On April 23rd, I’ll be teaching the first ever Growth Engineering Course on Reforge.
Here’s why I created the course, the topics it’ll cover, and how you can snag a spot.
Origin Story
When I first became an Engineering Manager, I was automatically enrolled into manager training. There was no question about it: Engineering Management is not Engineering. New managers are ramped as quickly as possible.
When I first became a Growth Engineer, I was automatically enrolled into absolutely nothing. In retrospect, this seems strange. Growth Engineering is quite different from the rest of Software Engineering. How was I supposed to pick things up?
As it turned out, many of the skills from starting Hacker Paradise were transferrable: be scrappy, focus on the funnel, and talk to customers. A year in, I enrolled in one of Reforge’s original Growth Series courses. This helped me get a handle on the foundations I’d been missing when I accidentally taught Growth Engineering to myself.
Let’s make it better
Still, it was a rather lonely experience: out of a hundred or so students, most were in Marketing or Product Management; I was the only practicing software engineer. Also, the level at which the course was taught assumed knowledge of Growth Framework and Financial Modeling fundamentals that I needed to catch up on in realtime. Great content, but I wasn’t quite the audience.
Fast forward a few years. As the Head of Growth Engineering at MasterClass, I started to build the kind of training program that I wish I’d had when I first started working on Growth.
When I moved to Japan and transitioned to advising a few years later, I ended up adapting the material for companies like Coinbase, Brex, Levels Health and many more.
The upcoming Growth Engineering Course is the natural continuation of my mission to help Growth Engineers be awesome. Here’s a bit more about it:
Contents Material
At the highest level, we’re going to make you a more effective Growth Engineer. To do that, we’ll cover topics like:
- Growth Fundamentals: What role does Growth play and why is it worth doing, what do all the acronyms and numbers mean, and how does my work impact the bigger picture?
- Clean Experimentation: How do the stats behind A/B tests work, and how can we design and analyze an experiment to avoid basic stats pitfalls & learn as much as possible?
- User Behavior: Why do customers behave the way they do, and how can we model consumer behavior to improve our implementation quality and help come up with ideas?
- Going Fast: Where can we cut scope to learn faster? Which reusable components and design patterns allow us to DRY up our code and speed up our velocity?
Who it’s for
- Engineers and Engineering Managers working in Growth or seeking to learn Growth Engineering best practices.
- Post Product-Market Fit companies (roughly Series A onwards). Most examples will draw from B2C or B2B SAAS companies.
The course will be less useful to:
- Product Managers: see Reforge’s great selection of courses, in particular Technical Foundations for PMs if that’s what you’re looking for
- Early stage companies: see this course on finding Product Market Fit
- Enterprise Sales companies: if you don’t have enough potential customers to be able to get into “fast iteration” mode, a lot of the content won’t apply to you.
Format
- 4 weeks, 4 modules
- Begins April 23rd
-
Sync:
- 2 live sessions per week, 1 with me & 1 with a Featured Guest (some Growth Luminaries)
-
Async:
- In-depth guides included with every module
- Join our dedicated Slack to meet fellow students.
Ultimately, this is the first-ever run of the course, so I’ll be super involved and looking forward to your feedback. Come shape the content that Growth Engineers will go through for (hopefully) years to come.
Since this is a first run, seats are limited, so be sure to sign up while you can.
Tags: #growth-engineering #teaching