Awesome Growth Frameworks

A curated list of the best resources about business growth frameworks for CEOs, founders, VPs of Growth, and product leaders.

Inspired by awesome lists. Maintained by Rework.

Growth isn't a marketing channel. It's a system. The best growth teams understand their growth model — how users acquire, activate, retain, and expand — and they run it as a tight loop rather than a leaky funnel. Whether you're pre-product-market fit, scaling a proven model, or reinventing a mature business, these resources cover the frameworks that actually move the needle.

Contents

Articles

Early-Stage Growth (Pre-PMF)

Scaling Growth (Post-PMF)

Enterprise & Scale Growth

Books

  • Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown - The most practical guide to building a cross-functional growth team and running experiments.
  • Traction by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares - The 19 channels for customer acquisition tested against a bullseye framework for finding yours.
  • Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh - The case for prioritizing speed of scaling over efficiency when a market is winner-take-most.
  • The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen - A framework for starting and scaling network-effect-driven products.
  • Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush - The definitive guide to PLG: how to use your product as your primary acquisition channel.

Videos & Talks

Tools & Software

  • Amplitude - Product analytics platform for understanding user behavior and building growth models around retention.
  • Mixpanel - Event-based analytics tool for tracking user journeys and optimizing activation and retention.
  • Heap - Auto-capture analytics that retroactively tracks every user action without manual instrumentation.
  • June - B2B SaaS analytics built specifically for tracking product-qualified leads and company-level engagement.
  • GrowthBook - Open-source A/B testing and feature flagging platform for running product experiments.
  • Hotjar - Heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys for understanding why users behave as they do.
  • Customer.io - Behavioral messaging platform for automating activation, retention, and re-engagement campaigns.
  • Segment - Customer data platform that routes user events from your product to every downstream analytics tool.

Templates & Frameworks

  • Growth Model Template by Reforge - A structured worksheet for mapping your acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue loops.
  • AARRR Metrics Dashboard by GrowthMentor - The pirate metrics model explained with benchmarks and tracking templates.
  • North Star Metric Worksheet by Amplitude - A guided exercise for identifying your North Star and the inputs that drive it.
  • Product-Led Growth Framework by ProductLed - Templates for mapping your PLG motion, onboarding funnel, and expansion triggers.
  • Growth Strategy Frameworks by Rework - A structured guide to selecting the right growth framework for your business stage and model.

Case Studies & Real-World Examples

  • Dropbox - Dropbox's referral program is one of the most-studied growth loop examples in history. Rather than spending on paid acquisition, they offered existing users additional storage for every friend they invited. The program grew Dropbox from 100,000 to 4 million users in 15 months — a 3,900% increase — at near-zero marginal cost. Sean Ellis, who ran growth at Dropbox, later systematized the experiment-driven approach in the "growth hacking" framework that spawned an entire industry. Source
  • Duolingo - Duolingo's growth story is a case study in finding and fixing the right retention metric. In 2018, Duolingo's DAU/MAU ratio was declining despite strong download numbers. The growth team identified that users who set a daily streak goal retained at dramatically higher rates. They rebuilt product features, notifications, and onboarding around streak maintenance — a behavioral growth loop — and DAU grew from 12 million to over 37 million by 2023, driving Duolingo's successful IPO. Source
  • Slack - Slack reached $1 billion in revenue faster than any enterprise software company in history, and they did it without a traditional sales team for the first three years. Their PLG framework was built on a single insight: if a team exchanges 2,000 messages, they almost never churn. Slack optimized every onboarding step around reaching that activation threshold, letting the product sell itself. The framework made "product-qualified lead" a standard concept in B2B SaaS. Source
  • Airbnb - Airbnb's early growth wasn't viral or algorithmic — it was manual. Paul Graham's famous advice to "do things that don't scale" came from watching Airbnb founders fly to New York, knock on host doors, and personally photograph apartments to make listings better. That non-scalable intervention proved the hypothesis that photo quality drove bookings, which led to the scalable program of professional photography at scale. Airbnb reached 10 million nights booked before touching a growth automation framework. Source
  • HubSpot - HubSpot's freemium-to-paid growth loop is one of the clearest examples of a product-led growth model in B2B. Their free CRM, with millions of users, generates a continuous stream of companies that grow into paid marketing, sales, and service hub seats. The PLG motion reduced HubSpot's customer acquisition cost by over 30% compared to their original outbound model and is the primary driver of their $2 billion+ annual revenue run rate. Source
  • Figma - Figma applied PLG to a category (design tools) previously dominated by installed, per-seat software (Adobe Creative Suite). By making collaboration free and multiplayer in-browser, Figma created a viral growth loop where every design file shared with a developer or stakeholder became a new user acquisition event. The framework grew Figma to 4 million users and a $20 billion acquisition offer from Adobe in just seven years — before Adobe abandoned the deal under regulatory pressure. Source

Communities & Newsletters

  • Reforge - The most rigorous growth education community, with cohort-based courses and an alumni network of senior practitioners.
  • Lenny's Newsletter - Weekly deep-dives on product and growth by Lenny Rachitsky, one of the most-read voices in the space.
  • GrowthHackers - Sean Ellis's community for growth practitioners, with case studies, experiments, and AMAs.

Rework Resources

Explore more growth content on the Rework blog:

  • B2B SaaS Growth Model - How to build a repeatable growth model for B2B software businesses.
  • ARR Forecasting - How to model and forecast annual recurring revenue across growth scenarios.

Contributing

Know a great growth framework resource that should be on this list? Let us know.