When a consumer Internet product achieves some kind of scale, there are some product organizations which create a specialized sub-role in the team called product growth. Amid many other product roles like product manager, technical product manager, program manager, project manager, and more, a product growth manager role is often not very clear. After all, each member of the product team, and of other teams of tech, design and various business functions, is working towards growing the product. But if you pay close attention to the underlying scenario when this growth role is created, i.e. product achieving some scale, you get to understand this role more clearly. Let’s examine it in detail.
Product Inception
The first phase of a product is inception, when a proof of concept is created and launched. This is the MVP stage of the product, i.e. it solves for the most pressing need of the most prominent persona of the target user segment, and it is launched with a clear positioning in the minds of that target user segment. Say, for example in a messaging product, at launch the product simply solves for messaging needs of young urban users by offering stickers and GIFs based chat ability. The positioning is of a hep and trendy way to communicate with your friends and make it more exciting with pictures and gestures.
In inception stage, which is also 0-to-1 transition stage of the product, the product offering is a value given to the users in a package that differentiates it with the competitors, if they exist. The product management role may not be played by a dedicated person or a team at this stage. Depending on the nature and finances of the company, one of the members of the founding team, typically the executive leader, takes care of the product vision and product management at this stage.
Product Validation
Post a successful launch comes the product validation phase. This is the 1-to-10 transition stage of the product. The value that the most prominent persona of the target user group finds in the product, this is the stage to validate that other personas would find the same value too. In addition, this is also the stage to validate if the product can solve for other needs of the user too, and enhance the product from the MVP stage. In our messaging app example, let’s say the MVP has good active user base and healthy retention. So in this phase, the product team can decide to enhance the user personas to even non-urban young users. Furthermore, to increase the engagement of these users, product can also start offering more value in terms of files and multimedia transfer and sharing abilities.
At this stage it becomes prudent to have a dedicated team for product management. Identifying user needs of growing user base, prioritizing these needs as per user’s desirability and company’s competencies, and driving their execution, launch and performance measurement, requires focused attention and efforts that only a dedicated product team can manage.
Product Growth or Product Operations
This is the product scaling stage where the product transitions from 10-to-100. Part of the product focus to achieve this scale is on identifying new user segments and innovating new value propositions on the product. The other part of the focus is on capturing more and more portion of the existing target user segment, keeping the active users and returning users counts on an upward trajectory. For most of the products, this latter part is more important as it directly affects the existing metrics and solves for existential questions for the product and the company. Taking our messaging app example, the product team can partly focus on expanding the user segment to other demographics and geographies, or can enhance the value proposition by offering more type of content to share like news or entertainment or sports content, ability to communicate with businesses, ability to make payments, more personalized user experience, and more such innovations. While these initiatives can increase the overall value of the product and the company, they still have an element of placing a bet on the future with more unknowns.
The product team can also equally focus on optimizing the existing value proposition and scaling product operations to a level where capturing more users from the existing target user segment itself doesn’t hamper the user experience. In our messaging app example, product team can streamline the pictorial and gesture based content production and ingestion process, personalize content at demography and even user level, identify pain points of existing personas and solve for them like chat assistant for users not well versed with typing, streamline digital marketing operations for user acquisition, and more such operational activities and processes around existing product ecosystem. The degree of uncertainty around success of these initiatives is a little less, as the list of unknowns is not very long.
This is the stage when the need for dedicated focus on product operations arises. Like the product management discipline itself, this role can either be played by a dedicated individual, or can be played by existing product management team members themselves, balancing between existing operations and new innovations. If a dedicated individual is required to play this role, most probably due to the large scale of the product, we call that individual a product growth manager.
Product growth is a goal that not only demands special attention within product team, but also transcends beyond product organization to other business functions too. Some functions chase it directly, like Marketing, while others chase it indirectly by excelling at their processes to sustain user experience at scale, like Operations. So a product growth manager is a role which aligns all these functions and drives product operations at scale keeping the growing user base in focus.