In this post, I help you understand which growth hacking skills are important to be successful in growth marketing in 2024.

You may already know that Growth Hackers have many different skills. That’s why I have made a complete list of all skills for growth hackers here.

Some skills are obvious.

Some skills are controversial.

… and some skills are only mastered by real growth hacking experts!

But all growth hacker skills are listed below (including necessity, difficulty level and extra learning material per skill) and I recently updated everything again for 2024.

Let’s get started!

❗- You can click directly through the list below to read more about the specific skills.

All Growth Hacking Skills for 2024

• 1. Data-Tracking & Analytical insight
• 2. Acquisition Marketing (Social, Search, Content, Email, etc.)
• 3. Technical Skills
• 4. Customer Retention
• 5. Referral Programs & Viral Marketing
• 6. Conversion Rate Optimization & A/B-testing
• 7. Activation & User On-boarding
• 8. UI / UX
• 9. Visual Design
• 10. Behavioural Psychology
• 11. Customer Interviews
• 12. Copywriting
• 13. Marketing Automation
• 14. Growth Hacking Mindset
• 15. ‘Learnability’ (Super important!)

3 Levels of Growth Hacker Skills

There are three levels of growth hacking skills:

• Fundamental skills for Growth Hackers: These skills are about understanding work forms, models and mindset. For example, controlling the Growth Hacking process, the Pirate Funneland the Growth Hacking Mindset.
• Generalistic growth hacking skills: These are skills you’ll need in every task you’re going to do and are therefore necessary skills for all generalists, such as copywriting, behavioural psychology and visual design.
• Specialist growth hacking skills: These are skills are not necessary for every growth hacker, but you will need it when the time comes or the skill is needed for the company you work for. (These are skills you usually develop ‘on the job’ when you’re specializing.) Think of Channel Marketing and Referral Marketing.

We also clearly see the similarities with the “T-shaped Growth Hacker”, in which every Growth Hacker has a broad basis of knowledge and skills, but they also need in-depth specialist skills.

It is therefore important that you don’t expect your growth hacker to master all the specialist skills described here.

And be aware that only the most experienced growth hackers master all growth hacking skills from this blog!

What skills does a Growth Hacker have?

This is the list of the most important growth hacking skills for growth marketers. Hopefully, this will give you a better picture of what is needed to succeed in this field.

For most beginners, I would advise taking an online growth hacking course, so you can learn the basics of these skills.

1. Data Tracking & Analytics

Data & Analytics is the #1 skill for growth hackers because growth hacking is a data-driven field;

Before you start experimenting, you need the data to find the biggest bottleneck for a company , known among Growth Hackers as the ‘One Metric That Matters’ (OMTM).

And afterwards, you need data again to know whether you have solved the problem and whether the experiment was successful.

What to expect from Junior Growth Hackers in terms of data skills?

• In terms of Google Analytics: can navigate through the tabs of Google Analytics and are familiar with most secondary dimensions.
• In terms of Google Tag Manager: ‘nice-to-have’ for junior growth hackers, but not a must-have skill. I would not expect too much when it comes to creating triggers and variables. Setting up a flawless data-tracking system can be pretty hard.
• In Excel / Google Spreadsheets: a junior growth hacker should know the simple formulas, but will probably not know the advanced excel formulas, such as SUMS.IF, HLOOKUP and IMPORTXML.
• In terms of CRM / Databases / SQL: not applicable for a starting growth hacker.

What to expect from Experienced Growth Hackers in terms of data skills?

• In terms of Google Analytics: this is a fundamental program and every experienced growth hacker should fully control GA. (With the exception of a few beta functionalities and special cases, such as setting up Cohort analysis.)
• In terms of Google Tag Manager: for advanced growth hackers, GTM should not be a problem and they can get along without a problem. Have a Google Certificate for Google Tag Manager isn’t uncommon.
• In terms of Excel / Google Spreadsheets: Excel and Spreadsheets should not be a problem. Experienced growth marketers will usually have enough experience with some spreadsheet add-ons and integrations for automation.
• In terms of CRM / Databases / SQL: You can expect an advanced growth hacker that he / she can handle Databases and SQL and has experience with some CRM systems, such as Hubspot or Pipedrive.

