel and not so much attention going to pay because I think there’s a tendency, particularly for leadership, because growth is so measurable or because paid, I think, if I’d separate paid out of growth is so measurable that it’s tempting to just look at that as the solution or potentially the problem if things aren’t going well. But really, and so it’s easy to kind of lose the force for the trees there where things like brand or things like, yeah, things. like influencers, stuff like that are a little bit more squishy, but equally important or you know, an important piece of it overall pie. I’m curious, like early days, you know, any changes that you saw or any kind of areas to capitalize that were maybe in that kind of disruption cycle where something had kind of popped and there was new opportunities. Any examples there?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, I think there’s two early stage. So mobile gaming in 2010. This is the time of like the iPhone 3 iPhone 3. This is one of people’s moms were getting their first iPhone. And so again, like I mentioned, you had this big shift of users onto this new platform. And that fundamentally meant like a new way of discovering products. I think there was a survey at that time where it said 80% of all app discovery was done by people scrolling the top 25 of the app store free rankings. And like, that was it. And so there, there was that opportunity. Well, like, okay, you know, how do you get into that place? How do you get yourself surfaced there? Because that’s where discovery is happening. And You know, when I was at TAPULUS, which was early, like one of the first big mobile gaming franchises before there were mobile gaming franchises, we figured out at scale how to get ourselves and all the mobile gaming apps that we created into that position. And I think we rode that and for about two years before it became saturated. And like the processes there were, you know, discovery, test, iterate, and then figure out scalable solutions to kind of ride that lever before it became saturated. I liked what you bring up more broadly about paid acquisition kind of in the common era with, I think the best example is Facebook as a platform. So Facebook as an ads platform, you know, you go back like seven years ago, who were you trying to hire and what skill set were you trying to get? You’re really trying to get like a quantitative person who could do really good arbitrage, you know, audience segmentation, turning stuff on and off. Like that’s where the games were. But fast forward now, most of that is done algorithmically. Like it’s hard to out -compete Facebook’s own ad serving algorithm. Now the opportunity is more on the creative side. So it’s kind of been like a fundamental shift. Like if I were to hire one person, like what were their superpower be? It would still be growthy in terms of their structured thinker, but it would be more creative. Like how do you build a scalable creative testing for creative optimization in a methodical way so that you’re getting your testing, testing, testing and getting more winners and you’re doing that at scale. So you kind of ride and realize like that opportunity in a very fundamentally different way than you did five to seven years ago.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, and it’s always been important, the creative testing element of it. But I think that to your point, some of those skill sets are different, it’s shifted more from quant into like higher empathy, higher… I mean, there’s still elements of science there, but that structure and that kind of how do we feed the algorithm and leverage what it’s already really good at? You think about UAC and it was bold of Google to launch it when they did. But like they gave them a chance to kind of really get that dialed in and you really are just kind of at the… of the algorithm and kind of pumping creative through it and praying it works and they’re getting better and better. And so, yes, and I think that there are, for anybody who wants to try and out- and repeat that, it might ultimately end up in an algorithm on top of an algorithm and whoever can build that best. But small, amen -sized companies aren’t going to be able to do that. And it’s kind of cost prohibitive given most of the scale unless you’re spending, I don’t know, 10 to 20 million a month or something. Like probably you’re going to have diminishing returns and your focus is probably better spent elsewhere. But yeah, I think that’s a big shift and really it still comes back to the fundamentals. It’s just really more about where the attention goes. And so, you know, you also spent, you know, we mentioned ease in your past, highly regulated cannabis, you know, one of the largest players, if not the largest player in cannabis. I’m curious, any stories there as far as, you know, when you think about expansion and new channel discovery or kind of working through, you know, you mentioned the Scotty K’s point of like, we just need somebody to come in and help us like figure out the big problem where, you know, the traditional paths of paid in particular, but maybe even in growth generally, you had some kind of handcuffs on given the nature of the business. What was that like? Talk to us about that. Because that was really kind of a new frontier at the time when you were there.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, Ease was a wild experience. So just to set the context for people who don’t know, you know, I joined ease in 2017. Ease was a cannabis delivery startup based out of San Francisco. When I joined, it accounted for 10% of California’s cannabis tax revenue. So 10% of the entire legal cannabis market in the largest cannabis market in the world. And the company was growing 10% month over month, a truly exponential growth. And they were doing this while acquisition growth was flat. So new users every month, but the same number of new users every month. Mathematically, what that meant is that long term, you’re not going to be able to maintain that growth. That same 10% top line growth that you’re trying to get.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, there’s some cap. I mean, you’re yeah, you have nothing else you’re geographically bound.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, yeah. And you’re basically you’ve been like over that time period of 10% growth with flat acquisition growth, you’d actually been leaning on improving retention and monetization. But you know, like any acquisition lever or any growth lever, you start hitting diminishing returns. At some point, you can only improve retention so much before you getting diminishing returns. Same thing with monetization. Now, the last thing about 2017 was this was about, I joined about nine months from the state going adult recreational use, which is a big shift before it was medical only and this is going to like open up the market. Cannabis also when, you know, when I started talking to you, they said, Hey, you know, We have all these great things about us. Acquisition growth is flat. This is the first big challenge. We want you to focus on whatever is the biggest bottleneck for growth at any time. And by the way, you can’t do 95% of the things you would in any other industry because of this. So no Facebook, Google, etc. And I’m like, great, this is awesome. You know, like sign me up for this weird, nebulous, orthocrat challenge. And yeah, like that was the starting point. And it was a very first principles approach for us to like figure out growth over the next, you know, three and a half years.

