The Kraken: a Growth Hacking Workshop

Growth Hacking Workshop

We present to you one of this year’s most successful workshops, The Kraken. Inspired by the AARRR metrics model with a pirate twist. AARRRg, an acronym for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.

This design thinking workshop that will help your team gather growth hacking strategies and bring home an array of new ideas and experiments to guide your roadmap. We’ll provide all the tools for your team to conduct this workshop remotely, including a Miro template and printable canvas. Find your free tools at the end of this article.

Remote workshop structure

The workshop is divided into four phases: warm-up, divergence, exploration, and convergence. The objective is to ideate and prioritize ideas or experiments to improve your KPI. Do it alone or with as many people as needed. In this article, we’ll explain how to do it with a group of 24 people.

Apart from the canvas, you’ll need a videoconference channel like Zoom or Google Hangouts. Generate a general group link and eight additional subgroups.

Grow the product internally

Generally, companies focus more on user acquisition rather than user retention. It’s interesting because new user acquisition is 7 times more expensive while existing users are 50% more likely to make a new purchase compared to new users. Typically marketing departments govern new user acquisition, independent from the product team, which usually has a ceiling set by an advertising budget or by the size of the market.

Growth Hacking has planted a new phenomenon we haven’t thought of before. What if we grow from inside of the product? This means that companies like Twitter, Dropbox or Hotmail could break growth records while dramatically cutting costs on advertising.

0. Break the ice and show the tools

These warm-up activities are meant to relax the participants and establish a group synergy. In our in-person workshops, we always use exercises that use physical contact and promote good vibes. In a remote workshop, physical contact converts into interface contact. For this reason, it’s important to not only create trust among the participants but also with the tool or channel you are using.

To get things started, we propose two truths and one lie. Give the group two minutes to write their name in a circle and put three post-its inside. Ask the group to write two truths and one lie regarding the central theme of the workshop.

Example: What do you like most about e-commerce today? What are some trends that mark the future of e-learning?

Once everyone is done, give them five minutes to review each other’s post-its and mark the one they think is a lie. In 15 minutes, review with them and have each person explain the reason for their lie. You will be amazed at the amount of information you can extract from a lie. Try to keep it under 30 minutes.

1. The crazy Kraken canvas

A fun canvas inspired by the Crazy Eights activity from Google Design Sprint methodology. Participants will choose one of the five metrics- Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, or Revenue to focus on during their brainstorming session. Remind everyone that we are looking for extreme ideas, the crazier the better, even if they seem impossible to do.

After everyone finishes, give them two minutes to decipher the best idea and center inside the eye of the Kraken. Later form teams of three people and give them ten minutes to exchange and debate ideas. The groups can be random, mixed departments, or with those with the same chosen metric.

2. The Kraken experiment canvas

Give each group 20 minutes to come up with the best idea and create a growth hacking experiment. Combine two ideas or create a new idea based on all the ideas gathered. The canvas has 2 sections. In the left box, we will outline and define the growth experiment. On the right side, we will add details and the hypothesis that we hope to achieve.

The ICE Method for prioritizing ideas

Give 10 extra minutes to fill in the right section of the canvas. Try to add a common prioritization system to detect ideas that require less work and have the biggest impact based on these three factors.

Impact: Determine the experiment impact, divide by the number of total active users.

Confidence: Provide evidence that the experiment can work, usually based on KPI and the degree of improvement that can result.

Ease: Teams involved will need to dedicate effort to launch the experiment. Normally you can define effort with days or story points (keep in mind that growth hacking tries to be as agile as possible in order to iterate as many times as possible).

Each factor will be scored with a value from 1 to 10 the ICE of each experiment should include the average between the three factors above.

3. The Kraken board to prioritize

At this point, you’ll have eight growth hack experiments to validate with ICE. In the ultimate phase, each group will have 2 minutes to explain their idea and 1 minute to explain the logic. If all participants agree, the experiment is situated in the column of the Kraken Board. Compared to other ideas, adjust accordingly to the ICE value. If nothing happens, try to do this workshop with the same team more than once, prioritizing will be easier to define and the collective intuition will be more precise.

Want the growth hacking canvas?

If you want this canvas or to receive the next that we share, subscribe and we’ll send them in print format and a Miro template to carry out the workshop remotely. If you need help, we can help you adapt design thinking methodologies to the image of your brand or sector. Digital transformation begins in culture, and that can only happen from within.

What do you think about our method of searching for growth ideas from within the product? Pass us your feedback through social networks. We are on Linkedin, Twitter, and Instagram. Let’s grow! 🐙

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