Growth Engineering

CHAPTER 1Growth Engineering

When you think about product growth, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Marketing, sales, social media awareness? Many companies even have dedicated growth marketing teams. But growth isn’t just about marketing or sales—it is also an engineering discipline.

The term “growth” is often said to have been popularized by Chamath Palihapitiya during his time at Facebook.¹ On the verge of being fired from his role, he pitched a new idea to Sheryl Sandberg: build a dedicated team focused entirely on growing the product through engineering, marketing, and data-driven experimentation. That bold move not only saved his job but also led to the creation of the first-ever Growth Team—a model that would soon be copied across Silicon Valley.

Employing the right growth techniques doesn’t just benefit marketing or sales. It empowers everyone, including engineers, designers, and product managers, by ensuring that product decisions are data-driven rather than based on guesswork.

Growth engineering is about setting up a product for long-term success by embedding scalable growth strategies into the development process. This could mean any of the following:

• Using feature flags to control which features appear for different user segments
• Logging user interactions to identify friction points, such as users getting stuck in a flow and failing to complete a core action
• Analyzing behavioral data to determine whether users are genuinely engaged—or if they simply dislike ...