Matt Widdoes
What were some of those levers that you were like, how did you solve for it? Right. So you take Facebook off the table. This is almost like a case study in what ifs, right? But it was a real world situation. So how did you approach that? Where did you find traction and, you know, within the restrictions that you had on cannabis?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah. So the short answers were for some reason you could do billboards.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. I remember seeing them up and down 101 for sure.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah. So you could do billboards. And when I joined, it was being done by a brand marketing team, kind of like spray and pray, no attribution, but still kind of working well with the opportunity on that one was like, let’s actually get attribution because then we can dial in like, what is working, what’s not and move our chips around to drive faster growth through billboards. So that was one thing. The second thing that became a huge play that turned into our largest acquisition channel was affiliates. And this wasn’t like your normal affiliates play. Like, you think about your typical affiliates play, you’re kind of like working with people who are trying to skim off the top, you know, like coupon sites, et cetera, who they’re bidding on your own keywords. And you know, you’re paying them because usually it’s a competitive industry, you’re just trying to crowd out other people. What we did was we found that affiliates could advertise on Google for the things we couldn’t because, you know, it’s a prohibited category. So we had to figure out like, okay, how do we go through them to do the things we want and completely flip how they typically operate, like how they’re instead of structure is.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah. How could the affiliates do it when you couldn’t? Is it because they just had a different business model or they were smaller or like, how did that work?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah. So this, I feel like I can talk about this now, now that it’s no longer competitive advantage and I’m well moved from the space. But the dynamics were like, we, I had my team test trying to advertise on Google. And when they did, the ROI was phenomenal. Like no one else was bidding on like marijuana delivery near me, stuff like that. And great. But then after advertising would say 50K, the account would get shut down. So this was turning to like a really like scrappy, hackery problem. And like, well, first step, can we scale those accounts faster than we get shut down? Yeah. And so, you know, we played around with that a little bit. That was a losing battle because, you know, you’re competing against these guys with big systems and they start getting smarter. So we didn’t go down that path. But But what we did find was that there were some affiliates who, because they spent so much on Google advertising and they had just the right kind of flavor, we could get them to advertise our products against those keywords without getting shut down. So we kind of took this first principles approach where it’s like, okay, hey, although you typically are trying to just bid on our keywords, how about I pay you to bid on these other keywords like marijuana delivery near me, and we figure out the right structure. So it just kind of like it passes through. And that was like really the big unlock and required kind of a different skill set. Like, yes, it required the analytical, the, you know, the scalable processes, all of that stuff. But uniquely, it also required the ability to make deals and change and get affiliates who are typically very, they don’t share their data, but get a relationship where it’s like, okay, we want you to do this. We want to help build stuff for you and we’ll pay you a fair price for all the acquisition you drive us.

