Course Content
Mastering Growth Program Overview
What to expect as you go.
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Learning Material
Quick start guide
Module 1: Introduction to Growth
Learn the fundamentals of growth and learn how to incorporate growth at your company the right way. We’ll start with defining what growth does and where it sits in the organization, and will show you how to make sure you have the right foundation on which to grow. This module includes digging into attribution and event tracking, data, and analysis and includes a review of the tools you’ll need to ensure success.
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Overview of Growth
Pirate Metrics & the Customer Journey
Why is growth important?
The Way We Build Features Is Often Broken
Growth led product development
Video: The Step Functions of Growth – Sandboxx Case Study
Composition of a Growth Team & Key Players
Case Study – Upside Business Travel Growth Team Structure
Interview – Seamus Leahy (Dropbox, Twitter, Thumbtack, Votion) – how the world’s fastest companies structure and scale growth teams (15:39)
5 Rules for Building Features and Products
Module 1 – Optional Homework
Mastering Growth Series – Foundations of Growth

Case Study – Upside Business Travel Growth Team Structure

Upside was a business travel platform whose goal was disrupting how business travel is researched, booked, what the on-trip experience is like from a product standpoint, and how the post-trip experience can be made more efficient. As Head of Growth at Upside, Craig (me!) was in charge of the following aspects of the business:

  1. Demand generation. The growth team was responsible for driving people to the website and mobile app. We didn’t have a traditional independent marketing team – growth along with the commercial, UX and content teams owned demand generation for the product, and were responsible for making sure we had a steady flow of customers coming in.
  2. Top of funnel experiments. We ran tons and tons of experiments across a wide variety of channels, including one where we actually gave away a free pair of Bose Headphones for new users to try us out (screenshot below of the promo)
  3. Marketing / Acquisition budget. Because we didn’t have a marketing team, we owned the budget and we did everything from large spends on experiments around referrals to low or no cost organic methods to reach our customers.
  4. Mid-funnel experiments – we tried all sorts of things to try to activate leads who came in but hadn’t yet booked – from promos to personal calls to them to surveys to a comprehensive content strategy, and more. Some of these strategies worked and others didn’t (in fact, MANY didn’t) but we doubled down on the ones that did and eventually grew!
  5. Retention. We had to figure out ways early on to get users coming back to book again. I call retention the Pillar of Growth and there is an entire module dedicated to this later in the course for you to check out.

Example promotion for new user acquisition (see an example referrer of this promo here)

Structure

At Upside, we used a shared team structure to power our Growth. Our actual structure was similar to the chart below, but differed in that we had multiple growth marketers (whom we called “Growth Leads”) embedded within the growth team.

Each growth lead owned or co-owned one functional area of the acquisition funnel – the AARRR section of the Pirate Metrics overview that we walked through in an earlier lesson. As such, we always had someone responsible for making sure we were tracking on key metrics set up based on areas of ownership, and as a team we could apply more people to areas where we needed more help short term.

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