How To Build A Kick-Ass Growth Team — Willix Halim

“The bleeding edge today is Growth Hacking and Data Science, and it’s where analytics, statistics, computer science and marketing meet. Growth Hacking quintessentially looks for platforms that provide one to many relationships (read: one to millions), and develops smart ways to harness them quickly.

Tech companies are literally hiring rocket scientists to exploit these channels and acquire customers quickly before they get crowded and the advantage fades as they get costly or restricted. If you want hypergrowth, conventional marketing won’t get you there, because traditional marketing methods involves absolute, linear growth and not relative, exponential growth.”
Matt Barrie - Freelancer.com CEO

I have had quite a few people approaching me with this one very question: "What is your ideal Growth Team?" To be honest, I don’t know the exact formula for this but I can share how I built Freelancer.com GROWTH TEAM from ground up.

I don’t have online marketers in my team. That’s not because I disregard their existence but mainly because what we do in the company is very mathematical, scientific and calculated. Marketers mostly being mathematical neanderthals are the exact opposite.

So I have a team of 12 Growth Hackers / Data Scientists / Product Managers-Growth / Whatever the f*** you call it - I call them growth ninjas:

1) 4 University Medallists (I used to have 6) - All the 12 graduated with H1/HD/First Class Honours
2) 4 PhDs
3) Mechatronics/Robotics Engineer
4) Computer Scientist - Machine Learning Expert
5) Computer Engineer
6) Mathematician/Statistician
7) Quantum Physicist

And there we have it, FREELANCER.COM GROWTH TEAM!!! Oh yeah, we have VP of Growth but not VP of Marketing :)

So what are some of the traits you want from these growth hackers?

1) They are engineers and should know how to PROGRAM

All the growth hackers in my company had to go through the same intensive interview process that the normal engineers would have gone through on top of separate GROWTH interview.

WHY? Well, growth hackers are different kind of breeds. They are hybrid of marketers and engineers as Andrew Chen would have kindly put it. Although I do think that growth hackers should be strategists too and hence our Freelancer.com Growth Team plays a critical role in core product strategy and decision making - ensuring every decision is analytics/data-driven.

Concrete Example: AirBNB managed to automatically post on Craigslist without any API. If you are not a programmer, you wouldn’t be able to do that. Needless to say, this is how AirBNB achieved its initial growth.

Additionally, no CONTEXT SWITCHING!!! You don’t have to go back and forth to engineers to ship minor tweaks/fixes. Freelancer.com GROWTH HACKERS ship about 15-20 A/B tests a week and if we are lucky, we will get 2-3 minor improvements. So if we are to involve core engineers for those, imagine how much longer this would take!!!

2) Avid Tech-News Reader

To put it simply, if you don’t read hackernews or techmeme or techcrunch or other sites alike, you shouldn’t be in the growth team. This is our UNIVERSITY or at least Freelancer.com growth ninjas’ :).

3) Hire THE BEST/second best/third best/...

I have one philosophy: YOU CAN’T GO WRONG WITH UNIVERSITY MEDALISTS/VALEDICTORIANS. At the very least, they have proven that they are willing to work hard - you can’t be graduating top of your class if you are a lazy arse.

4) PHD = Passionate - Hungry - Driven

A smart manager always hires people smarter than him/her, the best you can afford. Look for passionate, hungry and driven team members. I'm more comfortable hiring 22 year old graduate who is smart, deeply technical, passionate, hungry who is easy to get on than veteran "outsider". My average age for my growth team is about 23 years old.

5) Knowledge in Statistics & Data Mining

You probably don’t need the whole team to be experts in statistics and machine learning but all of them should probably have high level understanding of those fields like for example

- what is binary state classifier and how can you apply it?
- A/B testing statistical significance
- etc

So the idea is to have THINKERS in your team and have these mathematicians/physicists/ML experts to validate the ideas by series of number crunching.

You have to track basically everything that you push. You have to be able to quantify whatever you do have impacts on the core metrics you are trying to improve. That’s why in Freelancer.com we have thousands of graphs in the dashboard created by the growth team and it is available to everyone in the company because we LOVE TRANSPARENCY.

Oh yeah, you will also be amazed at what insights can come from Machine Learning.

In the case of the identifying paying customers for example:
ML - Binary State Classifier e.g. Random Forest Classifier can essentially predict whether a user is going to be a paying customer or not. Even better, it can also tell you - by weighting - which attributes to tackle so that more users are paying customers.

So what kind of interviews/questions you ask in hiring a growth hacker?

1) Technical Engineering Questions

I will probably start them off with engineering related interviews - the normal interviews software engineers would have gone through. Algorithmic related questions are probably the emphasis here cause you want to know how they think.

2) Data Analytics

- What does 95% CI mean?
- How would you run your A/B tests if there are over 10 simultaneous tests running?
- What is type1 & type2 error and why is it important in data mining?
- If you can have any data from google, what would you yearn the most for our company and why?
- What is EV?
- etc

3) Random General Knowledge Questions

I also like to ask general random questions as it shows how knowledgeable they are :)
- What is Subprime Mortgage crisis and why did it fail in hindsight?
- What is Big Mac Index?
You get the idea 

4) Case Studies

Finally, run them through some case studies preferably problems that your current growth hackers have encountered and subsequently solved !!!. This may include funnel visualization/optimization, A/B test, one of the core metrics improvement, etc. 

I hope you enjoyed my first of many posts to come :).

If you have any questions, please email me at willix.halim@gmail.com