Navigating Growth Hacking: Insights from Our Journey
How did spring 2024 look like for HUBS’s student team, Growth Hackers? What kind of practices, lessons, and insights emerged from working in a multicultural and multidisciplinary team?
Contact person
Iris Pajunen
Growth Hacker
This story was written by the HUBS Growth Hackers team: Iris, Tatiana, Leila and Maaz.
Greetings from Growth Hackers of Spring 2024!
Our journey began with the question of what is the difference between a group and a team? We came up with qualities such as common purpose, discussing and deciding together, shared success and failure, active problem solving, mutual accountability, and effective communication. From there on, these principles guided us during our spring as HUBS student ambassadors. This prompted personal, collective, and professional growth.
Now we want to share what working as a Growth Hackers taught us!
Ideation
It is amazing to notice how differently everyone thinks about topics and how in a team you can cover so many different viewpoints. Everyone ideates constantly in their personal as well as professional life. In some situations, you might not even notice that you are doing it! When we were planning our spring event schedule, we had an ideation meeting for it. Having settled on an event, but we were not sure about all the specifics, we held another ideation meeting.
In the Growth Hackers team, we did not use that many ideation methods, even though we did some research on them and there are plenty of good ones. We as a team worked best when we just went ahead and said different ideas aloud and wrote them down. Together we further refined them and eventually excluded the ones that were not that good or doable. In the future we could try different thought-provoking ideation methods to bring our performance up a notch.
Time management
Initially, working as Growth Hackers was met with the challenge of time management. Often, it felt like time slipped away, leaving tasks to be rushed at the last minute. The most significant revelation during this period was the simple yet profound understanding that if a task is not in the calendar, it is never done.
Proper calendar planning while prioritizing urgent tasks positively changed the work dynamic and satisfaction. Particularly when confronted with a workload lacking a fixed schedule. This semester, the cornerstone of the Growth Hackers’ working culture revolved around meticulously planning meetings, events, and marketing initiatives to ensure that there is enough time for essential tasks. Spoiler: it led to organizing impactful events.
Effective time management not only gave us successful events but also allowed us to enjoy our work at a comfortable pace. It also helped to maintain a harmonious balance between our Growth Hackers’ responsibilities, academic, and personal lives.
Project management
Project management means controlling resources in a way that follows the given timeline, budget, quality, outcome, and objective. This was central in our Growth Hacking job, since our primary task was event organizing. This required lots of planning, communication, responsibility, team leading, scheduling, problem solving, adapting, and decision making. We rotated the different assignments within the team so that everyone had the possibility to both execute their existing skills and take on new challenges.
At best, project management was super rewarding, because we got to improve many important competences and successfully executed seven events during the spring term 2024.
Event facilitation
Event facilitation, the process of guiding and managing activities during an event, was one of the key skills necessary to carry out successful events and workshops. This is not just about managing things on the event day; effective planning needs to start well in advance to ensure objectives are met successfully.
As Growth Hackers, we prioritized thorough preparation: holding separate meetings for each event to discuss key elements like workshop content, venue, refreshments, marketing strategies, and expectations. Through brainstorming sessions, we divided tasks among ourselves, setting deadlines to ensure timely completion. Despite unforeseen challenges, we successfully overcame them through teamwork and effective communication.
Learning by stepping out of your comfort zone
If you want to achieve your goals you must be willing to step out of your comfort zone and take risks.
Germany Kent
This quote perfectly describes what we have been doing at HUBS throughout the past few months. We all had our goals, but to achieve them, we needed to step out of our comfort zone, and HUBS provided the best platform. It is always hard to start something which you have never done before, but with constant encouragement and support from one another we tried different things. We successfully planned and executed a student event at Wappu for the very first time, designed posters and patches, and promoted HUBS through social media.
During this journey, we realized that even the smallest steps can produce remarkable outcomes with long-lasting impressions.
Giving and receiving feedback
Giving and receiving feedback are both skills that are a must in today’s day and age. We as a team did not have any designated time for feedback at the start. Having realized how important it is to give and receive feedback regularly, we dedicated time to it at the end of each weekly meeting.
Receiving feedback helps one to understand which qualities and efforts have been appreciated and the areas that the individual should work on further. We found out that some like to receive their feedback in a more straightforward manner, and others feel more comfortable starting and ending with words of affirmation. When working in a team, it is essential to try to understand and learn how the different members prefer to get their feedback. This ensures that the feedback will bear fruit and therefore benefit the whole team and its missions.
Insights on our personal development
The spring semester 2024 was very fruitful for us in terms of learning by doing and self-development. To conclude, we want to share an individual take on personal achievement.
I grew especially in regard to my knowledge of entrepreneurship. From a stereotypical understanding of mostly business skills to a more comprehensive mindset of innovation, action, opportunity, and self-awareness.
Iris
I developed from a person overwhelmed by work tasks and responsibilities to a proactive team leader capable of managing all ongoing activities effectively.
Tatiana
Being a Growth Hacker has enabled me to become more efficient and initiative as an event facilitator. My competencies to take on new challenges and work under pressure have grown. Along the way the acquired prioritization and delegation skills have provided me with a valuable insight into employee motivation.
Leila
I think the most important growth for me was to understand the effectiveness of planning and management. It is natural to be curious about numerous things, but understanding and acknowledging our time constraints pushes us to prioritize only the essential tasks worthy of our investment.
Maaz
If we would describe our semester in one phrase it would be “HUBSalotely amazing”!
Recommended next:
Check out HUBS Sustainable Entrepreneurship Podcast (episodes in Finnish)
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