ceo-orchestration 1.0.0

package/.claude/skills/domains/marketing-global/skills/growth-hacker/SKILL.md

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+---
+name: growth-hacker
+description: >
+  Experiment-driven discipline for product and market growth covering funnel
+  diagnostics across the full AAARRR (Awareness / Acquisition / Activation /
+  Retention / Referral / Revenue) model, statistically rigorous experiment
+  design, scalable channel discovery, and growth-loop architecture. Distinct
+  from paid-media specialists (PPC campaign execution, media buying) — this
+  skill focuses on hypothesis-driven testing across all channels and the
+  architectural loops that sustain compounding growth without linear spend
+  increases. Use when: diagnosing where a funnel is losing value before
+  allocating budget; designing an A/B or multivariate experiment with correct
+  sample sizing; prioritising a channel backlog using ICE or RICE scoring;
+  identifying whether a proposed growth tactic is loop-reinforcing or
+  one-shot; auditing a North Star Metric for vanity-metric drift; or
+  structuring retention analysis as the foundational growth lever.
+owner: Priya Mehta (Growth Hacker, domain persona)
+tier: domain:marketing-global
+scope_tags: [growth-experiments, aaarrr-funnel, ab-testing, channel-discovery, growth-loops, retention]
+inspired_by:
+  - source: msitarzewski/agency-agents/marketing/marketing-growth-hacker.md@783f6a72bfd7f3135700ac273c619d92821b419a
+    license: MIT
+    relationship: structural_inspiration
+    authored_by: ceo-orchestration framework
+    authored_at: 2026-05-07
+# --- smart-loading fields (PLAN-083 Wave 0b sub-agent 0.7c) ---
+domain: marketing-global
+priority: 8
+risk_class: low
+stack: []
+context_budget_tokens: 500
+inactive_but_retained: true
+repo_profile_binding:
+  frontend: {active: false, priority: 10}
+  engine: {active: false, priority: 10}
+  fintech: {active: false, priority: 10}
+  trading-readonly: {active: false, priority: 10}
+  generic: {active: false, priority: 10}
+activation_triggers: []
+# --- K1 paths: native file-touch activation (PLAN-135 W3 unit k1a) ---
+paths:
+  - "**/experiments/**"
+  - "**/growth/**"
+  - "**/funnels/**"
+  - "**/ab-tests/**"
+---
+
+# Growth Hacker
+
+## Cardinal Rule
+
+An untested hypothesis dressed up as an experiment is opinion with spreadsheets;
+opinion does not earn growth budget. Every growth action MUST be preceded by an
+explicit hypothesis in the form "if X then Y because Z", a primary metric with a
+pre-specified minimum detectable effect, and a sample size calculation completed
+before a single impression is served or a single user is enrolled. The "because Z"
+clause is not optional — it forces a causal mechanism to be stated and later
+falsified or confirmed. Growth work that skips the mechanism claim does not
+accumulate learning; it accumulates noise dressed as institutional knowledge.
+
+---
+
+## Fail-Fast Rule
+
+Growth experiments MUST be stopped early only when a pre-registered stopping rule
+fires, not when the current result looks good enough to call. Peeking at partial
+results and stopping on a favorable signal is p-hacking regardless of the intent.
+Conversely, an experiment that has crossed its pre-specified sample size and shows
+no signal MUST be called as null and the resource reallocated — extending the run
+to wait for a positive result that has not appeared is a different form of the same
+bias. The stopping discipline protects both the team's statistical credibility and
+the budget from being consumed by inconclusive runs.
+
+---
+
+## When to Apply
+
+Activate this skill when the work involves any of the following:
+
+- Diagnosing which AAARRR stage is the primary constraint before committing spend
+  to acquisition or activation improvements.
+- Designing a growth experiment: hypothesis formation, metric selection, MDE
+  specification, sample size calculation, and guardrail metric registration.
+- Prioritising a backlog of growth tactics or channel candidates using a scored
+  framework (ICE, RICE, or equivalent).
+- Architecting or auditing a growth loop to identify whether the reinforcement
+  mechanism is viral-coefficient dependent, content-compounding, network-effect
+  dependent, or product-led.
+- Selecting or validating a North Star Metric for a product or growth programme.
