A review by pharsaliamphilippos
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

5.0

This book was a useful read, one that I would recommend particularly for people who are working in product management or product analytics.

At its core, growth hacking is about establishing a culture of continuous customer-centric and data-backed experimentation to drive growth at a company. The first half of the book makes a case for why companies should implement the practice and describes the necessary components of a cross-functional growth hacking team, while the second half dives into growth hacking tactics in action. The book walks through the questions you should be asking yourself and metrics you should consider when targeting various parts of the customer/user journey to find different ideas to test. I found the numerous case studies from companies like Pinterest and Qualaroo that Ellis and Brown use as examples particularly helpful in grounding the framework.

While my more pessimistic side found it hard to wrap my head around the feasibility of implementing such rapid-paced testing at all companies, the book does make a compelling case for investing the resources to do so. One of the biggest hurdles is to shift your and your company’s thinking away from traditional wisdom and towards experimentation, away from intuition and towards data. The point that resonated the most with me is that success is a "numbers game", less about the discovery of one groundbreaking genius idea and more about “a series of small wins, compounded over time.”

The one element that did somewhat turn me off was the unequivocal commendation of Facebook as a company that dedicated itself to the growth hacking practices to incredible success. While I don’t disagree with that point, I think in the past few years, there has been a more nuanced examination of the consequences the “move fast and break things” motto has inflicted on the world. While the book does warn against the more intrusive ways companies can use customer data (e.g., the Target ads that knew a teenage girl was pregnant before her father did), it does so more from a PR and customer retention perspective than anything else. In fact, at one point in the monetization chapter, the authors even list selling customer data to third parties as an option for mobile apps to make money. It’s these little details that somewhat date the book. (It was published in 2017, which is around the time data breaches/abuse and the details around Facebook’s role in the 2016 election were really making their way into the public eye.)

None of these critiques invalidate the merits of growth hacking or the book itself, so I still recommend it, with just that asterisk.