Update: I became my target customer
I initially decided to pursue two simultaneous paths for customer development when I embarked on the journey to build Growth Logs:
- a) build a list of growth managers to contact and survey for specifics on how they run their process(es), and
- b) compile resources from best practices shared online to create a mashup.
Building a contact list
I achieved this by reverse-engineering a list of companies hiring for growth roles, then manually finding the person (presumably, in some cases) in charge of the department.
Having previously built a scraper that finds companies using Lever for their career site, I was able to search for "growth" job openings. From there, I searched LinkedIn for people at those companies with growth/marketing in their titles.
In the end, I wound up with a rough list of 500 folks. I started down the path of finding emails but gave up due to the tedium.
Compiling resources
I was surprised by how much detail I was able to find online as far as the type of questions people getting started with building a growth process ask (Quora, enterprise product forums). Further, the strategies, processes, and tools provided by experts are really useful. Here's a long list of resources I discovered during this research.
Becoming my target customer
During this time, I actually started working with a fledgling growth team where creating this very process is essential. This team will be working across a portfolio of products, giving me the chance to dogfood during the development of this product.
Plus, I found commonalities in approaches and have learned enough to combine with my experience to take an opinionated stance on what a process flow would look like in a standardized tool. With it, I can build a prototype for working with internally.
