Growth Courses: Which One Is Right for You?
Reforge's Growth courses cover the full range of how products grow, from a first introduction to growth through to leading a growth team. The easiest way to choose is to start with where you are in your career, then pick the specific growth lever or business model you work on.
Quick match
| If you want to... | Start with |
|---|---|
| New to growth, or want the big picture of how a product grows | Growth Foundations |
| Run better tests and build a repeatable experimentation system | Mastering Experimentation |
| Improve retention, activation, and engagement (3+ years of experience) | Mastering Retention & Engagement |
| Build and communicate a company-wide growth strategy (6+ years of experience) | Growth Strategy |
| Build a product-led growth motion for a B2B product | Mastering Product-Led Growth |
| Improve pricing, packaging, and monetization | Monetization & Pricing Strategy |
| Lead a growth team or move into a growth leadership role | Growth Leadership |
| Drive revenue from search, including AI search | Mastering Search & AI Optimization (SEO) |
| Grow a marketplace and measure its health | Mastering Marketplace Growth |
| Understand user psychology to unlock new growth loops | User Psych Foundations |
| Grow a consumer subscription app | Mastering Consumer Subscription Growth |
| Create, measure, and strengthen network effects | Mastering Network Effects |
Where to start
Most people should begin with Growth Foundations, which is designed for anyone new to growth. From there, the other courses fall into three groups:
- Go deeper on one lever: Mastering Retention & Engagement, Mastering Experimentation, Monetization & Pricing Strategy, Mastering Search & AI Optimization (SEO), and User Psych Foundations
- Apply growth to a specific business model: Mastering Product-Led Growth (B2B), Mastering Consumer Subscription Growth, Mastering Marketplace Growth, and Mastering Network Effects
- Operate at a senior level: Growth Strategy (6+ years of experience recommended) and Growth Leadership
Course snapshots
Growth Foundations
Build a foundational understanding of growth and the systems and frameworks that help a product grow. Covers retention and engagement, acquisition, monetization strategy, and growth models, then brings them together to answer the question, "How does our product grow?"
*Formerly known as Growth Series.
Best for: any product builders (PMs, marketers, designers, engineers, data analysts, and more) who are new to growth.
Mastering Experimentation
Create a strategic experimentation system for breakthrough ideas and run high-quality experiments, including evaluating opportunities, running tests, and Bayesian testing.
Best for: product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, data analysts, and other growth team members who want to build high-velocity experimentation systems.
Mastering Retention & Engagement
Proven frameworks to retain, activate, and engage users. Define and analyze retention from first principles, find your activation moments and friction points, build habits, choose the right engagement strategy, and move users from low to high engagement.
Best for: PMs, marketers, and other growth team members with 3+ years of experience who are focused on user retention.
Growth Strategy
Build and communicate a holistic growth strategy. Learn the different types of growth loops, build qualitative and quantitative growth models, find the constraint holding growth back, and improve your loops.
*Formerly known as Advanced Growth Strategy.
Best for: growth leaders on a lead, director, or VP career track (6+ years of experience recommended), and teams building complex systems of compounding growth.
Mastering Product-Led Growth
Build a PLG strategy to escalate users through product tiers and drive growth loops for your B2B organization, including how product-led growth connects to product-led sales.
Best for: B2B product and marketing leaders who want to get PLG right for their company. [Confirm against the course page.]
Monetization & Pricing Strategy
Learn the strategies top tech companies use to improve monetization and pricing: analyzing your monetization model, choosing strategies (pricing metrics, packaging, new use cases), and executing changes with internal buy-in, testing, and rollout.
Best for: product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, data analysts, and anyone in business operations or strategic finance focused on pricing and monetization projects.
Growth Leadership
Develop the skills to manage your growth team, goals, and career: plan your growth career, balance growth goals (KPI ownership and forecasting), and organize and expand a growth team, including hiring and interviewing for growth roles.
Best for: current or aspiring growth leaders.
Mastering Search & AI Optimization (SEO)
Drive sustainable revenue growth with a proven system for SEO, and get ahead of the shift from search to AI search. Covers sizing SEO revenue, prioritizing by topics and topical authority rather than keywords, creating content that outranks competitors, and building an ROI narrative for stakeholders.