How can you further develop your data skills?

• Book: Lean Analytics, Alistair Crowl, about the most important metrics for different business models, is a must-read book for growth hackers to improve your data-skills.
• Online course (Free): Google Analytics Academy, with courses on Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. Google Data Studio course is coming.
• Youtube: Measureschool, a great YouTube channel where the enthusiastic Julian can explain everything about GA and GTM (including beginners courses, which are a lot more fun than those from Google)
• Practice: Build your own website or volunteer for a non-profit or SME to help them with data tracking and challenge yourself a bit to try new things.

2. Acquisition Marketing (Social, Search, Content, Email, etc.)

Channel Marketing / Acquisition is a very broad skill, but I still mentioned it here as one thing, because the loose sub-skills don’t weigh as much as the other main skills in this list.

What should a growth hacker be able to do in terms of marketing skills?

• SEO / SEM
  
• PR / Influencer Marketing
  
• Paid Social Media (Advertising)
  
• Organic Social Media (Facebook / Instagram / LinkedIn / etc.)
  
• Content Marketing
  
• Side-Project Marketing
• B2B outreach
• Email Marketing

And within each of these marketing areas, there are also subcategories. These growth marketing skills are therefore the typical ‘trunk’ of the T-shaped Growth Hacker, because you only need these skills if it fits the company which you work for.

Some growth marketers work for a company that, for example, will never need SEO because of their industry or they work at this company where they’re never needed in the field of content marketing due to other team members.

What to expect from a Junior versus Experienced Growth Hackers in terms of marketing skills?

The marketing channels above are developing so fast that you cannot expect the marketing knowledge of a junior growth marketer to be completely up-to-date, unless they have worked intensively on this one channel at their last employer.

An experienced growth hacker should have an idea of ​​how the algorithms work for the different channels and should have a reasonable basic knowledge/experience of all channels.

However, you should not expect an experienced growth marketer to spend 500 hours in all the above channels and therefore be an expert in everything. That’s just impossible.

How can you further develop your marketing skills?

• Blogs: For every field of marketing there is a blog that writes expert articles with sample cases. For example, consider Backlinko, Ahrefs (both SEO), ConversionXL (CRO), Criminally Prolific (PR), KingKong (Paid advertising).
• Online communities: There are so many LinkedIn and Facebook groups where the latest growth hacks and tools are shared around different fields. Take a look at BAMF Facebook group.
• Start your own project: Well, you’ll see this example a few times in this list, but that is because this is also a good way to practice each skill as far as you want.

3. Technical Skills

One of the biggest differences between a growth hacker and a traditional marketer is the technical ability of a growth hacker.

As a Growth Hacker, it is necessary as part of the G.R.O.W.S. process, that in addition to finding the problems and coming up with the solution, you can also implement the solution yourself. Therefore you also need technical skills as a growth hacker.

What technical skills do you need as a Growth Hacker?

• Build and optimize landing pages. Building landing pages is hardly technical since the emergence of all kinds of drag-and-drop landing page builders, such as Instapage, Unbounce and Leadpages, but it is still a necessary skill for growth hackers in 2024.
• Front-end code. If you have mastered the basics of HTML and CSS, that is enough for 90% of the growth hackers.
• Web scraping for the collection of potential B2B leads.
• Be able to work with lots of different software tools. This may sound a bit strange, but I often see people who don’t easily learn new tools. That’s a shame because if you have a lot of growth hacking tools in your skillset, it can make your life so much make it easier. And believe me, you will need to work with a lot of tools as a growth hacker.

What to expect from a Junior versus Experienced Growth Hackers in terms of technical skills?

Most junior growth marketers start with a background or passion for marketing and therefore have little knowledge of the technical skills of growth hacking. As a result, they often have few technical skills.

However, the technical skills for growth hackers are not as essential as we often think. In practice, you are using a lot more data and marketing than technical skills, and you can perform most technical work through simple tools.