Matt Widdoes
Well, I think that kind of partnership, aligning incentives and finding these win -wins in the market are often a undervalued or under pursued strategy because it takes a lot of boots on the ground, legwork, lots of conversations. It’s not something you just turn on overnight. You have to win the buy -in of these other players in the market and you have to do it kind of broad as well. It’s likely not going to work unless you just find one massive whale affiliate. You’re going to need more than one going at it. With a backup plan, if those do get shut down, because it’s also cat and mouse, you don’t know what will or won’t fly in the moment. So you’re kind of making the rules up as you go. One thing too, we both spent time at Zynga and I know that there was an opportunity there in building out. You spoke a moment ago about driving monetization and retention and a lot of that is finding ways to get value out of your existing user base instead of relying entirely on new users. Talk to us about cross -promotion and kind of the opportunity or the use case that you found at Zynga to also monetize existing users.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, absolutely. So when I was at Zynga in this nebulous growth role, one of the things I did was I took over the cross -promotion team and this was like a product team plus an operations team. So what they did was they built throughout the network of Zynga games, like features where you could cross -promote users between games. For example, from Words With Friends to Farmville. And then they operated that system too. They actually ran the campaigns, all of that stuff. So built and operated. Now this was described to me as the least desirable job within Zynga and I’m like, great, sign me up. If it’s easy, it’s usually not valuable. And so I dug in there and I’m like, what’s happening here? And it turned out that… Cross promotion was such a huge opportunity at Zynga. At this time, Zynga had moved into mobile. They were leaning into paid acquisition. They were doing a good job there. But again, this was starting to get to the saturation point where the playbook was being copied, the arbitrage opportunity was smaller. We had this big network of Zynga users across multiple games. So the opportunity was users will churn one way or the other out of any individual game. What happens is you just re -acquired those users through paid ads back into the network in a new game. That’s wasting money. The better opportunity is as they’re about to churn, you cross promote them across the network into another game. It makes sense, seems simple enough, but it just wasn’t happening at Zynga. You dig in, you’re like “why isn’t it happening?” It’s not because there wasn’t the infrastructure, the tooling, all of that. It literally was the incentive strong. Yeah. So Zynga, you know, it’s a network made up of multiple gaming studios, each with their own PNL. And what happened was everyone wanted every game, every GM wanted all the other games and studios to cross promote to their game. But none of them wanted to cross promote out of their game. This makes sense, right? Like best case scenario, if you cross promote out of your game, it’s like net no benefit to you. You know, it’s net neutral. Worst case scenario is the user who you cross promote out of it, stops playing your game, starts playing the other game. That impacts your PNL. Oh, you have this situation where like, you have a bunch of really smart PMs who knew how to use like analytics as kind of like a blocker. Like, you know, oh, I want to see this analysis before we agree to do this. And they just had no incentive. So this big opportunity, nothing was happening. And that’s why it was also described as the least desirable job at Zynga. So the unlock there was actually like, how do you change the incentive structure to encourage and incentivize cross promoting out of your game? And, you know, all these games are monetized in different ways, you know, either through in our currency or games like Words with Friends, primarily through ads. And what, you know, we figured out is that like, instead of getting no benefit from cross promoting a user out of your game, what if we gave the majority of the benefit to like, Words with Friends? So now they’re incentivized to do that. And how do we do that? Well, we made a structure, a shadow PNL, or we were going to do this where if Words with Friends sends a user to Farmville, and that user goes to Farmville and, you know, makes like $10, you know, in our currency, 80% of that gets recognized on Words with Friends PNL. So now it’s just another monetization stream. Now these PMs who are super good at analysis and, you know, optimizing, they’re able to say like, Okay, here’s the moment in time where it’s worth it for me to cross promote users to another game because, you know, I will actually make more money than this user turning out. So that was clearly like an example of where growth wasn’t so much building something or marketing something in a different way. way, it was approaching the problem from a first principle sampling and figuring out a solve which happened to be the incentive structure to unlock growth.

