Companies such as Amazon, Airbnb, Facebook and Netflix have experienced unprecedented growth rates in recent years using an agile, cross-functional approach to growth. Facebook, for example, has added hundreds of billions of dollars to their market capitalization since introducing a growth team and cross-functional growth process. Even before Facebook’s pioneering growth efforts, Amazon and Netflix were using this approach to disrupt some of the most powerful companies in the world. Most of the early growth pioneers started with this approach from their early days and it is fully baked into the DNA of the company.These early growth pioneers executed this approach in relative secrecy until pretty recently. But as team members moved on to different companies, word got out about this superior way to approach growth. It became clear that uniting an entire team around a testing program to accelerate delivering value to customers is far superior to the siloed, static approach used by most companies.Learning Theory is EasyNow that the cat is out of the bag, it is relatively easy to learn and understand how this growth approach works. In Hacking Growth, Morgan Brown of the Facebook team and I laid out a guide to answer all of the questions for companies looking to implement this approach. Beyond our book, there are several online classes and group training programs to help growth hackers understand the theory of growth.The Real Growth ChallengeGrowth experts experience a painful reality check when they try to implement cross-functional growth programs in their own companies. A deep understanding of growth theory is not enough. Most organizations will quickly reject and/or frustrate a new internal growth leader, regardless of their knowledge and experience.Solutions for Kickstarting Growth TransformationTo drive success, companies must work to transform perceptions across the entire organization (or for an enterprise perhaps starting with a single business unit). One recommendation is to immerse as many team members as possible in the success cases of companies that have used this approach for breakout growth.The GrowthHackers Conference February 6th, 2018 in San Diego offers the perfect opportunity to introduce team members across your company to successful growth stories and learn how they drove breakout success. Speakers include heads of growth at Spotify, Drift, Slack and Eventbrite among many others. This week is Team Pricing Week for the GrowthHackers Conference, so the best time to get significant savings on group ticket rates.An alternative approach to kicking off cross-functional growth is to invite a recognized expert to your company for a full-day program to drive cross-functional alignment and growth training. This gives functional heads and specific team members an opportunity to agree on their specific role in driving breakout growth. I’ve been offering this type of program for several months now and I’ve found it is much more effective for getting everyone working together than previous longer-term consulting efforts. Of course it helps if a team member has already gone through a program like GrowthHackers University or Reforge. If you’d like to learn more about this type of program, please drop us a note at success@growthhackers.com. My colleagues will arrange a time for us to speak and give you more insights around the program, pricing and availability.Of course, to really stack your odds for success, you can bring multiple team members to the GrowthHackers Conference and then also run the Jumpstart Program. In fact, my team is offering an opportunity this week where the company that sends the most team members to the GrowthHackers Conference will get the Jumpstart Program for free (normally starts at $14,900). You can get more details here about how this works here. The winning company will be announced this Friday at 5pm Pacific time.

Source: blog.growthhackers.com