Hacking Growth
Not tricks — a meeting cadence, a backlog, a metric, and the discipline to keep the loop spinning.
- Authors
- Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
- Published
- 2017, Crown Business
- Core unit
- The cross-functional growth team
- Cadence
- High-tempo testing, weekly
Forms & parts of speech
What the book says
Hacking Growth converts the growth-hacking movement Ellis started into an operating manual: assemble a cross-functional team (marketing, product, engineering, data), confirm the product is must-have first (the 40% survey), find your growth equation and North Star metric, then run the high-tempo loop — analyze, ideate, prioritize (their ICE score — impact, confidence, ease), test, repeat weekly. Part two walks the funnel: acquisition, activation, retention, monetization, each with its own experiment patterns.
The ideas people quote
Growth is a process, not a bag of tactics; the must-have test before any scaling; ICE prioritization to keep the backlog honest; the aha moment — the experience that turns sign-ups into devotees (Facebook's seven friends in ten days) — and activation as the funnel's most underrated stage; and language/market fit — the message tested as rigorously as the product.
How to read it now
It remains the best single onboarding document for a new growth team — not because the tactics are fresh (some aged) but because the operating system holds: one metric, one backlog, one weekly tempo, every function in the room. Read it alongside the loops school (Winters, Balfour) for what compounds, and Kohavi for keeping the tests honest.
Synonyms & antonyms
Synonyms
Origin & history
Written 2015-2016 as the systematization of what Ellis had been teaching since his 2010 coining post and the GrowthHackers community's case library; Morgan Brown brought the operator's documentation. Crown Business published it in April 2017.
Etymology: source.
Usage trends
Search interest for this term over the last five years:
Common questions
- Who wrote Hacking Growth?
- Sean Ellis, who coined growth hacking, and Morgan Brown — published 2017 as the movement's operating manual.
- What is the book's method?
- Cross-functional teams running high-tempo weekly experiment loops against a North Star metric, after confirming must-have status.
- What is ICE scoring?
- The book's prioritization — rate each experiment idea on Impact, Confidence, and Ease to rank the backlog.
Related tools & calculators
Resources & people to follow
- bookHacking Growth — Ellis & Brown (the subject)
- referenceGrowthHackers.com — the companion community
- bookTrustworthy Online Controlled Experiments — Kohavi (the rigor layer)
Curated, non-competitor resources verified per term.
Related training
Disciplines
Areas of marketing where hacking growth is a core concern: