I’ve been interested in growth for a while, which means that I’ve been reading Sean Ellis’ writing for a long time. He’s one of the originators of the term ‘Growth Hacking’ due to work that he’s done with startups. I started reading his book, Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success ( coauthored with Morgan Brown), while on vacation, but wasn’t able to finish it until now. Through a mix of reading and having someone moving into a growth role, I wanted to connect the dots and was looking for more structure.

This book helped bring a better structure to everything I’ve read on the topic of Growth Hacking. It also brought to light several different organization structures to product and growth teams that is very relevant now for me. I’m looking to restructure around Jobs-to-be-Done and the timing to think through these roles and structures is perfect.

The book is split into two sections. ‘The Method’ is the first and contains a lot of foundational and important topics including organization structure and the roles that should be on growth teams. There were a few great ideas presented in this section, one of which is key to growth hacking: understanding if your product is a must-have. Every product manager believes their product to be, but what do your customers think? The authors do a good job of pointing out that growth hacking isn’t going to make a shitty product the next unicorn. But related to this concept of a must-have product is what is the aha moment where your customers have realized and recognized the value of the product? This chapter alone makes it a must read for product managers.

The other two chapters in this section are also highly valuable to any product manager, especially “Identifying Your Growth Levers”. This chapter helps us understand what are the key metrics that will contribute to growing our product, provides examples of dashboards, and the infamous AARRR framework. The other chapter “Testing at High Tempo” is important if your product team or company has poor velocity.

The next section “The Growth Hacking Playbook” makes up the bulk of the book. It takes the pirate metrics, AARRR, and discusses specific tactics, approaches and ideas to go after improving these parts of the funnel. Like any good business book, the authors provide cases studies from companies that have taken these tactics, applied them and have achieved measurable success. I’m not going to go into the details of these sections, just get the book.

Even if you are a product manager but aren’t on a growth team or your company doesn’t have one, this book will be very valuable to you. Every product still needs to improve and optimize around AARRR. I’ve found that many product managers from startups are familiar with these concepts, but those product managers from big companies will also benefit as well and are, candidly, in even more in need of a book like this.