Involving Everyone is Hurting Your Growth

Avoid the soup of indecision and disgruntlement

Author

Daphne Tideman
February 02, 2023

Hi there đź‘‹,

Growth is a team sport; I’ve said it often enough.

But you can go too far…

Too many start-ups, in the “name of collaboration”, involve the whole company in every growth decision. This is a mistake.

Which leads to:

Six different opinions, four rounds of iterations, two compromises, three weeks later and all that for a failed experiment 🤦‍♀️.

I once talked to Abi Hough, a CRO consultant, about this, and she put it perfectly:

"There is a saying in the UK, too many cooks spoil the broth.

The same can be said when you’re faced with too many stakeholders and opinions — it spoils progress, productivity and can lead to procrastination.

It cooks up a pretty stodgy soup of indecision and disgruntlement, simmering away with discontent and sprinkled with croutons of misery.”

Now that is not the kind of growth soup you want.

The goal is fast experimentation to drive flywheel growth, but how do you get there?

The #1 tool I use to reduce stakeholder overload

If you want to reduce the number of cooks, it is time to agree on roles:

  • Who can we trust within an organisation to drive improvement?

  • What is the agreed-upon response time?

This ends up being filled into an approval matrix as follows:

Now it can be the same person for multiple areas, but the key part is one check, not five. If the brand manager says the copy is fine, then in principle, the founder can’t come back and give feedback about it.

The backup field is alternative individuals you can contact if the primary contact is on holiday or sick. And then it’s also crucial to agree on the response time collectively, e.g. two days.

Want to take it a step further? You can agree on what size experiment even needs approval. A small ad test might not need a separate person to review copy and design.

For more methods on avoiding stakeholder overload, check out the full article here:

End of the day, we need to bring the focus back to value, as Tim Stewart, a digital consultant, explains:

"I call it 'indecision by committee'.

You end up with an aggregate of compromises, and it takes 10x longer because you are focused on the team dynamic rather than the actual value and requirements."

Recommendation

In every newsletter, I also share a related book, individual or newsletter to check out related to the topic of the week.

So given that I may have had a slightly public rampage against growth books this morning, I thought I’d give you an alternative book recommendation this week.

It’s one of my favourite books on stakeholder management, Crucial Conversations:

I love the framework they use to reach agreements:

What is the shared pool of meaning (the end goal) for both sides (e.g. how do we run more experiments to grow faster), and how do you work towards that versus arguing about the disagreement (e.g. Alice, Jen and Ryan definitely all need to be involved).

Daphne

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