Understanding Product Growth & The Tactical Steps to Achieve Success
One might think Product Growth is “Product Management”, “Growth Marketing” or “Product Led Growth”. It’s actually a bit of all three.
Product Growth is the blending of advertising, design, engineering, marketing and product management teams into a single vehicle that is driving towards a single destination. This vehicle enables these teams to work together to ensure the copy, art and code in the web, mobile and other mediums is setup to drive the highest number of valuable customer interactions for a business as possible.
In this world, a TV advertisement would be planned as part of an engagement campaign that is linked to the mobile experience through an on-screen QR code and was actually prioritized as part of the mobile app product roadmap. The advertising, design, engineering, marketing and product management teams were in cahoots on this one.
A Product Growth Framework
This product growth framework is a simple, yet effective tool to ensure your product team is optimizing both the buyer experience and product experience with equal footing and focus. It also acts as the vehicle Product Growth SME’s can use to easily rally their various team members around that might roll up to different organizations internally.
The ultimate goal of this framework is to move all four X’s to the center of the target. There are many levers to pull for your product experience to move the X’s close to the center, but it helps to focus on one per axis per quadrant until you have data to support your claim to make a change. Here is a version with levers instead of metrics.
If you are wondering what the value to use for “High” and “Low” on each axis of the metrics version is, this requires some extra work on the Product Growth SME’s part to figure out the ranges on each axis that make sense for your business. This part is difficult for Product Growth SME’s as it is very dependent on your industry and competition.
The high end of each range should be 10% above the brand leader in your industry. The low end of each range should be 10% below the brand that is in last place within your industry. The easiest way to find out what these are is to run an independent and anonymous survey using people in your industry and perform market research (see 10k’s from their SEC filings and publicly available interviews) to get a sense of what a v1 set of values could be that you then fine tune from there.
Who is a Product Growth SME & Where Do They Fit in on Your Team?
I read an article published by Clement Kao, a Product Manager at Blend that I think perfectly encompasses who a Product Growth SME is in a clear and concise set of words. (Source)
“Obsessively Quantitative & Creatively Qualitative”
They should be experts at understanding the intersection of product and marketing and should be able to build bridges between various teams to enable them to work together. They understand just how much higher your acquisition, conversion, engagement and retention (A.C.E.R.) metrics could be if the various pieces of your core product team worked together more seamlessly. They are relentlessly motivated to make that happen for your team.
A Product Growth SME is a member on your product team rolling up to your Product Owner or Product Manager like any other member on your team. The big difference here is that you give a resource dedicated bandwidth to stay laser focused on growing A.C.E.R. metrics and the gaps holding you back. There are so many other things a Product Manager / Owner has to focus on. This can be very valuable to product teams that manage larger and/or complex applications.
What Does a Product Growth SME Do Tactically Speaking?
A Product Growth SME spends all their time measuring how your product is performing within the four core pillars of any product experience (A.C.E.R. metrics). At the same time, they are holding strategy sessions and moving along the bridges they have built between product management, marketing, advertising, design and engineering teams to make adjustments to your engagement campaigns and habit-forming feature(s).
In order to figure out what the right adjustments are to make to these dials, Product Growth SME’s use product intelligence (more commonly known as product analytics) tools to understand what your users are doing so any adjustments shift the product experience to be more in line with your customers motivations.
Further, there are other tools that Product Growth SME’s need to be experts in using to make these adjustments. Mainly these tools consist of a Customer Data Platform, Engagement Platform, A/B Testing, Deep Linking/Attribution and Location Data, among others depending on your business goals and industry.
These tools allow brands to collect, clean, connect and act on data generated by users on your digital properties. Product Growth SME’s are the orchestrators of tools and teams within your product ecosystem and are typically experts at optimizing both the buyer and product experience alike.
One of the hardest things for a Product Growth SME is to form the cross-functional team and culture on top of these tools to maximize the value they can generate together. The trick is to use these tools (especially the engagement platform) and clever analogies to align advertising, marketing, product, design and engineering teams together around a common north star metric. The product team that can transform culture will always win out over those that cannot.
What Should Product Growth SME’s Not Do?
1. Don’t give advice in areas where you are not qualified to do so.
Product Growth SME’s sit at the intersection of many different competencies and are often speaking through frames that are informed by many different specialized perspectives. If a Product Growth SME adds their own advice to the frame, it should be centered on language that pertains to their skillset, not the others you are representing. Don’t make recommendations on design improvements for example. That should come from your design team.
2. Don’t underestimate the difficulty in building the bridges between different organizations in your business.
These bridges enable your team to be rowing together in the same boat towards a single destination as opposed to three separate boats all rowing towards that same destination independently. There is a multiplier awarded to the teams who do it effectively.
3. Don’t focus on too many growth plays at once.
Strive to be great at a small number of growth plays and learn how to wield the power of focus. One of the best ways to wield this power is to think about it as a game of Battleship. At the beginning of any digital product’s initial launch, the location of the best growth ideas is unknown. Product Growth SME’s work with their product teams to “fire missiles” over the top of the gameboard and measure to see if they hit anything using the product intelligence platform.
It’s best to keep firing in a smaller, well-defined area so you don’t waste any of your tests as opposed to spraying in random directions. Further, measuring the results and using them to inform your next move is the quickest way to strike pay-dirt. (Source)
In summary, product growth is a specialized function on your product team that has dedicated bandwidth to increasing usage, demand and revenue within your digital channels. In your product ecosystem, they are the orchestrator of tools and teams and enable the unification of the teams skillsets into a whole that is greater than the sum of any of its individual parts. The bellwethers of our digital future will be underpinned by product teams who create a culture of working together so closely, the different organizations represented in the wider product team are indistinguishable.
About the author
Tim is the lead of Bottle Rocket’s growth practice and an active thought leader on digital product growth in the marketplace.
About Bottle Rocket
Bottle Rocket is a digital experience consultancy that provides business strategy, product, design and technology services that drive business results and exceed customer expectations. We are proudly part of the WPP & Ogilvy Worldwide Network. To connect with Bottle Rocket, visit us at bottlerocketstudios.com or drop us a note at hello@bottlerocketstudios.com.
Sources
#1 — https://productmanagerhq.com/growth-product-management/
