# What Growth Management Tool Should You Choose? None.

- Link: https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/
- Published: 2019-11-07T10:04:52+01:00
- Author: Jakub Chour

#### We use Jira for growth management and we’re not ashamed. I’ll show you how we use it and why it’s probably better than, or at least as good as, your current growth tool.

![What Growth Management Tool Should You Choose? None](https://phiture.com/wp-content/
uploads/2019/11/What-Growth-Management-Tool-Should-You-Choose-None.-.png)

What do you use to track your product and marketing growth experiments? If you’re
serious, you probably track it somehow. In Sheets, an internal knowledge base, or
simply leaving it as it is in each A/B testing platform. It’s cheap and if you do
less than, say, 50 experiments per year, it’s probably fine.

However, this approach also has disadvantages. First and foremost, a huge mess, 
even if you only do a few experiments each week. Even something basic: here’s new
creative for Facebook, there’s a new onboarding screen in the app (Firebase), an
email to churning users has a new subject (Sendgrid) and you’ve also changed the
product price in France (Visual website optimizer). That’s four different experiment
platforms so far and we still haven’t finished. You might test more app platforms(
so iOS and Android), you probably do ASO, push-messages, influencers… you know the
stuff. So, by the end, you’re probably looking around for some solution.

Table of Contents

 * [Issues with current growth tools](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/#issues_with_current_growth_tools)
 * [What should every growth management tool have?](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/#what_should_every_growth_management_tool_have)
 * [Stick what you already have — Jira](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/#stick_what_you_already_have_%e2%80%94_jira)
 * [Keep up good work](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/#keep_up_good_work)
 * [Bonus: Name your experiments for less mess](https://phiture.com/mobilegrowthstack/what-growth-management-tool-should-you-choose-none-aff9a2f29ddf/#bonus_name_your_experiments_for_less_mess)

## **Issues with current growth tools**

The biggest issue with every tool I’ve seen is that it’s hard to extract results
from most of the sources programmatically. Take Google Play as an example. Even 
though it’s generally a good platform for testing (ASO), it’s impossible to access
experiment data by API or to download them manually. GP emails say _“this is a message
that you have a message”._ I have to look into the tool to check whether the experiment
was good or not.

![Google Play Console ](https://phiture.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Google-Play-
Console-min.png)

Despite having more reliable sources of data from your experiments, you probably
can’t really extract more than 70% of the data without copy-pasting from one tool
to another.

And there are also costs connected with having such a tool. I see some tools charging
$150 USD per month for a few-member team. If you manage huge growth budgets, it’s
probably fine, but still, it bothers me.

## **What should every growth management tool have?**

In my opinion, this is what any growth tool should do: **improve your experiment
tracking, look at past experiments, and **learn from them.

It should also be **close to the developers**. Many of our experiments are done 
with the help of our developers. Set up a feature flag in Firebase, back-end tweak,
database export etc. You’ll end up transferring texts from your growth management
tool to whichever issue tracking tool if you split it. Chances are, you already 
have it. It’s good old Jira. Please hear me out, I’ll show you why.

## **Stick what you already have — Jira**

Our set-up is pretty straightforward. We have a separate dashboard for growth (because
the flow is different from software development). It has the usual growth flow:

⌊Growth dashboard in Jira (flow)⌉⌊Growth dashboard in Jira (flow)⌉

_How does our Jira Growth flow look like?_

⌊Jira growth dashboard⌉⌊Jira growth dashboard⌉

_Our Jira growth dashboard_

Each growth issue has its own _growth score as a result of other custom columns 
_named Impact, Difficulty and Success Probability. Each is also a member of some
Epic like Screenshots or Monetization, and most of them have labels like _app names,
part of the funnel, platform, _etc.

⌊Typical growth issue⌉⌊Typical growth issue⌉

_Typical growth issue we have_

In our experiment traffic, it’s still possible to track and move tests between columns
manually, but for most apps we use for testing, it’s hard to automate. You can, 
for example, set experiments to move to testing when a related issue on the developer
dashboard is set as “DONE”, but in practice, it doesn’t work, as it also needs to
be deployed to app stores, each of which acts independently in terms of when they
release it, especially the App Store.

Some automation is still possible: each ready to build issue on the growth dashboard
can be automatically cloned to the developer dashboard and older issues can be cleared
and moved to the archive. This is done through Zapier. If you are fancy enough, 
you can also connect GitHub to track deployed issues, Typeform to gather feedback
and new ideas (a new form creates a new growth issue) or Miro, where we track visualizations
before they go into production.

⌊Miro dashboard for each issue⌉⌊Miro dashboard for each issue⌉

_Miro dashboard for each issue_

All it requires is a bit of discipline, but don’t go crazy. As far as I know, every
tool requires some effort, regardless of what they say. Remember how your old knowledge
bases, FAQs and Wikis ended up? Don’t bring in some new, soon-to-be-forgotten tool,
keep it simple and use what your team already uses.

## **Keep up good work**

If you’ve read everything up to here, you probably know how to track your experiments.
Simplify. Save your energy if you only do 1–2 experiments per week, especially if
you’re doing it in one of the better A/B/X testing platforms. If you do more or 
even multiple experiments, it’s not a hard decision what to use. Go with Jira like
we do or with whichever tool you use for sw development. Automation is possible,
but in many cases, it’s just not worth the extra effort.

## **Bonus: Name your experiments for less mess**

Do you do campaigns online? You probably track them, so you keep it tidy on Facebook
or Google Ads, right? My recommendation: if you want to go back to your experiments
in a few months, it’s best to name them. How? As simply and clearly as possible,
so you can tell what was it about only from the experiment name.

#### **Example Facebook campaign naming:**

GEO | Brand | Product| Campaign goal (funnel part)

_US | Pepsi | 7-up | Engagement_

#### **Experiment naming:**

ISSUE NO. | (potential) Growth score | What | Platform | Funnel part (AARRR)| repetition

_SURGE-167 _| _18 | Notification pop-up | iOS | Activation | #2_