Web scraping is an exception and is not that easy to learn. For LinkedIn ‘scraping’ you have very simple tools, such as Dux-Soup and PhantomBuster, but for other channels, web scraping is harder to learn. So keep in mind that not every junior growth hacker can do this.

Regarding senior Growth Hackers; Some top growth hackers even have an additional programming language in their arsenal and HTML / CSS is no problem. Also web scraping shouldn’t be a problem.

How can you further develop your technical skills?

A world will open up for you, if you are a beginning growth hacker when you discover how easy all technical skills are. Try a simple HTML / CSS course at Codecademy and then you have mastered basic front-end code.

The most important thing as a growth hacker is that you understand and can read HTML / CSS.

In addition, as a growth hacker, you have to try to stay up-to-date with the latest tools that come online. For example, look at ProductHunt or BetaList.

Fortunately, googling is also an important skill! 😉 Especially around these technical skills, things will never go the way you had hoped (even if you have done it several times). Then you google it, apply it and enrich your skillset little by little.

4. Customer Retention

Retention is an important step in the Pirate Funnel, which is a fundamental model in growth hacking. Recurring customers are essential for a company and you cannot grow if you have a leaking funnel.

The graph below shows you how important retention is for a business:

Even if you attract 10,000 new customers every month, your retention curve will flatten out if your retention is poor.

Retention is a very useful skill to have, since reactivating a lost customer is 5x cheaper than attracting a new one.

However, retention isn’t an easy skill, because the quality of your product also plays a major role. By Retention skills we mean different things:

• Reactivating customers when they are dropped out (an interesting blog on this matter: How to bring inactive users back from the dead)
• Push notification marketing
• Control of the “Hooked” model from Nir Eyal. (This book is mentioned in addition to other books in my list of best growth hacking books for 2020, so definitely one to read.)
• A part of user psychology
• Also, User Onboarding plays a role (but we will discuss this skill separately later on)

What to expect from a Junior versus an Experienced Growth Hacker in terms of Customer Retention knowledge/skills?

Since many companies are barely aware of the importance of retention, junior growth hackers do not often get in touch with it from the employer.

However, for an experienced growth hacker retention should be one of the first things to focus on. (Except if you are a startup with few or no customers, because then Awareness and Activation are the most important things.)

How can you further develop your retention skills?

Retention can only be developed by practising with it a lot at an employer, because it is so strongly related to the behaviour of your customers.

There is a lot of reading material to learn more about this:

• Customer Retention Optimization – A Growth Hacker’s Guide by Claudiu Murariu
• 22 Ways to Reduce Churn with Growth Hacking by Lincoln Murphy
• 35 Best Practices for Push Notification

5. Referral Programs & Viral Marketing

Almost all of the most famous growth hacks are referral programs.

Dropbox was one of the first to use their referral program: They offered users free additional storage if they would share Dropbox with their friends.

Dropbox grew from 100,000 users in late 2008 to 4 million in early 2010! At the peak, 2.8 million invitations were sent per month. Most channels cannot compete with such a viral marketing strategy.

That’s why growth hackers often try to apply referral marketing to companies, but it’s not easy.

To properly understand Referral Programs and Viral Marketing, you need to know which numbers to look for (see screenshot below from one of my presentations) and you need the experience to make the entire program run smoothly.

What to expect from a Junior Growth Marketer versus a Senior Growth Marketer in terms of Referral Marketing knowledge/skills?

Referral marketing is not an easy subject and you cannot expect a junior growth marketer to fully master this.

However, everyone will have heard the stories about the most famous growth hacking examples and this is, therefore, a red flag to pay attention to!

If a junior growth hacker wants to go head-to-head with setting up a referral program and sees it as the holy grail, then there is a great danger that he/she overlooks the other metrics of the Pirate Funnel. While there might be a bigger potential somewhere else in the funnel.

(This growth hacker might be more at the beginning of the Dunning-Kruger chart than you would like.)

How can you learn more about referral marketing?

