Divya Gundlapalli

Organic growth is trackable: measure how many people are installing your app or whatever core action you define outside of paid media. Google Analytics calls this organic if members search for your brand and land on your site directly. Please tag your media buys! This is critical to assist with measurement. Leverage broader metrics like life-time value can help show value from organic audience vs paid audience. Paid media audiences are helpful in building brand presence which can be tracked in brand health surveys. Brand building is also a good metric. not everything will need to be about install or click. Leverage ROAS to keep track of paid media returns. If a channel consistently has low ROAS, pause and reflect, adjusting your strategy.

Its not an either or strategy. Its understanding role organic plays vs paid media. Organic growth is hard to achieve but when it happens from word of mouth and you deliver authenticity and promise people coming to your product for, then power of organic growth is insurmountable. Paid media helps you reach people who could not come to your product on their own ( i.e. not organically). This extended reach factor can be useful when you use paid media to reach new audiences.

Often I see teams reverse engineering ... i.e. oh we want to build x, does this solve a user problem? Let's see what prob this CAN solve. This is a really sub-optimal way to define a problem as doing this makes you miss out on a crucial step: the actual issue users WANT you to solve. Never assume you are the user or you know the user. Talk to users, understand your competitive set, and figure out a feedback loop to surface the most important problems to solve. Here impact and how big is this issue lens is useful to figure out what is the issue. If you can define the issue in 2 sentences you understand it well. If you fumble into 4-6 sentences, you might be combining too many issues under the guise of one.

I am of the belief this step is not something one does at the end.. So again if we flip the process as we are building out business needs when you start thinking of objectives, if you consult strakeholders there, you have a list of ideas need to be considered at the outset than when you are pushing for why x idea now... you need to keep them involved where it counts.. so I think bringing them in at the point of gathering insight into business needs is important and then again once you share an initial list of 5 ideas across ( customer, business, prod strategy, and vision) to get further buy-in... in this way, you can explain to them why/how certain ideas float to the top OR engage in debate to refine ideas

As I shared above, building out objectives into 4 buckets will also help you sharpen your constraints maybe timing is not right because to deliver something in your vision, you need x tooling so it shapes your priorities and limitations accounting for business needs too

Following from objectives I talked about earlier, if you build it into the 4 pillars above, then balancing 4 pillars helps you decide whether you work on incremental or needle-moving ideas so you can prioritize a set of ideas across a spectrum. Business & customer lens: give you incremental impact Strategy and vision lens: give you needle moving