The most common trap in Growth PM interviews isn't running out of growth ideas — it's jumping to a solution that 'obviously should work' before diagnosing the actual bottleneck. Today we swap Reforge's linear funnel thinking for Growth Loops, use a six-step diagnostic chain to find the real leak, and look at a real JobLeads experiment that cut 22 steps down to 5 — and changed nothing — to see why experiment velocity beats any single home run.
The dividing line in growth interviews is whether you're talking about linear improvement or compound loops — adding an acquisition channel is marketing; making one user bring in two users is growth. Today we practice the Goal → Metric → Bottleneck → Hypothesis → Experiment → Measurement six-step diagnosis framework, with a question drawn from a real OpenAI Growth PM take-home.
Growth interviews don't test whether you can growth hack — they test whether you have systematic growth thinking. Core skills: growth loop design (the acquisition → activation → retention → referral flywheel), experiment design (the full hypothesis → metric → experiment → analysis process), retention strategy (finding the aha moment, designing habit loops), and using data to decide what's worth continued investment.