Why you don’t need a Growth Product Manager

Photo by micheile henderson on Unsplash

Alicia sipped her coffee, the steam fogging her glasses momentarily.

“John,” she began, “we recently made a new hire in our product team— a Growth product manager. Our board was adamant that we needed one.”

John raised an eyebrow, his curiosity piqued. “A Growth Product Manager?” he asked. “Isn’t that just semantics? Isn’t any good product manager supposed to be focused on growth?”

Alicia nodded. “True,” she replied. “But here’s the thing — while all product managers should focus on growth, a Growth PM has a unique, dedicated focus.”

John couldn’t help interrupting. “Unique focus? Do you mean, that the rest of your PMs don’t focus on the same outcomes as the Growth PMs?”

“Well, Growth PMs, specifically dive deep into the data, run experiments, and think about the product in terms of acquisition, retention, or monetisation”, Alicia explained.

“Hmm,” John hummed, choosing his next words carefully. “Seems like your board picked up on a lack of a more data-driven approach in the product team and a lack of focus on the bottom-line.”

Alicia smiled her turn now to carefully choose her words: “You could say that. We’ve been facing challenges in impacting the bottom-line recently. I believe they’re expecting a growth PM to bring a different approach”.

John leaned back in his chair. “I see. Sounds like a move towards the right direction. But doesn’t this underline a significant lack of skills in the PM team?”

Alicia paused, pondering his question. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it? But actually, we’ve always valued analysing our data when it comes to customer feedback. They talk with users as regularly as they can. Our PMs are great at it, but they’re stretched thin across multiple projects. With this new role, we aim to dedicate resources specifically to growth activities without overburdening our existing team.”

“I get it, it sounds like you have a capacity issue “, John exclaimed trying to appear sympathetic. “But, Alicia, don’t you think you’re simply patching up a larger problem? Shouldn’t all PMs have time and be able to focus on such crucial tasks?”

Alicia smiled. “You could argue that, John,” she admitted. “But sometimes you have to be pragmatic. Besides, specialised roles are becoming more common in our field.”

Let’s better end this hypothetical conversation here before the multiple product management dysfunctions suggested within it become too many to handle in a single blog post.

Have you ever had a similar discussion with colleagues? Or have you caught yourself pondering the answer to this blog post’s title before: Why would you need a growth pm specifically?

What is growth?

Before we dive in, firstly, let me clarify that Growth PMs are fantastic, and there is no doubt about the value they can bring to any product organisation. The point of this article is not to undermine the value of the role but to question the motivations behind needing one.

Secondly, let’s define growth in the context of product-based businesses and how it’s generally understood in product management: By growth, I mean the strategic focus on a set of growth variables believed important enough to make-or-break a company’s growth in specific areas.

These variables can be defined differently from company to company but will most often converge on at least three: Most notably acquisition, retention and revenue. A five-fold framework called the “Pirate Funnel” for its acronym “AARRR” was coined by Dave McClure and included activation and referral and later grew to six to also include “Awareness”. Ward van Gasteren expends into the six-fold Pirate Funnel nicely in his 2023 blog post.

I take a different and less sexy interpretation — since I can’t really make a backronym out of its acronym: The “RRRC”, for Reach, Retention, Revenue and Cost. The first 3Rs collectively encapsulate all the above concepts too with Cost being a new addition I personally believe also impacts growth, the reasons for which I will get into in another post.

If you want to dive deeper into the topic of growth product management, look up the following two pioneers: Andrew Chen and Sean Ellis. Andrew Chen’s blog offers numerous articles on growth, while Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacker” and provides valuable resources on experimentation.

The wrong reasons why to hire a growth product manager

Following on from the hypothetical dialogue above and judging by Alicia’s responses and John’s insistent probing you can see how hiring a growth product manager, while well-intended, can often happen for the wrong reasons. However, before you carry on reading remember that engaging in actions for the wrong reasons is not always an issue if net positives can still be created. Just like you can diet solely to fit into a specific outfit rather than for genuine health improvement — you can still end up with improved overall health.

