6 Speed over perfection
Article written by
Stuart Brameld
A big part of marketing is getting something live, noticing how the market reacts, and then iterating to make it better based on what worked well (this process is the core tenant of the scientific method). That's why following a regular cadence of launching new experiments is a critical step in improving everything about your marketing: from messaging to conversion rates.
Optimise for speed
Inherent in an experiment-driven approach to marketing and growth is optimising for speed. Growth marketing teams need to be shipping work and launching new programmes in days, not months. Nobody wants to wait 3 months to see the results of a campaign. Change happens when people see action.
Monitoring your experiment velocity is a foundational part of any good growth marketing strategy because an increase in velocity directly correlates with an increase in learning.
Jeff Bezos describes how experiments at Amazon include everything from website changes and new features, to design changes, recommendation algorithms, search rankings, strategic partnerships, and new services.
Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.
Geoff Charles, VP of Product at Ramp, the world’s fastest-growing SaaS company:
“In essence, we believe that doing is better than planning. Any second you spend planning is a second you don’t spend doing. The moment you are aligned in a direction, you don’t need a high level of accuracy. It’s impossible and costly to try to predict what you can do—and part of our competitive advantage has been that we can respond very quickly to the change in environment, strategy, or customer feedback. We learn something new every day that helps us adjust our plan.”
Elena Verna is a growth advisor and has held leadership positions at Miro, SurveyMonkey, Amplitude, and Dropbox:
Speed of learning sets high-performing growth teams apart. It enables quick validation of assumptions, leading to a swift discovery of the successful strategies.
Sean Ellis spearheaded the go-to-market at Dropbox, Eventbrite, Lookout, and LogMeIn, putting them on the path to billion-dollar valuations (Dropbox reached $1B in ARR faster than any prior SaaS startup), he's now a globally recognized speaker, author, and growth advisor:
“The more tests you run, the more you learn about how to grow your business. So it’s only natural to want to run as many tests per period of time as possible.”
The easiest way to increase your speed and velocity is to work in shorter cycles and reduce project scope. Seeing progress and outcomes after 2 weeks of effort makes it a lot easier for teams to stay focused and motivated.
Focus
An immutable law of speed in execution is focus (another of our growth principles). The only way to achieve fast execution is to focus. I can't divide my attention. You can't either, Mr. Proud Multitasker. And the less concentrated your energies, the more total time a task or project will require.
For one, context switching slows everything down. The more times you have to circle back to something, the more time you'll spend figuring out where you left off. Ruthless prioritisation and saying no to as much as possible, is the greatest obstacle to progress in any single project.
Having a clear goal and a prioritised list of activities is what gives you the freedom to focus on what’s most important and to respond with “sorry, not right now” to everything else.
You ship your calendar, so your calendar should reflect your goal. Guard your time carefully in order to remain continually focused on your goal.
Think big, start small
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt first popularised the theory of constraints, and it remains one of the most widely read business books of all time. The theory states that there is, and will always be, a constraining or limiting factor in any process or system and that output is always determined by this one constraint.
Typically there are 2 options here:
Reduce the scope - focus on fixed time rather than fixed scope experimentation
Reduce interdependencies - reduce or eliminate your reliance on other teams, including agencies, where possible
Constrain your experiment cycles to 4 weeks, or 28 days, to force creativity. This can come under the guise of lean, or agile, or growth marketing, but the core principle is the same.
"The enemy of art is the absence of limitations."
Orson Welles
For more information read our article on growth marketing and the theory of constraints.
Keep it simple stupid
The principle of KISS, which stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid", is a guiding philosophy in many areas, including business growth and the design of experiments. The essence of KISS is to favour simplicity over complexity, making it easier to understand, manage, and predict outcomes.
Big bets based on big assumptions are a terrible way to run a modern marketing team. Modern teams and growth strategies are built on the idea of being able to validate or invalidate ideas over a short period of time. There are no prizes for the most complicated or elaborate experiments, instead your goal should be to prove or disprove your hypothesis in the most efficient way possible.
Avoid a “complexity is beautiful” culture and work iteratively. Avoid overdeveloping projects early on.
Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.
Steve Jobs
Applying the KISS principle doesn't mean avoiding innovation or not tackling complex problems. Instead, it's about breaking down these complex issues into simpler, more manageable parts. By doing so, you ensure that growth strategies and experiments are grounded in clear, straightforward approaches that are easier to execute, measure, and refine.
To summarise
As a growth marketer, speed of execution is your biggest advantage. This is particularly true for smaller teams - you likely cannot out-work or outspend more established brands, but you can outmanoeuvre them. This has never been more true than it is in today's AI era where traditional marketing capabilities are being commoditized faster than ever.
Your goal is to ship fast, learn fast, and to find the channels, tactics, and technology that enable you to outperform the status quo.
"Turn speed and focus into a competitive advantage: only do things which will move the goals you are after and do them with speed. Embracing speed allows you to try things at a faster pace - shipping campaigns, testing marketing channels, testing messaging variations, designs, etc. The faster you can get to answers, even when the answer is failure, the closer you are to finding success and the big opportunities for the business."
The faster the feedback loop between idea and learning, the quicker the path to success. For traditional marketers, this requires a mindset shift from slow perfectionism to fast and good enough. The quality bar for growth teams should be high, not pixel perfect. Growth teams should embody the characteristics of a small, scrappy startup and individuals must develop a strong intuition for things that can be skipped, or hard-coded, or made more robust later on.
7 Principles of Effective Growth
Article written by
Stuart Brameld