/growth-engineering

name: growth-engineering
description: "Engineer growth loops. Use when: building referral programs, viral loops, or product-led growth strategy."

Growth Engineering

When to Use This Skill

Activate this skill when the user's request involves any of the following:

• Designing or improving a product-led growth (PLG) motion
• Building or optimizing referral programs (customer referral, partner referral, ambassador programs)
• Creating viral loops or increasing organic sharing mechanics
• Planning a product or company launch (Product Hunt, beta launches, waitlists)
• Improving user retention, reducing churn, or designing re-engagement campaigns
• Running growth experiments and building an experimentation culture
• Setting up or optimizing affiliate marketing programs
• Designing activation flows and reducing time-to-value for new users
• Building growth models or forecasting viral growth coefficients
• Solving cold-start problems for marketplaces or platforms
• Identifying and scoring product-qualified leads (PQLs)
• Any question about growth levers, growth loops, or sustainable acquisition strategies

Brand Context (Auto-Applied)

Before producing any marketing output from this module:

1. **Check session context** — The active brand summary was output at session start. Use the brand name, industry, voice settings, channels, goals, compliance, and competitors shown there. 2. **If you need the full profile**, read: `~/.claude-marketing/brands/{slug}/profile.json` 3. **Apply brand voice** — Formality, energy, humor, authority levels must shape all content tone and word choices 4. **Check compliance** — Auto-apply rules for brand's target_markets and industry using `skills/context-engine/compliance-rules.md` 5. **Reference industry benchmarks** — Consult `skills/context-engine/industry-profiles.md` for the brand's industry 6. **Use platform specs** — Reference `skills/context-engine/platform-specs.md` for character limits and format requirements 7. **Check campaign history** — Run `python "${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/scripts/campaign-tracker.py" --brand {slug} --action list-campaigns` before planning new work 8. **If no brand exists**, say: "No brand profile found. Use /digital-marketing-pro:brand-setup to create one, or I can proceed with general best practices." 9. **Check brand guidelines** — If `~/.claude-marketing/brands/{slug}/guidelines/_manifest.json` exists, load and enforce: `restrictions.md` for banned words, restricted claims, and mandatory disclaimers; `channel-styles.md` for channel-specific tone overrides (may differ from base voice); `messaging.md` for approved key messages, taglines, and positioning language; `voice-and-tone.md` for detailed voice rules beyond the 4 numeric scores. If producing content for a specific channel, channel style rules take precedence over base voice settings.

Do not ask the user for information that already exists in their brand profile.

Required Context

Before executing, gather the following from the user (ask if not provided):

• **Product type**: SaaS, marketplace, ecommerce, mobile app, content platform, service business
• **Business model**: Subscription, transactional, freemium, free-trial, advertising-supported
• **Current stage**: Pre-launch, early traction (under 1,000 users), growth stage, scale stage
• **Key metrics**: Current MRR/ARR, user count, activation rate, retention rate, churn rate, NPS
• **Existing growth channels**: Which acquisition channels are active and their relative performance
• **Viral potential**: Whether the product has inherent sharing mechanics or requires artificial virality
• **Team and resources**: Engineering capacity for growth features, marketing budget, partnership resources
• **Target user**: Who the ideal user is and what their primary motivation for using the product is
• **Competitive landscape**: Key competitors and their growth strategies

Capabilities

Product-Led Growth (PLG) Strategy

• **Free-to-paid conversion**: Freemium model design, free trial optimization, feature gating strategy, usage-based pricing triggers
• **Activation metrics**: Define the "aha moment," map the steps to reach it, measure and optimize activation rate
• **Time-to-value optimization**: Reduce friction between signup and first value experience through onboarding design, templates, sample data, and guided tours
• **PQL scoring**: Define product-qualified lead criteria based on usage patterns, feature adoption, team size, and engagement frequency
• **Self-serve expansion**: In-product upgrade prompts, usage limit notifications, team invite flows, seat expansion triggers
• **Reverse trial**: Give full access first, then downgrade to free -- when this works better than traditional freemium

Referral Systems

• **Give-and-get programs**: Both referrer and referee receive incentives (e.g., Dropbox's extra storage model)
• **Tiered referral rewards**: Escalating incentives based on number of successful referrals
• **Milestone referrals**: Rewards triggered at referral count milestones (1, 5, 10, 25) to maintain momentum
• **NPS-to-referral pipeline**: Target promoters (NPS 9-10) with referral requests at the moment of highest satisfaction
• **Double-sided incentive design**: Balancing referrer reward (motivation to share) with referee reward (motivation to convert)
• **Referral channel optimization**: Email, unique link, social share, in-app invite, SMS -- which channels perform for which product types
• **Fraud prevention**: Detecting self-referral, fake accounts, and incentive gaming without creating friction for legitimate referrers

Viral Loop Design

• **Inherent virality**: The product naturally requires others to use it (Slack, Zoom, Google Docs)
• **Artificial virality**: Manufactured sharing through incentives, social features, or content creation (shareable reports, badges, results)
• **Content virality**: User-generated content that surfaces on external platforms and drives new users back

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