However, hiring a growth product manager carries much higher stakes if done for the wrong reasons because:

1. You are an organisation lead and already have PMs and product teams but are motivated to hiring a growth team because of a series of dysfunctions inside your organisation — that you are probably not aware of. You need to understand and fix the dysfunctions first.
2. You are a product manager and your focus and responsibilities significantly diverge from those of colleagues that have the prefix “growth” in their title. This may indicate that you are not able to focus on the core aspects of the Product Manager job or are missing the conditions, skills and mandate to focus on them.

So let’s have a look at some of the potential dysfunctions that lurk when we find ourselves motivated to suddenly “‘need to do growth” and want to hire “growth-specific-PMs” to complement our team.

1. Your organisation is structured in silos.

Your organisation is structured in distinct silos. You have a Sales team, a Marketing team, and maybe a Customer Success team, while Product is another very distinct team. By very distinct, I mean that each team owns and rigorously develops its own processes. Each team throughs well-intended company-wide comms every now and then to share with others how they work and what their mission is. Most distinctively, each team owns and tracks its own metrics (i.e. KPIs).

If the discipline of generating and measuring growth is about Reach, Retention and Revenue (or any of the growth variables described above) then who should own and measure impact in a silo-ed organisation? Depending on the size and structure of your organisation, what often happens is that most of these Growth-related metrics are owned and tracked by Sales teams (i.e. Revenue targets). Customer Success may adopt Retention metrics while Reach goals might be shared between CS, Marketing and Sales. Since growth metrics are in the interest of the board and investors, both the founding team and finance may also be involved in tracking and owing them. Not to mention external consultants who often come in to advise about the ever-elusive topic of pricing and its impact on Revenue.

This situation raises an important question: if you already have an existing product team or are in the process of building one, and other functions within the organization are responsible for owning and driving the key growth metrics, what specific metrics should your product managers own, and how will they collaborate with the rest of the organization?

2. The product manager’s day-to-day work significantly deviates from the essence of the product manager’s job.

Growth product managers are often considered a specialised discipline within product management that focuses on identifying and implementing strategies and tactics to achieve measurable, sustainable and scalable growth.

Isn’t that the job of all PMs? Just like John in his conversation with Alicia, I’ve already suggested that I consider the “Growth” prefix on a PM’s title to be a semantic rather than essential addition when it comes to executing the essence of the product management job. In essence, the job of a product manager, whether a growth PM or a regular PM, remains the same: Focusing on managing value generated by the product.

We often confuse the specific “roles” we take within different organisations (such as acting as a Product Owner or managing a technical product as a TPM) with the job itself. Marty Cagan regularly talks about the need to distinguish the two and ensure your job’s essence is first understood before applying it to your context.

Regardless of the context in which you operate and the role you take, the fundamental objective of the PM job is always centred around maximising the value generated by the product. If you are taking 90% of your day to write and re-write tickets for developers, you leave a lot of room for interpretation as to whether this about actually about managing value in an impactful way. You can read more about how to think about value management in my article, What are Product Managers good for?

3. Your product team is building features but isn’t pursuing growth.

If the silo-ed organisation structure I’ve described earlier sounds familiar, you already realise that your product team is not mandated to own any of the key growth variables required for Growth management. They instead default to filling that gap by adopting a “request-response” agenda where they attempt to reason with and accommodate every problem or idea raised by customers or stakeholders (including other silos within the organization). This approach can be detrimental as it shifts the focus away from growth-focused decision-making and can result in a reactive, fragmented product development process that never culminates into any real input to the bottom line.

Driven by such an agenda, product development often entails mostly spending time responding to requests and prescribing solutions — such as designing wireframes or developing features. Without filtering these requests through the lens of Growth, prioritisation and trade-off analysis is unlikely to be made effectively or strategically. Without such a lens, product teams revert to prioritising and making trade-offs based solely on the available engineering capacity and most-requested idea. A.k.a: “Doing the most requested thing, when we next can”.

