4 Main Skills of Growth Hackers
In the past months, I have written an article about why you need growth hacking and how you should do it. If you wish, you can find that article from the link below
Blog #1 Why Do You Need Growth Hacking? And How Should You Do?
The previous article was actually on the mentality of this growth hacking. In this article, I will talk about who is a growth hacker and what skills a growth hacker should have.
Growth hackers play a critical role in developing the product. Because even if the product you develop has the best algorithms and engineering, it is very difficult to find a response if people do not use your service or buy your product. For this reason, a growth hacker must be in your team and work for it while developing a solution that tries to reach the target audience that has a problem from the first stage of a product.
Let’s take a look at the 4 main skills Growth Hackers should have.
1. Data Skills
First of all, it should be noted that growth hacking is a data-driven business. As a growth hacker, you should be able to read and analyze the data you have well. Of course, no one expects you to be an expert data scientist at the beginning, but if you know and use google analytics and similar tools well, it will be enough for the first time. (You should have other data capabilities for further.)
Data has an important place in your life. If we go back to the beginning, even in the work you will do to solve a problem, you must first prove the problem. You also need data for this. Being data-driven at every stage of the product you develop from the idea stage will help you produce a much more successful product. Every step you take for your product means you generate and understand more data.
There is a hypothesis under every change you want to make for the product, and you have proven the equivalence of these hypotheses with data. This design may be very pleasing to your eyes, but what if users are more comfortable with the other design? You should be able to measure these.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” — Peter Drucker
2. Reaching Users (Digital Marketing)
A growth hacker is expected to have marketing skills. As a growth hacker, you should be capable of doing SEO / SEM, PR, email marketing for the product you are developing, in other words, it is expected to reach your target audience by using digital marketing skills. The work to be done here will help gain more users. You should use every data you receive as a result of these studies to make your product much better and automatically accessible to millions of people.
3. Design Skills
Growth hackers with good design skills have a huge advantage. Here, what I mean by design is that it has a design that the user can easily understand and use, rather than great flying animations. For this reason, the fact that a growth hacker has a design skill is an important plus for that product. In order to develop this design perspective, navigating, examining, and practicing Dribbble and similar platforms will give you a design perspective. For an MVP, basic UI / UX knowledge may be more important than technical skill, as the most important part here is testing and it is easier these days with UI / UX knowledge. It is possible to create landing pages, websites, and even mobile applications with drag and drop without the need for coding knowledge.
4. Technical Skills
Perhaps the feature of growth hackers that sets them apart from classic marketers comes to light here. Growth hackers also have technical skills.
As I said before, you do not need to be a very skilled developer when you first started, but you should have some fundamental knowledge. It is important for the development of the product to know what it can do with existing technologies. Since you will be with developers constantly, you must speak the same language. At the same time, you should constantly review and follow other products to understand competitor products and technologies.
You must be able to make websites and landing pages. Nowadays, this kind of work has become much easier with tools like Wix, Elementor, Tilda, and Webflow. It is possible to do great things with drag and drop.
Data + Marketing + Design + Technical Skills
In order to draw the general framework and understand it more comfortably, I would like to mention the T Model prepared by Brian Balfour, one of the famous growth hackers, and which is also famous in the ecosystem.
In the table above, you can see the capabilities that growth hackers should have. A growth hacker is not expected to be an expert in all of these subjects but must know a certain level in all of them. And I want you to know that only the most experienced growth hackers are experts in almost all of the information in this table.
I hope this article will be useful for you. If you want to talk on this topic, you can comment here or you can contact me from the accounts below. I would like to listen to your ideas.
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