2023 W49 - Assumptions 🤨
Every week I post about one thing that happened at Rows. We're building in public!
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This week we're going to do our usual Quarter Planning, for Q1 2024.
We've gotten pretty fast at it, and right now it's 3 days (or less) of very intense discussion around what we want to achieve.
Teams create Challenges, which are projects that contribute towards our company goals (grow revenue!). Those include a context (why), objectives (definition of success) and potentially approaches (how).
The management team provides feedback on clarity of Challenges, Priority (sequencing) and missing elements.
We loop until we agree.
An important part of generating Challenges are the Assumptions. Our assumptions doc is a part of preparation to each quarter, and it includes a problem tree of where we want to go to.
The assumptions do starts with hypotheses of how to get to the objective (Revenue), then they are broken into sub-hypotheses, representing the funnel to conversion, and finally divided into the sub-sub-hypotheses (SSH) which are potential opportunities within features that may contribute to that funnel.
####### Assumptions Doc ########
Hypothesis 1: To get to our target revenue faster than industry, we must 3x our PLG success rate. Today, we acquire xk users per week. Acquisition includes valuable companies (XXX etc), from all sizes, and drives upgrades in the right geographies (US, UK, DE are top 3). Today, we activate X% of users. We have X paid workspaces and convert X new workspaces per week. At that pace we’ll add x new ARR in 2024. So we need to 3x it during the year!
We don’t acquire users with enough intent.
Templates don’t drive enough acquisition of high-intent users.
...
Users can’t onboard properly.
Users on mobile devices fail to experience value in their first minutes of the product.
...
The Import experience is inconsistent, confusing, and limited.
It’s not easy to enrich existing Tables.
...
Users are not inviting others enough.
There aren’t enough collaboration features, so inviting others is a small value.
Sharing with the link is much simpler than inviting someone.
...
The Spreadsheet UX isn’t good enough to retain users.
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We convert workspaces at a slow pace.
We don't have enough triggers to capture the value of the platform.
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Hypothesis 2: To get to the target revenue, we must have X larger enterprise deals (>12k ARR).
...
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It is the Growth and Product teams who generate this document, which is completed with the feedback from users, and data. That is, each atomic element has to be proved with data and quotes from users.
Once hypotheses are proved or disproved, an image emerges of what the objective should be,... , and the team creates Challenges (the Projects).
That's it!
Have a merry Xmas if that's your thing, and see you next week!
- Humberto