4. You are primarily using qualitative data to make trade-off decisions.

Your teams are actually always keen to talk to customers and understand their pains and aspirations. This might be your product team having interviews with customers and discussing new ideas or your sales and customer success teams proactively reaching out to customers and prospects.

While these are great initiatives, when the majority of discovery activities are primarily based on qualitative feedback, then any new insights risk being heavily biased. Instead, these should be complemented with some quantitative assessment too.

There is no doubt that measuring and quantifying anything is hard. However, when the lack of measuring and quantifying is coupled with the previously mentioned dysfunctional “request-response” approach, it further minimises the chances that your teams will have the space and motivation to engage in anything beyond qualitative validation. They become overwhelmed by the mission of addressing requests and providing responses, leaving little room for other measuring and analysing.

There is no one-size fits all frequency and granularity of measurement that needs to happen in any product-based company. They will tend to vary with the magnitude of interactions your users are having with your product. You should ideally aim for at least a 50%-50% mix between qualitative and quantitative analysis — if not an even higher quantitative percentage to further protect you from bias when you have a lot of interactions or are operating in a bigger market.

5. You’ve been thinking about growth as primarily increasing the number of customers.

Growth is often mistaken for the pursuit of a numerical increase in leads or customers, but this isn’t the case. In the context of product-oriented companies significant decisions about the business’s current and future state (i.e. investment or acquisition) can be derived just by looking at the health and prospects of the four key growth variables Reach, Retention, Revenue and Cost. While the above activities do entail increasing the customer base or converting customers (i.e. impacting Reach or Revenue) growth isn’t limited to these and it should be understood as a widely encompassing driver of essential product and business value.

Having the assumption that growth is defined as or limited to one thing like an increase in customers may encourage you to reinforce dyfunctions in the company such as developing silos further by — for example — enforcing the believe that the pursuit of growth is solely the concern of marketing or sales — i.e. because it is tasked with increasing leads or customers.

How to correctly prepare for growth

All the above are some of the most common dysfunctions. Bringing in a Growth PM team to solve this or move on despite these isn’t the solution; little will be solved if you do, but none of these are addressed. Here is what you can do to fundamentally turn things around:

1. Establish what growth is and pursue it with your product strategy.

Invest in defining and understanding what growth means at your organisation and how everyone can focus their efforts towards it. Determining growth should be straightforward. I suggest doubling down on the following four key topics: Reach, Retention, Revenue and Cost. At various times in the evolution of your business, any single one of these will play a key role in impacting your bottom line.

As a natural next step, ensure that product strategy = business strategy or is at least highly aligned with it. In many cases, the mission and purpose of a product are often mistaken for its strategy. Strategy is different; mission and purpose are at a higher level and can inform strategy. Strategy, however, should be a set of deliberate and higher-level choices that can guide decision-making on the way to pursuing mission and purpose. To guarantee that the decisions our product and other front-line managers will be making in the future are delivering on growth, we should explicitly frame in our product strategy the specific growth variables we should be pursuing.

As a starting point, consider the most important growth variable you need to improve on in the immediate future. Make this your North Star metric and focus everyone’s attention towards it. For example, if you are a dating app then the Average Number of Matches per User might become your North Star because it has proven to be linked with Retention. Paweł Huryn has a great article on what a North Star metric is and how to choose it.

2. Execute strategy with cross-functional, empowered product teams.

Having set a clear mandate for growth in your product strategy, you now need to ensure that this doesn’t get lost during execution. To achieve this, your product teams will need to be empowered to own the impact they can have on growth; namely reach, retention, revenue, and cost.

To guarantee a focus on growth, the organisational silos need to be brought down, and no individual team should solely own and track growth metrics. To effectively achieve this, you need to create genuinely cross-functional teams to transition away from silo-ed structures Most cross-functional teams end up being a mixture of engineers, designers and product people. This isn’t cross-functional enough to pursue the four variables of growth: Reach, Retention, Revenue and Cost.

