👓 DADDA Issues?

Hey folks! 👋

Here’s what you’ll find in today’s edition of the Product-Led Geek:

  • DADDA: A 5-step framework for driving product growth through data-informed iteration.

  • Effective knowledge management: Practical tips for documenting and sharing insights within your growth team.

  • Data-driven iteration in action: How to use a structured approach to turn data into impactful product decisions.

Total reading time: 5 minutes

Let’s go!

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DADDA Issues?

If your growth team is struggling to create impact, it might be time to take a step back look at the big picture.

Get back to the fundamentals of how growth teams should operate.

How?

I’ve learnt that concepts stick better if packaged in a memorable wrapper.

DADDA is just that.

It’s a way to think about how growth teams work to create impact.

The best growth teams prioritise something I call leveraged learning velocity - the ability to learn quickly and leverage those learnings for scaled impact across the org.

DADDA stands for Discover, Analyse, Document, Discuss, and Act.

It summarises the macro process of growth.

It’s helped teams I’ve worked with build and reinforce good habits that enable their work to make a difference.

Understanding DADDA: An Overview

DADDA is about transforming insights into tangible improvements.

It's a cyclical process ensuring data collection leads to meaningful change.

Here's a brief outline:

  1. Discover: Unearth new insights about your users and product.

  2. Analyse: Examine the data to extract meaningful patterns and implications.

  3. Document: Store learnings for later leverage.

  4. Discuss: Share findings and collaborate on potential solutions.

  5. Act: Implement changes based on learnings.

Let's delve deeper into each phase.

Discover: Unveiling New Insights

The discovery phase is where you are finding fresh insights from various sources:

  • User feedback (surveys, interviews, support tickets)

  • Product analytics

  • A/B test results

  • Market research

  • Session replays

  • Sentiment analysis

  • 


Valuable discoveries often emerge from unexpected places.

You might gain crucial insight about your onboarding flows by analysing social media conversations or forums where your users hang out.

The key is to explore diverse channels for insights.

The best growth teams have an insane ability to find signals regardless of where they are.

Don't get caught in the trap of limiting yourself to analytics dashboards – engage with users, scrutinise support tickets, spend time where your users do, and always be listening.

This is universally applicable, whether you’re seeking insights to spark a new idea for a product, or unblock a specific bottleneck in a growth loop.

Keep the blinkers off.

But sometimes you’ll need to dive into specific sources to diagnose something.

That’s OK too - just don’t get stuck down there.

Analyse: Decoding the Data

After gathering raw insights, it's time to analyse.

This stage involves separating relevant information from noise and identifying patterns that could lead to actionable improvements.

  • Identify correlations between metrics.

  • Segment data to uncover hidden trends.

  • Use statistical tools to validate findings.

  • Focus on what and why something happened - which often means gathering qualitative insights too.

  • 


For example, you might find that users / teams who reach a specific milestone within their first week of sign-up are more likely to become long-term customers.

This insight could become the foundation for an improved activation metric for your product.

Knowing that users who reach that milestone retain better is a great first step.

But you don’t want to be the growth team throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks.

Haphazard experimentation is not the way.

If you can bring in other data to understand the why behind what you’re seeing, you earn a distinct advantage.

Hence the importance of diverse inputs in the Discover step.

The better you understand why something's happening, the more you can leverage those learnings for growth.

Deeper understanding = Greater leverage.

Document: Expanding Knowledge Reach

The documentation phase is crucial for creating a lasting repository of insights for future use.

By thoroughly recording your findings, analyses, and conclusions, you create a valuable resource for future growth decisions and strategies.

Unfortunately, most growth teams are bad at this.

It's important to document learnings in a form and location optimised for future value, easy retrieval, and proactive surfacing.

To effectively document your learnings:

  • Use a centralised, searchable system (e.g., Airtable, Notion. Something structured. Google Docs is a bad solution)

  • Include context about when and how the insights were gathered.

  • Use categories and tags - but don’t overdo them or they’ll become less useful. Product Surfaces is a good example of a dimension to associate learnings with.

  • Record both successful and unsuccessful experiments/initiatives - both provide valuable learnings.

  • Use clear, concise language that future team members can easily understand, and document any specific product or domain terms in a glossary.