+- Running cohort analysis to diagnose D1/D7/D30 retention breaks.
+- Evaluating whether a channel is in cold-start, scale-up, or saturation phase.
+
+Skip when: the work is paid-media campaign execution or bid management (use
+ppc-strategist instead); the task is content calendar production or brand voice
+(use content-creator instead); or the engagement is a market-sizing exercise
+with no experimental component.
+
+---
+
+## Funnel Diagnostics
+
+The AAARRR model is a diagnostic sequence, not a prioritisation order. The correct
+practice is to measure conversion at each stage first, identify where the largest
+absolute loss of value occurs, and allocate experiment budget to that stage.
+Spending on top-of-funnel acquisition while a broken activation stage discards
+80% of arriving users is budget waste, not growth work.
+
+### Stage Definitions and Primary Signals
+
+| Stage | Definition | Primary Loss Signal |
+|---|---|---|
+| Awareness | Potential users encounter the product or its content in a context where they form an initial impression. | Share of relevant search queries not captured; branded search volume flat against category growth. |
+| Acquisition | A potential user takes a first attributable action — signup, trial start, waitlist entry, install. | Signup-to-install conversion rate; cost per acquisition trending against LTV ceiling. |
+| Activation | The user reaches a moment where the product delivers its core value for the first time. | Time-to-first-value metric; percentage of new users who complete the activation milestone within a defined window (commonly 24 hours or 7 days). |
+| Retention | The user returns to extract value in a subsequent session or period after the initial activation event. | D1/D7/D30 cohort retention curves; rolling 30-day active rate for the installed or signed-up base. |
+| Referral | Existing users bring new users through deliberate or organic sharing behaviour. | Viral coefficient K; referral-attributed acquisition as percentage of total new users. |
+| Revenue | The product captures economic value from the user relationship — subscription, transaction, advertising, or expansion. | Conversion rate from active to paying; ARPU trajectory; expansion revenue as percentage of net new ARR. |
+
+### Choke-Point Identification Protocol
+
+Before designing any experiment:
+
+1. Pull stage-to-stage conversion rates for the most recent 30-day cohort.
+2. Compute the absolute user count lost at each transition.
+3. Rank stages by absolute loss — not percentage drop, because a 50% drop on
+   100 users is less impactful than a 15% drop on 100,000 users.
+4. Apply a leverage multiplier: recovering 10 percentage points at Activation
+   propagates through Retention and Revenue; recovering 10 points at Referral
+   benefits only the incoming cohort. Upstream fixes compound; downstream fixes
+   are additive.
+5. Confirm the hypothesis that the choke-point stage is addressable — if
+   Retention is broken because the product has no repeat-use value, no
+   growth experiment fixes that; a product decision is required first.
+
+Spend is allocated only after this protocol is complete. Intuition-first channel
+allocation before a funnel diagnostic is an anti-pattern.
+
+---
+
+## Experiment Design
+
+Every experiment registered on the team's experiment backlog MUST contain all
+six required elements before it is eligible for execution.
+
+### Six Required Elements
+
+**1. Hypothesis statement**: "If [treatment] then [primary metric] will [direction]
+by at least [MDE] because [causal mechanism]."
+
+No element may be missing. The MDE must be stated as an absolute or relative
+change, not as "an improvement." The causal mechanism must be falsifiable — it
+must be possible for the experiment result to disprove it.
+
+**2. Primary metric**: one metric that, if it moves in the stated direction by at
+least the MDE, constitutes a win for this experiment. Multiple primary metrics
+cause p-hacking incentive; there is exactly one.
+
+**3. Guardrail metrics**: two to four metrics that MUST NOT be materially harmed
+by the treatment. Common guardrails: retention rate for an activation experiment;
+support ticket rate for an onboarding experiment; revenue per user for a
+conversion-rate experiment. A result where the primary metric wins but a guardrail
+metric is materially harmed is not a clean win — it is a tradeoff requiring an
+explicit Owner decision before rollout.
+
+**4. Minimum detectable effect (MDE)**: the smallest change that would justify
+acting on this experiment result and that the business outcome would require. MDE
+is determined by business impact threshold, not by what looks achievable. Setting
+MDE after peeking at data is not permissible.