If your growth funnel resembles the “Pirate Funnel” more — which expands into more growth variables such as awareness, Acquisition, Activation and Referral — it should be even more apparent that a broader set of skillsets need to be employed in each product team to impact all of these areas effectively. Truly cross-functional teams remain small enough to align on a problem effectively while encompassing expertise ranging from marketers, product analysts and UX researchers to sales teams or even financial analysts. The fact that these teams have all the necessary skills to pursue growth is one of the key ingredients that makes them truly empowered to act autonomously, without needing to fall back to silo-ed teams, each with their specific specialisation.

3. Your product management function should be about value management.

Cross-functional teams with as broad a skillset as described above often feel like overkill at first glance or raise the question of whether their broadness of perspectives will be effectively focused. Enter the product manager. Given the product-oriented nature of your business, value management should be consolidated in the product function. After all, this is the primary job of product management; managing the value generated by the product.

After employing the earlier suggestions, teams should by now be more effectively resourced to tackle complex growth challenges. They should also by now have a strategic mandate to help them narrow their focus and Product Managers can finally default to what they were meant to do primarily and best: value management. As I discussed in What are Product Managers good for?, to effectively do so, PMs will need to focus more on the following activities:

1. Discovering what’s valuable, such as combining qualitative and quantitative data to identify bottlenecks in growth variables and formulate a hypothesis on what could be improved — such as if we improve X, we expect to impact Y by Z amount. For example: “By analysing user feedback and conducting A/B tests, we discovered that simplifying the checkout process and reducing the number of form fields could increase conversion rates by 20%.”
2. Assessing to what extent something is valuable by doing trade-off analysis, and taking hard decisions about which outcome would be more important to pursue given the strategic growth objectives.For example: “After conducting market research and analysing the potential ROI, we decided to prioritise developing new features over bug fixes to capture a larger market share and drive revenue growth.”
3. Creating a focus on what’s valuable, rallying the team to narrow their focus towards the given goal while aligning with stakeholders to ensure the whole organisation is aware of decisions and direction. For example: “By conducting user research and sharing customer insights across departments, we aligned the entire organisation on the importance of delivering a seamless mobile experience, resulting in increased user satisfaction and higher retention rates.”

4. Analyse and measure growth indicators

As we’ve already established, to be able to focus on growth deliberately, you need to prioritise quantitative analysis and regularly measure anything that impacts your key growth variables. That means periodically analysing your data about product interactions to discover trends and patterns that might be impacting one of these variables.

The implication, of course, is there will be multiple of these patterns to look for that knowing what to measure often becomes harder than measuring. To help with that, you need to maintain and measure a collection of more granular KPIs that have or can be proven to impact the bottom-line growth variables such as RRRC (Reach, Retention, Revenue and Cost) For example:

• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) example: By improving the customer support process and achieving a higher CSAT score of 90%, customer retention rates increased by 15%, leading to higher revenue through repeat purchases and positive word-of-mouth referrals.
• CES (Customer Effort Score) example: By streamlining the onboarding steps and reducing the effort required to get started, the CES score improved by 20%, resulting in increased user adoption and usage, ultimately leading to higher revenue generation.
• Onboarding Steps Completed example: By optimising the onboarding process and ensuring that users completed all essential steps, the percentage of users who completed the onboarding increased from 50% to 80%, resulting in higher user engagement, improved retention, and increased revenue.

Do you still need Growth Product Managers?

Let’s reiterate: Growth PMs are fantastic. Bringing on board a GPM with a tested and trusted growth-oriented mindset can significantly facilitate the adoption of the tactics discussed above. However, recruiting a Growth PM or an entire growth team isn’t the silver bullet. The key takeaway from all the above fundamental, growth-oriented actions is that every Product Manager should have the space, ability, and responsibility to implement them, regardless of their specific titles, and the organisational structure should effectively enable a focus on growth. This is why you should first ensure that PMs are zeroing in on the right objectives. Moreover, your organisation’s structure and alignment should foster a laser-focused commitment to growth. Then you can hire a GPM too.