5 essential principles that make growth product management work
Here are five principles that allow businesses of all sizes and maturity levels to benefit from GPM.
1. Growth product management uses data to reduce barriers to value
Growth product management is most valuable for existing products that already solve user pain points but are not yet optimized. GPM helps product teams reduce barriers to value, which means they enable customers and users to quickly find value within the core product—it’s all about removing friction.
Of course, you can’t improve what you can’t measure, so growth product managers are highly focused on data and specific metrics related to a product’s success, like
- Acquiring new users
- Increasing retention rates
- Finding new ways to monetize a product to boost revenue
- Encouraging existing users to refer newcomers
The growth product team, rather than building and launching one product, finds ways to help get a product into more users' hands, and to identify friction points that may be holding a product back from reaching its potential.
Pro tip: quality data is the foundation of growth product management. Growth product management revolves around using data and tracking metrics to identify opportunities for improvement, assess the outcomes of experiments, and make evidence-based decisions for products. Use Contentsquare to set up a system to continuously collect user and product experience (PX) insights. These will give a growth PM more awareness of where they should focus their energy. After all, you can’t improve what you don’t understand. |
2. Growth PMs don’t replace core PMs—they work with them
Introducing a growth mindset to the PM role can be a big shift for traditional (or core) product managers. It requires traditional PMs—who are used to focusing on long-term, customer-focused roadmaps—to wrap their heads around a product development strategy that also includes short-term, business-focused objectives.
That’s why a growth PM shouldn’t be viewed as a replacement for an existing PM—nor should a core PM take on more growth-oriented responsibilities. A growth PM should be viewed as different from, and a further specialization of, core product managers.
Growth product managers are peers to core product managers. But rather than owning a specific product, the growth PM is focused on improving a specific business metric or commercial goal.
These mindsets can lead to different approaches to:
Solving customer problems
The core PM is thinking about delivering long-term value, while the growth PM is primarily focused on delivering more easily-quantifiable business outcomes.
Core product managers will be interested in key product activities, such as improving the in-product user experience or cleaning up code to make the product more sustainable. Growth PMs typically focus on specific tactics related to a product’s success with immediate results, such as
- New customer acquisition strategies to encourage more engagement with potential users
- Customer retention initiatives and upselling strategies to deepen relationships with customers and increase revenue
- Discovering more 'aha! moments' to push customers more effectively along the funnel
- Add-ons that help customers gain greater value from the product faster, and drive profit for the business
Product development and performance
Through quick testing and optimization, a growth PM is constantly looking for ways to immediately impact revenue. They may splash out one day, but yield big sums the next day. That's part of their work.
Core PMs, in contrast, tend to be more cautious. Since they’re more focused on fairly large deliverables, the constant shifts and iterations that come with product experimentation can create friction in the whole development process. Their pre-planned approach to delivering value means they would rather stay out of unpredictable situations.
It’s not hard to understand why a core PM could get protective or dismiss the short-term focus of a growth PM. This friction between growth and core PMs can become a real challenge in many organizations.
But with a strong focus on excellent communication and a relationship founded on trust, their combined efforts can lead to incredible results.
3. Growth product management requires a deep understanding of the customer
To prioritize initiatives that remove value barriers and deliver improvements with the greatest impact, growth product management requires a deep understanding of how users experience and interact with products—and the common problems they face.
It’s often said the core PM’s primary stakeholder is the customer, while the growth PM’s primary stakeholder is the business. However, this should be seen as a reflection of the goals for the individual roles, rather than the processes they'll build and implement.
GPM provides a vital link between user behavior and the ongoing product lifecycle. Even though growth product management focuses on business metrics and goals, teams often (and should) tie results to customers. At the end of the day, more customers will generally mean more growth.
This requires product growth teams to:
Have a good understanding of the product's customer base
Achieving business-specific growth metrics in a product-led company requires a fundamental understanding of
- Who is using the product
- Why they're using the product, and
- What might encourage them to form a deeper relationship with the product
It also requires understanding potential users, why they aren’t already engaged, and what might motivate them to become engaged. This helps them align their efforts to customer needs.
Deal with customer-centric metrics related to acquisition, engagement, and retention
To achieve short-term, business-focused objectives, product growth teams will almost certainly look at growing or enriching engagement with customers across every stage of the funnel. For example, they may be charged with growing the customer base, or pushing customers towards more expensive subscription plans.
These metrics revolve around customers—the ones who judge whether the product is useful to them or not. Achieving growth means giving your main customers what they want, which means the product growth team needs to be customer-centric.
4. Testing and experimentation are essential to growth product management
As part of an effective growth product management strategy, teams may discover that certain functions or features require revision to maximize value. To get this done, product growth teams rely on a series of short-term experiments to incrementally improve and increase efficiencies throughout the funnel.
Depending on the objective, they’ll home in on one specific problem, form hypotheses, run experiments, and move the needle until they’ve optimized the metric. This can mean:
- Testing different onboarding experiences to improve activation
- Designing and defining pricing plans that utilize quantitative and qualitative data and methods of measuring the effectiveness of the monetization strategy
- Running an A/B test with different variants of product launch experiences to boost new feature adoption
- Analyzing the user lifecycle, including the activation, retention, dormancy, and resurrection phases, and deploying experiments to improve the lifetime value (LTV) and decrease product churn
- Trying to upsell users at the right time by triggering offers based on in-app events
Combined with data-driven decision-making, experimentation allows product growth teams to drive products to reach the next level of scale, impact, and profitability.
Pro tip: use Contentsquare’s Heatmaps and Session Replay to identify underutilized features and meet your product adoption goals. You can watch how users navigate your product and see what's working and where they're getting stuck. This helps you pinpoint which features and elements they’re ignoring, so you can prioritize making them findable and user-friendly. Just released a change? Watch replays to check it’s working as expected |
5. Growth product management involves cross-functional teams
A product growth team's job is to identify the little things that might fall through the cracks and affect the customer experience. They may work on new ways to help customers discover new product features, or to identify unexpected use cases, which would open up new opportunities.
To get this done, a growth PM should work with a dedicated, cross-functional team to strategically run product prioritization initiatives, select experiments, and define measurements. Otherwise, putting ideas and strategies into action may be harder than it should be. Regular, transparent communication is vital to ensure a harmonious and productive growth process.
This cross-functional collaboration can include engineers, designers, marketers, and data scientists who work independently from other product teams. The team might focus on one particular phase of the funnel, such as acquisition or retention, or own the whole funnel and connect with various other company resources depending on the current initiative.
For example, if the goal is to increase the activation rate of a freemium model product, the core product manager of that product will be involved to some degree. The product growth team might also work closely with the sales and customer service/support teams to understand what speed bumps the customers are experiencing, and with product marketers to learn how to best reach and communicate with the target audience.
The product growth team will meet regularly to identify and decide on the highest impact initiatives—and then design experiments, ship improvements, and measure results.
Next steps for growth product management
Growth product management initiatives can vary from organization to organization, depending on maturity and the type of product you’re trying to drive more value for.
If you’re interested in solving customer-facing challenges—like acquisition, onboarding, engagement, and retention—that enable users to get more value, and if you’re passionate about moving numbers upwards, then growth product management might be for you!
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