John Egan

I read a post recently about how it is impossible to hire growth engineers. I’ve been lucky enough to have the opportunity to work on the growth engineering teams at two successful companies over the past few years. In that time I’ve learned that just like with any engineering role, hiring growth engineers is hard, but it is not impossible. Here’s how:

1. Cultivate Growth Engineers

Whenever any engineer joins a new organization, there is a learning curve and they need to learn & adjust to numerous things. They need to learn the company’s culture, their technology stack, their coding practices, etc. Growth engineering is a relatively new discipline, so the best strategy is to look for engineers that have the qualities that makeup a good growth engineer and help cultivate them into being a successful growth engineer. Teach them the importance of quickly shipping features and learning fast, teach them what MVP means, teach them to analyze the results of A/B experiments.

2. Look for Full Stack Engineers

Growth teams by nature touch the entire technology stack of a product: backend infrastructure, web frontend, Android, and iPhone. However, growth teams are also often extremely resource constrained and have a keen sense of urgency. Experienced engineers that can develop on multiple parts of the stack and quickly learn the parts they don’t know when necessary are critical to a growth team’s success. They give the growth team a huge amount of flexibility to move engineers around when projects/priorities change and also help keep the growth team from getting blocked.

 3. Product Sense 

Engineers believe it or not can have a keen product sense. This is evidenced by the numerous Product Managers that I’ve met over the years that had a CS background. Finding engineers who have a passion for being involved in product is important because they will be the engineers that are engaged by the mission and challenges of growth. They will also be the engineers passionate enough to really think about the user’s experience and mindset as they build product features to create a polished experience on their first try.

 4. Find Creative Problem Solvers

Often times in growth you have to find creative solutions around certain technical limitations. In my mind this is really where the term “growth hacker” comes into play. Whether it is finding a way to track invites on iOS (which has no attribution tracking for their app store) or figuring out how to generate recommendations for people to send invites to from a user’s contact list, creativity plays a large role in the success or failure of growth features. There is no substitute for creative problem solving, you either have it or you don’t.

Hiring growth engineers can be hard, but it is not impossible. Many of the best growth engineers I know came from standard engineering backgrounds, but they had the right mix of skills and were able to grow into the role.  If think you have these skills and are interested in learning how grow a company to millions of users, Pinterest is hiring growth engineers.