[seanellis]

It's best to learn through practice. If you're working on a web business, define a growth objective and use your development skills (AKA problem solving skills) to achieve it. So a good example would be to try to improve new user activation from 20% to 30% in the next 30 days. We had a similar goal in my company recently and our VP of engineering generated and implemented an idea that gave us a 300% improvement in new user activation. It was a new onboarding flow. Generally you need to run a bunch of tests to find a handful of things that really make a difference. Other objectives you might want to consider would be improving customer retention or customer referral or even building embeddable widgets for 3rd party sites. Developers have an advantage with growth hacking because they can not only have good ideas, but they can also execute relatively complex ones. Reading can help, but doing is really how you learn it.