The role of Growth Product Manager is increasing in popularity. In fact, there has been a 425% month over month increase in Google searches for “Growth Product Manager”, according to productled.org. Compared to “core” Product Managers, Growth PMs are typically driven by improving metrics. Their areas of responsibility often span across multiple products as they are tasked with improving things like customer acquisition, engagement, and retention.
Growth PMs need similar skillsets to a traditional Product Manager: prioritization, clear written and verbal communication, empathy for the user, and cross-functional know-how. However, Growth PMs also required expertise in a few more specific areas.
Important Skills for the Growth Product Manager
1. A deep understanding of your funnel and conversion metrics
Growth Product Managers are usually tasked with improving specific company metrics. So it is not surprising that it is critical for the Growth PM to have a firm grasp on the KPI’s for which they are responsible. What is the average conversion rate from a landing page hit to a completed purchase? What are the steps a user needs to take in order to complete that purchase (aka the steps in the “funnel”)? What is the average conversion rate from step to step? Do those metrics differ from the web to native mobile platforms? These are some of the questions Growth Product Managers should be able to answer with ease.
2. Proficiency in testing methodologies
If the first part of Growth Product Management is knowing the key metrics in the customer journey, the second part of Growth Product Management is trying to understand the why behind those metrics. Growth PMs need to be experts in creating hypotheses to make sense of the quantitative data. For example, the data may show that there is a high drop-off point at a certain step in the conversion funnel. Is this because the interface is unclear? Is the call-to-action not compelling enough? It’s a key function of the Growth PM to be able to ideate experiments to help answer these questions.
Additionally, Growth Product Managers need to know the fundamentals of how to run experiments. They should know how to design an experiment that isolates the change they are testing. Growth PMs should also understand things like statistical significance, A/B versus multivariate, and the impact of running tests in parallel.
3. A grasp on the fundamentals of marketing and traffic attribution
Growth Product Managers are generally in tune with the efforts of the marketing team. Alongside marketers, Growth PMs are highly invested in accurately tracking where their traffic is coming from. Growth PMs should be familiar with things like Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) sources, tracking pixels, and Google Analytics to deeply understand how their users are finding their product. They should also be invested in following these users through the customer lifecycle. Customers from traffic source A convert better on our landing pages, but they don’t ultimately complete the signup process. What does this mean? Did the ads they were shown not explain the product well enough? Is there something about this cohort of people that misses the mark on our target customer? It is a function of Growth Product Management to be able to ask and answer these questions through both quantitative and qualitative data.
4. A pulse on the marketplace and the competition
Growth PMs are predominantly working with new customers. They need to not only understand what users are doing inside their product, but they also need to understand the holistic adoption journey. Are users comparing your tool to other tools? Is there something about a competitor's marketing voice that is more appealing? Are there features that are critical to a purchasing decision that isn't being highlighted on your landing page? A critical piece of understanding user conversion is thinking about the user's expectations versus what their experience is when they begin using your product. And a great way to understand expectations is to look at comparative tools in your market - because that's often what your users are doing as well. Additionally, competitive analysis is a great way to spur ideas for how a PM's own product can be improved.
Final Note: Growth Product Management is a subset of Product Management that is fast-moving and outcome-oriented. While this role does have its challenges, it also can be a very high-impact role in an organization. I would encourage anyone wanting to move into Growth Product Management to work on building the skill sets mentioned above, along with traditional product management skills.
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