Intro to Growth Product Management
Once a product organization finds product / market fit with one of its products, its focus shifts away from building additional “table stakes” core functionality and towards driving growth for that product instead.
Therefore, product managers should ideally have both core product management skills as well as growth product management skills, so that they can seamlessly evolve alongside their product orgs.
A quick set of definitions:
Core product management is focused on creating new features that make up the product’s current and/or future value proposition
Growth product management is focused on optimizing business metrics based on the product’s current value proposition
For example, when Instagram expanded into Reels, the PM who led Reels was likely focused on core product management. Instagram Reels was a fundamentally new value proposition for Instagram, which had previously focused on photo-based stories.
Conversely, the product manager in charge of the “recommend Instagram friends to follow” functionality was likely focused on growth product management. This functionality doesn’t expand on the core of Instagram’s value to users or to advertisers, but the functionality drives increased user engagement based on the existing features of Instagram.
Since products are finding product / market fit more quickly than ever before, growth product management is an increasingly valuable skill set for all kinds of product managers.
In this essay, we’ll first discuss what growth product management is and how it differs from core product management. We’ll then share the kinds of skills that PMs will need to successfully tackle growth product challenges.
The goal of growth product management
Growth product management is focused on making it easier for customers and users to find value in the product. That is, they are most successful when they are optimizing an existing value proposition.
Core product management is all about unlocking new abilities for users, whereas growth product management is all about making it easier for users to find and use these abilities.
Since the core product already exists, growth product management is less focused on user interviews or product/market fit iteration, and is far more focused on A/B testing and metric optimization.
That’s not to say that growth product management is only allowed to fiddle with existing features, however. Growth product management can introduce new features entirely.
For example, Dropbox’s referral workflow and incentives were introduced through the lens of growth product management. As a different example, many integrations with external products are driven through a growth product management lens as a way to capture new users.
Some examples of business metrics that you may be focused on when tackling growth product management:
Acquisition: bringing new people to your product
Activation: helping users understand how to use the product and gain value from it
Retention: keeping users engaged in the long run
Revenue: turning your users into paying customers
Referral: getting users to share your product with others
Now that we understand the goal of growth product management, which skills will we need to bring to the table to tackle these challenges?
Skills for tackling growth product management
We can break down growth product management into three core skills:
Comfort with data and experimentation
Deep product adoption knowledge
Product positioning chops
Of course, many other skills are valuable for growth product management too (e.g. technical comfort, knowledge of UX, leadership & collaboration, etc.). Our specific focus here is on the key skills that differentiate growth product management from core product management.
Comfort with data and experimentation
By definition, growth products have already found product/market fit and have an initial base of customers and users. Therefore, when tackling growth product management, PMs should spend less time running qualitative research (e.g. interviews, surveys, shadowing) and should spend more time running data-informed experiments at scale.
Our goal is no longer to identify which new features to build to gain a foothold with a given customer segment - after all, we have that foothold now with our core product. Instead, the goal is to drive business metrics upwards through iterative optimization.
When tackling the growth phase of a product, PMs need to have clear insight into the performance metrics of their products. And, they need to be scientifically-minded in designing A/B tests to validate hypotheses.
When designing A/B tests, PMs should be asking themselves these questions:
What product change do we believe will change user behavior?
Why do we believe this product change will change user behavior?
How much do we expect user behavior to change by?
How do we know that the metric change was due to the experiment and not due to external factors?
Then, when running these A/B tests, PMs should consider these additional factors: which tests can be run in parallel, which tests must be tested separately, and how long a given test group needs to “reset” to their baseline behavior before they should participate in another experiment.
If you’re looking to strengthen the data analytics chops of your product org, we provide live group workshops to teach these critical skills.
Deep product adoption knowledge
Growth product management cannot happen unless the product manager has a deep understanding of what it takes to make a user successful within their product.
Take Facebook, for instance. They discovered that the aha moment for new users was when they added seven friends within a period of ten days. This moment was integral to long-term engagement. For a successful onboarding experience, Facebook needed to recognize this critical activation threshold for new users; otherwise, they might have optimized for the wrong things e.g. comments, likes, groups, etc.
Similarly, Hinge, a dating app, identified what their specific customers needed from them. Through user research, they found that their customers were significantly more successful when they focused on a single match at a time, rather than when they needed to navigate through all of the different “likes” that they might have received.
Why did this user behavior happen? The team at Hinge found that people were procrastinating on engaging with incoming matches, because there were too many matches happening at once. People were being paralyzed by having too many choices.
Because Hinge acted on this insight, the company was able to drive 4x user growth and 20% increased retention within a single year.
Therefore, when tackling growth product management challenges, understanding how users adopt products can make the difference between success and failure.
Product positioning chops
Product positioning enables products to experience exponential growth. For example, Dropbox skyrocketed in popularity thanks to the way that its referral program was positioned.
The primary goal of the workflow was not to encourage users to refer their friends to Dropbox. Instead, the primary goal of the workflow was to encourage users to receive free extra storage. When a user successfully convinced a friend to use Dropbox, both they and their friends received free storage on Dropbox.
The success of this approach came from its thoughtful double-sided rewards. Without incentives for both the referrer and the invitee, it would be a hard sell for someone to recommend Dropbox to their friends. But when both parties benefit, the referrer no longer feels like they're making a sales pitch to their friends. Instead, they feel like they’re helping their friends out by introducing them to a product that will make their life easier.
When tackling growth product management, our attention should be focused on how to position our existing features and products more effectively, rather than on deciding what new features to ship. We should seek to understand what kinds of pain points our users have, and we should iterate on our product positioning to help users understand that our features are the best way to solve those problems for them.
As an aside, if you’d like to learn more about how to build a successful referral program as a product manager, we cover this topic (and dozens of other ones) in our monthly masterclasses.
Leveraging growth product management skills
Now that we understand what growth product management looks like, let’s discuss how organizations structure their product managers when considering core product management vs. growth product management focus areas.
Some organizations will hire dedicated growth product managers. Their job titles will explicitly denote that this product manager will solely focus on growth product management challenges rather than core product management challenges. These growth PMs will be cross-matrixed with dedicated core PMs, where a growth PM might work alongside multiple core PMs to move a business metric forward.
In other organizations, product managers are expected to evolve alongside the product, and to pivot into core product or growth product based on the lifecycle of the product.
What does this mean for you as a product manager?
If you’re interested in solely focusing on growth product challenges, then we recommend that you seek dedicated growth PM roles. We feature some of these roles on the Product Teacher job board.
Conversely, if you’re more interested in focusing on a product from start to finish, irrespective of its lifecycle maturity, then you will probably want to seek product orgs that don’t differentiate between core PMs vs. growth PMs.
Closing thoughts
If you’re interested in helping people get the most value out of a product, if you love finding ways to improve existing features, and if you’re passionate about increasing usage, then growth product management might be the problem area for you.
And if you’re a core product manager, consider investing in learning growth product management skill sets. It can help you drive increased leverage from your product and help you move into the next stage of your career.
Thank you to Pauli Bielewicz, Mary Paschentis, Goutham Budati, Markus Seebauer, Juliet Chuang, and Kendra Ritterhern for making this guide possible.
