Mastering Growth Series Overview
An 8 week, part time series for becoming a growth expert
Mastering Growth Series will teach you how to become a growth expert. The field of growth is expanding rapidly and growth roles are one of the fastest growing roles in the professional space. Up until now, most growth practitioners have had to learn as they go without a clear roadmap for how to master the art of growth.
The Mastering Growth Series will equip you and your team in all aspects of growth – from basic growth tests to detailed retention modeling, acquisition, activation, and much more.
We’ve brought in some of the best growth and product minds around to help guide you through the journey to becoming a master.
This program is designed to be accessed from anywhere – there is no physical component to it, and all classes and examples are distributed weekly digitally.
Learn from industry leading growth practitioners
Learn from experts at companies like Dropbox, Pinterest, Google and many more.
Deep dive into growth
Built for professionals in Marketing, Product Management, and Growth roles, the Mastering Growth Series is a deep dive into the essential elements of Growth. You’ll learn:
- How to build and prioritize growth tests into your roadmap
- Build a detailed quantitive growth model
- Learn how to capture higher returns on your acquisition efforts
- Get customers and users to follow your intended actions
- Solidify your retention strategies, leading to more growth
- And much, much more!
You’ll learn from seasoned practitioners who have built and scaled companies of all sizes, and get hours of hands-on material, downloadable frameworks to use as templates, and a network of seasoned mentors to share knowledge with.
This program is designed to be accessed from anywhere – there is no physical component to it, and all classes and examples are distributed weekly digitally.
What is growth?
Growth starts with looking at every stage of the customer journey and ensuring that the product or service adds value to that customer’s experience the entire way through their lifecycle.
Why is growth critical?
Way back in 2006, Paul Graham, the famous founder of startup incubator Y Combinator wrote about why startups fail. Fast forward to 2018 and CB Insights ran 101 startup postmortems on companies that failed, and categorized their findings. What did these two sources find?
A whopping 74% of startups who fail consider market or marketing challenges as the key reasons for their failure.
Between these two sources, 28 out of 38 reasons for failure had to do with market and marketing.
This is your chance to level-up!
If you’re a Product Manager, Marketer, or already working in Growth, the Mastering Growth Series will arm you with the knowledge playbook to help de-risk your company and level-up your skills.
Helping you grow your company and career is our #1 goal
Companies either grow or die. Product and marketing teams are under intense pressure to perform at higher and higher levels, and top performing employees want the tools and tactics to thrive.
At the same time, the tools, technology, strategy, and markets are shifting faster than ever. And while the amount of content available to learn growth has exploded, there is a huge lack standards and strategies to actually improve your performance. What’s more – just because a certain tactic or “growth hack” worked at one company doesn’t mean it’ll work at yours.
At Growth Minded our Mastering Growth Series will arm you with the tools, processes, approach, and frameworks needed to help you level up your company and your career.
What this is
✔︎ A comprehensive curriculum of how to learn and apply growth strategies for your product & company
✔︎ A set of frameworks and tools that you can leverage along your career path
✔︎ A way for growth leads, marketers, product managers, other team members, and executives to share in a common and clear vision for growth across your company
What this series is NOT
✘ A bunch of one-off “growth hacks” that will change your company overnight
✘ A quick fix solution for all of your growth challenges
✘ A one-time effort – you need to apply this framework over time
Instructor & Host
Craig is a 6-time founder (4 startups & 2 agencies) and has advised or consulted for close to 100 others. He’s run Growth teams at Upside Business Travel, Red Tricycle, Votion & Sandboxx.
He’s a top rated speaker on product & growth, startup mentor and advisor who believes every company has growth potential to unlock.
See Craig’s LinkedIn profile here , visit his Startup Blog Pocketnote to see his writing, or visit the About page to learn more.
Who is this for?
The Mastering Growth Series program is focused on helping you move up the learning curve for Growth initiatives. We move quickly and cover a lot of ground in our sessions, but give you ample time outside of class to run tests, validate hypothesis, and execute on real problems within your company based on material you are getting every session.
Our typical participant roles include Product Managers, Marketers, Data analysts, Data scientists, Growth leads, Engineers, and Execs looking to build a growth team.
Product managers
Learn how to incorporate growth into your product strategy and roadmap and how to evaluate and prioritize your growth initiatives. Gain the knowledge to drive a growth-based mindset across your team and become a champion and owner of growth across your company. Reap the rewards of a comprehensive strategy and plan of attack. Learn how practitioners at companies like Dropbox and Google have leveraged growth to propel them forward.
