How to run an effective growth team meeting

The weekly growth team meeting is the most critical activity for ensuring you get results from your growth marketing process. However, the larger the team, the higher the opportunity cost of holding the meeting.

Bringing together a team of 5 people for a 60-minute meeting, with 15 minutes of disruption either side of the meeting, equates to 6 and a half hours of time that could be spent on other growth activities.

You need to run a tight ship.

Growth team meeting structures

Jim Huffman at Growth Hit suggests structuring growth team meetings as follows:

• 15 minutes: Metrics review & update focus area

• 10 minutes: Review last week's tests

• 15 minutes: Key lessons learned

• 15 minutes: What to focus on in this cycle

• 5 minutes: Growth check of idea pipeline

Brian Balfour of growth training company Reforge suggests ensuring a focus on 3 main things:

1. Focus on learnings, not activity

2. Dig deeper on the learnings

3. No debating priorities as a group

Over the years, we have developed our own meeting agenda template (below) and encourage teams to use this document as a resource to develop their own.

Growth Method meeting agenda template

We recommend a weekly 45 to 60-minute discussion to review, prioritise, and plan experiments with the entire growth team. This is in addition to asynchronous check-ups and one-to-one meetings with individuals to discuss specific projects and experiments.

Use our recommended outline agenda below for your growth team meetings:

• Metrics Review: 5 minutes - Check key growth metrics, KPIs or OKRs & the health of the idea backlog.

• New Idea Triage: 15 minutes - Each person can nominate semi-formed ideas to "pitch" to the team in order to receive feedback. Once given a "green light," they can move forward to the experiment phase.

• Learnings & Insights: 20 minutes - Focus on learnings and insights, not on activities. Individuals should contribute learnings and findings from their experiments, as well as any implications for further actions.

• Discussion Topics: 15 minutes - Address any key themes, announcements, or discussion topics.

Pre-meeting expectations

The pre-meeting email should be sent automatically and include the meeting agenda and a summary of current experiments. It is a reminder to ensure that team members come to the meeting knowing what is going on.

Every meeting starts with good preparation, so set the expectation that everyone shows up to the meeting with an understanding of:

1. The experiment pipeline and experiments in progress.

2. Key business metrics and progress against objectives.

3. Key learnings they would like to contribute to the meeting.

Focus on learnings and insights

High-impact opportunities come from continually learning about your products & services, acquisition channels, prospects, and customers, and testing ideas against those learnings. The growth meeting is the perfect opportunity to bring the learnings out into the open so that others can apply them in their work.

Growth meetings should focus on:

1. How tests are impacting growth metrics

2. Extracting and discussing lessons learned (consider using the 5 why's)

3. How lessons learned can be applied to new opportunities

4. Making decisions on key issues or blockers

Team members bring fresh insights and perspectives on experiment outcomes and data and ask questions that help the whole team to dig deeper and extract more from the work that is being done.

Growth team meeting best practices

Follow the best practices below to maximise the value of your growth meetings:

1. Plan the meeting in advance and send automated reminders that include any prep required

2. Maintain a consistent time, format, and structure in order to build good habits for learning

3. Keep meetings to between 45 and 60 minutes

4. Make sure there is a meeting owner to facilitate and keep things on track

5. Address bad behaviours quickly through 1-on-1 feedback

6. Celebrate and reward impactful learnings

Growth meeting traps to avoid

Activity review

Avoid your weekly meetings becoming activity review sessions where individuals talk through everything they have done, and every experiment at every stage of the process is listed out and discussed. In general, meetings that focus on the “what" are both uninteresting and unproductive, and there are more efficient ways to communicate this information (such as email or Slack notifications) that keep the team passively updated on any changes.

There are 2 ways to avoid this:

1. Maintain a public growth marketing system that makes this information available to every member of the team at any time. If an individual needs or wants more details on a specific experiment, they can easily find this for themselves.

2. Send automatic experiment updates (via email or to a Slack channel) to update team members of changes in real-time.

As experiment velocity increases, how well you learn from previous winners and losers affects the success rate of the next batch of experiments you run.

Unstructured brainstorming

Avoid unstructured brainstorming and ideation wherever possible. In general, some ad hoc discussion of ideas is fine; however, avoid too much loosely structured brainstorming as this is not a productive use of time and should be taken offline.

Micro-level growth vs. macro-level growth

Avoid growth meetings that focus too much on micro-level growth (like the results of an individual A/B test) and that lose the focus of macro-level growth, like a larger MQL objective. With this in mind, use the metrics review and automated reporting to ensure continual focus on core objectives.

Growth team meeting resources