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Hacking Growth book club questions
Here are 11 book club questions for Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. Copy them, print them, or bring them up one at a time.
Hacking Growth is Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown's guide to building a growth function — an organizationally distinct, cross-functional team focused on finding and exploiting opportunities to accelerate customer acquisition, retention, and revenue.
Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown · 2017 · 5h 20m
Full summary and key takeaways →The 11 questions
- 1.
Ellis says product-market fit is required before growth hacking. How do you know when you have it? Is the 'very disappointed' test he describes actually reliable?
- 2.
What would the North Star Metric be for a business you know well? How would you choose it, and how would you guard against optimizing for the wrong single metric?
- 3.
Activation is consistently underinvested compared to acquisition. Why do you think companies allocate more attention to finding new customers than to ensuring existing ones have a great first experience?
- 4.
What makes an experiment well-designed in the context of growth hacking? What are the common mistakes that produce misleading results?
- 5.
The AARRR framework assumes a linear funnel. How does it apply to products with more complex, non-linear customer journeys?
- 6.
Retention is the most underrated lever. What specific tactics have you seen produce meaningful retention improvements, and what made them work?
- 7.
How do you staff a growth team? What mix of skills and backgrounds produces the most effective experimentation cycle?
- 8.
Growth hacking has developed a reputation for dark patterns — tricks that generate short-term metrics at the cost of customer trust. How do you distinguish legitimate growth tactics from manipulative ones?
- 9.
Many growth experiments fail. What is the right mindset for teams that run twenty experiments and only two produce positive results?
- 10.
The book describes a specific growth team structure. How do you embed growth thinking into a company that does not have a dedicated growth team?
- 11.
How has the growth hacking methodology evolved since Ellis coined the term in 2010? What practices from the original playbook are now table stakes, and what is genuinely new?
How to run the discussion
- Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
- Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
- Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
- Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.
Themes worth steering toward
If the conversation stalls, these are the threads that usually restart it.
Common questions
What are good book club questions for Hacking Growth?
Here are 11 book club questions for Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, ordered to open easily and end somewhere worth arguing about. The strongest openers ask what each reader noticed rather than what they concluded, and the discussion usually turns on growth, marketing, startups.
How long should a book club discussion of Hacking Growth last?
Most groups run 60 to 90 minutes of actual discussion. That is roughly six to eight questions, not all of them, so pick the ones that suit your group rather than working down the list in order.
What are the main themes in Hacking Growth?
Growth, Marketing, Startups, Product strategy, Data analysis. Those are the threads most likely to divide a room, which makes them the useful places to steer a discussion that has gone quiet.
Picking the next one? See books like Hacking Growth or questions for other book club picks.
