Start-up Growth Engineering comprises the techniques and best practices applied by the world's most successful tech companies to exponentially grow from the start-up phase into large-scale organisations, with millions of users. These techniques have been distilled from best practices employed across start-ups in the Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Start-up Growth Engineering moves beyond traditional product development and marketing activities into an integrated, scientific approach to introducing a new product idea into a market and driving viral user growth.

The Start-up Growth Engineering course combines theory with a large number of practical examples taken from well-known organisations. It equips students with the skills to employ their software engineering and product development skills more effectively, in a real-world environment.

Two one-hour lectures and one one-hour laboratory session per week.

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Examination 50%, assessed practical exercise 50%

To familiarise students with the fundamental techniques used by tech companies to drive exponential user growth, including user retention techniques, the different types of compounding growth mechanisms, and optimization techniques.

To equip students with the analytical and strategy skills necessary to analyse real-world start-up growth trajectories and construct predictive and optimisation models to drive user growth.

To enable students to apply these techniques in team situations and to gain an understanding of the typical Growth Engineering team structures and processes employed in Silicon Valley and other leading start-up incubation areas.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

1. explain and apply the techniques used to create viral user growth in tech companies;

2. create a growth strategy for a start-up, designed to drive exponential growth.

3. explain the key metrics involved in driving start-up exponential growth, and how to optimise those metrics;

4. qualitatively and quantitatively predict the growth performance of a product or start-up based on current growth metrics

5. analyse and explain why some start-ups grow into very large-scale organisations, while others with similar products fail;

6. explain how growth teams are configured inside leading start-ups and the development models used by them.