The Elevator Ride That Changed How I Run Growth

11 years ago, I sat paralyzed, staring at my MacBook at WeWork on a chilly day in San Francisco. My screen lit up with a Google Sheet listing new marketing ideas for next year’s annual marketing plan. The finalized plan and timelines were due to leadership in 3 days.

Weeks earlier, the marketing team had suggested a long list of new ideas. Each one pitching for budget and prioritization of their different use cases, AB tests, new channels, tech debt fixes, and, as always, marketing tools to buy.

Now sitting alone at my desk. I felt overwhelmed looking at the 79-plus ideas, trying to choose which ones to bet on first. If I picked wrong, we’d burn a quarter. If I picked right, we’d hit our number, and I’d look like a genius. No pressure.

Executive Summary

• Most marketing teams don’t have an ideas problem. They have a prioritization problem.

• When you have 20–80+ ideas, “gut feel” and politics pick roadmaps that fail.

• The key to growth is velocity: how fast you can ship, learn, and adjust your plan.

• The VICE Framework is a marketing prioritization framework that provides clarity on planning your short-term and long-term growth ideas

• Making it easy to adapt quickly and increase agility.

How Thinking in Bets Falls Apart at Scale

Normally, I treat every marketing idea like a growth bet. I ask myself, “How much would I bet that this idea actually increases revenue?” Highest bet wins. Thinking in Bets (great book) works great when you have five ideas.

It completely falls apart at 79.

With my CEO impatiently waiting for marketing’s plan, I needed to find a better process.

As always, I turned to Google to start searching for how others succeeded in this prioritization dilemma.

I read article after article on different prioritization processes and strategy analysis frameworks.

The first find was Sean Ellis’s ICE Framework for prioritizing growth experiments. Scoring each idea from one to ten based on its Impact for the business, your Confidence in it working, and Ease of implementation. Proven framework with lots of success behind it.

Sean is the OG in growth and wrote the book on growth hacking, Hacking Growth.

But I never just go with the first thing I find.

Next Up: the RICE Framework, created for product teams. Same bones as ICE, but adds Reach. How many users actually experience the feature? Solid upgrade.

There were all kinds of scoring frameworks, from the PIE Framework, which scores Potential, Importance, and Ease, to the DVF, RAT, and V0 Frameworks. Google it if you are curious about the acronyms.

And then non-scoring and more qualitative frameworks like the MoSCow Method. Must Have, Should Have, Could Have, and Won’t Have. Or more visual frameworks, such as the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) framework.

I spent hours and hours intently digging into all of them. What each is best used for, and the successes or failures others have had using them.

After hours of making no progress prioritizing my plan.

The ICE and RICE frameworks obviously stood out, but I wanted to sleep on it. I’ll kick off one of them in the morning and see where I land with my plan.

Then the Elevator Gave Me the Answer

Tired and ready to head home. I headed to the elevators. It was 5pm, elevator rush hour, and 1,000 other people were trying to get out just like me.

I wanted to get downstairs as fast as possible. During elevator rush hour, if you choose the wrong elevator, it takes forever to get downstairs. Like up to 5 minutes.

Wanting the fastest elevator down, I scanned the 8 elevator floor indicators. Looking to see if it’s going up, if it’s going down, and how many floors away it is.

Standing there, trying to measure their velocity, it hit me.

None of the frameworks accounted for Velocity, how quickly we could experiment with one of the new ideas and determine whether it was working.

Velocity isn’t just about testing faster. It’s about building a plan that compounds winners and learning, rather than locking you into slow bets.

Just like each elevator’s Velocity up and down, getting to me, and getting me out of the building.

ICE was solid, scoring ideas on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to prioritize ideas for experimentation.
The RICE framework added Reach. How many users will experience the new feature? Great upgrade, as the more users, the bigger the impact it can have.

In Business, especially in marketing, one of the most important factors in your success is your ability to quickly experiment and learn. Most of our ideas, or the implementation of that idea, is a coin flip on whether it creates real, measurable revenue growth.

Why Velocity Is the Multiplier in Growth

Most teams prioritize for impact. The best teams prioritize speed of learning.

Let me give you an example of why Velocity matters so much.

A year before this paralyzing moment, I was VP of Growth at CodeSchool.com (later acquired by Pluralsight). I had committed a large portion of our team’s effort to copying the Dropbox referral program (created by OG Sean Ellis).

Sign up for a Dropbox account, get 500MB free. Invite a friend, get another 500mb. Wildly successful. Studied to death.

So we built our version. Spent a month on the MVP. Launched it. Waited a week.

Almost nothing happened. A few referrals. Nowhere near enough.

The team came up with 20-plus ideas to optimize it. We listed them out and prioritized by gut and emotion. Then we started running experiments.

Here’s the thing, some experiments took 5x longer than others to conclude, with the biggest factors in duration being the amount of traffic/users who would experience the experiment, and how dramatic the test change was.

Naturally, tests with the most views would run faster. And tests with dramatic changes from control to variant also ran faster.

That insight changed everything for growth.

We stopped asking “Which idea has the biggest impact?” and started asking “Which idea offers insights the fastest?”

We started picking experiments that ran the fastest. Our testing velocity kept increasing. Every winner compounded our conversion rates. We got to the point where the referral program was so good, we had to reduce the program’s rewards.

And here’s what most people miss about experiments.

