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Data Science Models & Their Business Applications

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Entrepreneurship: Launching and Scaling New Ventures

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Strategic Planning: Creating Long-Term Success

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Marketing Fundamentals: Building and Implementing Strategies

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Sales Leadership: Leading Teams to Achieve Excellence

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Influence and Power: Strategies for Professional Impact

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Product Design: Crafting Solutions for Customer Needs

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Product Management: Driving Success Across Product Lifecycles

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Product Marketing: Aligning Product with Market Needs

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Project Leadership: Managing Teams for Successful Outcomes

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Project Management: Delivering Projects on Time and Budget

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Technical Program Management: Leading Complex Programs

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Strategic Marketing: Aligning Goals with Market Opportunities

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Leadership and Decision-Making Under Pressure

Breakthrough Innovation Strategy

Scaling AI Strategy

Lead With AI

Growth Strategy: Find the Problem. Grow the Business.

Build the skills to spot growth opportunities, test new ideas, and scale what works, using lessons directly from Uber's executive team.

Uber

An adjacent opportunity is a way to grow out from your \[core product\] that reuses a strength of your offering or the \[trust\] you’ve earned from your customers. A bookkeeping firm adding payroll is adjacent. The same firm adding web design isn’t.

Adjacent opportunity

**Andrew Macdonald is President and Chief Operating Officer at Uber**, leading all business initiatives across Mobility and Delivery as well as cross-platform efforts like advertising, customer support, and autonomous vehicle strategy.

Previously, he led Uber’s mobility business in 70+ countries around the world. He joined Uber in 2012 as the company’s first general manager for Toronto, and has since helped grow Uber into the largest mobility platform in the world.

Andrew currently serves on the Boards of Directors of Maple Leaf Foods, Lime, and Careem.  
Prior to Uber, Andrew was an entrepreneur and a management consultant with Bain & Company. Andrew studied undergraduate business at the Ivey Business School at Western University.

Andrew Macdonald

The Ansoff Matrix sorts growth into four paths, based on two questions:

1\. Is your idea for a new product or an existing one?  
2\. Is your idea for a new market or one you already serve?

Where your answers meet is your growth path: \[market penetration\], \[market development\], \[product development\], or \[diversification\]. Risk rises as you move away from the products and markets you already know.

Ansoff Matrix

An applied learning activity is a short, AI-assisted exercise that helps you turn a course framework into a personalized plan—in just a few minutes. 

Unlike a \[capstone\], which builds across a whole module, an applied learning activity gives you something you can use right away. 

Each one produces an \[artifact\] saved to your Digital Toolkit.

Applied learning activity

An artifact is a personalized plan or strategy you create in this course, such as your Growth Bet Brief or Risk Radar and Response. Every artifact is saved to your Digital Toolkit, along with your unlocked tools. Select the Toolkit icon to access them.

Artifact

An asset is something your growth created that you can keep and reuse. Growth typically produces five:

1\. Data: what you’ve learned about how customers behave.  
2\. Network: the groups on each side of your marketplace.  
3\. Trust: your customers’ belief that you’ll deliver.  
4\. Infrastructure: the systems, tools, and teams you built for one job.  
5\. Relationships: the people who take your call.

Naming your assets is the first step in using them to help fuel your growth.

Asset

A capstone is a graded submission that addresses one phase of the \[Growth Model\]. You’ll complete four phase capstones in this course to make up your final \[Growth Strategy\].

Capstone

Picture your products in three concentric circles—like a bullseye. A core or first product that works extremely well is what earns you the right to expand outward.

The three rings in the Concentric Circles Model:  
1\. **Center:** your core product, the thing you’re known for.  
2\. **Middle**: adjacent opportunities that reuse your strengths and earned trust.  
3\. **Outer**: future growth bets you’d test before committing to.

Use the Concentric Circles Model to see which moves sit close enough to your core to be promising. 

Concentric Circles Model

A constraint is anything that limits your ability to meet your customers’ expectations. Growth rarely creates a constraint; growth reveals one that was already there. The three kinds to watch are \[technical constraint\]s, \[operational constraint\]s, and \[marketplace constraint\]s.

Constraint

Your core product is the primary thing you offer and what your organization is known for. It may be a digital product, physical goods, services, or even an idea that you want people to rally around.  
In the \[Concentric Circles Model\], your core product sits at the center. Making it work extremely well is what earns customers’ trust and your ability to grow.

Core product

Cycle time is the time between deciding to create or improve a product and putting it in front of customers.

Shorten cycle time by cutting the time it takes to make decisions, not the time spent on design and quality.