+
+**5. Sample size and duration**: calculated from baseline conversion rate, MDE,
+desired power (≥0.80 standard; ≥0.90 for irreversible decisions), and alpha
+(0.05 standard; Bonferroni-corrected for multiple comparisons). Duration must
+account for at least one full business-cycle period (typically 7 days minimum for
+products with weekly seasonality).
+
+**6. Randomisation unit**: user, session, device, or account — specified before
+launch. Switching the randomisation unit after launch invalidates the experiment.
+
+### Pre-Launch Checklist
+
+- Sample size calculation recorded and signed off.
+- Baseline metric value from the most recent comparable period on record.
+- Guardrail metrics instrumented and confirmed firing in the analysis environment.
+- Stopping rule registered: minimum sample reached AND minimum duration elapsed.
+  Early stopping only permitted if a pre-registered harm threshold on a guardrail
+  metric is crossed.
+- No other experiment running on the same population segment that could interact
+  with this treatment.
+
+---
+
+## Statistical Rigor
+
+### Alpha, Power, and Multiple Comparisons
+
+Standard threshold: α = 0.05, power = 0.80. Power below 0.80 produces experiments
+that fail to detect real effects at an unacceptable rate; underpowered experiments
+that return null results are not informative — they are inconclusive.
+
+For experiments testing more than one variant simultaneously, Bonferroni correction
+is the minimum adjustment: divide alpha by the number of comparisons. For k variants
+versus control, α_adjusted = 0.05 / k. More conservative corrections (Holm-Bonferroni,
+Benjamini-Hochberg for discovery contexts) are preferred when the number of variants
+exceeds four.
+
+### CUPED
+
+CUPED (Controlled-experiment Using Pre-Experiment Data) reduces variance in the
+outcome metric by regressing out pre-experiment variance in a correlated covariate.
+The effect is equivalent to increasing sample size without adding users. CUPED
+is applicable whenever a pre-experiment observation of the primary metric (or a
+correlated metric) is available for the same users. When variance reduction via
+CUPED is available, it MUST be applied before concluding that a larger sample is
+required — the sample size increase from CUPED is free; a longer experiment run
+is not.
+
+### Novelty and Primacy Effects
+
+Experiments run on existing users are subject to novelty effects (initial
+over-engagement with the treatment) and primacy effects (initial under-engagement
+due to unfamiliarity). Both resolve over time. The minimum duration rule (one
+full business cycle) addresses this partially. For products with strong weekly or
+monthly seasonality, the minimum duration is two full cycles.
+
+### Reporting Requirements
+
+Every experiment result report MUST include:
+
+- Sample size achieved versus planned.
+- Observed effect with 95% confidence interval (not just a point estimate and
+  p-value).
+- Whether guardrail metrics were materially affected and in what direction.
+- Statistical significance status at the pre-registered alpha.
+- Recommendation: ship / iterate / kill — with explicit reasoning.
+
+Reporting only p < 0.05 without confidence intervals, without guardrail status,
+or without a recommendation is incomplete and MUST be rejected at review.
+
+---
+
+## Channel Discovery
+
+### ICE and RICE Scoring
+
+Prioritisation frameworks exist to make the backlog ordering explicit and auditable,
+not to automate judgment. Two frameworks are supported:
+
+**ICE** (Impact × Confidence × Ease): suitable for early-stage or resource-
+constrained teams where speed of iteration is the primary constraint. Score
+each dimension 1–10; multiply. High-ICE items enter the sprint queue; low-ICE
+items are archived with the scores recorded for retrospective calibration.
+
+**RICE** (Reach × Impact × Confidence / Effort): suitable for teams with
+sufficient historical data to estimate reach and effort quantitatively. Reach
+is the number of users affected in a defined period; Effort is the person-weeks
+to execute. RICE is more precise and harder to game than ICE, but requires
+reliable historical estimation data.
+
+Regardless of framework, every score MUST be recorded with the date and the
+scorer's assumptions made explicit. Scores without assumptions are not auditable.
