At one level this exercise is simply to get people to think about how forgotten features can have value for customers. But at another level it’s about educating the entire team to have a more growth hacking mindset.

In a nutshell: what is different about growth hacking is picking small specific point, and leveraging that for big gain.

The exercise then is to get teams (5 in each group) to look at their current activity in their division or business unit, and pick an example where if a product or activity was tweaked/improved it would have a significant impact. Or to put it more succinctly to “hyper-focus” on that “a-ha” moment” customers might have in using a new product, and amplifying that to potential customers to drive adoption. Or it may be that one team member has a ‘golden nugget’ of customer-related info (thinsliced insight) they now have the chance to share in this competition context to come up with a winning idea.

(After all, it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog.)

Ideally the person running this exercise would give ideas of tools that could prove that, which teams could pick to show how they would have the data to support their growth hack, with success not being revenue necessarily, but a result of a significant growth in customer attention, acquisition or retention.

Winner of this mini competition is the team which has biggest potential difference from small tweak to large biz impact.

Update: while I can’t go into detail this exercise I ran at Causeway Technologies resulted in over a dozen campaign and product ideas, with one I am already working on with a potentially significant cross-company impact, around an email automatically sent out to customers that is ripe for the addition of ‘powered by’ marketing messaging.