Growth Product Manager: Roles and Skills

Growth product manager. We know what you’re thinking, “product manager? 

What in the world is a growth product manager?” 

The growth product manager is the person in charge of driving customer acquisition and revenue growth. 

A growth product manager strongly focuses on the product side of things and works closely with sales, marketing, engineering, and all other departments within the company. 

A growth product manager is responsible for driving the growth of their product by performing three main tasks: 

• Make a detailed plan with their team 
• Get it done
• Isolate the results

Having product management software to carry out these tasks is a must!  Chisel is a primary app for product managers to create roadmaps to build team alignment and collect customer feedback. 

Sign up today and get the best benefits to manage your projects effectively. 

Let us learn more about growth product managers in this article. 

What Is a Growth Product Manager?

A growth product manager, often known as a “product growth manager,” works on lowering value impediments to improving a business metric or objective (acquisition, engagement, retention, recommendation, or profitability).

A growth product manager is involved in addressing customer problems in the same way a traditional product manager does. Still, they prioritize efforts that create the most substantial business impact.

A growth product manager should have a dedicated team of engineers, researchers, and UX designers who collaborate to prioritize initiatives strategically, create experiments, and establish metrics. 

Based on the prevailing effort, this cross-functional team communicates with various additional organizational resources. 

Making a good economic case for initiatives is crucial for managers who need a team dedicated to acquiring access to corporate resources influenced by a prioritized initiative. 

Growth Product managers must understand the nuances of revenue, from creating pricing plans to using pricing metrics to determine the best price points. 

Long-term, you want to boost product income.

For instance, a product manager probably owns and is accountable for an email marketing product’s performance. 

A growth product manager will be in charge of a particular business statistic, like increasing the ratio of freemium to premium email users from 50:1 to 10:1.

While they work closely with the product, their job differs from that of the product manager.

They will be less keen on critical product tasks such as code cleanup to make the product more long-lasting. 

Their responsibilities might extend beyond the scope of a single product to marketing teams and, in some cases, complementary goods owned by the company that contributes to the firm’s ultimate purpose.

When Are Growth Product Managers Needed?

Hiring a growth product manager happens when a high-quality product is already on the market. 

The company wants to expand its customer base, improve revenue, or expand into other markets.

In most cases, the growth product manager will be assigned a particular task. They will be growing the customer base by a specific percentage, pushing freemium users to upgrade to premium, boosting customer lifetime value, and so on.

They will undertake research and experimentation to determine which activities will significantly influence attaining this goal. Their perspective will encompass the entire customer journey, from advertising and acquisition to engagement and development, rather than when the user uses the product.

A growth product manager’s default working technique will be agile. They will test many ways to discover which will be the most productive and then execute them iteratively while monitoring the results. They’ll try a lot of various things before focusing on high-impact projects.

Although the actual responsibilities of a growth product manager vary depending on the product and the company’s objectives, the following are some of the actions that a growth product manager might undertake:

• They are creating new customer acquisition techniques to entice more potential consumers to interact with the product.
• To improve client connections and enhance revenue, develop customer retention activities and upselling techniques.
• Examine customer segmentation methods to discover if there’s a better way to characterize why customers use the product and, as a result, better coordinate messaging to drive growth.
• Using behavioral psychology to improve customer funnel features and A/B testing to test different techniques to move customers more effectively down the funnel.
• Onboarding interactions are modified to help clients get more value from the product quickly.
• Identifying alternate “wow moments” may be more effective in getting participants to interact with the product more intensely.
• Examining add-ons that provide value to customers while generating profit for the company.

Growth Product Manager Skills

A growth product manager’s capabilities to achieve their objectives are known as growth product manager skills. 

Hard skills are directly relevant to marketing, such as using marketing analytics software, interpreting A/B testing findings, and planning a marketing campaign. 

Soft skills, such as excellent communication and task prioritization, are personality-based talents that can assist a growth product manager in being more productive.

Experimentation and Quantitative Analytics

As a growth product manager, the most critical set of skills to have is a strong emphasis on numbers. 

You won’t be able to create a long-term influence if you demonstrate that your activities are creating growth.

That implies you must be well familiar with all of your pirate metrics. 

You need to know how each of your experiments progresses and what benchmarks in adjacent industries and competition look like.

You should also be scientific in your approach. After all, if you aren’t scientific, you jeopardize the overall product.

You can not make any modifications since any change will have an instant and potentially irreversible effect on income.

To separate the influence of your experiment, you must carefully construct tests that ensure that the main product acts as a control.

That means you’ll need to be an expert in experimental design. 

Which experiments do you think you’ll be able to execute concurrently? 

What experiments must be kept apart from one other? 

How long will it take for your test group to return to baseline behavior so you can utilize them again? 

What biases did you add to selecting your test vs. control groups?

