Traits of a Growth Product Manager - Product Thoughts #120

While the term 'Growth Hacking' has certainly exceeded its expiration date, building products around elements of growth certainly hasn't. So it's no surprise that leading a product team focussed on growth requires a particular set of skills I want to discuss today.

Understanding Marketing Mechanics and thinking 'logged-out.'

Working in Growth means to operate at the intersection of Marketing and Product even more than in every other domain of Product Management. Marketing is not only a stakeholder you have to keep informed. Instead, understanding the marketing toolbox and fundamental performance marketing funnels is crucial.

For example, you should know about the most crucial growth terms like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), CPC (Cost per Click), Conversion Pixels, Bounce Rates and which advertising platforms your colleagues utilize and why. This knowledge helps you to put stakeholder feedback into perspective and decide on what to build next. 

Especially when you have been working on the "inside" of a logged-in product, everything before the registration or login form can feel like a strange world beyond your interest. You not only need to understand how people use your product, but what has brought them to the landing page in the first place.

Mindful A/B Testing

While this is the skill which is most often associated with the term 'Growth,' it's the hardest one to get right. WYSIWYG editors for manipulating your website or app may suggest a one-click effort to run an A/B test, but it's a lot more complicated.

First, you need to make sure that your idea has enough behavioral and visual contrast. All too often, A/B testing is used merely to settle internal conflicts which then leads to the infamous example of testing button colors.

Then you have to apply statistical thinking to analyze and interpret your testing results the right way. This includes, e.g. letting tests run for at least two weeks, reaching a minimum of 500 conversions per variation and looking for statistical significance above 90%.

You maybe hear stories about big companies running experiments only for days or perhaps even hours with a significance goal of 60-70%. It's important to not confuse this approach with a "right" or "wrong" methodology. Often-times these companies know what they're doing, and their company culture supports moving extremely fast. Ultimately, they trust that the accumulation of these experiments will lead to bottom-line revenue growth anyway.

But if you're not Google, Airbnb or booking.com, it's dangerous to desire testing scenarios like this. Most likely, you don't have the company culture, technical infrastructure, and traffic to experiment like this.

Data-informed Decision Making

In growth, you most likely won't act primarily on clearly articulated user problems. Instead, you look for behavior patterns in your data to come up with ideas for creating new experiments. 

You then instead aim for rapid execution and measuring your results, then to craft a flawless user experience.

But even in growth, it pays off to not only look in the rear mirror of quantitative data but to also look ahead by factoring in qualitative feedback. While analytics and heatmaps might tell what people are doing on your landing page or registration form, it won't tell you why they're behaving like this.

Putting your ideas through usability interviews helps you to spot potential side effects of your implementation which prevent your KPIs from picking-up.

Staying Clear of Dark Patterns

Tricking your users into signing up for your service or paid plan isn't a craft you should pursue. While companies like LinkedIn and others popularized this technique a couple of years ago, more and more teams are now trying to stay clear of things like that.

Angel Steger, Director of Growth Design at Dropbox puts it like this:

You can trick users into doing things, but the truth is they're only going to fall for it so many times. Instead, push an experience that addresses the nuances of their emotions — that's when growth will drive repeat behavior and start building user habits.

While your job of working in growth is to improve a set of metrics, you should always aim at sustainably enhancing them. Dark Patterns may help you to create an end-of-quarter hockey stick, but will probably fall short of maintaining that level throughout the year and leaving alone quality aspects like user satisfaction or churn rates often-times dropping as a result of this.

What I read this week

How to make “product principles” more useful

The biggest challenge I see with principles like these is figuring out how to make them specific enough to help us make decisions. The further I get into reading Good Strategy, Bad Strategy the more I realize how much we tend to hide behind nice words, when in most cases those nice words don’t actually change our behavior in any meaningful way. For example:

8 Ways to Focus your Product Team on Impact, Not Features

Big-bang, linear change works in some contexts, but product development is a different beast; it’s very easy to push the wrong buttons and disrupt your change-agent mojo. With that context in mind, here are eight impact-focused nudges that I’ve observed successfully and safely encourage change in a range of organizations.

How we use OKRs on GOV.UK

When a product team starts a new mission, we add the objective to the template. We get together as a team and ask ourselves ‘What does success look like?’ This produces a set discovery and delivery goals to be reached, which usually shape our key results. Since the key results have been produced and agreed by the team as a unit, we have a shared view of how we’ll achieve the objective. Every fortnight a product team will meet with the GOV.UK programme team – senior management for the platform – and report on how they’re progressing. It’s also an opportunity to raise any risks they’ve come across or anything they need from the programme team. Meetings are light touch and only take 30 minutes. Product teams have more time to spend solving problems, and the programme team can offer help where it’s needed.

Take Control of Prioritisation

Technical debt is like your basement is flooding – but if you don’t turn that tap off, you’re wasting your time.

Why Your Product Vision Might Be More Critical Than Your Company Mission

A company mission describes what the company is trying to do in broad, easy to understand terms. These mechanisms have been described as a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) in Jim Collins’ book Good To Great. Companies need a mountain to climb, as Collins put it. This is true, but what mountain you end up climbing, and why you climb it are not the same thing. Furthermore, how you climb it is very important. The distinctions are subtle and yet entirely game-changing in their application.

The Power of the Elastic Product Team — Airbnb’s First PM on How to Build Your Own

In 10 weeks, a cross-functional team — product managers, designers, engineers, and data scientists reallocated from elsewhere in the org — was assembled. There was extensive support from other areas of the company including legal, operations and comms. It was a herculean task for everyone who worked cross-functionally. But two months later, the initial infrastructure was up and running in Cuba. And almost as quickly as it formed, the team was disbanded, with the ongoing work of maintaining Cuban business doled out to existing product areas.

Routines to align squads

Each Friday, Product Designers (6 people) meet during two hours to share projects they want feedback from the rest of the Design team. Ideally, they share one or two elements (research approach, solution decision, scope decision, UX challenge, visual) they want to be challenged from the rest of colleagues.

5 Excellent Ways To Create Your Own Product Management Portfolio

If there is a professional community who has it pretty easy to show their achievements, it is those who build our cities and infrastructures. Headquarters, apartment buildings or bridges are a physical portfolio for these professionals. But what about the builders of the digital world?

Qualitative vs. quantitative user research: the answers you will (and won’t) get from each

How much research did you conduct before launching your last marketing campaign? Or running your last A/B test? Who had the final say on your website redesign? If you want to make better—more profitable—marketing decisions, you need research to back them. Qualitative and quantitative research both have a role to play: together, they give you a rich portrait of what your customers want and need.

John Maeda: “In reality, design is not that important”

“Over half the designers still want to make things beautiful and can’t help it. That’s a built-in competency,” Maeda says. “To a business person that seems irrelevant. To the developer, it’s like, ‘I have to build that.'”

Product Thoughts is a weekly newsletter/digest I send out to over a thousand leaders in product, UX, and business every week. To learn more about previous editions and sign up for it, go to herbig.co/newsletter.