Growth Model and North Star Metric Definition
You cannot optimize what you have not defined. The AI Head of Growth template leads you through building a growth model that maps your acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue loops. It helps you identify your north star metric — the single number that best captures the value you deliver to users — and break it down into its input metrics that teams can actually influence. The output is a growth model document that everyone in the company can understand, aligning product, marketing, and sales around the same definition of success.
- Build a quantitative growth model with acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue loops
- Define a north star metric and decompose it into actionable input metrics
- Map the full user journey from first touch to power user with conversion rates at each stage
- Identify the biggest drop-off points in your funnel and size the opportunity of fixing them
- Set growth targets that are grounded in your model's assumptions, not wishful thinking
Experimentation Program and Roadmap
Growth teams live and die by their experimentation velocity and rigor. The AI Head of Growth template builds an experimentation program with a structured process for generating ideas, prioritizing them by expected impact and effort, designing valid experiments, and making ship-or-kill decisions based on results. It maintains a living experimentation backlog and a results database so your team never repeats failed experiments and always builds on what worked. The template enforces statistical rigor — minimum sample sizes, significance thresholds, and holdout groups — so you can trust your results.
- Build an experimentation backlog with idea generation, prioritization, and scoring frameworks
- Design valid A/B tests with hypothesis statements, success metrics, and statistical power analysis
- Prioritize experiments using ICE or PXL frameworks with explicit impact and effort estimates
- Maintain an experiment results database to prevent repeating failures and build on wins
- Generate experiment review dashboards that track velocity, win rate, and cumulative impact
Funnel Analysis and Conversion Optimization
Most companies have no idea where they are leaking users. The AI Head of Growth template builds a comprehensive funnel analysis that traces users from first impression through activation, engagement, conversion, and expansion. It identifies the specific steps where users drop off, segments drop-off by user characteristics to find patterns, and generates hypotheses about why users are leaving. For each friction point, it proposes experiment ideas ranked by expected impact on the overall funnel conversion rate.
- Map your end-to-end conversion funnel with rates at every step
- Segment funnel analysis by acquisition channel, persona, and behavior to find patterns
- Identify the 3-5 highest-impact friction points and size the opportunity of fixing each
- Generate experiment hypotheses for each friction point with predicted lift estimates
- Track funnel metrics over time to measure the cumulative impact of optimization work
Channel Strategy and Acquisition Mix
Sustainable growth requires a diversified acquisition portfolio where you understand the unit economics of every channel. The AI Head of Growth template evaluates every potential acquisition channel against your target audience, CAC, and scalability. It helps you identify which channels to double down on, which to test, and which to deprioritize. For each active channel, it builds an operating plan with creative strategy, budget, targeting, and success metrics. Over time, it optimizes the channel mix to maximize total acquisition volume within your CAC constraints.
- Audit current acquisition channels and evaluate new channel opportunities
- Calculate channel-level CAC, conversion rates, and LTV to compare unit economics
- Build channel operating plans with creative strategy, budget, and targeting
- Develop a channel testing roadmap to diversify acquisition beyond your primary channel
- Optimize channel mix allocation based on marginal CAC and volume potential
Retention and Engagement Loops
Acquisition without retention is a leaky bucket. The AI Head of Growth template helps you map your retention and engagement loops — the mechanisms that keep users coming back and deepening their relationship with your product. It analyzes cohort retention curves, identifies the behaviors that correlate with long-term retention, and designs interventions to get more users to adopt those behaviors. It also builds re-engagement programs for users at risk of churning, with messaging and offers that are tailored to their usage patterns and churn risk signals.
- Analyze cohort retention curves and identify the behaviors that predict long-term retention
- Design activation experiments to get new users to the aha moment faster
- Build habit loops that drive regular engagement through triggers, actions, and rewards
- Create churn prediction models and re-engagement programs for at-risk users
- Map viral loops and referral mechanics with viral coefficient tracking
Growth Reporting and Stakeholder Communication
Growth work can look like a black box to the rest of the organization. The AI Head of Growth template builds reporting rhythms that make growth work visible, credible, and aligned with company priorities. It generates weekly growth digests that summarize experiment results, funnel movements, and channel performance. For leadership reviews, it produces monthly and quarterly growth narratives that connect experimentation output to business outcomes, making the case for continued investment in the growth program.
- Generate weekly growth digests with experiment results, funnel metrics, and channel highlights
- Build monthly growth review decks with narrative, data, and forward-looking plans
- Create a growth dashboard that makes key metrics visible to the entire company
- Document growth playbooks for successful experiments so they can be scaled and repeated
- Connect growth metrics to revenue and valuation to demonstrate the ROI of the growth program