What is Growth Ops?
Definitions & examples of "Growth Operations"
Hi all!
How not to start this series of emails with this question: what is Growth Operations?
This is what we’ll cover in this article:
What is “growth operations”?
What is the scope of a Growth Ops team?
Some examples of projects as a Growth Ops:
Big project (several months): Re-building Qonto’s “growth stack” from scratch, to scale
Medium-sized project (a couple of weeks): revamping a tracking plan
Small project (few hours): Optimizing a lead qualification process from Google Ads
How to know if your Growth Ops team is good? What metrics to look at?
Skills needed to be a Growth Ops
What is the difference between RevOps & Growth Ops?
After years of working as a “Growth Ops” & hours of scrolling articles/job descs, I am finally able to write this article to define this unknown job: Growth Operations.
Let’s go!
What is “growth operations”?
Growth Operations teams are in charge of tools, data, and automations for Growth teams, inside a company.
Nothing more, nothing less!
The role of a Growth Ops team is to ensure tools & data work smoothly across teams:
To maintain and improve the “stack” of tools
But also: to find (and test) business opportunities available thanks to those tools/data.
What is the scope of a Growth Ops team?
The scope of a Growth Ops team could be super large (that’s why it’s so difficult to define it).
For instance, a Growth Ops can work on:
Automations
Tracking
Data:
Analysis
Flows (make sure data is at the right place at the right time)
Tools
So basically, you are doing the bridge between people from different teams, thanks to fancy tools, with some automations & data. How cool is that?!
Some examples of projects as a Growth Ops:
1. Big project (several months): Re-building Qonto’s “growth stack” from scratch, to scale
What is a growth stack?
It’s basically the set of tools your company uses for growth. This often includes:
CRMs (Salesforce/Hubspot)
Customer Data Platforms (such as Segment) to collect/send behavioral data to your tools
Analytics tools: to understand this behavioral data with dashboards
Marketing automation tools: such as Customer.io, Braze, and even Intercom
And then a lot of other tools to manipulate, and send/receive data anywhere you’d like. (Zapier, Fivetran, Hightouch, BigQuery… we’ll chat about those later).
One of the biggest projects I have been working on as a Growth Ops was to re-build a stack from scratch for Qonto, a french B2B neobank.
The ‘old’ stack was becoming unreliable because tools were not performant enough, and there was too much data flowing in and out.
This was causing some business issues: if your sales team misses a lead because “something didn’t work”, then you have to fix it.
If you fix it, but it re-brakes, you have to change it.
That was pretty much the case at Qonto when we switched from our old Customer Data Platform (Hull.io) to Segment (& Personas).
Along with that, as the company was overwhelmingly growing, we reviewed:
All the data models (how we transformed data using SQL)
All the user attributes (and naming conventions)
All the data flows (from what sources to what destinations)
All the email & sales campaigns: reduce it, simplify it
So basically, we broke, reviewed, and rebuilt everything to make sure the stack would scale for the next 5 to 10 years.
Yup, that’s a big project!
2. Medium-sized project (a couple of weeks): revamping a tracking plan
I recently worked for a client whose tracking plan was entirely made for Google Universal Analytics (RIP).
Working with a CDP such as Segment/Rudderstack (or simply with an event-based analytics tool) drastically changes how you build your tracking plan.
Here’s an event created for the same purpose:
The first one, on a Google Analytics tracking plan:
And the second one, made by GaaS for an event-based tool:
Hopefully, you can spot the difference: simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, and when it comes to the tracking plan, it’s crucial to have as many people as possible understanding what events are made for.
Moreover, you should not be creating events just for specific tools, but for what you want to track and understand from your users.
3. Small project (few hours): Optimizing a lead qualification process from Google Ads
I recently worked for a client who was generating leads from Google Ads (we also started the campaigns together).
Here was the process:
A lead search for the product on Google
He sees an ad, then lands on the landing page and submits the form
The form creates a CSV with all the leads
Someone downloads this CSV and then uploads it to Airtable
The lead qualification team calls the lead, to ask him about his interest, company size, expected spending…
Problem: there were soooooo many leads that his team was not able to reach out to everyone.
So we worked on a fully automated process. We did not want to ask more questions in the first form, not to reduce our conversion rate.
So we decided to create a second form, available once the 1st one has been submitted.
Here it is:
Leads search for the product, lands on the landing page, submit the form
Once the 1st form is submitted, 2 things happen:
The lead name, email, phone, and company name are sent to Airtable (via Zapier)
All the answers are passed into the URL using parameters (getgaas.com/?=thisisaparameter)
The lead is redirected to a “thank you” page, where he can now answer our qualification questions (what product they want, how much they’re going to spend…)
When the 2nd form is submitted, a new Zap updates the Airtable with the news information
Leads don’t have to re-submit their email/name/phone as we collect everything passed in the URL (from the 1st form).
No more manual calls, and more qualified leads per week, thanks to one little automation that took a morning to build, from ideation to production!
How to know if your Growth Ops team is good? What metrics to look at?
As you can see, most of the work done by Growth Ops are “projects”.
It’s quite hard to put numbers on it: you won’t necessarily make more sales and have a better ROI/conversion rate after a Growth Ops has worked for you.
You can measure the quality of what has been done: are the automation breaking? is the data clean/understandable for anyone?
Sometimes, you will be able to add some numbers to the projects you tackle.
For example, with our “lead qualification process improvement”, we can quickly know how much time the team won, by comparing the situation before and after the automation was created.
So my take on this would be to always try to find a number your project is having an impact on:
If you work on data pipelines from your product to your CRM tools, look at your sales team’s closing rate
If you work on tracking tools on a website, have a look at the CAC in paid ads
If you work on emailing campaigns, look at the conversion rate before/after your intervention
Skills needed to be a Growth Ops
Growth Ops are not engineers, but they’re not really far from it.
The main (hard) skills required:
SQL
Automation: do you know how to connect tools together?
Either with APIs & code (Javascript/Python) or no-code tools (Make, Zapier, n8n)…
Webhooks
Global understanding of things work (technically) on the web:
What the hell is going on with cookies?
What is server-side tracking? How does it work?
How do paid platforms work?
How does a database (and a warehouse) work?
Sometimes people are even referring to this as being a “semi-technical” person: you’re not a developer, but you understand what happens behind the scenes.
I would add that learning Webflow could unlock many things for growth ops.
If you can build a scalable website and connect it with your tools together to enable fast experimentation in your growth team, then of course it’s worth learning it.
What is the difference between RevOps & Growth Ops?
(I don’t know & I don’t care much 😅)
Jokes apart, here’s what I found doing some research on the web (and speaking with some folks):
RevOps includes all the business operations, including:
Marketing, Growth
Sales
Customer Service
Finances (sometimes)
whereas Growth Ops will be more focused on pure “growth” (and technical) projects.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how you name it, as soon as you understand the scope!
If you feel like you need a Growth Ops person, have a look at our website: getgaas.com
We can save you months of hiring (and learning) and deliver quickly custom solutions tailored for your needs.
See you!
Victor