I have found few good sources around referral marketing at the moment, explaining it step by step and not just mentioning growth hacks.

That’s why I started it myself. Coming soon 😉

In the meantime, you can already look at my presentation on Referral Marketing that I recently gave. (Text is in Dutch sorry.)

The blogs of some Referral software companies are very good. Take a look at:

• Referral Saasquatch
• ReferralCandy
• Viral Loops

6. Conversion Rate Optimization & A/B-testing

In addition to attracting customers with creative and viral marketing campaigns, conversion optimization is one of the most ‘sexy’ skills of growth hacking.

The ROI of a skill such as conversion optimization can be huge. The image below describes the “Power Law of CRO“, which describes how conversion rate optimization impacts your revenue in multiple ways.

What skills do you need as a growth hacker to master conversion optimization?

• The technique of A / B testing, because not all AB testing software is equally easy.
• The data side of A / B testing, because at the end you want to be sure that an experiment has passed positively and has yielded a significant difference.
• The psychology of A / B testing, because you have to understand the customer well enough to set up a successful AB test.
• The production side of A / B testing, because you have to be able to write convincing text (read more: copywriting) and design the necessary visuals yourself, to iterate quickly.

Should a junior growth hacker also be able to run AB-tests? And what can you expect from a senior growth hacker in terms of optimization skills?

Since most AB testing software is expensive, you will see that few young growth marketers have been able to practice this.

However, conversion optimization is such an important skill for growth hackers that a medior growth hacker should definitely have certain knowledge and skill of conversion optimization and AB testing.

A senior growth hacker should have run a good number of growth hacking experiments before calling themselves senior.

How can you improve your conversion optimization skills and gain experience with AB testing?

There are many extensive conversion optimization blogs to read about this. I recommend reading the following:

• Nick Kolenda’s Conversion Optimization Handbook (if you have the time, it’s a good idea anyway to read more of his guides on marketing and psychology)
• Conversion Rate Experts blog
• Conversion XL blog

You could also try Google Optimize for a personal website to put this growth hacking skill into practice. bring. This is, unfortunately, the only free optimization tool on the market. The rest of the tools start at >$ 200 per month.

There are also enough online courses and I would recommend following the conversion optimization course from ConversionXL, which I myself took as well.

7. Activation & User Onboarding

Growth hacking guru Sujan Patel calls onboarding the most important growth factor in growth hacking.

And to be honest, I can understand that:

Because if you give users a good onboarding of your tool or your service, then a customer will more easily see the value, have a higher retention-rate and give more referrals.

And because it is incorporated in the Pirate Funnel, activation is an important skill for growth hackers anyway.

What can you expect in terms of knowledge and skills from a junior versus a senior growth hacker with regard to onboarding & activation?

Setting up a user onboarding is a task for a senior employee. You must have knowledge of the customer journey and then be able to set up a fitting onboarding.

You can expect a junior marketer to cover the practical side of user-onboarding (Setting up an automatic email series or using tooltips via Appcues of Userlane ).

But creating a customer onboarding based on qualitative research and being able to iterate on your onboarding process are skills that fit more with advanced growth hackers.

How can you learn more about activation and user-onboarding as a growth hacker skill?

Above all, try to deepen your knowledge of marketing skills, such as customer journey mapping and customer development. Those skills are very useful for performing activation better at a tactical level.

Also, read these great blogs that elaborate on activation and onboarding within growth marketing:

• Why activation is the most important pirate metric for SaaS growth, an activation-handbook by Appcues
• The Growth Hacker’s Guide To Better Onboarding, by InnerTrends

8. UI / UX

Especially when working for apps or SaaS companies, UI / UX is a very important skill for a growth hacker.

A user-friendly environment is essential for multiple Pirate Metrics since a customer is always making choices to click or not to click on a button, and that has a major impact on all your click-through rates and conversion percentages.

You do not have to be able to design complete user interfaces, but you do need to understand and be able to apply the principles of UI / UX.

What can a junior growth hacker do in terms of UI / UX and what can a growth hacker do with more experience?

