5 Best Growth Hacking Books That Product Manager Should Read
In simple terms, growth hacking means a new marketing technique developed by tech startups to sell products and gain more visibility. It combines traditional marketing and analytical skills to attract and acquire new users. Growth Hacking solves a key problem that organizations often face: lack of coordination between their marketing and product development departments.
Growth hacking is bridging the gap between marketing and product development by focusing on adopting low-cost alternatives to traditional marketing. Thus, it allows startups to move to lean launches, which are focused on "growth first, budgets second." Growth hacking is a complex field and there are a lot of growth hacking books on the market, since you need a lot of knowledge to be successful in this field.
5 Growth hacking books for product manager
Good growth hacking books can help you better understand what growth hack marketing is and what the fundamental processes are that underlie growth hacking. To help you on your way, We have a list of the best growth hacking books based on the advice of several growth hacking communities:
1. The Growth Handbook by Andrew Chen & Intercom-team
The Growth Handbook is a collection of stories and valuable lessons from Growth Marketing experts, who have grown businesses from nothing to many billions in revenue, including Intercom, Intuit, Slack, Duolingo, Atlassian, Pinterest and more.
This book was initiated by Intercom, a chat software, and I can't guess exactly why they did it, except as a lead magnet for collecting email addresses from growth hackers or as a marketing tool. We all know Andrew Chen in the growth hacking scene. He works for a large investment company and is one of the first thought leaders within growth hacking.
2. Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown
Hacking Growth is the perfect book to get acquainted with Growth Hacking. The writers explain how the field originated, give a lot of examples of growth hacking at different companies and describe in a few general steps.
Sean Ellis is the creator of the term "growth hacking" and the entire field in 2011 and founder of the growthhackers.com platform. Striking in this book is that he is introducing the term "North Star Metric" for the first time, around which he would later start a software company, called NorthStar.
Morgan Brown is the co-author of almost all Sean Ellis books. Morgan Brown also works as a Product Manager at Facebook and you will often find him as a guest at podcasts and online discussions on Twitter.
3. Growth Hacker Marketing by Ryan Holiday
Although Sean Ellis first introduced the term, Ryan Holiday was the first to share the phenomenon in the form of a book about growth marketing. Ryan Holiday is a media columnist for a variety of online magazines, such as Forbes, The Huffington Post and New York Observer, and former marketing director of American Apparel.
In this book, Ryan explains with stories how well-known startups have grown and what insights you can take with them to your own company, if you need to grow your startup without a marketing budget. And although this book was already written in 2014, the growth hacker mindset that Ryan Holiday describes, is still as relevant today. He's also made an online course from his book.
4. 100 Days of Growth by Sujan Patel
Sujan Patel is certainly no stranger in the startup world or in the growth hacking scene. He is the founder of several software companies: Mailshake, When I Work, Quuu and Narrow. He is also co-owner of two online marketing agencies (Single Grain and Web Profits) and is a regular blogger for Forbes, Inc. and Entrepreneur.com.
This book is a collection of growth hacking tactics. Sujan Patel believes that you should not sit still too long and therefore better get started and apply a new growth hack every day, instead of reading a growth hacking blog every day.
5. Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll
Alistair Croll is a well-known author of multiple books and is currently working hard at the intersection of big data and society. The Lean Startup movement has had a huge impact in the startup world, in terms of how one starts a startup. Lean Analytics helps you to understand which data you should pay attention to.
This book is not about the use of growth hacking tools or analysis tools such as Google Analytics etc., but more about what to do with the data you have. The book starts with a more general view of data-driven work and then discusses a specific business model per chapter. That saves a lot of reading because you can therefore skip a lot of chapters.
Product prototype tool you need to know
Wondershare Mockitt is one of the best web and mobile prototype development platforms-can build and deploy prototypes of fully interactive web/mobile programs, and can simulate similar finished products. It can run in most browsers and provides 3 important interfaces: dashboard, editor and player.
The dashboard can be used to manage projects. The editor is an environment for building prototypes, which consists of a set of tools for designing and developing prototypes, and can also build interactions. The player is used to view and interact with the prototype, and provides related tools to mark and retain feedback information. You can test the prototype directly on a real mobile device. And you can use the browser on iOS or Android to run the prototype in full screen mode.
Simple interface
Prototyping tools are powerful tools that have overgrown with millions of functions over decades of development. To understand all the modules and repeat the operations in automatic mode, you need to spend 2-3 years studying and improving your knowledge every day.
But, it's easier with Wondershare Mockitt. It takes several days to master the basic features. You don't need to take design courses to successfully study Wondershare Mockitt. Any user with a sense of balance, who knows how to match colors and distinguish bad from good UI, will quickly figure out the features of the editor and make a cool layout. Wondershare Mockitt solves the problems of all segments of the target audience:
improves team interaction for collective players;
saves time on coordination of edits with the customer for single designers;
makes it possible to create the appearance of an application or site without the help of a specialist.
Multitasking
They are very similar to artboards in Photoshop, but they have a lot of flexibility in work - they scale well and can be easily used in other frames. For frames, there are set device sizes: Phones, Tablet, Desktop, Watch, Paper, Social Media. Therefore, there is no need to keep them in your head and be confused in size.
