Growth Engineering

I have spent the past 7+ years of my career working as a Growth Engineer^* at two of the largest and most successful companies in their respective industries - first at Tripadvisor, and now at Shopify. Over that time, the questions I get the most frequently are:

• What is a growth engineer?
• What do you do?

Admittedly, in the moment, I typically have a hard time explaining exactly what it is that I do - and that's because being a growth engineer typically involves doing a lot of things, and more specifically, it involves doing a lot of different things. So, I decided to write this post in an attempt to try and articulate exactly what it is that I do on a daily basis, and the next time somebody asks either of these questions, I can simply point them here instead of just spewing out a bunch of buzzwords and watching their eyes glaze over as I speak.

What a growth engineer is not

Before I try to explain what a growth engineer is, let me start by saying what a growth engineer is not. Many people equate growth with marketing, and they feel that development within the marketing organization is a position for junior developers, as the role doesn't require solving hard problems.

However, this couldn't be further from the truth - at least not the way that growth engineering is done at Tripadvisor and Shopify.

So, what is a growth engineer?

In my experience, a growth engineer is a well rounded, full stack developer that also posesses strong data and analytical skills, and is interested in experimenting to find new ways to get customers further down the acquisition funnel.

That is a mouthful, so I will offer an example from my own personal experience to try and better illustrate what a growth engineer does. While working at Tripadvisor, I did the following:

• Devised, executed and analyzed an experiment that increased organic traffic to our restaurant listing pages by 20%
• Worked on the tool that was used to run and measure experiments
• Built the pipeline for the data source that drove the experiment measurement tool

That is to say, a growth engineer wears many hats!

Whether it be working on external facing tools, landing pages and experiments to attract customers into the funnel, or building internal tools to help gain insights into how customers flow through the funnel, the goal is the same: optimize the customer acquisition funnel as much as possible.

Being a growth engineer requires having a mindset that is constantly asking why? and how can it be improved?, and then setting out to answer those questions using any means necessary.

And, what exactly do I do?

Since joining Shopify last year, I have been primarily focused on building internal tools that:

• collecting data to provide insights into how Shopify is performing versus competitors;
• increase the number of experiments that may be run simultaneously, allowing for more ideas to be tested more quickly; and
• assist others in being more efficient in their day to day jobs so that they can be even more focused on driving growth.

One of the aspects of being a growth engineer that I enjoy the most is unlocking data and making it more accessible to those that rely on it in order to formulate ideas and execute experiments. The phrase "data is king" is thrown around by many, and indeed, companies in this day and age have access to more data than ever before. However, that data is not always readily available to everybody within an organization, and thus the true potential of the vast amount of data collected is never fully realized.

As a growth engineer, I spend a large portion of my time building data pipelines to harvest data from external sources and bring that "in house", where it can then be collated with internal data to provide valuable insights and show historical trends. Once the data is available internally, tools can be built that allow for non-data savvy people to easily dig into areas of growth that are relevant to their role, and help them make better decisions as to what should be tested and what can be improved. Also, it is my experience that the more data you make available to folks, the more value they will see in the data and start making requests for additional data sources that they believe could provide value.

Another key role within growth engineering that I enjoy is working on solutions to help increase the velocity of experiments that can be run. While it is great to have a laundry list of ideas that are waiting to be tested, it is useless if there is not a mechanism in place that allows for those ideas to be executed quickly. When you take into consideration how growth wins compound over time, each day that passes where a test can not be run due to limited test bandwidth can have a detrimental impact on the growth of a company. Thus, it is vital that test velocity and throughput be maximized whenever possible, and as a growth engineer it is our job to help build tools and systems that increase the overall experimentation throughput in order to help maximize growth.

Finally, the thing that I enjoy most about being a growth engineer is being able to work on internal tools that allow my colleagues to be better and more efficient at their own jobs. There is no better feeling than when a tool you have worked on plays a direct role in helping unlock an experiment that drives significant growth for the company. This is something you can point to as having made a direct impact on the bottom line of the company, and it is not something that can easily be done in other areas of software development.

While I realize that the work I do will never be (directly) seen by millions of people around the world, which is certainly a key driver for many developers, there is a different level of satisfaction you get when the "customers" of your work are your colleagues, and they express to you directly the value of what you have built. I'll take that over having millions of eyeballs on my work any day!

Summary

While Shopify has seen tremendous growth over the past couple of years - particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, where many brick and mortar retailers were forced to take their business online in order to survive - there is still plenty of room to grow, and that means it is an exciting time to be a growth engineer at Shopify!