What if you combine performance hacking & design sprints? An intro to performance sprints. 

For every company, it is about figuring out why you are growing and finding ways to make that happen purposefully and faster through experiments.

Where should you focus your efforts and how do you start? What will this experiment look like in practice? How many discussions and debates are needed before you are sure you have found the experiment with the most potential? Complex questions that entrepreneurs often do not have a straightforward answer to. We have the way to answer these important questions: run a performance sprint.

But first things first…

1. What is a performance sprint?

 
A performance sprint is a combination of performance hacking and a design sprint.

It was Jonathan Courtney of AJ&SMART who revealed the combination of Design Sprint and Hacking Performance because they fit together perfectly. The power of a Design Sprint and the effectiveness of performance hacking are combined to enable any organization to quickly experiment with rapid growth ideas. It usually involves an intensive workshop with your entire team where you get answers to business questions that make your company grow faster and better.

A performance sprint is suitable for all types of teams, from small startups to large companies, from freelancers to government agencies. For anyone with great potential, a business problem or idea that you need an answer to today.
 

What is performance hacking?

Performance hacking or performance marketing is experiment-driven, results-oriented, but above all measurable. A performance hacker systematically investigates new growth opportunities through online experiments: they test which direction works best/where the biggest growth opportunities lie, whereas traditional marketing often focuses on one method with less focus on proof-of-concept and direct ROI.

Think of these online experiments as A/B testing platforms, target audience selection, visuals, media budgets, etc. All these experiments provide the performance hacker with insights so that you eventually find the success formula for your goals and always have a clear overview of what your investments yield.
 

What is a design sprint?

A design sprint is a five-step process, designed by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures, in which you as a company try to get answers to the most critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with real customers. You do this to reduce the risks of bringing a new feature, product, or service to market. During a performance sprint, we combine a design sprint with performance hacking, which will lead to enormous insights during a quick workshop.

2. How does a performance sprint work?

A performance sprint is meant to provide insight into how the market and your company"s business model work. Based on 4 categories, you zoom in deeper on different aspects of the market. This is interesting for startups and new companies in the market that have not yet built a solid business model, but in principle it is useful for every company. For example, when you want to launch a new product or service. Or when you are looking for new ways to achieve faster and more efficient growth.

The goal of a performance sprint workshop is to ensure that teams leave this workshop not only with prioritized ideas and a clear plan of action, but also with the ability and confidence to repeat this process over and over to build better growth strategies in your organization.

3. Getting started with a performance sprint

Step 1: Determine North Star Metric

At the beginning of the performance sprint workshop, you first determine your North Star Metric. The North Star Metric (NSM) is a measurable parameter that a company uses as a focus for their growth. For example, Spotify"s NSM is the number of listening minutes per user, and for Facebook it is the number of monthly active users.

To find your "North Star Metric," you simply need to figure out what is truly essential for your company"s customer success. What are the pillars within your company that – if they disappear – would cause your company to get into trouble? For many companies, this is:

• generating profit,
• satisfying customers,
• measuring progress toward those goals.

A measurement method that only yields money without satisfying customers will fail in the long run, just like a company that satisfies customers without being profitable. A good North Star Metric reflects the three factors above.

To determine your North Star Metric, ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why does a customer buy from my company?
2. What is the success moment in the customer"s buyer journey?
3. Can you measure this and how?
4. Will my company grow anyway if the above grows?

Taking into account that your NSM generates revenue, reflects customer value, and measures progress, it means that your company improves in every respect when your North Star Metric improves.
 

Example Spotify:

source: https://growwithward.com/nl/north-star-metric/

Step 2: Sailor Questions & How Might We"s

The next step in the performance sprint is asking the sailor questions and the how might we"s. During the sailor question exercise, everyone in the team discusses what pushes the company forward. What is the wind in your company"s sails and divide these points among Acquisition/Activation/Retention or the entire AAARRR funnel.

Each person works individually and writes on a sticky note what they see as the best push for the company"s growth. Once completed, everyone sticks their choice on the board and each attendee takes their turn to explain their choice. Then each participant votes on what they consider the most applicable answer.

For example: Acquisition: blogs bring in new customers / Activation: most leads become customers / Retention: customers stay with us for years.

You can also do the sailor question the other way around: What is the wind in your company"s sails that pulls you backward? Another tool for this is the how might we"s method.

What are we doing well? What is holding us back? These brainstorming sessions happen often enough, but they often get stuck after the first flood of ideas. You need a structure to turn that brainstorming into something usable; the performance sprint forces you to prioritize the challenges that teams identify. We then turn these challenges into a "How might we…". This means we literally rewrite the challenge into a question like "How might we … help customers find our products faster?".

This idea makes it easier for your company to take the path of developing options instead of getting lost in the problem.
 

Step 3: Full Funnel Ideation

Throughout this entire process, it is of utmost importance to have a focus on the entire marketing funnel. It allows you to map out which part of the customer journey has the most gaps, and therefore should get the most priority to optimize. Because you have the data to measure that, you can interpret it and draw valuable insights.

Another reason why full-funnel marketing is a necessity is that it means that if you are only responsible for one part of the funnel, you automatically limit your impact on the other phases.

Full-funnel marketing is useful at any time and for any company – it is especially valuable when your marketing team and sales team are not aligned. After all, it"s all about the customer journey. Plus, it"s a step above other marketing approaches. Why? Because it makes it possible to calculate marketing efforts. The targeting ensures that investments are not aimless, and the potential results are clear before you take action. It is focused on results rather than just activities.

And afterward, you can perform a full funnel analysis. This means you can analyze data and take measures to further fine-tune the funnel. You can even take the funnel to a higher level by segmenting by time and goals. That way, you know if you are on track to achieve your objectives and how well your company is performing over a longer period.
 

Step 4: Rank & plan

Once all experiments are created, they are lined up on the wall. Each participant reads them carefully and casts a vote on what they think is the best and most realistic experiment to solve the problem. Once all votes are cast, we set aside the experiments with no votes. The participants then explain why they voted for the experiment.

Next, a scale of effort and impact is created using an ICE Score to measure which of the experiments will offer the most value or impact with the least effort to execute.

Prioritizing with ICE Score.
ICE score is a prioritization method, originally intended to prioritize performance experiments, but can also be used for regular product ideas.

You calculate the score, per idea, like this:
ICE score = Impact * Ease * Confidence

Impact is an estimate of the extent to which the idea will have a positive influence on the key metric you are trying to improve.
Ease (of implementation) is an estimate of how much effort and resources will be needed to implement this idea. Usually, this is the inverse of effort, lower effort means higher ease.
Confidence indicates how certain you are about the impact, and to some extent also about the ease of implementation.

The three values are rated on a relative scale of 1-10; your team can choose what 1-10 means, as long as the rating remains consistent.

The experiments with the highest ICE Score are the ones you logically execute first because they will offer the most value or impact with the least effort to execute.

Ready to boostU"r business?

Interested in a performance workshop with your team?
Contact us and we will ensure your company gets the right wind in its sails!

Contact us