From Growth Hacker to Product Manager with Leslie Lai

This interview is part of our Roads to Product Management series. Questions and responses have been paraphrased where necessary for clarity.

Leslie Lai is a Product Manager for the Business Experience Theme at GOGOVAN. He previously studied at UC Berkeley and worked on Growth teams at Facebook, ByteDance, and OneSky before transitioning into Product Management. You can find him on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Can you share with us a bit about yourself and your background?

Sure. I studied at UC Berkeley, majoring in Economics. Right after graduating, I created a startup building a mobile app similar to Vine, but location-based. I had picked up a bit of programming, so I built the iOS front-end and worked with other co-founders. After we launched to the App Store, I realized that as a team, no one knew anything about marketing, and that was a huge factor in the lack of success.

From that, I came back to Hong Kong and worked on the marketing side for a local startup called OneSky. I learned about B2B lead generation at first, moved into growth hacking for a year-and-a-half, then moved to China to lead local operations. Afterwards, I worked for Facebook for about a year in growth marketing. Later on, I moved back to China to work for ByteDance, where I focused on the user acquisition side of growth marketing for the TikTok product.

Most recently, I came back to Hong Kong for personal reasons and joined GOGOVAN, where I now work as a Product Manager for the GOGOBusiness product line.

What triggered your transition from growth marketing into product management?

I’ve always been very interested in tech products and entrepreneurship.

Everything I’ve done before and since graduating was to get as much experience as I can to eventually create my own company or product.

Over the years from my own side projects, my first startup, and experiences at various companies, I better understand how to create a product from scratch, launch it to market, and actually get users to pay. Now, I think I’m ready to do product management for tech startups like GOGOVAN.

You mentioned your goal is to gain experience that would best help you be an entrepreneur. What are some skills you get as a PM that you didn’t necessarily get while working on growth marketing?

For growth marketing, the most important thing is data — to quickly have results and discuss what to do next based on it.

For product management, sometimes you can’t argue just based on data. In communicating with other teams or stakeholders, you can’t just show them a number and expect to get buy-in. You need balance. You need to have a deeper understanding of how different teams work.

For example, the sales team has their own KPIs, and some of the things we decide to do in product may not immediately align well with them. So we have to deeply understand their context, then try to share the big picture and why we decided to prioritize certain tasks.

I think this is the most challenging, or most different, thing compared to growth marketing where we just took the data, looked at the dashboard, and since everyone has the same goals, quickly executed campaigns to achieve them. Here, you have to strike the right balance of understanding with different teams, and that requires a lot of non-data related things that I had to learn along the way.

Are there ways in which your background in growth marketing has helped you be a better PM?

Yeah, I think there are two things. The first is the growth mindset.

Especially coming from growth or growth marketing, you understand how important it is to actually know after doing something, whether you moved certain key metrics. This kind of mindset is crucial, especially for a young tech startup, because we’re still growing.

No matter how good a story may sound, without growth, eventually the company will still die.

We have to understand that there are a lot of things we can or want to do, and are generally good things to do, but may not really move any core metrics for our product.

I try to inject this mindset that I acquired through many years of experience with TikTok and Facebook.

The second thing is, because I have some marketing experience, especially with B2B, whenever I talk to the marketing team or sales team, I actually understand what they want or what they’re trying to do. I can give suggestions or insights like: “I did this before, here are some other things we can possibly try, and here’s how we can evaluate our results”.

I think the key is to understand what different teams care about, like marketing with user acquisition numbers, costs like CPC (cost per click). Then, I can find perspectives on how the features I plan to build can help them achieve their goals as well.

I think this part helps me get buy-in for what we need to do, and has helped me a lot in dealing with the business side with other teams.

What are some concrete ways someone from a growth or growth marketing background could help spread that mindset?

I think the best way to share that kind of knowledge is through examples of what you’ve done in the past. So after joining, I had sharing sessions about experiments I did at Facebook or at ByteDance. Through those sessions, people can understand “oh, actually this is growth, this is marketing”. I think in Hong Kong, growth is not a very popular term or thing that everyone understands yet, so we have to have more introductory levels for growth-related topics.

Another thing that I did to try and spread this mindset… since we have a product strategy meeting every quarter, I usually try to focus on some key metrics and data. Instead of just talking about the big picture, I get data for my product, like retention curves and things that are very basic in growth but maybe not very popular in a lot of Hong Kong startups. I try to share those with my team and explain to them how certain curves show whether we are doing better than before, and how it matters to our product if we are looking at the long-term product health.

Considering the growth mindset, when different ideas might affect a metric similarly, how do you decide whether to pursue one versus the other?

I think it depends on the stage of the company.

If you’re looking for survival, then things that give short-term results might be good to do. Once you’re at a steady stage where you’re not at risk of dying very quickly, then it’s actually better to do something that you know has a bigger potential to apply to a bigger user segment, even though when you first do it, it does not have big short-term return.

This is something that can be very hard to explain to different stakeholders, especially those who may not have the same experience as a product manager, so they may not look at things as broadly.

