Preparing Your Startup to Scale.
How we set up a framework to scale with a focus on our customer Lifecycle.
My phone storage was full AGAIN, and I ended up scrolling through my photos- I came across the one below. It was probably our last (sober) photo together and one that always makes me smile and brings with it a sense of achievement. Although it’s been over three years since it was taken — the story behind this photo deserved mention as well as a forever home. As a digital strategist at heart that someone that has held titles with Business Intelligence and Business Excellence in them — I’m often asked what it actually means to create a digital strategy and how that helps businesses. In fact, it is part of business excellence too. The 2 go together hand in hand, and I often use them interchangeably because one can’t BE without the other.
So here is a story of how a Digital Strategy using ‘intelligence’ collected from data, users, and skilled experts was mapped out and implemented to help you understand better how paramount it is to the success and rapid growth of a business.
We were developing an app called 1Tap by ReceiptBank (a mobile app that helped small businesses); we had a multitude of data from different sources. We needed structure but not too much, something dynamic that would be consistent enough to help us make better decisions and flexible enough to ‘adapt’ or represent our users’ behaviours. We needed to perform regular growth experiments, record their findings and implement, modify, or remove according to what experiment had in fact ‘moved the needle’ in one way or the other or nothing at all. We needed everyone to work on things that mattered, to be focussed, and for everyone to know what part of the puzzle, so to speak, they were contributing to.
So, in under 6 months of sifting and sorting our data and growth models, trying out different segmentations, experiments, and working closely with our UX team who spoke to our users regularly, we managed to create dynamic behavioural segments of our users and reduce our KPI’s down to six and a single dashboard to visualize it all.
Most of you know that in today’s world of endless data and information, one can get overwhelmed at what to focus on and, most of all, have everyone work towards the same thing. It’s not as simple as it sounds — because to have everyone in the company know exactly which part of the puzzle they contribute to and have that ONE dashboard that accurately visualized it was the work of some cool minds coming together. It’s no wonder how the famous data iceberg clearly depicts the effort it entails to achieve the accuracy and quality of the data you see versus the processes, logic, modelling, etc. that lie beneath.
Nonetheless, we managed, and the following were the main outcomes of our efforts:
👉 We had ONE main dashboard that we all referred to and based our work on
👉 We knew which segment we were targeting with every growth experiment we did, creating content with the exact segment in mind.
👉 We knew if our experiments influenced the targeted segments to move up or down the user lifecycle.
How did we do this? I pinned it down to 7 fundamentals of the model:
1. We defined our behavioural segments.
2. We minimized the number of KPIs and made sure everyone was on the same page.
3. We Set an Overall Objective (North Star Metric)
4. We mapped out and consistently updated our tracking plan.
5. We identified our Core Events.
6. We Grouped our Events into Event Groups
7. We created THE 6 KPI — Mother of All — dashboard.
Making excellence a part of business
We learned that making excellence an integral part of the business by identifying unmet needs, goals, opportunities, and challenges of all departments and aspects of the business were key to our success. We then mapped out initiatives related to the goals we set out and regularly oversaw their progress to ensure we met the model’s objectives.
This framework had basically, one dashboard with six reports visualising our six KPIs and provided us focus and clarity.
A tribute to the team
The team at 1tap was unique, and it’s not every day you get to work with such a talented group of people all under one roof. We had forward-thinking, modern leadership that empowered us, and we had coherent teamwork where even though we didn’t always agree, together, we were able to form a framework that was truly customer-centric, data-driven, and dynamic. This model helped us achieve results and gave us the freedom to try and try again because we could clearly see what was working and what was not, and that is not always easily achieved. We learned that cross-functional company alignment is the way to go — and we always had the USER/Customer at the model’s centre.
So whatever happens to this photo, I’m happy to finally give it and the story behind it a home, and I hope to have sparked interest and motivation in the mind of whoever reads this.
Here’s a summary
There is more!
If you are in a startup or scaleup you might relate to my other article called “When everyone becomes the data expert.”
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