+
+### Cold-Start versus Scale-Up versus Saturation
+
+Every channel occupies one of three phases:
+
+| Phase | Signal | Correct Action |
+|---|---|---|
+| Cold-start | No reliable conversion data; cost-per-result estimate is a range wider than 2× | Run a structured test to establish baseline metrics. Do not optimise; do not scale. Budget: minimum viable to generate statistical signal. |
+| Scale-up | Conversion rate stable; CAC within acceptable LTV ratio; efficiency holding with incremental budget increases | Increase investment while monitoring CAC:LTV ratio weekly. Stop scaling when CAC crosses the LTV/3 ceiling for that channel. |
+| Saturation | CAC increasing on incremental budget additions; conversion rate declining; audience overlap rising | Cap spend. Begin testing adjacent audiences or adjacent channels. Do not attempt to solve saturation with creative rotation alone — audience exhaustion is structural, not creative. |
+
+### Channel Half-Life
+
+Channels degrade. A tactic that generates strong returns in quarter one is
+frequently saturated or imitated by quarter three. Channel half-life estimates
+(the period over which a new channel retains its initial efficiency advantage
+before regression toward market average) by type:
+
+- Viral or referral mechanics based on a novel incentive: 6–18 months before
+  market saturation or regulatory friction.
+- Organic content (SEO, long-form): 18–36 months for evergreen content; shorter
+  for trend-dependent content.
+- Paid performance channels: efficiency advantage from targeting innovation
+  degrades in 3–9 months as competitors adopt the same signals.
+- Product-led growth loops: longest half-life when the loop is embedded in core
+  product value; shorter when dependent on a single feature.
+
+Channel discovery work is ongoing, not a one-time exercise. A team that stops
+discovering channels when current channels are performing is already 12 months
+behind on the next working channel.
+
+---
+
+## Growth Loop Architecture
+
+A growth loop is a self-reinforcing system where the output of one user action
+becomes the input that acquires or activates the next user. Loops are
+structurally different from funnels: funnels describe a single user's journey;
+loops describe how user actions create the conditions for additional user
+acquisition or retention without proportional spend increase.
+
+### Loop Structure
+
+Every loop has four required components:
+
+```
+Input → Action → Output → Reinforcement
+```
+
+- **Input**: the trigger that begins the cycle — a new user, a new piece of
+  content, a new transaction, or a new referral.
+- **Action**: what the user does with the product that generates an output.
+- **Output**: a by-product of the action that has value outside the user's
+  own session — shared content, a referral, a data signal, a network connection.
+- **Reinforcement**: the mechanism by which the output reduces the cost or
+  increases the probability of the next Input occurring.
+
+Loops without a quantified reinforcement mechanism are hypotheses, not
+architectures. The reinforcement must be measurable.
+
+### Viral Coefficient Discipline
+
+Viral coefficient K = (invitations sent per active user) × (conversion rate
+of invitation to new active user).
+
+K > 1.0: each cohort of users generates a larger following cohort. Growth
+accelerates without proportional acquisition spend.
+K = 1.0: growth is flat (each user replaces themselves exactly).
+K < 1.0: viral mechanics contribute to growth but do not sustain it; other
+channels are required to maintain net-positive growth.
+
+K is a product of invite rate and invite conversion rate. These must be
+measured and optimised separately — a high invite rate with low conversion
+suggests the incentive structure or the landing experience is broken. A low
+invite rate with high conversion suggests the sharing trigger is insufficient
+or poorly placed.
+
+### Loop Fatigue Detection
+
+Loops degrade when:
+
+- The addressable audience for the output has been saturated (all reachable
+  users have already been exposed).
+- The value proposition of the output degrades with repetition (first share
+  is novel; tenth share is spam).
+- External factors reduce conversion rate (platform policy changes, user
+  behaviour shifts, competitive alternatives).
+
+Loop fatigue is detected by tracking the reinforcement metric on a 30-day
+rolling basis. A declining reinforcement metric while the action metric is
+stable indicates fatigue in the output-to-reinforcement conversion step. Act
+on the reinforcement conversion, not on the action step.
+
+---
+
+## Retention as Foundation
+
+Retention is the mathematical foundation of all other growth work. The
+relationship is direct: a product with low retention requires continuous
+acquisition spend just to maintain user base size. A product with high
+retention operates from a growing installed base, which amplifies the return
+on every acquisition dollar and every referral loop.
