Concepts in Growth & Experimentation, page 7
User Bucketing: The Engine of A/B Testing
User bucketing is a deterministic hash that assigns users to experiment groups. It ensures a user sees the same variation every time, which is critical for valid A/B tests. The main footgun is using an unstable user ID, which can re-bucket users and ruin your.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dunning Management: Recovering Failed Subscription Payments
Dunning is the automated process of chasing failed subscription payments. It's how you recover revenue from expired cards or insufficient funds, which is crucial for any SaaS or subscription business.
HEART Framework: Five Metrics for Product Health
HEART is a vital-signs panel for product health, not a single score. Use it to pick metrics for feature launches so you track user value, not vanity numbers. Measuring all five dimensions when only one matters creates dashboard bloat and analysis paralysis.
Sessionization: Bounding Events into Visits
Sessionization groups raw user events into visits using idle timeouts. Teams use it to measure engagement and attribute conversions per sitting. The footgun is treating sessions as users, which inflates counts and wrecks retention analysis.
Scarcity Principle: Limit Availability to Drive Action
People want what they might lose. In growth, scarcity amplifies conversion by framing offers as limited in time, quantity, or access. The footgun is fake scarcity: invented limits destroy trust and backfire permanently.
Commitment and Consistency: The Identity Ratchet
People follow through on what they already said yes to. Use it to turn a tiny user action into sustained engagement, or to get a team to ship by making a public deadline. A coerced yes creates resentment, not consistency.
Framing Effect: Presentation Rewires Decisions
The same fact hits differently depending on its wrapper. In growth, framing decides whether users see "90% uptime" or "10% downtime," swinging conversions without changing the product. Teams obsess over the offer yet ship copy that frames value as a loss.
Bayesian vs. Frequentist A/B Testing
Frequentist testing asks how surprising a result is if nothing changed; Bayesian asks probability B is better. Frequentist fixes sample size to control false positives, while Bayesian lets you peek.
Golden Path: The One Journey That Matters
Golden Path is the single user journey that drives core value. In growth, you optimize this highway before fixing side roads. The footgun is A/B testing edge cases while your main funnel leaks users.
Resurrection Campaign
A resurrection campaign is a targeted effort to win back dormant or churned users by re-engaging them with relevant value, often via email or push. It matters because reactivating known users is usually cheaper than acquiring new ones.
Revenue Churn: Dollars Lost, Not Logos
Revenue churn tracks dollars lost from your existing base, not just headcount. In subscriptions, one enterprise downgrade can dwarf ten small cancellations. Teams often celebrate low logo churn while ignoring revenue churn that silently erodes growth.
Revenue Recognition in Growth Experiments
Revenue is earned as you deliver value, not when cash arrives. In growth experiments, booking an annual prepayment as immediate revenue makes a pricing test look like a massive win. Teams often confuse bookings with revenue and credit experiments incorrectly.
Log Exposure, Not Just Assignment
Exposure logging records when a user actually sees a variant, not just assignment. Counting assigned but unexposed users dilutes treatment effects and biases lift. The common footgun is logging assignment as exposure, which silently underpowers your test.
Embedded Growth Teams: Experimentation as a Squad Muscle
Growth talent embedded in product squads spreads experimentation beyond a central team. It fits multi-surface products needing data-driven culture. The footgun is letting embedded specialists become sole experimenters while squad PMs and engineers disengage.
We are hiring for this. Every open role lists the topics its interview covers, so you can prepare for the real thing rather than guessing.
See open roles