Growth Marketing interview prep.

Behavioural questions to expect

1. Walk me through your CV.
2. Tell me about a project where you owned a measurable growth outcome — CAC, activation, retention, K-factor.
3. Tell me about a weakness, a failure, or feedback you have worked on.
4. Why consumer-internet growth marketing — versus enterprise demand-gen, brand marketing, or product management?
5. Why this product type — social vs content vs commerce vs gaming vs utility?
6. Why the firm?
7. Walk me through the firm's growth model, dominant loop, and unit economics in your own words.
8. How does the growth marketing function actually drive value at a consumer-internet firm?

Technical concepts to master

• AARRR + growth loops + retention curves

  AARRR (pirate funnel) · Growth loops vs funnels · Retention curve + PMF signal · K-factor + viral cycle time · Cold start + atomic network

• Paid acquisition + creative engine + ASO + MMM

  Blended MER vs platform ROAS · Creative volume as the binding constraint · Incrementality testing + geo holdouts · MMM (Media Mix Modeling) · ASO (app store optimization) + SKAdNetwork

• Activation + onboarding + first-session craft

  Magic-number behaviour · Activation funnel decomposition · Time-to-aha + onboarding compression · Day-0 + Day-1 push framework · Preference quiz + content seeding

• Lifecycle + retention + re-engagement

  Lifecycle flow stack · RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) segmentation · Push notification discipline · Win-back + reactivation · First-party + zero-party data

Practical drills

• the firm reports: last quarter blended CAC was $14, ARPU per active user $2.40 / month, contribution margin 60% of ARPU, ad spend $2M / month, new activated users 143k / month. This quarter: blended CAC $18, ARPU $2.30, contribution margin 58%, ad spend $2.5M / month, new activated users 139k / month. Walk through the diagnosis + the first three moves.
• the firm wants to add (or deepen) a viral / referral loop. The product is a content-sharing app with 4M MAU, week-4 retention ~22%, and a referral programme currently delivering K-factor ~0.15. Design the V2.
• the firm's week-1 retention has dropped from 28% to 25% over the last 8 weeks. The team suspects the recent onboarding redesign + a paid-source mix shift toward a new short-form-video channel. Build the diagnosis + 90-day recovery plan, including the cohort math for the recovery.

Smart-question anchors

• Growth model + dominant loop — what compounds the user base, where the loop is leakiest, the bet for the next 12 months
• Paid mix + creative engine — channel split, creative volume, in-house studio vs agency, MMM / incrementality maturity
• Activation + onboarding — the magic-number behaviour, the activation funnel rates, the current onboarding bet
• Lifecycle + retention — flow stack, push / email / in-app split, RFM segmentation maturity
• Attribution + data — post-ATT measurement posture, SKAdNetwork operating model, first-party data programme

Sourced from

Reforge — Growth Series + Retention + Acquisition curricula · Eric Seufert / Mobile Dev Memo — post-ATT attribution + paid UA realities · Sean Ellis + Dave McClure — AARRR / pirate funnel + growth canon · Andrew Chen — Cold Start Problem + viral mechanics · App store optimization + mobile UA practitioner sources (Adjust, AppsFlyer, AppFollow, Branch) · Growth interview question banks (Exponent growth track, RocketBlocks, Lenny's Newsletter case studies)