Hacking Growth Coauthors Morgan Brown and Sean Ellis Discuss Latest Growth Insights

In this week’s episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast, brought to you by Rise with SAP, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr are joined by Sean’s co-author of “Hacking Growth” Morgan Brown. The book was published back in 2017, so in this episode, we get to hear the two guys who literally wrote the book on growth “geek out” about their most important growth learnings since their initial collaboration.

Morgan’s perspective on growth has been shaped by the leadership roles he has held at Inman News and Facebook, and in his current Vice-President of Growth position at Shopify. These companies are an order of magnitude larger than anything he and Sean had worked on prior to writing the book, so as we dive in we look to understand how the sheer scale of these businesses has impacted Morgan’s perspective. 

Would he write a different book or change anything today with the benefit of hindsight?

Morgan found incredible value in the understand, identify, execute, approach, that has molded Facebook into the most sophisticated growth organization in the world. At Shopify, he is now working to grow a team that leverages structured thinking to run trustworthy experiments that use the playbook of “Hacking Growth” at scale. Sean’s own experiences working with fast-growing companies since writing the book guide his thinking on these topics, and that makes for some fascinating discussion! 

There is plenty to learn in this episode, but before you jump in learn more about RISE with SAP S/4Hana Cloud here. If you have ambitious goals, SAP is the technology partner you need to scale and drive innovation. Instead of relying on stitched together solutions to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations, leverage the flexibility of SAP’s cloud-based ERP solution to gain the insights that will help drive your breakout growth success. 

RISE with SAP Link: bit.ly/3u27Ay6

Thanks for tuning in and please rate and review the Breakout Growth Podcast wherever you listen. 

We discussed:

* Scale matters: the humbling experiences of working at Facebook, the world’s most advanced growth organization (05:36)

* The sheer number of funnels: why scale offers so much opportunity to experiment (06:47)

* Building “trustworthy” experiments: developing the muscle to gain valuable learnings across an organization (11:51)

* Big bets versus smaller optimization: Morgan’s belief in Hacking Growth’s iterative process to drive value (20:18)

* Find the root cause: Learnings from Facebook’s understand, identify, execute approach  (25:47)

* Two books in one:

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