Many junior growth marketers will certainly be able to list the basic principles, because they know a number of growth hacks and have probably read blogs about UI / UX in apps.

It is important to pay attention to the applicability of this knowledge. Can my growth hacker draw conclusions based on why our interface works or doesn’t work? Or does he/she always fall back on the same principles and is that person not open to possible other explanations? Growth Hacking is all about an open, experimental mindset.

A senior growth marketer is able to design excellent interfaces and participate in discussions with design and development about the user experience.

However, this component depends very much on the background and preferences of the growth hacker. Some growth hackers simply have the strain of their T-form on the more technical or analytical side.

Tips to improve your UI / UX skills as a growth hacker

For improving your skills around User Interface and User Experience, I can definitely recommend the following sources:

• goodui.org is a website with useful UI best practices for beginners and advanced growth marketers
• To better understand what is involved in a complete UX project, you can take a look at the UX Project Checklist on Github
• Another great article is: The Psychology Principles Every UI / UX Designer Needs to Know on Medium
• Also, try designing interfaces yourself with tools such as Sketch or Marvel.
• Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is a must-read for every web designer and growth marketer.

9. Visual Design

Designing is one of the basic skills that every growth hacker must learn anyway, because you have to design things so often: Visuals for ads, landing pages, whitepapers, lead magnets, interfaces, blog images, etc.

If you can’t design by yourself, you’ll be a lot slower on iterations and maybe not be able to test every hypothesis as easy and quick as it could be.

Fortunately, the practical side of designing is no longer a difficult skill these days. Simple, free tools such as Canva have taken over the market for beginning designers and can no longer be missing in the skill set of a growth hacker. (I have also mentioned Canva as one of the important tools in my list of top growth hacking tools for 2020)

Unfortunately …

Good design is highly dependent on feeling.

And not every growth hacker has a good feeling for design. You can teach yourself and partly ‘fake’ it by using good designs online as inspiration.

How can you improve your design skills as a growth hacker?

Practicing a lot. Start drawing, try using Canva and follow a few good designers on Instagram. This can help you get a better feeling for design.

On a tactical level, you can of course also read many blogs and watch YouTube videos. Hereby some tips from me:

• The Futur is a well-known youtube channel among starting freelance designers, so here you can also learn a lot about the value of good design.
• Philip VanDusen is a well-known designer who gives many tips on design and YouTube strategy.
• And again: Try Canva! I’m not being sponsored for this, but I cannot emphasize often enough how easy designing becomes once you try Canva.

10. Behavioural Psychology

As a Growth Hacker, you always try to influence customers. For that, you need a lot of insight into psychology and specific behavioural psychology.

“Putting the customer first” is of course also a feature that is interwoven in the growth hacking mindset, but in this instance, I also see it as a skill for growth hackers to master.

You will need a skill such as psychological insight in everything you do: How do you write a text that convinces the customer? How do you increase your CTR of advertisements by responding better to the pains that the customer experiences? How do you design converting landing pages that perfectly match that one target group?

To answer those questions, you must have Behavioral Psychology in your growth hacking skill set.

To what extent does a junior growth marketer master psychology and what can a senior growth hacker do?

This is a skill that is highly dependent on experience. You have to speak to a lot of customers and do website audits to recognize those psychological patterns.

The most important thing to pay attention to when hiring a junior growth hacker is that he/she is open to the opinion of the customer. So possibly more mindset than skill.

How can you learn more about psychology as a growth hacker?

To further develop this skill as a growth marketer, you can practice by searching deeper in customer research. By doing more qualitative research and more often by asking about the motives of customers, you get a taste for psychological research.

Therefore try to do more customer interviews, which I will mention next in itself as an important skill for growth hackers. Two birds with one stone 👍

You can also read a number of blogs to increase your psychological insight:

• Psych’d: A new user psychology framework for increasing funnel conversion – Andrew Chen
• Psychology of Persuasion: How to write Facebook Ads that convert
• And practically all articles and courses from Nick Kolenda are must-reads if you want to improve your understanding of user psychology.

