What is a growth product manager?

A growth product manager identifies the company’s growth opportunities and ensures the business drives to meet them. They will work to significantly improve a specific business metric or commercial goal by solving problems – e.g., to grow revenue, acquisition, retention or referral.

• Revenue is the money received from usage of the product
• Acquisition is identifying new customers for your product and getting them to use your product
• Retention is applying techniques to encourage your existing users to stay customers of the product over an extended period of time
• Referral is when existing customers of the product introduce new users

What are the main objectives of a Growth Product Manager?

To understand the market

The growth product manager will need marketing and analysis skills, including understanding where the product fits in the market, how to showcase its features, and what the right price is to drive consumers to engage continually over time.

To define the growth priorities and direction

The growth product manager will understand the sales and marketing funnel from awareness through to user acquisition and customer retention. The growth product manager will analyse consumer behaviour and data at each stage of the funnel, using A/B testing techniques to optimise the movement of customers through to the next stage. To do this, often the GPM will pull data from various sources into dashboards using Saas analytics tools, to track the metrics, and improvement measures over time.

Work cross functionally

A GPM will need to work with engineers, analysts and user experience designers to use data gathered from the funnel analysis to create a plan to combat current inefficiencies. This will include what experiments to run, how to measure success, and how to prioritise the roadmap against company objectives.

To increase business profitability

This can be achieved through encouraging users to upgrade packages, gaining new users, expanding into new markets and locations, and increasing the lifetime value of existing users.

Hiring a Growth Product Manager

Google Trends have reported a 425% increase in average monthly interest for the search term ‘growth product manager’ over the last 5 years. So there is interest in the market for this position.

What types of questions are likely to be asked at interview stage?

It’s likely the focus will be on previous experience and results in reference to revenue, acquisition, retention and referral, such as:

1. Give me an example of an initiative you have implemented that increased customer acquisition. What did you do, and what were the results?
2. What would you do in our business to drive customer retention?
3. How would you drive cross-sell, up-sell and upgrades within our product?
4. What methods have you used to drive customer referral? Was there any method that did not work?
5. How would you measure success of the product?
6. What metric is the most important to measure for our product and why?

What qualities does a growth product manager need to possess:

• Ability to foster a culture of experimentation and learning
• Cross functional communication between engineering, data science and design
• Problem solving to achieve desired results
• Ability to work with and influence internal stakeholders towards product innovation
• Ability to work quickly and prioritise against objectives
• Deeply analytical and data driven mindset, using results to inform product strategy
• Proactive team player
• Deep understanding of acquisition KPIs and complex funnels

To see what growth product manager jobs we have available, check out our job listings here.