Who are Growth Product Managers?
Catch the next wave of Product Management.
While Product Management roles have been growing rapidly for a while, a recent analysis of Google Trends revealed an increase of 425% in average monthly interest in Growth Product Management over the last 5 years.
So, who is a Growth Product Manager?
Growth Product Managers are responsible for leading experimentation along with data-driven decision-making in an organization to drive products to reach the next level of scale, impact, and profitability. You need to analyze your experiment results and make improvements to your strategies constantly.
Experience of data-driven customer segmentation(behavioral, demographic, etc.) & conducting growth experiments, A/B and multivariate tests, funnel analysis with a proven track record of success.
You need to know the ins and outs of monetization, from designing pricing plans to determining optimal price points using pricing metrics. Your long term goal is to increase revenue for the product.
Product Manager versus Growth Product Manager
Growth Product Managers are a further specialization of Product Managers.
While Product Managers focus on the success of the customer, Growth Product Managers focus on the success of the business.
Unlike regular Product Managers focussing on the long-term via Product Roadmap, Growth Product Managers are solely focused on growing the company by achieving short-term business goals and driving revenue.
Even if a company has a great product, they won’t be successful if they don’t have any users.
Skills needed to become a Growth Product Manager
- Analytics and data visualization: Growth PMs have to perform comprehensive product analytics covering the entire funnel from marketing acquisition to conversion.
- Experimentation and optimization: Growth PMs need to improve marketing and product experiences, they rely heavily on technology to quickly spin up new experiments to test their hypotheses. It goes without saying that they rely heavily on A/B testing tools for simple web and front-end messaging variants.
- Engagement and Retention: Increase engagement via use-case, frequency, intensity, and feature adoption. Determine casual, core, and power users and create a retention chart to view average retention per cohort over time. The end goal for Growth PMs is retention — more users bring in more business.
- Project management: With so many initiatives running in tandem and multiple teams involved in each one, project management becomes even more critical for growth PMs than it is for traditional PMs. Good project management software is a must in any growth stack.
- Customer Onboarding: Growth PMs are looking across the entire customer lifecycle. One of the most critical areas for growth in the early stages of the customer experience in the product, starting with the signup stage — setup an automated user onboarding journey! Measure click-through percentage and drop-off percentage through the sign-up flow and remove unnecessary friction from the sign-up process.
What would you do as a Growth Product Manager?
- Build a growth strategy plan to acquire new customers by defining the target market, identifying personas, and aligning them to the most efficient acquisition channels. Regularly analyzing the key Product Growth metrics of your product and optimize the Growth strategy accordingly.
- Apply behavioral psychology to the customer purchase funnel to improve the product’s design, and run A/B tests to assess success.
- Apply best practices for how to best engage customers, and retain them for the long term.
- Analyze the user lifecycle, including the activation, retention, dormancy, and resurrection phases, and deploy experiments to improve the lifetime value (LTV) and decrease churn.
- Focus on making your product profitable, including selecting key markets and outreach channels.
- Apply best practices of experience design, measure the effectiveness of your monetization strategy. Design and define pricing plans that utilize quantitative and qualitative methods.
The Growth Product Manager role is still in its infancy. Its definition varies from organization to organization, and the goals assigned to the position can vary widely. But, soon, companies will be having both Product Managers and Growth Product Managers. Even though Growth Product Managers are mainly focused on the business, and core Product Managers are focused on the customer, the two need to work together to drive more value for the product.
