Growth
165 bites tagged Growth — interview questions with model answers, and 60-second explainers.
PPC: Buying Intent, Not Attention
PPC buys intent, not attention: you bid to appear when someone searches for what you sell, paying only if they click. Use it for high-intent offers like B2B software where organic reach is slow.
Seven-Figure Copywriter Ditches Eloquence for Customer Research
Seven-figure copywriter Tim Stoddart says clarity beats eloquence. Mine customer pain points from sales calls and Reddit, then mirror that language in copy. Engineers should swap jargon for verified customer vocabulary to increase conversion.
Product-Led Growth (PLG): When the Product Sells Itself
Product-Led Growth (PLG) makes the product its own salesperson. Instead of a sales team, the product's features and user experience drive acquisition and expansion.
ICE Scoring: Prioritize Features with a Quick Gut Check
ICE scoring is a gut-check for prioritizing features by multiplying Impact, Confidence, and Ease. It helps teams rapidly sort experiments or backlog items. The main footgun is its bias towards easy wins, potentially ignoring high-effort strategic projects.
AARRR 'Pirate' Metrics: A Funnel for What Really Matters
The AARRR framework is a five-stage funnel (Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue) that tracks the user journey. It helps product teams focus on metrics that directly impact business health, not vanity metrics like social media likes.
LTV to CAC Ratio: Is Your Growth Profitable?
The LTV to CAC ratio measures if you make more money from a customer than you spent to get them. It's the core health metric for a subscription business, used to judge marketing efficiency. A ratio above 3:1 is often healthy.
Network Effects: Value Grows with Users
A product with network effects is like a telephone: its value grows as more people join. This powers social media, marketplaces, and communication tools. The main pitfall is the 'cold start problem'—attracting the first users to an empty, valueless network.
Vanity vs. Actionable Metrics: Measure What Matters
Actionable metrics explain *why* and guide your next move, while vanity metrics just look good on a chart. Use actionable metrics for setting KPIs to understand user behavior and business health.
Quantitative Growth Model: The Spreadsheet That Runs Your Business
A quantitative growth model is a spreadsheet that maps your business, showing how inputs like ad spend turn into revenue. It's used to forecast growth, simulate strategy changes, and set goals. The footgun: your model is only as good as its assumptions.
What a Head of Growth Actually Does
A Head of Growth is a systems architect for revenue, deciding where to place strategic bets, not just a campaign manager. They align product, engineering, and marketing around shared metrics and build the experimentation engine.
Growth Engineer: The Entrepreneur Inside the Company
A growth engineer is an entrepreneurial developer using code to directly drive business metrics. They work across the product, optimizing onboarding or running experiments to boost activation.
Holdback Groups: Measure Your True Cumulative Impact
A holdback group is your product's long-term control, shielding a small set of users from all new features. Use it to measure the cumulative impact of many small changes over months or years, beyond what individual A/B tests can show.
Product-Led Sales: Your Product is Your Best Salesperson
Product-Led Sales (PLS) treats your product as the primary lead generator. Instead of cold calls, sales teams engage users who show buying intent through their product usage, guiding them to a natural upgrade.
Product-Led Growth (PLG): Let Your Product Sell Itself
Product-Led Growth (PLG) makes the product the primary engine for acquiring and converting users. It relies on a mix of free features, virality, and a smooth upgrade path to paying tiers, letting users experience value before they buy.
Expansion MRR: Growing Revenue from Existing Customers
Expansion MRR measures new monthly recurring revenue from your existing customers. It's how you grow through upgrades, add-ons, or cross-sells, not just new signups. The footgun is mixing it with new business MRR, which hides your product's retention power.
Time to Value (TTV): From Signup to 'Aha!'
TTV measures the time from signup to a user's first "aha!" moment. Product teams track it to reduce early churn, as faster value builds trust. The footgun is defining "value" as completing setup, not a real user win.
The PIE Framework: Prioritizing What to Test Next
The PIE framework ranks A/B test ideas by scoring them on Potential, Importance, and Ease. It helps teams decide where to experiment first, focusing limited resources on high-impact changes.
Managing Growth with an Experiment Backlog
An experiment backlog is a prioritized list of testable ideas that turns strategy into action. Agile teams use it to manage projects, using business intelligence to measure performance and ensure ideas deliver value. The footgun is a lack of governance.
The K-Factor: Measuring Your Product's Viral Growth
The Viral Coefficient (K-factor) measures how many new users each existing user generates. It's key for products with referrals or sharing. The common mistake is chasing K > 1; even K=0.5 is valuable, as it effectively halves your acquisition cost.
AARRR: Pirate Metrics for the Customer Lifecycle
The AARRR framework maps your customer's journey through five key stages: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue. It helps startups diagnose leaks in their growth funnel, from first visit to final sale.
Growth Loops: The Engine of Product Growth
A growth loop is a closed system where outputs are reinvested to generate more inputs, creating compounding growth. Unlike linear funnels, this model unifies product, marketing, and monetization. The footgun is using funnels, which creates silos.
Experiment-Driven Organization: Run Your Org Like a Lab
Treat organizational change like a lab experiment, not a big-bang project. This helps companies adapt by testing new processes on a small scale first, generating evidence before committing to a full rollout. The footgun is mistaking chaos for experimentation.
The North Star Metric: Your Company's One True Focus
A North Star Metric (NSM) is your company's compass: a single metric capturing the core value you deliver to customers. Spotify uses 'time spent listening' to align teams on user engagement.
Growth Hacking: Marketing via Rapid Experimentation
Growth hacking treats marketing like a science experiment, using rapid, low-cost tests to find what grows a user base instead of relying on big, slow campaigns. It's used by startups to A/B test ideas before investing resources.
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