Agile growth means creating a company that can grow while being able to make quick adjustments as it grows. As a company expands its planning cycles generally become longer, more approvals are needed, and more time is spent on coordination instead of on doing. Agile growth removes this friction and combines agile ways of executing with defined growth outcomes to keep all parties involved engaged and motivated.
1. What Does Agile Growth Mean?
Agile growth ties every aspect of your daily work into measurable business results. The teams you have working on projects complete their work in cycles, see those improvements on the market faster, and continue to track and measure the performance of the company. Instead of trying to create a few large bets at the end of each quarter, companies will be able to create momentum with numerous small improvements made along the way that add up to bigger results.
The key benefits from agile growth include improving the rate at which you acquire customers, activate them, retain them, and increase revenue by learning faster than the market does.
2. Why Do Modern Businesses Need Agile Growth?
Customer expectations are changing rapidly, and competitors can now copy the features you put out to the market faster than ever before. Companies that rely on long road maps may find themselves too far behind in meeting customer expectations when they find that customer behavior has already changed in the middle of the project cycle. Agile growth reduces that risk by allowing you to validate the idea of the product or service much sooner and adjust your strategy before investing more time and money into the wrong direction.
Agile growth can also align various departments within a company. When multiple departments are working toward the same outcome-based goals and measuring their performance against the same metrics, priorities become more clearly defined and decision-making processes are accelerated.
3. The Key Components of Agile Growth
Outcome-Based Planning
The core concept of agile growth is that the planning process is centered on the desired outcome versus the completed deliverables. In other words, a deliverable could be “launching a new onboarding flow,” while the outcome would be “improve activation” or “decrease time-to-value.” The switch from deliverables to outcomes forces companies to be clear about what they want to achieve prior to starting the project, and then evaluating progress by tracking and measuring the results.
Cross-Functional Growth Teams
Growth within a company is often the result of the collaboration and coordination among various departments. The best companies to date use cross-functional teams that consist of employees from different departments who can collaborate on planning, building, launching, and measuring a particular initiative or project. Cross-functional teams reduce hand-offs, accelerate the pace of the execution, and provide clear accountability for achieving the outcome of a specific metric.
Structured Experimentation
Agile growth relies heavily on experimentation, but experimentation must follow a structure. Structured experimentation begins with an insight, follows with forming a hypothesis, conducting a small-scale experiment, measuring the results of the experiment, and determining the course of action to take moving forward. Structured experimentation allows teams to remain focused on the goal of learning as opposed to simply shipping products or services.
Data-Informed Decision Making
Agile growth is successful when there is dependable data used in decision-making. Teams should pay close attention to early indicators (signals) of whether a change is having a positive effect on a particular metric, while remaining accountable to the long-term business outcomes that drive value to the organization. The early indicators allow teams to learn quickly, while the long-term outcomes confirm the true level of impact.
4. How to Bring Agile Growth into Your Organization
Begin with one focus area – such as activation, retention, conversion, or expansion – to allow your team to execute quickly without becoming too dispersed. Establish a common definition of success using one primary metric and a small number of secondary metrics, ensuring all stakeholders agree on the definitions and metrics being tracked.
Establish a growth backlog based on hypotheses, rather than individual tasks. Each item in the backlog should outline the customer problem, proposed solution, and how the success of the proposed solution will be measured. Establish a steady rhythm of operation – ship small improvements, regularly review the results of the improvements, document the lessons learned from the improvements, and apply the lessons learned to scale the improvements that are showing success.
5. Common Errors That Prevent Agile Growth
Agile growth will stall if teams lose sight of the relationship between activity and impact, or if teams fail to develop clear hypotheses for the experiments they are conducting, or if teams are optimizing for acquisition while ignoring the weaknesses in retention. Agile growth will also fail if the measurements being used to evaluate performance are unreliable, or if the approval processes create unnecessary barriers to the timely completion of initiatives.
Conclusion
Agile growth provides a practical mechanism for modern businesses to create scalable systems that deliver continuous improvement. By establishing outcomes-focused development, enabling cross-functional teams to operate, creating structured experimentation, and using data-driven decision making, businesses can develop a repeatable growth model that will produce consistent results in rapidly changing markets.