Growth Hacking Course

Third year in a row, together with Columbia Road we run the popular hands-on course on growth hacking, i.e., “getting things done” in the digital world. Course size is limited to 20 students, so we’ll figure out how to choose the students.

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash.

Growth hacking? Eero Martela from Columbia Road explains:

It is an approach for growing a business through rapid experiments in customer touchpoints. Typically growth hacking activities are a combination of marketing, software development, sales, service design, and analytics. In short, it’s about trying all (morally and legally approved) means in order to achieve tactical growth.

The course

The course starts in period III and goes to end of period IV. The lectures and hands-on training sessions are Wednesdays 9–12 and Thursdays 16–18. Each student is assigned to a team of four that works on a specific project.

We are ready to take 16 or 20 students, depending on popularity. We have a quota of four students (one team) in English. The lectures etc are in English but the cases are mostly in Finnish, except for one or two.

It turns out that people already signed up for the course. We will think how to choose the participants. Students with Information Networks as a master’s major have priority, and then we have a special quote of four to non-Finnish speakers. We can take maximum twenty students.

Cases to work on

The projects this year are from the Information Networks programme’s products and marketing efforts (to guarantee that tools etc work smoothly for the team). We have four cases ready, and one of them is in English. We have one more extra case if need be, either in English or Finnish.

• Growth hacking the number of users for a tailor-made planning tool for Finnish secondary high schools (lukiot) and their transversal competence teaching (laaja-alaiset opinnot). The tool itself has been developed in the past Fall and the goal is to get as many teachers to use it as possible. The work is in Finnish.
• Growth hacking the number of users for the online Aalto course Sosiaalisen median ilmiöt (https://someilmiot.informaatioverkostot.fi/).The course has roughly 20 000 monthly visits already, now the job is to make it popular among secondary high schools (lukiot). The work is in Finnish.
• Growth hacking the number of non-students (i.e., work life professionals) for the course TU-E3170 Facilitating Change starting in period V. Last year the course had 400 non-students out of which circa 200+ remained active. This team works in English.
• Growth hacking listeners to Computer Science departments new podcast series Kahvit näppikselle. The podcast is launched in January and it is targeted to young adults, mainly secondary high schoolers and students. The work is in Finnish.