On the latest episode of Growth@Scale, product and growth expert Ed Lee returns to talk about turning creative failures into learning opportunities and how to use cross-functional collaboration to unlock growth. 

Some of the main topics discussed include:

Focused Growth Strategies: Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, successful User Acquisition strategies involve targeting your core audience where they are and speaking to them in a way that resonates. 

Experimentation and Learning: The foundation of growth, especially for early-stage companies, is experimentation; success often means poring over creative failures to glean new learnings to leverage into future success. 

Cross-Functional Collaboration: From creative and design, to data analytics, product, and sales, collaboration among different teams is a valuable way to share knowledge and innovate new strategies based on different experiences with the customer journey. 

Integration of Product and Marketing: Both product-driven and marketing-driven approaches are essential and should be integrated, with successful companies leveraging strategies that unite both elements.

Budgeting for Growth: Decisions about spending on growth channels are based on data-driven test plans, with phased approaches and checkpoints to ensure money is spent wisely.

Building a Strong Creative Team: Building an effective creative team is a complex process that doesn’t stop at just hiring the best talent. You also need to establish effective test structures so you can get adequate learnings from every creative. 

Creative Optimization: Dissect what works, understand the components of successful creatives, and iterate based on those insights. Sometimes you’ll see significant impact from something as simple as adjusting copy. 

Listen at the link below and subscribe to Growth@Scale to hear new episodes every week.

Book a complimentary consultation with one of our experts
to learn how MAVAN can help your business grow.

Let’s Talk

Want more growth insights?

Thank you! form is submitted

[hubspot type=”form” portal=”20951211″ id=”9c538ed2-fb12-45f1-a573-ad7953c058cc”]

Related Content

  • MAVAN featured graphic answering the question "Where Does AI Fit In Creative Development?" on a deep navy-to-black background with coral-red light streaks, sub-headline "It Should Fuel Winners, Not Just Volume" with "Winners" underlined in coral red. A left-to-right process flow shows three white "Previous Winning Ads" cards feeding into a glowing coral-red "AI" orb, which fans out a spray of dim grey concept cards toward a white human-head silhouette with a coral-red spark at the temple, labeled "Human Taste + Audience Truth." Three bright coral-red "Winners" creative cards with play buttons emerge on the right. The flow illustrates that AI generates concept volume from proven winners while human taste and audience understanding select the few concepts that win. The coral MAVAN logo sits in the bottom-right corner.

    How Do You Use AI For Winning Ads In Creative Development?

    AI’s biggest near-term payoff in growth is creative. Use it to generate more concepts and rebuild what already works — then rely on human taste, audience truth, and disciplined testing to decide which creative ships and scales.

    Read More
  • MAVAN featured graphic on a deep navy-to-black background with a bold white headline reading 'Why Do Users Ignore the Flow You Built?' where the word 'Ignore' is underlined in coral red. A bird's-eye illustration shows a muted-gray paved sidewalk traveling from a white circular node labeled 'A' to a coral-red circular node labeled 'B' in an L-shape, turning at a 90-degree corner. A glowing coral-red dashed desire path cuts straight across the diagonal from 'A' to 'B', illustrating the shorter route users actually take versus the longer built flow. A two-line white caption reads 'They're taking a desire path to value. This has big implications for CAC and LTV.'

    Why Do Users Ignore Your UX Flow? (Tip: Find Their Desire Paths)

    Users ignore the flow you built because they’re taking a shorter or more intuitive path to what they’re looking for — what designers call a desire path. You find these paths by watching real behavior: funnel drop-off, session replays, and the workarounds that users invent. Then you rebuild the flow around what they already do.

    Read More
  • Featured graphic for the MAVAN article comparing two marketing leadership models for Series A startups, titled 'Which Scales Growth Better? Fractional CMO vs Growth Pod,' with 'vs' in coral red on a deep navy-to-black background with coral light streaks. On the left, a model labeled 'Fractional Hires / Vendor Stack' shows five white nodes — 'Paid,' 'Lifecycle,' 'Data,' 'Product,' and 'Creative' — loosely joined by dotted lines broken by coral warning triangles, illustrating a fragmented growth function. On the right, a model labeled 'Growth Pod' shows the same five nodes connected by solid glowing coral-red lines in a clean pentagon, illustrating an integrated, cross-functional team. The caption reads 'One can provide strategy but can't see the full picture or fully execute vision based on insights. The other spans the entire org, can find leaks fast, and scale growth quickly.'

    What Scales Series A Startups Best: Growth Pods or Fractional CMOs?

    A fractional CMO gives a Series A startup senior marketing strategy on a part-time basis. A growth pod adds the cross-functional team that ships it. The right choice depends on whether your real bottleneck is direction or delivery.

    Read More
View More