Growth Playbooks

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/marketing-strategy.md exists (or the legacy .agents/product-marketing.md, .claude/product-marketing.md, or product-marketing-context.md filenames), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task. Also check .agents/marketing-learnings.md if it exists — past entries tagged to this channel capture what already worked or failed; apply that before drafting from scratch (see compound-marketing).

Famous brand growth stories get told as trivia — "Dropbox did a referral program" — when the actually useful thing is the mechanic underneath: what loop made growth compound instead of needing to be re-earned every period. This skill catalogs those mechanics, grounded in what the brand actually did (not invented statistics), translated for retail, and updated for what changes when a meaningful share of discovery and purchase now runs through a customer's own AI agent rather than a human browsing a page.

Grounding Rule

Every entry describes a real, publicly documented mechanic. When citing a specific number (Dropbox's referral-driven growth, PayPal's early referral bonus), only use figures that are widely and consistently reported — don't invent or round-fabricate a stat to make an entry more persuasive. If a mechanic is well-known but the numbers aren't reliably documented, describe the mechanic and say so, rather than manufacturing a metric. Applying a playbook to the user's business is a hypothesis to test (route it through compound-marketing's Brief stage), not a guaranteed outcome — the original brand's execution, timing, and market mattered as much as the mechanic itself.

The AI-Era Delta

This is what most "growth hacking" references miss — they're frozen at a pre-LLM internet. Five shifts change how these mechanics play out now, and they cut across almost every entry in the catalog: