Growth Hacking and Continuous Deployment: How Are They Related?

Growth hacking and Continuous Deployment: how the heck are both connected?

What’s the Objective of Growth Hacking?

A growth hacker is a person who is a blend of marketing and programming.

It is all about getting exponential business results through the test-and-try methods by exploring different possible opportunities from which you can ethically grow your business. You can reap the full benefit (like Airbnb, Hotmail, Dropbox, etc. did) by automating things through growth hacking tools.

What’s the Objective of Continuous Deployment?

Automating most of the repetitive and mundane software development tasks in a software powered organization is important so that the organization can grow fast by delivering features to the audience. It reduces the time to market and enables continuous feedback by customers to improve the product and get things done with speed. Continuous Deployment follows Continuous Delivery, where the code is automatically deployed to production when it passes the automated tests.

Can you see the similarity between growth hacking and Continuous Deployment now?

Both, in turn, are directly responsible for the growth of the organization and this applies more when it comes to software powered organizations.

Now, you can consider Continuous Deployment tools as growth hacking tools.

For example, tools like Shippable, Codeship, and Snap CI can be called growth hacking platforms since they all help you automate your tests and make deployment faster.

The Need for DevOps Practice

DevOps is not just a tool; DevOps is a set of principles that help make cultural shift (change) in an organization. To make DevOps work in an organization, you need some set of tools that foster the cultural change and break the silos. Continuous Deployment tools help organizations practice DevOps and go Agile.

Change is difficult, which is why many software organizations still don’t practice DevOps and are lacking the growth hacking opportunity.

It’s time for organizations to move to the next level and embrace DevOps. To make DevOps come true, you need to make sure to use certain tools that help you succeed in DevOps.

Choosing the right set of DevOps tools is very important. Here is a set of tools that I've identified as good ones.

1. Plan: GitHub, JIRA

2. Build: Docker, Bitbucket, Puppet

3. Continuous Integration: Shippable, Codeship, Travis CI, Circle CI

4. Deploy: Heroku, Amazon Web Services

5. Operate: Splunk, Botmetric, PagerDuty

6. Continuous feedback: Survey Monkey, Get Feedback, Pendo