11. Customer Interviews

The G.R.O.W.S.-process (= the growth hacking process) always starts with hard data first to investigate where the problem is within the Pirate Funnel. After that, however, there is an important question:

“Why do my customers drop out of my funnel here?”

To answer that question, you can try to use heat mapping tools or surveys, but ultimately you will have to come up with a more qualitative, in-depth answer. And you can only find that by talking to customers.

As a growth hacker, you cannot avoid it and you will have to master this skill. You need to know how to set up an interview, how to ask questions, which questions you should and should not ask, how you get people to want to do an interview with you and how you can analyze those interviews.

Doing customer research is such an important skill for growth hackers because it can save you a lot of failed growth experiments. You no longer have to guess why your customers are dropping out, but you can get the answer directly from them.

Customer Development as a Skill: Beginning Growth Hackers vs Advanced Growth Hackers

Few growth hackers pay attention to this and therefore do not develop this skill so strongly, because interviewing is incredibly time-consuming and other growth hacker tasks seem to have a more interesting ROI. As a result, few growth marketers have experience with this.

That is why starting growth marketers often still make beginners mistakes by, for example, asking guiding questions or constructing interviews in the wrong way.

As soon as growth marketers are guided in this, you will see that they will master this skill better and better.

A senior growth hacker should understand the importance of talking to the customer and should be able to do flawless customer development by himself.

Tips to improve your qualitative research skills:

On a practical level, you have to practice a lot under supervision, as I said before.

At the tactical level, you can avoid a lot of mistakes by delving further into the field of ‘customer development‘. There are many experts who share knowledge online.

The following books will help you as a growth hacker to improve your research skills:

• MUST-READ: The mom test, Rob Fitzpatrick: book / video
• Get out of the Building! (Youtube video)
• Value Proposition Design, Alexander Osterwalder

12. Copywriting

Texts. You need it everywhere: in advertisements, on websites, in lead magnets, in email marketing, in blogs, etc.

Copywriting, the writing of convincing texts, is a true basic growth hacker skill. Not that other disciplines do not need this skill, but as a growth hacker, you cannot do your work without this important skill.

But copywriting is not an easy skill, because you are always balancing. Attention-grabbing, but not click-bait. Convincing, but not sales-y. Easygoing, but also profound. In addition, you also need to understand enough psychological drivers, so that you can touch the client on an emotional level.

What can you expect from a growth hacker (junior/senior) around copywriting skills?

Anyone can write texts, but there is a difference between normal texts and catchy texts.

There are few people who can write really good texts and they’re not all growth hackers. You can’t expect every growth hacker to be great at copywriting

I do believe that the 80/20 rule applies perfectly here: with 20% of the knowledge you can achieve 80% of the result. By that, I mean that a growth hacker can write good texts for landing pages and advertisements and that the text will not make the difference between a successful or a failed experiment.

In short, this is a difficult skill to gauge, but should not be a reason for hiring or rejecting a growth hacking candidate.

How can you improve your copywriting skills as a growth marketer?

There are a lot of copywriting formulas that can quickly improve your level by applying it. For example, look here for the copywriting formulas from Joanne Wiebe of CopyHackers.

In addition, Nick Kolenda is again here with a lot of tips about this growth hacker skill: ‘31 Copywriting Principles based on psychology‘.

Finally, from my own experience, I can recommend John Buchan’s copywriting course and his resources (swipe files, ebooks and templates) on his site Charm Offensive to make copywriting a lot more fun.

13. Marketing Automation

Growth hackers are often big fans of automation. The reason for this is that it can save you a lot of time and you can get so much more done in a much shorter time.

However, this is not one of the difficult skills on this list of growth hacker skills. These days you have a lot of tools for growth hackers to automate tasks such as Dux-Soup and especially Zapier!

With those tools, you can already link more than 1500 tools together without any technical skills.

What automation skills does a starting growth hacker have? And what can an advanced growth hacker automate?