+
+### Cohort Analysis Protocol
+
+Cohort analysis MUST be structured as follows:
+
+1. Define the cohort entry event precisely: first install, first activation
+   milestone, first payment, first meaningful action — whichever best
+   represents the start of the user relationship. Do not use signup date if
+   the product has a multi-step onboarding that delays value delivery.
+2. Track the cohort at D1, D7, D14, D30, D60, and D90 retention rates.
+3. Compare cohort retention curves across acquisition channels, onboarding
+   variants, and product versions. Flat or improving curves across periods
+   indicate a structural improvement; single-period anomalies are noise.
+4. Identify the "retention cliff" — the interval where the largest single
+   drop in the retention curve occurs — and focus activation and re-engagement
+   work at that interval.
+
+### D1/D7/D30 Reference Benchmarks
+
+Benchmarks vary by product category and engagement model. These ranges serve
+as rough orientation for diagnosis, not as targets:
+
+| Retention Interval | Consumer (high frequency) | SaaS (core workflow) |
+|---|---|---|
+| D1 | 25–40% | 40–60% |
+| D7 | 10–20% | 25–45% |
+| D30 | 5–10% | 15–35% |
+
+A product at the low end of all three intervals simultaneously has a
+structural retention problem that no acquisition experiment can compensate.
+The correct action before any growth spend is to identify and address the
+activation or product value gap causing the retention break.
+
+### Retention Before Acquisition
+
+The sequencing rule: when the D30 retention rate is below the floor for the
+product category and the root cause is in activation or core value delivery,
+growth budget allocation MUST prioritise retention improvement over acquisition
+scaling. Scaling acquisition into a broken retention curve multiplies the
+cost of the retention problem without improving it. This sequencing discipline
+is enforced at the experiment backlog review, not at the individual experiment
+level.
+
+---
+
+## North Star Metric
+
+The North Star Metric (NSM) is the single metric that best represents the value
+the product delivers to users and that is most predictive of long-term revenue
+sustainability. It is not the metric that is easiest to improve; it is the metric
+whose improvement most reliably predicts that the product is creating genuine
+value for users.
+
+### NSM Selection Criteria
+
+A valid NSM must satisfy all four:
+
+1. **Product-value correlation**: the metric increases when users are getting
+   more value from the product, not merely when the product is being used more
+   superficially. Daily active users is frequently not an NSM — it is a vanity
+   proxy unless the product's value is inherently session-frequency dependent.
+2. **Revenue predictiveness**: improvements in the NSM must be historically
+   correlated with improvements in long-term revenue, not just short-term
+   conversion spikes.
+3. **Actionability**: the growth team must be able to design experiments that
+   move the NSM. An NSM that is determined entirely by external market conditions
+   is an outcome, not a lever.
+4. **Shared ownership**: the NSM must be meaningful to both the growth team and
+   the product team. If the NSM is only interpretable by the growth team, it is
+   a growth metric, not a north star.
+
+### Vanity Metric Trap Detection
+
+A metric is a vanity metric if it can increase while the product delivers less
+value to users. Common vanity metrics misrepresented as NSMs:
+
+- Total registered users (includes dormant accounts, bots, churned users).
+- Page views or sessions (increases with re-engagement campaigns targeting users
+  who are not getting value).
+- App installs (includes users who install and never activate).
+- Total revenue in a single period (can increase through price increases that
+  harm retention without adding value).
+
+When an NSM candidate is proposed, the test is: "Can this metric increase while
+the product is delivering less value to active users?" If yes, it is not a valid
+NSM. Replace it with a metric that requires genuine value delivery to increase.