Inventiveness

When a growth product manager initially joins an organization, there is a lot of low-hanging fruit for them to pursue. They can create new drip campaigns, run A/B tests on layout and content, and do many other things that don’t affect the main product.

However, after a little while, most of the accessible possibilities will have been taken advantage of. 

As a result, growth product managers will have to think outside the box. They can’t depend on unlimited repeats of modest copy edits since these trials will eventually stop yielding results.

That implies they’ll have to develop new product features that don’t give the user new superpowers but are crucial to the company’s success.

Growth product managers will be unable to develop new strategies to boost their metrics if they lack innovation.

Focusing on the User

Growth product managers have a keen understanding of what it takes for users to succeed.

For instance, Facebook discovered that getting to seven friends in ten days was their aha moment for new users. 

Users stayed on Facebook for considerably longer after realizing the value of adding friends.

Understanding the essential activation criterion for new users was necessary for the performance, given the breadth of the product suite. They might have emphasized the improper behaviors as part of onboarding if they hadn’t done so.

Marketing Know-How

Dropbox is well-known for its rapid growth thanks to its referral scheme. They paid users for referring friends with more free space and giving their friends extra free space for accepting an invite.

You need to reward both the referring user and the user who accepts the invite in this two-sided referral scheme to display robust marketing expertise.

After all, consider the user who referred you. If the referring user were the only ones who benefited, they would be hesitant to recommend Dropbox to their friends. Instead of feeling like a great friend, they’d feel like a marketer.

However, if their friends benefit, the referring user will no longer feel as though they are intruding on their pals. 

Now that they’re doing the polar opposite: they’re improving the lives of their friends! They’re considerably more likely to refer someone now.

User research, psychology, sales, and marketing are all skills that growth product managers must possess. They must comprehend why customers desire to utilize the product and what prevents them from obtaining value or inviting others.

Teamwork, Respect, and Transparency 

Product managers responsible for growth products must work closely with one another. They’ll be focusing on features that belong to other teams, and they’ll have to persuade them that they’re having a positive influence and acting ethically.

A growth product manager who fails to build a connection with their core product manager colleagues will have a tough time driving their concepts to the end of the race. 

For growth product managers to take immediate action, they must acquire the trust of the primary product team. After all, a growth product manager who can’t deliver results quickly isn’t worth their weight in gold.

Growth Product Manager vs. Product Manager

Traditional Product Manager and Growth Product Manager have a lot of common ground, and they both primarily deal with customer and product-related activities. Nonetheless, they differ.

To be clear, Growth Product Managers are primarily responsible for overseeing business-oriented growth efforts, whereas the core Product Manager’s focal point is the consumer within the product.

If a product manager is in charge of a product, the growth Product Manager is in order of the product’s growth metrics and commercial objectives.

Let’s take a closer look at the differences between these roles.

People use a product to address their difficulties, and the term “opportunity” is crucial in this case. 

When a traditional product manager discovers new possibilities, a Growth Product Manager looks for the most effective ways to deliver them.

Product managers, for example, are in charge of a product’s overall performance. 

Significant product operations, such as code cleanup or minor design modifications, are fundamental.

On the other hand, the growth Product Manager focuses on new user activation and happiness, examining what works and what doesn’t. Their job is to improve relevant statistics by conducting experiments to find the best possible alternatives and analyzing the results. 

Furthermore, the PMs domain’s expansion is wider than just a single product. They may also be responsible for a marketing team or other items that a company offers.

To optimize marketing and product engagements, growth Product managers rely primarily on technology to swiftly spin up new research to evaluate their theories. They rely extensively on A/B testing tools for simple online and front-end message variants.

As you can see, they both work in the product industry, but their responsibilities and areas of focus are entirely different.

How To Strengthen Your Skills as a Growth Product Manager:

Obtain Marketing Knowledge

Getting job expertise in multiple marketing positions is one method to develop your skills to become a growth product manager. 

Several growth product managers begin their careers in entry-level or associate marketing jobs, such as marketing coordinator or social media manager, to get experience in analytics, strategy development, and other essential marketing skills. 

As a marketing or product manager, you can earn mid-to upper-level marketing expertise while honing your leadership and communication skills.

Form a Professional Relationship With a Mentor

A mentor may provide you with advice, solve your problems about your professional path, and connect you with marketing resources and relationships. 

Your mentor might be a senior marketing executive at your present company, a previous marketing professor, or a growth marketing consultant. 

Mentoring is a relationship that involves patience, collaboration, and understanding on both sides to succeed, but it can assist you in determining your perfect professional path.

Final Words

The Growth Product Manager function differs from one firm to the next, as do the goals given to the position. 

But, in the not-too-distant future, businesses will employ both Product Managers and Growth Product Managers. 

Even though growth product managers are primarily concerned with the company and core product managers are concerned with the consumer, the two must collaborate to increase the product’s value.