Mastering Growth Engineering

Master the technical levers to scaling product-led companies

Alexey Komissarouk

Previously Head of Growth Engineering at MasterClass

Outcomes

Audience

Creators

Course outcomes

Most Engineers get thrust into working on growth without prior context, picking up bets and pieces of best practice through experience and osmosis. There’s a better way.

Whether looking to grow impact within an established Growth Engineering team or laying groundwork as Growth Engineer #1, this course is built to get engineers to level up their understanding of the various parts of Growth Engineering from scratch.

Specifically, we’ll focus on:

Product
- Accounting: What is CAC/LTV and why do I keep hearing about Contribution Margin at the all-hands?
- Ideation: Where do ideas come from? It’s not just “the PM”. Getting systematic around ideation and prioritization.
- Growth 101: How does a PM view the world? Understanding the loops and funnels underpinning Growth.
Stats & Analytics
- Experimentation: Experiment Setup 101, Nailing Event Implementation, Getting the most out of Experiment Analysis
- Stats: Getting the math right: understanding Stat Sig & Power Analysis, Alternative Statistical Methods to get more learnings from less data.
The Code
- Implementations: maximizing code reuse, cutting scope
- Quality: preventing bugs through monitoring and automated QA
- External Tools: What’s the right place to leverage MarTech tools (and which ones) versus build in-house?
- AI: Which places in the funnel are most ripe to plug in LLMs to boost conversion?
Leadership
- Process: What combination of meetings, rituals and tools work best for a Growth team?
- Motivation: How do we motivate Engineers to work on growth and contribute to the roadmap?
- Planning & Prioritization: How can engineering best partner with Product to decide what to focus on?

Course outcomes

Most Engineers get thrust into working on growth without prior context, picking up bets and pieces of best practice through experience and osmosis. There’s a better way.

Specifically, we’ll focus on:

Product
- Accounting: What is CAC/LTV and why do I keep hearing about Contribution Margin at the all-hands?
- Ideation: Where do ideas come from? It’s not just “the PM”. Getting systematic around ideation and prioritization.
- Growth 101: How does a PM view the world? Understanding the loops and funnels underpinning Growth.
Stats & Analytics
- Experimentation: Experiment Setup 101, Nailing Event Implementation, Getting the most out of Experiment Analysis
- Stats: Getting the math right: understanding Stat Sig & Power Analysis, Alternative Statistical Methods to get more learnings from less data.
The Code
- Implementations: maximizing code reuse, cutting scope
- Quality: preventing bugs through monitoring and automated QA
- External Tools: What’s the right place to leverage MarTech tools (and which ones) versus build in-house?
- AI: Which places in the funnel are most ripe to plug in LLMs to boost conversion?
Leadership
- Process: What combination of meetings, rituals and tools work best for a Growth team?
- Motivation: How do we motivate Engineers to work on growth and contribute to the roadmap?
- Planning & Prioritization: How can engineering best partner with Product to decide what to focus on?

Course outcomes

Most Engineers get thrust into working on growth without prior context, picking up bets and pieces of best practice through experience and osmosis. There’s a better way.

Specifically, we’ll focus on:

Product
- Accounting: What is CAC/LTV and why do I keep hearing about Contribution Margin at the all-hands?
- Ideation: Where do ideas come from? It’s not just “the PM”. Getting systematic around ideation and prioritization.
- Growth 101: How does a PM view the world? Understanding the loops and funnels underpinning Growth.
Stats & Analytics
- Experimentation: Experiment Setup 101, Nailing Event Implementation, Getting the most out of Experiment Analysis
- Stats: Getting the math right: understanding Stat Sig & Power Analysis, Alternative Statistical Methods to get more learnings from less data.
The Code
- Implementations: maximizing code reuse, cutting scope
- Quality: preventing bugs through monitoring and automated QA
- External Tools: What’s the right place to leverage MarTech tools (and which ones) versus build in-house?
- AI: Which places in the funnel are most ripe to plug in LLMs to boost conversion?
Leadership
- Process: What combination of meetings, rituals and tools work best for a Growth team?
- Motivation: How do we motivate Engineers to work on growth and contribute to the roadmap?
- Planning & Prioritization: How can engineering best partner with Product to decide what to focus on?

Who this course is for

This course is for an explicitly technical audience. It was written for Growth Engineers, by Growth Engineers.

Live sections will target a “tech lead or above” level of expertise. Diligent individual contributors are welcome, but will want to complete each week’s reading in advance to get the full benefit from the live sessions.

Much of the advice of this course will not yet be applicable to pre-market fit companies. The sweet spot will be for engineers from growth-stage (Series B+) or post-IPO companies.

Though the course will cover examples from both B2B and B2C surface areas, the focus will be on PLG companies who strive to run “lots of growth experiments” companies. Enterprise Sales-lead companies will still benefit from the course, but are not the primary target audience.

Who this course is for

This course is for an explicitly technical audience. It was written for Growth Engineers, by Growth Engineers.

Much of the advice of this course will not yet be applicable to pre-market fit companies. The sweet spot will be for engineers from growth-stage (Series B+) or post-IPO companies.

Who this course is for

This course is for an explicitly technical audience. It was written for Growth Engineers, by Growth Engineers.

Much of the advice of this course will not yet be applicable to pre-market fit companies. The sweet spot will be for engineers from growth-stage (Series B+) or post-IPO companies.

Course created by

Alexey Komissarouk

Previously Head of Growth Engineering at MasterClass

These days, I help mid-stage start-ups build and scale growth engineering teams. From 2020-2023, I led Growth Engineering at MasterClass. I spent 2016-2020 at Opendoor as an early engineer and then managing Growth Engineering teams. It was intense! Between 2013 and 2016, I built out a product engineering consulting company, helping clients such as Dropbox, Pebble, Boomerang, and Binti grow and expand lines of business through a combination of product management and engineering. In 2014, I left San Francisco to travel while working remotely and co-founded a boutique work+travel company, Hacker Paradise. Since the company’s inception in 2015, we’ve run trips to over a dozen locations and been joined by more than 800 Alumni. In 2012, I graduated with a CS degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where I started the PennApps Hackathon, a now-biannual event with over 1,500 student participants from universities across the US and beyond.