Matt Widdoes
Well, I think you bring up a tool that’s often ignored or at least underutilized, which is predictive churn analysis. So forward -looking, lots of people are focused on their forward -looking LTVs and really tracking CAC super close. But so few companies, even companies that don’t have the ability to cross promo, even companies that just have a single product or a subscription for one thing, really understanding predictive churn and getting ahead of that in a way to drive revenue and essentially stave off some potential losses there. Personal example with me that I was on the receiving of, which was really smart, is probably a couple of years ago before home interest rates went kind of through the roof. We were seeing billboards on again on 101 talking about all of these like refi and, hey, get this new lower rate, et cetera, et cetera. And we were seriously considering it, but it’s a pain. You have to get together all your, like all these documents and it’s like, it’s kind of a chore. And one day we received a letter from Wells Fargo that carries our mortgage that just said they had lowered our rate proactively. They’re like, hey, we lowered this rate. Congratulations, you have a lower rate. And we’re like, oh, great. Now we don’t have to do that. And it was still slightly higher than what we would have gotten if we refied, but with none of the pain. And I know, I mean, clearly with absolute certainty that we were on some segment where they said, hey, we think these people are highly likely to refi for any number of reasons. So let’s just hit them with a discount because we know we’re already seeing them walk out, people that look just like this group. And those are things that oftentimes are just ignored and people are like, yeah, people are just leaving. And it’s like, well, you can get ahead of that, but you need analytics, you need the ability to identify the commonalities between these groups, segment them, make the offers, test the offers and say, yes, we did some hold out. And it turns out that when we just proactively give them this discount, we actually make more than if we don’t do anything at all because the churn that’s happening on the other side and the lost opportunity outweighs the discount that we’re giving in the other promotion, essentially.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, totally. Super smart. I think it’s like, you see a general issue with a lot of companies where instead of focusing on churn prevention, they overly focus on resurrecting. So that’s very, very hard. You know, you get way more bang for your buck on focusing on churn prevention.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, when there’s still a heartbeat. So you work with a lot of startups and kind of speaking of pattern recognition generally, anything that stands out to you as common mistakes in growth at mid to late stage companies or early stage companies, what do you see as common there?

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, I think there’s a few things, a few cardinal sins. One is, you know, when you get to that mid size or even late stage, people start thinking about growth and they think about the growth responsibility falling on like one function. So whether it’s a centralized growth team, growth marketing, like whatever, they’re like, that’s your job. That’s cardinal sin number one. Like that’s not going to work. Growth is everyone’s responsibility and it needs to be cross functional and you need to get that same DNA built into all orgs. So they’re thinking about what am I doing? Is it contributing growth? How much? And if not, like, should I still do it? The answer might be yes. Number two is another big one is prioritization. As it comes to growth, big companies just seem to lose the ability to prioritize their individual roadmaps around growth. I remember when I joined Ease, I walked in, Ease and Zynga, the first day they’re like, hey, before you showed up, we did an exercise, here are the 50 growth ideas that we have. There’s way more stuff than you can do. And most of the time, it’s done without any sizing of the opportunity. And that’s just like, you can only do a few things every quarter and 80% of growth ideas fail. And under those circumstances, like picking the right thing and prioritizing the right thing is actually really important and de -risking it. Most companies I’ve seen just pattern recognition don’t have that or don’t have a rigorous version of that. Whether that’s in growth marketing, growth product, RevOps, sales, et cetera. Like that just doesn’t exist. And that’s one of like the big unlocks from an organizational standpoint that, you know, I’ve done over the last two to three years with startups is like building that muscle. whether it’s starting in one function or spreading it across the rest of the org?

