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Growth Playbook

Compile the confirmed hypotheses, winning experiments, and reusable procedures into a playbook that survives team turnover.

Why

A growth team's most valuable asset is not the experiments it runs this quarter but the accumulated learning it can apply to the next — and that learning lives in people's heads, which is the most fragile storage medium. When a key growth person leaves, 18 months of learning leaves with them, and the new hire spends 6 months re-discovering what 'referral triggers on save, not on settings' before the team is back to where it was. A playbook (documented hypotheses, winning experiments, reusable procedures) externalizes this learning so it survives turnover and onboard new members in weeks not months. The playbook also prevents re-running disproven experiments — 'we already tested single-sided rewards in Q2 2025, it lost' — which is the most common waste in growth teams. The discipline is to write every learning into the playbook the day it's confirmed, not at the end of the quarter, because by then the detail is lost.

When

When the team has 10+ confirmed experiments. Build the playbook incrementally; every confirmed hypothesis is an entry.

How

1. Create a playbook home (Notion, internal wiki, or a repo) structured by funnel stage: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue
2. For every confirmed experiment, write an entry: hypothesis, what was tested, result (with CI), the learning, the reusable procedure
3. Tag each entry by funnel stage, metric, channel, and ICE score so the team can find relevant learnings for a new experiment
4. For winning experiments, document the reusable procedure: the exact change, the code/config, the rollout steps — so anyone can re-apply
5. For refuted experiments, document the hypothesis and the result so the team doesn't re-attempt it (tag: 'do-not-retry')
6. Write a 'growth principles' section: the cross-cutting learnings ('triggers fire at peak motivation, not in settings menus') that apply to all experiments
7. In onboarding, assign every new growth member to read the playbook + 3 'principle' entries in week 1; quiz them in week 2
8. Review the playbook quarterly: prune entries that are stale (the product changed), and promote recurring 'principles' to the top

Example

# Growth playbook (structured by funnel stage)

## Activation
- [confirmed] Onboarding progress bar → +4.2% activation
  Hypothesis: users drop because they don't see the end
  Procedure: add progress indicator to any multi-step flow
- [refuted, do-not-retry] 12-step UI tour → -8% activation
  Users churned at step 4; tours teach features, not outcomes

## Referral
- [confirmed] Trigger on save (not settings) → 10x invite rate
  Principle: triggers fire at peak motivation, not in menus
- [confirmed] Double-sided reward → 2.4x participation vs single
  Procedure: default to double-sided, in-product credit

## Growth principles (cross-cutting)
1. Triggers fire at peak-motivation moments, not in settings menus
2. Small bets (copy, color) win more often than large bets (redesign)
3. Every experiment needs a pre-registered hypothesis + stop date
4. Optimize the funnel's weakest stage, not the one you're comfortable with

# Onboarding (new growth PM, week 1)
Read: playbook (45 min) + 4 principles (15 min)
Week 2 quiz: "Where should a referral trigger fire, and why?"
→ Answer references the principle, not just the result

Common Problems

  • ⚠Keeping the playbook in heads, not docs; when the key person leaves, 18 months of learning leaves with them.
  • ⚠Writing learnings at quarter-end instead of when confirmed; by then the detail is lost and the entry is generic.
  • ⚠Documenting wins but not refuted experiments, so the team re-runs disproven ideas 6 months later.
  • ⚠No tagging or structure, so the playbook is a flat list no one searches and the learning is as inaccessible as it was in heads.

Best Practices

  • ✓Write every confirmed learning into the playbook the day it's confirmed, not at quarter-end; the detail is lost by then.
  • ✓Document refuted experiments with a 'do-not-retry' tag; the most common growth waste is re-running disproven ideas.
  • ✓Structure by funnel stage and tag by metric/channel so the team can find relevant learnings for any new experiment in 2 minutes.
  • ✓Assign every new growth member to read the playbook + principles in week 1; this is what onboards them in weeks not months.