Cycle time

**Dara Khosrowshahi is the CEO of Uber**, where he has managed the company’s business in more than 70 countries around the world since 2017\. Prior to this role, he spent twelve years as CEO of Expedia, which he grew into one of the world’s largest online travel companies. He first joined Expedia as Chief Financial Officer of IAC Travel and became CEO in 2005\.

Dara currently serves on the Board of Directors of Expedia and Catalyst.org. He’s a passionate advocate for refugees in crisis around the world, having himself left Iran during the Iranian Revolution at the age of 9\.

Dara grew up in Tarrytown, New York, and received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Brown University.

Dara Khosrowshahi

The Decision Clock is how quickly you decide what to build and how.

Speed up the Decision Clock by putting your effort on the \[long pole\], shrinking the deciding group to a \[two-pizza team\], and using the \[Door Test\] to move fast on reversible calls.

Decision Clock

The Digital Toolkit is where your course work is saved: the \[artifact\]s you create and the \[tool\]s you unlock. Find the Digital Toolkit on the left side of your screen on a large display, or at the bottom on a small one. Everything in the Digital Toolkit is yours to use during the course and keep after the course ends.

Digital Toolkit

Diversification means building something new for customers you don’t serve yet.

Developing a new product and market at once makes diversification the highest-risk path on the \[Ansoff Matrix\].

Diversification

Dogfooding is using your own product the way your customers do, to find what’s broken and feel what it’s like when something goes wrong. The term comes from old pet food ads claiming the food was good enough for the owner to eat. Dogfooding is the closest you can get to your customer’s experience and sits at the top of the \[Five Levels of User Feedback\].

Dogfooding

1\. You encounter a problem: A flow breaks or behaves in a way you didn’t expect.  
2\. You document it: 

* What happened   
* What you expected  
* How it affected you

3\. It gets prioritized: Ranked against open work and queued for a fix.

4\. Ship the fix, then text it again.

Dogfooding Feedback Loop

The Door Test asks whether a decision can be reversed.

A two-way door is a move that you can undo. This deserves more speed.  
A one-way door is something that’s hard to walk back. That deserves more care.

Sorting decisions this way keeps you from slow-walking cheap calls and rushing expensive ones.

Door Test

An empathy map is a simple chart that sorts what a customer does, says, thinks, and feels into one view.

Fill out an empathy map from your own experience using the product rather than guessing at someone else’s.

The value of an empathy map is that it names the exact moments where friction creeps in, so you know what to fix.

Empathy map

A feedback loop is a rhythm for collecting input on what you are selling and acting on it.

A feedback loop is about learning: feedback goes in and a better product comes out.

Compare it with a \[growth loop\], which is about scaling: usage goes in and more customers come out.

Feedback loop

The Five Levels of User Feedback rank ways of learning about your customers. They run from the most distant methods, which reach the most people, to the most personal.

**1\. User data:** analytics show what large numbers of people do.  
**2\. Surveys:** users tell you what they think in their own words.  
**3\. Focus groups:** a small group talks through their experience together.  
**4\. One-on-one interviews:** people share things privately they’d never say in a group.  
**5\. \[Dogfooding\]:** you use the product yourself and feel what goes wrong.

Most businesses rely on the first two, missing the more personal and intangible insights.

Five Levels of User Feedback

A flywheel is a growth cycle where each turn takes less effort than the last. The flywheel is hard to start, but once it’s moving, momentum builds and growth continues without as much push. Uber’s leaders use the flywheel to describe how each success makes the next one cheaper and faster. Compare with \[growth loop\].

Flywheel

Friction is anything in a product or process that adds effort, delay, or confusion for a customer.

Not all friction is bad: desirable friction is a step that educates the customer or gives them control. Undesirable friction is clutter, delay, or a skippable step that tests their patience.

Seek to eliminate undesirable friction—every moment of confusion is a moment someone might leave.

Friction

**Georgie Jeffreys is Uber’s Vice President of Global Marketing.** She leads marketing across Uber’s portfolio, responsible for how Uber builds its brands, drives growth and demand, brings new products to market, and connects with consumers, merchants, and earners.

Throughout her career, Georgie has worked at the intersection of brand, creativity, and business growth, building and leading teams across markets around the world. Since joining Uber in 2015, she has helped to build and scale the company’s marketing organization. She has led some of its most recognized and awarded work, including all six of Uber’s Super Bowl campaigns. Her work has been recognized with an Emmy for Outstanding Commercial, the US Grand Effie, and more than 20 Cannes Lions, including a Cannes Lions Grand Prix.

Georgie Jeffreys

\[Georgie Jeffreys\]’ three-part test for a marketing concept. A concept has to clear all three of these:

\- Entertainment value: is it genuinely entertaining?  
\- Brand fit: does the brand have a clear role in the idea, rather than sitting on the sideline?  
\- Singular message: is there one clear thing you want people to take away?