Existing Growth Marketers
Level up your skills by learning how to build a strong foundation from which to drive your strategy. You’ll learn by doing – and will come out with a blueprint and framework so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel at each step function of growth. You’ll get real world examples and guidance from seasoned practitioners, and will get access to our network of other like minded growth people.
Digital Marketers
Learn how to augment your existing toolkit with growth marketing specific tactics and strategies. You’ll get a deep dive in all aspects of the marketing funnel, and will come out with templates you can use to drive better results with your efforts. You’ll also learn how to incorporate growth minded thinking and leapfrog your skills that you can use for the rest of your career.
Engineers, Data analysts & Data scientists
Get a deep dive in how growth marketing works, and where you’ll play pivotal roles in the ideation and execution of the growth strategy. See how companies like Dropbox handle growth from a data and engineering standpoint.
Executives
Learn why growth specific roles are growing more critical for your business success. See how your team will learn, test, & implement growth initiatives within your company, and see how other companies have leveraged this process to achieve success.
Program format
When you join the Mastering Growth Series, you’ll receive:
Video based instruction and detailed written material
There is roughly 2 hours of video based instruction each week. In addition, written materials for each module will be distributed along with the video.
Relevant, real-world examples
Everything we teach is based on being able to take the concept and apply it’s methodology to your current company and problem set. Examples are based on existing real world scenarios from recent and current companies.
How do you start moving on growth if you are at a 2 person startup? How about at a 100 person VC backed company? How do companies like Peloton and TripActions handle customer acquisition? What does AirBnB do to stay to of mind for hosts? How does on-boarding differ based on your product usage type?
Actionable steps for each week
Learning growth comes from both strategy and execution. Every week we’ll provide you with the tools you’ll need to move up the learning curve – by having you do the work you need to learn along the way. We’ll give the mic over to growth experts who will share their stories with you so you can get multiple different viewpoints on how companies address growth.
Growth Minded community
We believe that growth is best achieved when a strong foundation exists, and you have a support network built in. With Growth Minded, you won’t be alone in your journey – starting before our 1st week kickoff you’ll have an opportunity to network with other growth experts, Growth Minded community members, other founders, and mentors within our slack group and private community.
Total commitment
4-8 hours per week for 8 weeks.
Series Overview
Module 1: Foundations of Growth
Learn how to kick off 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.
Module 2: Building your growth framework
In this module we will build the growth framework that you’ll use to drive your growth strategy, build your growth model on top of, and use as your go-to resource for tests and reporting.
We’ll look at how to measure your product performance, including conversion rates. We’ll cover how to spot issues early, and we’ll look at how to build a model to help predict future growth.
Module 3: Organic levers: referrals, SEO, content marketing
Organic channels can be immensely powerful for your company regardless of stage, amount of capital raised, or revenue. We’ll look at the levers you can pull to drive more organic traffic, what it takes from a time and team standpoint, and how to determine which areas to focus on first.
Module 4: Paid Acquisition
Learn when and how paid acquisition should fit into your overall growth strategy. We’ll look at the options available to you across the wide market of paid channels, and will explore how to maximize your ROI regardless of your budget. You’ll come out of this module with a set of tools you can use across all paid channels.
Module 5: Activation & Driving Intent
How are you driving your users to take the intended action you want them to take? How are you driving engagement for your audience? We’ll look at all aspects of activation, including onboarding, drip campaigns, and conversion optimization and outline key steps to drive a higher user to activation ratio.
Module 6: Retention – the pillar of growth
Learn why retention is the single biggest driver of success no matter what type of company you are. In this module we go deep into retention modeling, cohort analysis, and the different stages of retained and lapsed users. You’ll come out of this module with the tools and tactics needed to track and measure retention, and the strategy to drive your decision making process.
Module 7: Experimentation
Building on the test framework we reviewed in Module 2, in this module we’ll dig into experimentation and how to leverage hypothesis driven tests to maximize growth at each step of your customer lifecycle. We’ll look at how to build tests properly, we’ll walk through how to prioritize growth tests, and we’ll dig into measurement and iterations.
Module 8: Roadmapping growth
As you start to have some success with growth on your own, you’ll likely want to get some other folks in your organization involved and helping out. It might be that you need some engineering help, or you’re ready to get other departments helping ideate tests. We’ll look at some fun and effective ways to build a growth based company, how to get your tests approved by management, and how to get your successful tests that require engineering help to get on the product roadmap to ensure you’ve got the tools and resources you need to move forward.