Matt Widdoes
Well, I think that piece you brought up on rigor is like having the process by which you weigh ideas against each other from the capital expense, from the personnel expense, from the size of the opportunity, from the time that it’s going to take to show proof of concept versus like, if we have to build a whole new website, build a whole new flow and involve 15 different people, and the size of the prize isn’t even necessarily that big, it’s sometimes tempting to go after these really big opportunities, especially in product, but in product and marketing, where it’s actually unproven and you just make all these assumptions and decisions early and say, okay, we’re going down that path, and then you wake up nine months later, it’s still not done, or it is done, and it’s not working, you don’t actually know why, and that importance of having a framework by which you can judge ideas and prioritize them. And it often turns out that the five easy to execute small ideas that are incrementally valuable, especially at scale, but even on smaller scale, are oftentimes more beneficial to the org than one big idea, even accounting for the fact that sometimes the big ideas work, but when factoring the likelihood of failure. So there’s a wide range of ways that we might judge these ideas with some sense of rating or scoring that still has a ton of assumptions built in, but if you’re not putting in that work, or the loudest voice is winning, or the last voice is winning, you can get into this thrash within organizations where it’s like, we’re swinging this way, we’re swinging this way, and you’re actually not, there’s lots of things happening, but there’s not a lot of predictable growth being driven by those efforts, which causes not only challenges to the business itself, but to the people within it, that can be very taxing, and nobody’s able to hold onto a win, and it can just drag people down too. So there’s all these other ancillary challenges with that.

Yousuf Bhaijee
I’m going to tell you about two things I hate related to this. One thing I hate is the ICE framework. And then the other thing I hate is-

Matt Widdoes
For people that don’t know ICE, walk us through the ICE of that.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, so the ICE framework is impact cost effort. It’s a way to do prioritization. So the intention is good. You’re trying to get to- a score effectively for every I am typically in a product roadmap for how much is it worth and how much typically Engineering cost is involved. The problem with the ice framework is you get to just a numerical score for most organizations Like a one two three four, which feels very arbitrary like it is Yeah, how are you actually making a go -no -go decision? You know, you actually don’t know like is a three ROI positive or not because you’re comparing just a numerical score to like some cost Where I think it falls short is that there’s not a common currency not a true common currency that can be compared across the org And that can also get you to an ROI number So if you take that ice framework where you’d be eyes impact The thing that needs to be replaced is there needs to get dollar amount So every line item is like how much incremental revenue or profit profit preferable is each of these ideas Mm -hmm going to drive what is the expected value that that actually occurs by working on it and then you can get to okay Here is like an idea or initiative that’s sized based off of common currency that you can use to prioritize and you can make a decision on like, actually, do we even get more resources? Should we go hire more people because there’s so many things that are ROI positive that need to be done that it justifies hiring more people to do it? So that’s where I think like the ICE framework is so lacking and the pattern recognition I see in companies is like, I kind of have them shift from the ICE framework to what we call like the common currency framework. And they usually what you see is this like starts in one org, then other orgs who kind of like observe it are like, wow, this is great. And they start adopting it. So, you know, when I was at Brightwheel and working with Brightwheel, it went from like RevOps and marketing starting to do it to then the sales team saying, hey, we should do this too. And then it expands like more broadly across the org. So that’s trigger one is the ICE framework. Trigger number two is this idea of folks on A/B testing over assumption testing. And assumption testing is more like, you know, you mentioned you could have like a big idea and, you know, it could take a long time to see if that works. You do all that work. And then at the end, you A/B. test, did it actually show impact? The more important thing I think is with these big ideas where you’re not going to have feedback until much further is you do assumption testing. You’re doing discovery work to dis like what identify what are the key assumptions that are underlying this and how do we de -risk those assumptions? Like, for example, in product, you can do a painted door test where you don’t build the feature. You just kind of build like the painted door. Like it’s like the feature exists and you’re just checking to see.