Use the golden triangle to judge the creative itself. Use your \[growth loop\] to decide where to point it.

Golden triangle

In this course, growth is what happens when you solve a real problem so well that people keep coming back. Growth shows up as more customers, greater loyalty, new revenue, and a stronger business. Growth is the result of creating something customers value, not the starting point.

Growth

A growth accelerator makes your flywheel turn faster.

AI and \[partnerships\] are two accelerators that let you borrow a capability instead of building it.

Both multiply an \[asset\] you already own, rather than creating something new.

Growth accelerator

A growth bet is any move you make before you know whether it works: a new service line, a second location, a product your best customers keep asking for. Growth bets sit in the outer ring of the \[Concentric Circles Model\] and get tested small, so a failure doesn’t damage your \[core product\].

Growth bet

The growth curve helps you classify your business’s growth across four phases:

1\. Starting Line: you’re planning to grow and no one’s paying you yet.  
2\. Slow Start: growth is just beginning and each customer feels like a win.  
3\. Steep Climb: growth is picking up speed and customers bring other customers.  
4\. Plateau: growth is leveling off and what used to work returns less.

Place yourself on the growth curve to set goals you can track over time.

Growth curve

### **Example 1:  HVAC service company** 

This example is from Dana, an operations manager at HVAC service company that serves commercial customers. 

1. **The Move.** Sell our existing preventive maintenance contracts to K–12 school districts. Ansoff quadrant: market development. Same service, new customer type.  

2. **Why It Holds Up.** Distribution. Our techs already cover the three counties those districts sit in, so no new routes and no new hires to start.  

3. **The Drag.** Any contract over $50K needs owner sign-off, and he reviews them monthly. Fix: raise his threshold to $150K on renewals and pre-approved service tiers. 
 
4. **The Lesson.** Metric: quote-to-close time on district bids, tracked against our commercial average of 34 days across the first six bids.  

5. **The Question.** Will district procurement let us close mid-year or only during budget season? If it’s budget season only, the whole timeline shifts.

### **Example 2: Mobile language-learning app** 

This example is from Ravi, a product manager with a language-learning app.

**The Move.** Get more of our existing free users into a daily habit. Ansoff quadrant: market penetration in the same markets we already serve. No new product and no new audience, just more depth in the base we have.

**Why It Holds Up.** Data\! We log every session, so we already know who finishes three lessons in their first week has better retention. The bet is built on patterns we see in our analytics.

**The Drag.** Any onboarding change goes through a design review, localization pass in nine languages, and a release train that ships every two weeks. So the worst case is that it takes five weeks to change a line of copy. I’m asking to run onboarding tests in English only and trigger localization after a test shows promise. 

**The Lesson.** The metric is the share of new users who finish three lessons in week one. Today it’s 19%. We’ll run one onboarding test per release and keep the number on a dashboard the team sees at standup.

**The Question.** Is the 5x retention causal? Or just saying that motivated users were always going to stay? I want a holdout group before I spend a long time optimizing for it.

Growth Direction Map Capstone Examples

* You can use short sentences or bulleted lists. Clarity matters more than length.  
* Reference your toolkit to review your artifacts and saved frameworks.  
* Estimate where you don’t have exact numbers. A rough figure is fine.  
* Name real strengths, not aspirational ones. Build on what you actually have.  
* Use AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement. The plan should sound like you.

Growth Direction Map Tips

A growth loop is a self-reinforcing cycle where the output of one step powers the next, so your product generates its own growth instead of relying on constant ad spend.  
A growth loop is the flywheel aimed at one job: winning customers, keeping them, and turning them into more customers.

Every growth loop moves through four steps:  
1\. Trigger: what brings someone to your product.  
2\. Action: the one thing they do.  
3\. Reward: what makes it worth doing again.  
4\. Reinvestment: what they put back in that brings the next person.

Growth loop

![](https://www.masterclass.com/course-images/attachments/e5rg50hope7wnwrzi02v85bhix38)

The Growth Model is the four-phase cycle this course uses to build a repeatable growth strategy.

1\. **Design:** build around a real customer problem.  
2\. **Grow:** choose a path and expand from your core product.  
3\. **Sustain:** protect quality and trust as you scale.  
4\. **Accelerate:** use what growth gives you to power your next move.

Each phase builds on the one before it, and the cycle runs again

Growth Model

Your Growth Strategy is a working document you’ll keep using after the course ends. Each \[capstone\] adds a piece: how you’ll improve your product, where you’ll grow next and why, the risks you’re watching, and how you’ll keep growth compounding. By the end of this certificate, you’ll have something you can use to keep your business growing for years to come.

