(Note: This lesson is written content only.
We’ve talked previously about how growth wins, how the game has changed, and how we
need to adapt to a new and different approach. This new approach is a system that is
sustainable, repeatable, systematic, and deterministic.
The goal of the Reforge Growth Series is to piece together all of the disparate concepts
around growth, cut through the noise, and assemble them in a cohesive process and
system that you can implement in your product, your company, and your career.
By the end of this program you'll be able to do four things:
1. Understand. First, you’ll be able to understand the key parts of growth and how they
interact with each other.
2. Evaluate. Second, you’ll evaluate each area qualitatively and quantitatively to diagnose
issues and find different opportunities.
3. Create. Third, is to apply various frameworks to create strategies that drive your
roadmap and influence growth.
4. Communicate. Fourth, and potentially most importantly, is to be able to communicate
everything to your teammates, your managers, and across the organization so that you
can drive change.
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Let’s go through what this will look like on a week by week basis.
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Week 1
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In week one, we start with the foundation of growth: retention and engagement.
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We're going to learn how to define, measure, analyze, and construct different retention and
engagement strategies across the three levers of retention. To do this, you'll be building
the Reforge Retention and Engagement Diagnosis Sheet.
This will help you systematically go through retention, engagement, activation, and
resurrection to diagnose and find opportunities and build strategies at the same time.
Week 2
We’ll then move onto acquisition and talk about how to define, measure, analyze, and
combine various acquisition loops to drive growth.
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In this key framework, we’ll look at how acquisition loops do not work as funnels, but rather
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as a system of loops.
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We'll go through the four different categories of loops and some of their subtypes and look
at the key differences, levers, and factors that drive these loops within products and
companies.
Week 3
We're then going to move on to monetization and talk about how a monetization model
enables or disables various retention and acquisition strategies.
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The monetization model is much more than just price; it’s also about how you charge, when
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you charge, what you charge, and the amount you charge.
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All of your decisions around these four key pieces and how they influence the rest of your
ecosystem will be explored through a framework we call “the four fits.”
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Week 4
We then move on to one of the most important weeks, growth models.
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Growth models brings all of the key lessons from the first three weeks — retention and
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engagement, acquisition, and monetization — into one holistic picture to answer the most
important question: How does your product grow?
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We’ll build a qualitative growth model and use that to build a quantitative model of a single
loop.
We’ll then learn how to build an end to end quantitative model that represents our entire
product.
Week 5
In the next week, we’ll talk about user psychology.
It's not enough to just know how our product grows through the qualitative and
quantitative growth model; we need to understand how to move different variables in our
growth model in order to increase growth. In order to do that, we need to understand how
our users make different decisions within our product.
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We explore this in the Reforge ELMR Framework — emotion, logic, motivation, reward —
and translate that into an actionable tool that we call the user psych map.
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We then take these components — our growth model, and our user psych map — to form
experiments.
Week 6
Next, we walk through experiments around defining incredibly good hypotheses and
prioritizing those hypotheses in two-dimensional scorecards.
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As we analyze those experiments, we’ll also look at how to communicate them across the
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different levels of the organization.
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Bonus Material
We then round out the program with a bonus module about defensibility and how
everything around our growth machine accrues value over time to become more
defensible.
We’ll also talk about the different types of network effects as well as other types of
defensibility through branding, embedding, and scale.
We’ll break down how to approach these things in a more deterministic way: how we build
a network effect, how we build a brand, and how we build embedding and scale to produce
defensibility over time.
These modules make up the Reforge Growth Series. During this time we’ll build a growth
machine that is systematic, deterministic, repeatable, and sustainable.
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