If a growth hacker has a few years (1-3) experience, he/she should certainly have worked with Zapier before and be aware that there are growth hacking tools that can automate your life a lot further. Therefore, this is a skill that you can expect from a junior growth marketer.

A senior growth marketer should have a lot of experience with this, such as setting up a fully automatic marketing flow between different channels and would certainly have linked several (10+) different tools in Zapier.

Then you have the most technical growth hackers … They can write their own bots and scripts, and can create unique integrations via APIs without programs such as Zapier. But this is only a small proportion of all growth hackers.

How can you learn to automate better?

Start practising with tools such as Zapier and Dux-Soup. For example, take a look at your current duties and ask yourself which things you can automate.

This blog from GrowthRocks may give you a broader look at what is possible in terms of marketing automation.

14. Growth Hacking Mindset

You can argue that this is not really a skill, but it is undisputed that a Growth Hacking Mindset is necessary to be a successful growth hacker.

When talking about the growth hacker mindset, we mean a certain way of looking at challenges and opportunities.

Someone with a growth hacking mindset does not hold onto his own view of the world and knows that he doesn’t know everything. That is why experimenting is such an important part of growth hacking. “What is the best way to solve this random problem?” There isn’t one right answer and that is why we are experimenting.

It is also important that you test things in small before you roll them out in large. First let’s see if something works before we invest more time/effort/money in it.

The growth hacking mindset is a skill that you can hardly develop yourself. For this, you need to be challenged and it can be useful to work along with a more experienced growth hacker. In another blog, I described 5 tips for developing a growth hacking mindset.

15. “Learnability”

‘Learnability’ is the most important growth hacker skill.

Growth Hacking is a field that changes so quickly and is strongly influenced by new skills and tools. Therefore, individuals must develop “learnability“; the desire and ability to grow quickly and adjust one’s skill set (to stay relevant and to succeed in any field).

I was recently a speaker at an HR meetup called “Skills of the Future,” and Learnability was mentioned as the most important skill for the future (not only in Growth Hacking!).

In practice, you’ll see this as googling something, when you run into a problem instead of running away.

As an example, Growth Tribe uses the motto “Get Sh*t Done” among their employees referring to their Learnability. They see that nobody knows everything and they don’t mind that. With this motto, they want to encourage employees to learn new things when needed, as long as you reach your goal.

Do I have to have all these skills as a growth marketer?

For the specialist growth marketing skills, I have often experienced that the 80/20 rule applies. With 20% of the knowledge, you can then achieve 80% of the result.

Maybe 80% is a bit exaggerated, but the point is that in many cases you can experiment well with different channels with only a small part of the knowledge. When you see that your experiments produce results in a small setting, you can have the most difficult work done by an expert in that channel, instead of doing it yourself. It probably has a better ROI.

So don’t wait until you have mastered all the skills before you start experimenting.

But why does a growth hacker have so many skills?

As a growth hacker, you have to be able to work quickly and therefore you have to depend as little as possible on others. That is why it’s important that a growth hacker can program on his own, analyze data and that he can design by himself.

He/she doesn’t have to be an expert in everything, but has to understand the basics of everything in order to be able to iterate quickly.

Conclusion: What skills does a Growth Hacker need?

A growth hacker has an enormous amount of skills and that is typical of this field.

You never know in which part of the Pirate Funnel or which marketing channel your company needs you, and you must be prepared for that by having a lot of fundamental growth hacking skills.

As always with growth hacking, you have to let go and see where the data takes you. Then, through your ‘Learnability‘, you need to master the skills and tools to get the job done.

Can I help you with anything?

I do a lot of growth hacking training courses and supervise junior growth hackers asgrowth hacking consultant in developing their skills and processes.

You can hire me to set up a growth team for your company, including recruitment and training.

Feel free to contact me if you want to ask something or possibly add additional resources or skills to this blog.

Good luck for now developing your growth hacking skills!

FAQ on Growth Marketing Skills

Finally, I want to answer a few loose questions and summarize answers (for the slightly lazier people among us. Yes, I’m talking to you! 😉)