How to succeed in your first 30 days as Chief Growth officer
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Your First Month as Chief Growth Officer: A Comprehensive Guide
A Chief Growth Officer (CGO) is pivotal in driving company growth and achieving business objectives. But where Should you start when joining a new client or company? This comprehensive guide provides a simple plan for your first 30 days as a CGO or CMO. It will help you to achieve a successful onboarding and impactful start, emphasising the importance of understanding the vision, data-driven strategies, and thorough analysis.
Phase 0: Preparation Before Starting
Like for any other position, your onboarding starts way earlier than your starting date and your interview process already gave you the time to research, test the product and hear about the challenges ahead. After all, that’s why you have been brought on board. As a refresher, i would advise you to:
Review the job Spec and your notes from the interview
Test the Funnel / Product / App / Website and take some notes about your user experience
Research some competitors and test their Funnel / Product / App / Website to get some comparative basis
Ask the People department to share the company org chart in advance alongside the job description including remit and responsibilities of the different roles to understand the company’s structure.
Companies are getting better at documenting their processes. If you can get early access to their notion or any library source, it will help you get some interesting insights about the business. This part may be daunting, but you can use some tools like NotebookLM to make it easier and more interactive
Lastly, prepare at least 3 questions for each department onboarding.
- What is their ideal way to collaborate?
- What are their biggest challenges?
- What is their definition of success?
- If they Had a magic wand, what would be the first thing they would fix?
Phase 1: Start with the Vision and Business
The Vision and Mission
Start with the founder: Conduct in-depth interviews with the CEO to Understand the company’s vision, mission, and short & long-term goals.
Assess :
The Current State: Evaluate the current business landscape, including market position, customer segments, personae, the competitive environment, current OKRs achievements, and burn Rate.
- The past: What has been tested, their learnings, successes, any structural and strategical changes.
- The future: Deep-dive into the roadmap of all departments, budgets, resources, upcoming Partnerships,
The Funnel and Stages
Draft the Customer Funnel: Collaborate with the CEO to draft a detailed customer journey funnel. Identify each stage from lead generation to conversion/retention and capture all the key variables affecting the business performance.
Map the user stages and KPIs/Metrics with their Department owners: clarify stage ownership and identify the Key Owners for each stage and process.
The Vision and Mission at the department level
Similar structure to the one used above with the CEO, but this time, you will need to focus on processes, User clustering, more granular performance & KPIs, and user Behaviours depending on stages.
Fragmented Customer Funnel: Using your previous draft, deep dive into the department Funnel stage. Gather more variables and make sure to insist on the transition stages (user journey between departments)
Review KPI calculation and data sources: It’s not uncommon to see departments using different tools with different data sources to analyse performance and manage their day-to-day. If it leads to better efficiency and team productivity, it may be ok, but you need to make sure to consider the following:
Data sources: Are there any discrepancies in the performance reported between the tool and the single source of truth?
User stage mapping: is it the same across reports? do we have the same definition? it’s not uncommon to see different stage mapping, which could lead to unaligned performance results (i.e., a conversion could mean a contract agreement for a sales department, a product shipper or received for operation or a paying customer for finance.)
KPI calculation: following the previous point, if your definition of stage is not holistic within the entire organisation, then you will have a team reporting different performances for the same KPI.
Phase 2: Data
Gather and build a full-funnel view
Gather Data: Ideally, you would build yourself a data table that will refresh daily, starting from the most granular level you can get in order to create a report giving you a full view of the funnel. it may require you to merge a multitude of tables to build your customer journey analytics and customer journey mapping
Build your report: Using your draft of the customer journey and your Stage mapping made previously with the CEO and the other departments’ leaders, build a report including all metrics and KPIs following the chronological order of your user journey. This holistic view of the business will help you to pinpoint the quick wins, areas of improvement, and user drops.
Assess Data integrity: Using the data and report created, play with different segments and clustering. You may find some issues here and there or missing captured information that will require you to amend processes for better insights gathering (i.e., not-normalised lost reasons, missing or blank entries.)
Conduct Performance Analysis: Jump into your report and analyse the effectiveness of current campaigns, channels, processes & Teams’ efficiencies, users' stage performances and tactics. Identify patterns, trends and correlations that can inform you on user behaviours and future strategies.
Evaluate Current Strategies: Review existing strategies and use the insights you find Improvements and decreases in performances) to understand what has been tested and the impact of those tests. classify each finding into two categories: “Quick-Wins” and “long-term fixes”. Using the previously made “user-stage mapping” by departments and the roadmap, prepare a list of actions and projects to discuss with the KPI owner.
Phase 3: Shadowing
At this stage, you will have a clear understanding of the business and what can be done to improve it. But a strategy is only as good as the amount of variables it considers. Therefore, now, it’s time to go even deeper!
User interviews: Talk with customers. after all, they are the best way to get clear feedback on how the offer, services, and product fulfil their promises. You may uncover some very interesting facts about your market product fit.
Teams Shadowing: Blok a day or half a day to sit, observe and understand how each department handles their part of the customer journey. Let them be your devil’s advocate and challenge your list of ideas, as there may be an obvious reason why some things you thought about haven’t been tested or implemented.
Phase 4: Develop Recommendations and Roadmap
You are now ready to develop and present your recommendation.
Make Data-Driven Recommendations: Based on the performance analysis backed up by your multiple interviews, draft and prioritise projects and optimisations to improve growth metrics. Ensure that recommendations are backed by data, supported by the team’s feedback, the observations of your shadowing sessions, and align with the company’s strategic goals.
Collaborate with Teams: Present your ideas and ranking to their user stage Owners first. Foster a collaborative environment where team members are encouraged to share insights and feedback.
Transform your Teams into Data-Driven Powerhouses: Implement a clear strategy to leverage data for decision-making and performance optimisation. This is a big piece but you can find a comprehensive step-by-step guide here
Present your Roadmap: After discussing with the department leader separately and getting confirmation of the priorities ranking and impact of your ideas, it’s time to consolidate it into one final Roadmap. Present your consolidated plan to the leadership team and get ready to present it to the entire company for your next all-hands meeting.
The first 30 days as a Chief Growth Officer are critical in setting the stage for long-term success. By following this comprehensive plan, you can ensure successful onboarding, leverage data-driven strategies, and conduct thorough performance analysis to drive growth and achieve business objectives.
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