Everyone just sees the test losers and moves on. But just like in sports, you learn more from your losses than your wins. Every failed test gave us a learning we used to inform the next round of experiments across the whole funnel and product.

You can see a case study of the Code School referral program here.

Where Marketing Teams Get Prioritization Wrong

• They optimize for impact, not learning speed.
• They treat annual plans like contracts instead of experiments
• They delay launching quick wins to build complicated big bets
• The HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) dictates test prioritization
• They run fewer than 4 experiments per quarter.

Velocity compounds. Slowness compounds, too.

As I stood there in front of the elevators, tracking the velocity of each. Elevator 4 was the shortest distance from my floor and was already heading down. So, I pushed the button for elevator 4.

Riding down the elevator, stuffed 13 deep, shoulder to shoulder. I was excited about how I knew Velocity was one of the most important factors in prioritizing my annual plan.

The Birth of VICE

In the Uber on the way to my hotel, I thought about how the ICE Framework was a great tool, and the RICE Framework added Reach for their product feature prioritization. I considered all the other frameworks and recalled none was as proven in the wild as ICE.

I didn’t need a new theory. I needed something simple enough to use that night.

Without much thought, I was like fuck it, I am adding Velocity to ICE, and we will now have the VICE framework.

Finally, arriving back in my hotel room, I was jazzed. I had a solution to prioritize my plan and get leadership off my back.

I hopped onto my laptop, opened my spreadsheet, added columns for VICE, and scored each idea.

Within 30 minutes, my annual plan was coming together. Yeah, my scores weren’t perfectly powered by all our company data. But I knew our data, metrics, and the company. My arbitrary scoring was based on loads of insights and context.

For the first time that day, I had a plan I could back up with logic, rather than mostly gut.

Exhausted and relieved, I hammered out the final plan and hit the sack.

Waking up early, I was pumped to add some final polish and then headed directly to see the CEO.

Practically strutting into their office to review my annual marketing plan.

Fast forward 6 months. Over 52% increase in traffic and a 3x increase in conversions. Not to mention multiple new marketing programs increasing LTV.

That was the first time I used VICE.

It wasn’t luck. It was structured prioritization with speed built in, and it reduced risk because we stopped betting quarters on slow ideas.

How to Prioritize Marketing Plans Using VICE (Without Overthinking It)

Whether you’re the one building the annual plan, or the one trying to prioritize which 10 experiments to run this quarter.

VICE has the same outcome. It accelerates your growth.

Since then, VICE has become my core framework for prioritizing everything from marketing plans and experiment ideas to ranking job candidates.

My team at McGaw uses VICE with almost every client. It’s how we prioritize and plan marketing tactics and funnel experiments to create predictable growth.

It has worked over and over again, creating wild success for our clients and us.

If you’re sitting on 20+ ideas and no clear order to execute them, download the VICE Framework spreadsheet.

Score them. Stack rank them. Start shipping.

It’s simple on purpose.

And if you want help building a real execution rhythm inside your team, request a Growth Plan session with McGaw.

How McGaw Uses VICE With Marketing and Growth Teams

Most CMOs don’t struggle with ideas. They struggle with prioritization and focus.

That’s where VICE shines.

We use VICE as part of our audits and strategies to:

• Gain Focus on the 3 highest-leverage bets
• Increase the velocity of learning and wins
• Create a 30/90/180 execution plan

 

How McGaw Scores VICE

• Velocity = First, consider the volume of test views, then consider how dramatic a change the experiment features. High views, and tiny change, maybe a 5. Moderate views, dramatic change. Maybe an 8.
• Impact = If the tests win, how much of an Impact will it have? Personally, I prefer Impact on Revenue. At times, that’s not reasonable. Impact on signups, leads, or something else.
• Confidence = Based on your experience, are you confident the idea will win?
• Ease = How easy is it to design, write copy, develop, QA, measure, and launch the idea? Take into account all steps and people in the process.

After you score as many as possible, start back at the top. Time to improve the accuracy of scores by comparing across ideas. Once the second pass is done, sort by the highest rankings.

The top 1-3 ideas are low-effort to launch and have low to medium impact. Enabling you to run fast and get started.

As you get to ideas 3-7, their impact increases, but they take more planning and effort to build. This enables you to start building early and be ready when ideas 1-3 conclude.

For every idea you run, when it is concluded, and you have learnings. Go back to your VICE to review ideas and see if scoring should be adjusted or if any idea could be improved.

The VICE Framework is meant to be an ever-evolving list of what’s next. Providing you the ability to be agile in this fast-moving world we now live in.

Find the VICE Framework spreadsheet template here

Or if you want McGaw’s help implementing VICE to accelerate your growth, contact us here

Frequently Asked Questions About VICE

What is the VICE Framework?
The VICE Framework is a prioritization model that scores ideas based on Velocity, Impact, Confidence, and Ease. It helps teams win faster and learn faster.

Why is Velocity more important than Impact?

Impact still matters. But without speed, impact gets delayed. Velocity accelerates impact and compounding results.

How many experiments should a growth team run per quarter?

High-performing teams often run at least 4–8 meaningful experiments per quarter. Fewer than that usually signals low execution velocity.

Can VICE be used outside of marketing?

Yes. VICE works for any type of prioritization, hiring decisions, roadmap planning, or operational improvements.