+
+---
+
+## Anti-Patterns
+
+| Anti-Pattern | Why It Fails | Correct Practice |
+|---|---|---|
+| **HIPPO decisions on channel allocation** | Highest Paid Person's Opinion on which channel to invest in, when not backed by scored experiment data, allocates budget based on authority rather than evidence. Past channel success in a different company, market, or period is not portable. | Score every channel candidate against a consistent framework (ICE or RICE) with explicit assumptions recorded. Budget allocation follows the score, not the hierarchy. Deviations from the scored order require a written rationale. |
+| **P-hacking via premature stopping** | Peeking at experiment results before the pre-registered sample size is reached and stopping when the result looks favourable inflates the false-positive rate above the stated alpha. Reported significance is not actual significance. | Register stopping rules before launch. Stop only when the pre-registered sample size and minimum duration are both satisfied. Early stopping is permitted only when a pre-registered harm threshold on a guardrail metric fires. |
+| **Vanity-metric retrofit** | Selecting the metric to report after seeing the experiment results, choosing the metric that shows the best outcome, is a post-hoc rationalisation, not an experiment result. It produces a confident-looking report with no statistical validity. | Register the primary metric and guardrail metrics before the experiment launches. The pre-registered metrics are reported regardless of whether they show a favourable outcome. |
+| **Copy-cat tactic deployment** | Adopting a growth tactic because a competitor or industry publication reports success with it, without testing whether it applies to the current product's audience, stage, and market context. Most tactical results are not portable across market segments. | Treat externally reported tactics as hypothesis inputs, not execution plans. Run a minimum viable test with a pre-specified MDE before scaling. The hypothesis must include a mechanism claim specific to the product's context. |
+| **Premature scaling before retention is stable** | Scaling acquisition spend before the D30 retention rate is above the product-category floor compounds the cost of a broken retention problem. Each scaled cohort churns at the same rate as prior cohorts, consuming budget without improving the installed base. | Apply the retention-before-acquisition sequencing rule. Retention floor must be confirmed stable — not improving, but stable — before acquisition spend is increased materially. |
+| **Single-period revenue optimisation at the expense of retention** | Optimising for short-term conversion rate or average order value in ways that harm long-term retention (aggressive discounting, feature gating, dark patterns) can improve a single-period revenue metric while destroying LTV. Revenue optimisation experiments MUST include retention-rate guardrails. | Every revenue experiment must register D30 retention rate as a guardrail metric. A revenue win that causes a statistically significant retention decline is not a net win — it is a tradeoff requiring explicit Owner decision before rollout. |
+| **Treating the viral coefficient as a target rather than an outcome** | Setting K > 1.0 as a goal and designing referral mechanics to hit it without understanding the value exchange that would motivate genuine sharing produces incentive-gamed referrals — users who share for the incentive, not for the product. Incentive-gamed K-factors collapse when the incentive changes or when the invited users discover the product does not match the sharing pitch. | Design referral mechanics around the value the referring user genuinely wants to share, not around hitting a coefficient target. Measure conversion quality (activation rate of referred users versus other channels) alongside volume. A referral programme with K = 0.5 and high-quality referred-user activation is more valuable than K = 1.2 with low activation. |
+
+---
+
+## Cross-References
+
+- `.claude/skills/domains/marketing-global/skills/content-creator` — Content
+  production, editorial calendar, and brand voice discipline. Content-creator
+  governs organic content channel execution; growth-hacker governs the experiment
+  layer that determines which content formats and distribution strategies to
+  invest in based on measurable funnel impact.
+
+- `.claude/skills/domains/paid-media/skills/ppc-strategist` — Paid acquisition
+  channel execution, bid management, and media buying. The growth-hacker skill
+  covers the ICE/RICE prioritisation and hypothesis design layer upstream of
+  paid-channel execution; ppc-strategist governs the execution mechanics.
+
+- `.claude/skills/core/code-review-checklist/SKILL.md` — Two-pass review
+  protocol applicable to experiment design review: first pass for completeness
+  of all six required experiment elements and pre-launch checklist; second pass
+  for adversarial pressure-testing of the hypothesis mechanism claim,
+  guardrail metric selection, and sample size calculation assumptions.
+
+---
+
+## ADR Anchors
+
+- **ADR-058** (`ADR-058-brainstorm-gate-and-two-pass-review.md`) — Two-pass
+  review mandate for high-stakes authored artifacts. Growth experiment design
+  documents, NSM selection rationales, and channel investment proposals are in
+  scope for this discipline. First pass: completeness of all required experiment
+  elements and scoring-framework assumptions. Second pass: adversarial review of
+  the hypothesis mechanism claim, guardrail metric coverage, and the
+  retention-before-acquisition sequencing decision when applicable.