  • Include relevant data, visualisations, and supporting evidence. If linking to analytics charts, take snapshots at the time.

At Snyk, we created a growth group hub on Notion.

It served as a central repository for our growth principles, process documentation, strategy, and growth model.

It linked to an Airtable base with detailed records of our experiments, outcomes, and insights, creating a valuable resource for current and future initiatives within and outside the growth group.

Discuss: Collaborative Problem-Solving

Analysis shouldn't occur in isolation.

The discuss phase involves stepping outside your bubble and sharing your findings with your team, other growth teams, and external teams.

In my experience, cross-functional discussions are particularly valuable - bringing together product, engineering, marketing, sales, and customer success teams often leads to better ideas and new questions to unpack things further.

Things that I’ve found work well to facilitate discussion and foster a culture of shared learning and collaborative problem-solving across functions:

  • Hold regular Impact and Learnings (I&L) reviews to share findings and insights.

  • Invite teams to share their findings and insights, and encourage participation from all employees.

  • Make I&L reviews open to the entire company to promote knowledge-sharing and collaboration.

  • Implement collaborative problem-solving by encouraging teams to work together to address challenges and find solutions.

  • Publish internal newsletters or blog posts.

  • Incorporate key insights into new team member onboarding - revisit regularly.

  • Post regular updates in a company-wide Slack channel.

I also think of this ‘D’ as ‘Disseminate’.

Socialisation is a prerequisite to leverage learnings for impact beyond the immediate context.

Act: Translating Insights into Impact

The final step is to act on your insights, where learning translates into either

  1. Tangible product, user experience, or process improvements to scale impact, and/or

  2. Action to learn more.

For instance, if you discover the importance* of a specific action in your onboarding flow, you might redesign that process to make it easier for new users to complete it.

*Important here could mean improvements in your activation metric, leading to better retention and monetisation rates.

e.g. Based on our F30D activation metric insights at Snyk, we redesigned our onboarding process to guide users to fix their first vulnerability more quickly and easily.

Related insight led to creating targeted onboarding experiences for the first and subsequent users in a workspace, acknowledging the multiplayer nature of developer security.

End-to-End Example

Here’s a recent example from one of the companies I work with.

  • A Discovery was made around a slowdown in new user growth counterintuitively coinciding with an acceleration in self-serve revenue.

  • Analysis uncovered a meaningful mix shift in the acquisition channels for new users AND changes in the quality of those channels. One channel (programmatic SEO) was converting at a higher rate than it previously was while another (paid social) showed a sharp drop in conversion rates.

  • The findings were Documented in the growth learnings database and shared in a weekly growth update.

  • The analysis was also shared at a regular growth workshop (their equivalent of an Impact and Learnings review). Healthy Discussion ensued between a growth PM, a growth marketer, and a RevOps leader about what was happening.

  • The team decided to Act on two fronts. First, they decided to capitalise on the effectiveness and quality of the first channel (an SEO loop) with additional investment, and second, they agreed to further analyse and experiment with the paid channel that previously had strong conversion.

The DADDA Cycle

DADDA is a framework to help growth teams to improve their learning velocity.

It isn't a linear process, but a cycle that continuously feeds into itself.

Your actions will lead to new discoveries, restarting the process.

It describes the process by which your product and growth strategies evolve based on the latest insights.

By ensuring you don’t ignore any phase – Discover, Analyse, Document, Discuss and Act – you create a learning engine that drives sustainable growth for your product-led business.

Just be consistent.

It’s simple, but not easy.

I think the acronym helps.

It’s easy to remember and sticky with the teams I’ve shared it with.

Integrate it into your team's processes and you'll see compounding effects over time.

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GEEK OF THE WEEK

What’s your favourite metric at your company? What does it measure and why is it important?

Team cumulative MRR - it measures all the MRR we get from teams using our product. We moved from a single user use-case to a multi-user use-case roughly a year ago. Since then this metric has been slowly overtaking the majority of our MRR which is a great thing to see.

Imre Nagy, VP of ProdEng @ Colossyan

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Favourite metrics, unconventional growth tactics, failures and learnings, surprising insights and more.

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THAT’S A WRAP

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That’s all for today,

If there are any product, growth or leadership topics that you’d like me to write about, just hit reply to this email or leave a comment and let me know!

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Until next time!

— Ben

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