Has your relationship with metrics changed since becoming a PM?

Good question. I still look at similar metrics, though maybe a bit different because we’re in the logistics business and not in social networking. However, the thing I always look at is user retention and not only the 30-day or 90-day, but actually for a year or an even longer period of time.

Actually, there was more of a change for me from traditional marketing to growth marketing. For example, in growth, we don’t just look at new users acquired the first day. Although that is important and can give you some insight on whether your campaign performance was at least okay, if you actually want to understand its efficiency, you have to look at the longer term behavior. I think this is also true for the product side because for a product, if users think it is valuable and fits their needs or solves their problems, they will come back. For different versions or iterations of a product, it takes longer to look at the results. Luckily since GOGOVAN has launched for a few years, we already have a baseline to compare against.

But yeah, I think for core metrics, there hasn’t been a big difference. Of course, there are some things like NPS that we didn’t do before in growth marketing but in product it makes sense to do for the users.

So far, it sounds like there’s an incredible amount of advantages that a growth background brings to the product management role. Are there ways in which it holds you back, or lends itself to blind spots?

Yeah. Even though I come from a growth marketing background, I had some programming experience before when I started my own company. If I didn’t have that and am coming from a purely growth background, it may be hard to get buy-in from engineers because you may not know deeply what they do or what it takes to implement certain things at a high-level.

It can be very easy to fall into a trap where you show people data and throw out things like “this is the business, and this is revenue, and we have to do this” without understanding their positions. For example, engineers always want to upgrade or refactor things to make their codebase cleaner and easier to maintain. It can be easy for a pure growth or marketing person to say just build more features so I can grow this number. That may work for a short period of time, but in the long-run, I’m pretty sure your teammates will not appreciate it because then you’re just a pure business person instead of a product person.

If you’re someone who is coming from a pure growth background, make sure to not just look at the data, but also understand what engineers, designers, or others care about. They’re not factory workers who just keep doing things to ship. Realize that they need to spend time to learn new things, and also consider time to work on things that they think will help which may not directly relate to growth, but still has impact on the business.

What is the biggest difference between what you initially thought product management was, and what you think it is now?

I used to think product management was, and this was something I heard a lot, “being the CEO of the product”. It’s kind of true in the sense that as a PM, you bear all the results and consequences of where your product ends up. There’s no excuse that it’s not your thing, or it’s other people’s fault, etc.

But the biggest difference from when I first started is how I thought you had to manage all the tasks, set all the timelines and everything.

There is still project management work as a product manager, but those tasks are not the most important. The more important thing is what to do. You have to think deeply and do as much research as you can to prioritize the most important thing you should do next.

And after balancing with all the stakeholders, effort estimation, and even external situations, you have to be very clear to the team on the mission, what we want to do, and why we should do it because people can always come back to challenge you.

For some companies, I know they have dedicated scrum masters or project managers to keep track of timelines and progress, and I think that can be great.

The best work you do as a PM is to set a vision, prioritize the tasks that achieve this vision, and get buy-in from everyone — all of which I didn’t know was that important until I joined.

What is something you enjoy most about being a PM?

Enjoy most… as I said, prioritizing is the most important and it certainly sounds easy, but when you actually execute it there are always some setbacks. It can be from the sales team saying that this feature is not the most important thing, you should do our thing instead. Even more complicated is when you have a product supporting different countries, then you get a lot of different opinions. The most important thing is to keep talking with them and get into discussing trade-offs while also understanding the markets.

In growth marketing, we didn’t really have to deal with all that. We just had to find something with positive ROI, then scale it up and try to spread it out in as many channels as we can. From a PM position, we actually have much more limited resources and we have to be very careful on what we build next and make sure it actually fits the use-case.

I think this part is the most challenging thing so far and what I’d like to do well as a PM: to work with limited resources and limited time to achieve something big. How you have different trade-offs, how you decide to scope something out, or how you work with designers to come up with a flow that can achieve your goal without polishing it to be perfect.

You have to discuss with everyone and eventually come up with something that uses the minimal resources to achieve the biggest impact. I think this is the most fun and interesting part.

Ultimately, you want to build your own company again. Looking ahead to that next transition, what are the key things you’ll take with you from being a PM?

I think PMs are very close to what the CEO of a startup would be. Especially for a tech startup, what the product has or doesn’t have, whether it fits the market or fit the people’s needs, those are the most important things. This is the same thing a product manager has to work on, even at a bigger tech company. What we’re trying to achieve in either case is the same: to create something people actually want or need.

Also, being a PM, we have a lot of communication with different internal stakeholders or team members; and externally, you have to understand what other people think. I think this creates a much broader experience compared to just looking at metrics and doing whatever moves them. It’s impossible to build a product that people like that also fits every stakeholder’s perspective, so to gather people’s buy-ins and balance what people think, I think this will be a skill I can reuse in the future when I have my own startup.

If you are interested in using technology to transform the last mile in logistics, we are actively hiring new talents to join our analytics, design, engineering and product teams. Check out our careers page for details.