The following are examples from other certificate participants:

### **Example 1: Scheduling Software**

**This capstone is from a product manager for Wren, a scheduling software for independent home-service contractors.**

**Our flywheel**

1: Contractors send accurate arrival windows through Wren

2\. Their customers have a better experience and leave reviews

3\. Those reviews bring the contractor more jobs

4\. The contractor schedules more work in Wren and tells the crews they work alongside

→ More contractors sending accurate arrival windows, back to step 1

**Next turn.** We’d launch pricing guidance: telling a contractor what similar jobs are billing in their area this month. We’d win it because four years of booking data across 11 metro areas is the expensive part, and a competitor would need years to match it. It strengthens the trust we’ve earned, since our whole pitch is helping small trades businesses look professional, and underpricing is the most common way they lose money.

**Our accelerators** *(I chose the AI option)*

**Asset:** 2.3 million completed jobs across 11 metro areas, each with what was charged and how long it took. This speeds up step 4, because contractors who price right win more of the jobs their reviews bring them.

**AI:** today that data only produces a monthly average by trade, which a contractor has to go looking for. AI could read a contractor’s own job notes and suggest a price for the job in front of them, before they send the quote. Same step 4, but in thirty seconds instead of a week.

### **Example 2: Regional coffee roaster**

**This capstone is from the owner of Marisol Coffee, a regional roaster with a wholesale business.**

**Our flywheel**

1 More cafés serve our coffee

2 Their customers taste it and ask what it is

3 Some of those customers buy from our online store, and the café mentions us to other owners

4 More café owners hear about us and sign wholesale accounts

→ More cafés serving our coffee, back to step 1

**Next turn.** We’d supply our cafés with more than beans: syrups, filters, and cups, sourced through the buying relationships we’ve built over nine years. We’d win it because café owners already trust our sourcing judgment, which is the hardest thing for a distributor to earn. It strengthens the trust we’ve earned, because we’ve always sold sourcing judgment more than coffee.

**Our accelerators**

 **Asset:** nine years of order history across 140 wholesale accounts, so we know what each café reorders and when. This speeds up step 4, because we can show a prospective owner exactly what a shop their size spends in a year.

**Partnership:** we’d work with a regional distributor who carries and ships the non-coffee items, with our sourcing name on the front of it. This speeds up step 1, since a café can get everything from us without us building a warehouse we don’t want.

Growth System Blueprint Capstone Examples

Before you submit, consider the following tips suggested by professionals like you:

* Answer in short sentences or bullets. Clarity matters more than length.  
* Estimate where you don’t have exact numbers. A rough figure is fine.  
* Name real strengths, not aspirational ones. Build on what you actually have.  
* If you choose AI, pair it with something you already own. AI on its own isn’t an accelerator.  
* Use AI as a thinking partner, not a replacement. The plan should sound like you.

Growth System Blueprint Tips

Select highlighted text to reveal definitions, explanations, or other helpful content.

highlighted words

A large language model, or LLM, is an AI system trained on large amounts of text that can answer questions, generate writing, and analyze data.

Examples include Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot—though there are many others. Choose the LLM you prefer and have access to.

This course offers optional LLM prompts you can use as a thinking partner. Always edit the output to make it yours.

Large language model (LLM)

The Learning Clock is how quickly you hear from customers and act on what they tell you.  
It depends on running a \[feedback loop\] on purpose rather than letting silence stand in for an answer.

Learning Clock

When you’re setting up a tent, there’s one pole that really needs to go up first, or the whole process takes longer. That’s the long pole. 
It’s the one task that takes the longest and holds up everything else. 
Identifying the long pole and putting your highest value resources towards it can help you reach your goal faster.

Long Pole

Market development means taking a product that already works to a new region, industry, or type of customer.

The product stays the same and the audience changes, which makes market development medium risk on the \[Ansoff Matrix\].

Market development

Market penetration means growing with the product and the audience you already have.

Market penetration is the lowest-risk path on the \[Ansoff Matrix\], because both the product and the market are already familiar.

Reach for it by getting current customers to come back more often or to choose you over a competitor.

Market penetration

A marketplace constraint is an imbalance between the supply and demand sides of your business.

Signs include climbing wait times, spiking prices, and partners or suppliers starting to leave.

Marketplace constraint

Onboarding is everything a new customer goes through between signing up, or first engaging with your business, and getting something they value.

Easy onboarding keeps people around long enough to get a benefit, which makes it one of the best places to remove friction.

Onboarding

An operational constraint is a limit in how you run the business and deliver at scale.

Signs include a support queue held together by after-hours heroics, worst cases getting worse, and one market or location lagging the rest.

Growth Strategy

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