Best for: companies and individuals optimizing their SEO efforts, especially those who want to understand how the field is changing with AI engines.
Not for: people who need in-depth coverage of Technical SEO or Programmatic SEO.
Mastering Marketplace Growth
Build a playbook to grow your marketplace and measure marketplace health.
Best for: product managers, marketers, analysts, engineers, leaders and founders directly working on scaling or managing the health of a marketplace startup.
User Psych Foundations
Step inside your users' minds to better resonate with them and unlock new growth loops.
Best for: product managers, marketers, analysts, designers, leaders and founders working on unlocking new growth loops and better connecting with their users.
Mastering Consumer Subscription Growth
Build and execute a playbook to accelerate the growth of your consumer subscription app, improving the premium experience for long-term subscriber value and using proven paid and organic strategies for cost-efficient acquisition.
Best for: anyone building or marketing a consumer subscription app at a company that is pre-IPO but past initial product/market fit (founders, executives, PMs, marketers, designers, engineers), especially growth teams accountable for subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization.
Not for: founders launching a new consumer subscription app from scratch, professionals at companies still finding product/market fit, professionals at mature post-IPO subscription businesses (such as Netflix or Spotify), and professionals at B2B SaaS businesses.
Mastering Network Effects
Learn how to create, measure, and enhance network effects in your product.
Best for: senior product professionals who have direct influence on their product roadmap and can shape network effects in the product.
Commonly confused
Growth Foundations vs. Growth Strategy
Growth Foundations introduces the whole system (retention, acquisition, monetization, and growth models) for people new to growth. Growth Strategy assumes you already know the basics and goes deeper on growth loops, quantitative modeling, and finding the constraint on growth. If you are new to growth, choose Foundations. If you are a lead, director, or VP-track growth leader with 6+ years of experience, choose Strategy.
Growth Foundations vs. the "Mastering" courses
Growth Foundations gives you a working understanding of each growth lever. Mastering Retention & Engagement, Mastering Experimentation, and Monetization & Pricing Strategy each go deep on one of them. Take Foundations first if growth is new to you, then pick the lever that matters most for your product.
Growth Strategy vs. Growth Leadership
Growth Strategy is about what your growth system is and how to evolve it. Growth Leadership is about how you lead: planning your career, owning and forecasting growth goals, and organizing and hiring a growth team.
Mastering Product-Led Growth vs. Mastering Consumer Subscription Growth
Product-Led Growth is built for B2B organizations. Consumer Subscription Growth is built for consumer subscription apps and explicitly is not designed for B2B SaaS professionals. Choose based on your business model.
Mastering Experimentation vs. Mastering Product Analytics
Mastering Experimentation focuses on setting up an experiment system and managing tests. Mastering Product Analytics, covered in our Builder courses article, is aimed at PMs who want to make better data-driven decisions through data tools and insights. [Link to add.]
Mastering Search & AI Optimization (SEO) vs. Mastering AEO
The SEO course covers a full search optimization system and how it is evolving toward AI search. Mastering AEO, covered in our AI courses article, is a focused guide to winning in answer engine optimization. [Link to add.]
Name changes to know about
- Growth Foundations was formerly known as Growth Series (and, in some places, Product Growth Foundations).
- Growth Strategy was formerly known as Advanced Growth Strategy.
- Mastering Experimentation was formerly known as Experimentation & Testing.
Suggested paths
- Getting started in growth: Growth Foundations → Mastering Retention & Engagement → Mastering Experimentation
- Growing a B2B product: Growth Foundations → Mastering Product-Led Growth → Monetization & Pricing Strategy
- Moving into growth leadership: Growth Foundations → Growth Strategy → Growth Leadership
Common questions
Do I need to work on a growth team?
No. Growth Foundations is designed for any product builder who is new to growth, including PMs, marketers, designers, engineers, and data analysts.
Which course is best for AI-driven growth?
See AI Growth in our AI courses article.
Where do marketing channels fit?
Channel-specific courses such as Mastering Growth Marketing and Mastering Paid Social are in our Marketing courses article.