You might be a perfectionist or something who gets into fixing every small issue they find. Or you might just have too much on your plate, trying to improve many things at the same time. Neither of these approaches is ideal.
If you really want to get into the mindset of a growth marketer, you must be able to focus (without getting distracted by issues and vanity metrics) on a single most important metric, called the north star metric or the OMTM (the one metric that matters)
Each growth experiment you design should have one focus metric you’re trying to improve.
Remember to keep the focus on the most important metric of your experiment rather than trying to improve everything with a single experiment.
You can adopt this mindset in life by narrowing down to the key aspects of life itself.
Here’s how to build this mindset:
- Start by really writing down all the metrics that are important to you in all aspects of your life
- Example: Think about “What is the most important metric to measure the quality of my friendships?”
- OR “What is the most important use of my time right now?”
- OR “What would I work on today if I could only work one day this week?”
- This will start making you more focused as you go through life as well as through our growth marketing experiments.
You can also narrow down further by thinking:
- What is the main goal of the next 30 minutes I spend?
- What is the main goal of today’s workout session?
- If I can improve any one thing about my relationship or friendship this month, what would it be?
- What is the one thing I can improve to be a better friend/son/daughter/husband/wife this month?
Focusing on one thing at a time gives the right kind of time and energy to it as it deserves. This is why it’s important to choose the right metric to focus on.
You can also notice how, in the above examples, I’ve limited the time duration of tracking the metric by adding “this month” etc. This is to give a time-bound experimentation to improve the metric.
Thinking in time-bound, experimental loops, will also help you develop the mindset of a growth marketer.
In this chapter, we will limit our discussion to the mindset-building questions.
We will discuss more on what the right metrics are to measure for different startups and businesses in the further chapters in this book that deal with the growth marketing funnel and the growth marketing metrics.