Matt Widdoes
No development required.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Click on it. Use it. Like, and again, that idea could still be attached to a really large opportunity. But before you’ve done all that assumption testing and de -risking, I put the expected value closer to 5%. And so, just by taking these small, fast steps, you can start to get more conviction and an idea and also make kind of pivots accordingly.

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, makes sense. And I think we could probably do a whole other podcast on some of that building out hypotheses using the scientific method to predict what we make a claim on what we think is going to happen, how we’re going to measure it, how we’re going to reduce noise. A whole other thing that we could probably go into as well is AI and the early stuff in AI and how that’s going to impact growth. I’m curious for today, because we have limited time, for our listeners who are founders or senior within mid, maybe even smaller sized companies, but what advice would you give them or somebody you just ran into on a plane if you said, hey, I can just give you one or two pieces of advice for when you’re thinking about growth within your org, when you’re thinking about hiring a VP of growth or you’re thinking about hiring a head of product or head of acquisition or whatever. Just thinking about how your company approaches growth, any advice that you would give that just says, hey, this is a starting point and you should be thinking about it with this kind of frame.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, I think my short advice is predicated around one truth that I’ve seen, which is growth roles have the most ambiguity and the highest failure rates. And it’s, it’s the hardest to recruit for, and it fails the most often, which sets an org back. And part of it is because it’s like the least understood one. So the remedy for that is two things. One is when you’re hiring for these types of role, try before you buy or feasible. You know, there are many people who who’ve been like growth veterans who are taking time off. And you know, you could do like a one month, just a one month thing, let’s work on a problem together. Let’s short circuit the interview. Because when you’re working with someone, that’s where you really kind of like the skeletons come out of the closet. And two to three weeks, you get a sense for like, Oh, okay, here’s the real story about this company. And then the company can also say like, Oh, okay, this candidate, here’s how they think about it, do our visions aligned, our working styles align. Yeah, can we just de -risk the hire?

Matt Widdoes
Yeah, the shared context is so important.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah. So that’s number one. And then the second part is like, I put on the founders and the execs to understand growth better. And oftentimes you can do that. What is growth at your company? What is the biggest opportunity? What should you be looking for? You know, a lot of times you can hire an advisor to do that work with you a little bit, start to get the motion going for growth without, you know, a leader, and you get a really good idea for like, Aha, my flavor of growth leader is this, you know, it’s kind of, they have to be really good at either these loops, they have to, the biggest risk factor is they need to be able to work with the head of product really well.

Matt Widdoes
Right. Yeah. And I think that’s true in the sense that, you know, on paper alone, it’s really hard to find who’s going to be great for you. People make, you know, CMOs are like the fastest, you know, churn role within most orgs. And I think oftentimes CEOs hope that there’s some magic bullet and one person that can kind of save the entire company, and that’s just not going to be it. And you can hire based on industry experience, you can hire based on all these other things that would seem like a good signal. But even within your org, just because you’re in the same industry, the timing is different, the needs of the org are different, the personnel are different from how people interact to what they’re actually good at, to what you already have on the bench. So I think the tribe before you buy, we’ve seen a lot of success with where it’s just like there’s no substitution for the work and lots of people can talk about things, but really when the rubber meets the road, that’s where you’re able to sort the wheat from the shaft, if you will. Well, Yousuf, thanks for the time today. Always great chatting with you. I feel like we could do one of these a week and have valuable stuff come out of it. So I look forward to the next one, but really appreciate your insights today and look forward to the next one.

Yousuf Bhaijee
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

Matt Widdoes
Absolutely. Cheers. Thanks for listening to this week’s episode. We hope you found Yousuf’s insights on how growth has changed over the years as valuable as we did. And you’ll join us next week for another episode of Growth at Scale.