"Stage one: Stimulating virality"

"Like all startups, growth is essential and the challenge is obvious: grow or die."

"""In the early days, you don't need a growth team,"" Awan said. ""Everyone is the growth team."""

"""Growth has to be built into the product,"" says Awan."

"Stage two: Systematizing growth"

"From 2008 to 2011, LinkedIn started investing more in growth. The key: the company started to make it a system, building a team that boosted user numbers 10 times from 14 million to 140 million."

"""As you get scale, you need to build a growth team,"" Awan says. ""You need product people and marketers on that team -- you need both -- and you need data scientists and engineers as well."""

"In addition, the company identified its major growth channels by studying what users were doing and how they were finding the site."

"Stage three: Use data to ramp up your growth rate"

"In stage three, LinkedIn got really serious about understand members beyond the acquisition stage."

"Define one ""North Star"" metric for success"

"Good product comes first, growth comes second"

"Identify growth channels by checking how users are currently finding you"