AMA: Nuvemshop Director, Product Growth, Bruno Gobbis on Growth Product Management

I get this question a lot, and I'm a little wary of resource lists because PLG has gotten over-theorized — at some point you just need to ship. That said, these are the ones I actually re-read or send to my team: Books: Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown (the closest thing to a foundational text — the experimentation cadence chapter alone is worth the price); Product-Led Growth by Wes Bush (a good primer if you're transitioning from sales-led); Hooked by Nir Eyal (less PLG-specific, ...Read More

Good one. I've worked on growth teams at very different stages — Superhuman (a small, focused team), RD Station (much larger), now Nuvemshop — and the principles that hold up across all of them are pretty short: Move at the speed of learning, not the speed of building: A growth team's output isn't features shipped, it's learnings generated. If a small experiment teaches you something fundamental about your users in a week, that's a higher-leverage week than a polished feature launch that taught ...Read More

I've hired a few growth PMs across companies, and I've made enough bad hires to have a strong opinion here. The role is genuinely different from a core PM — it's not just a label. Analytical fluency: A growth PM has to be comfortable in the data. Not a data scientist, but someone who can pull cohorts, read funnel reports, spot a statistical artifact. If they need to file a ticket every time they want a number, they'll be too slow. Experimentation instinct: They need to think in hypotheses, not f ...Read More

Every growth team I've been on has more ideas than capacity, so the prioritization muscle ends up being more important than the experimentation muscle itself. With AI, we are stretching where we can go and how much we can deliver, but still this is a crucial skill to master. Map the funnel first, ideas second: Before scoring any single experiment, I want to know where the funnel is bleeding. If activation is at 22% and the industry benchmark is 40%, that's where the leverage is — not on a CTA te ...Read More

Good question — this is something I've thought about a lot, because growth PMs and core PMs can either reinforce each other or step on each other's toes depending on how the metric tree are drawn. In my experience, the cleanest model is to share the top-line outcomes and divide the input KPIs underneath them: Shared north stars: Both growth and core PMs should care about the same business north star — usually active customers, revenue, or retention at the company level. If growth is optimizing o ...Read More

I get this question a lot, and I think the definition has gotten muddied because every SaaS company now claims to be PLG. So let me share how I think about it -> Product-led growth is when the product itself is the primary engine for acquiring, activating, retaining, and expanding users — not sales, not marketing campaigns, and not a CSM team. The product does the heavy lifting (most part). A few things I find useful to clarify: PLG is not the same as freemium or self-serve: Plenty of freemiu ...Read More

Love this question — and one I get asked often, usually from founders who feel they "should" have a growth PM because everyone in their YC batch does. So let me push back on the timing question itself first: it's less about when and more about whether you've earned the leverage. In my experience, you're ready to add a growth PM when most of these signals are true: You have evidence of product-market fit: This is the hard prerequisite. If your retention curves don't flatten and your "very disappo ...Read More

I'll answer both honestly. The roadmap process for a growth team looks meaningfully different from a core product team, and I'm not sure any version "works well" in the absolute — but here's the version I find least broken: Quarterly themes, not quarterly features: Core teams can roadmap features 6 months out. Growth can't — by the time you ship a quarter-out feature, the experiments you ran in week 1 have changed what you thought was important. So we set a quarterly theme (e.g., "improve activa ...Read More

This is basically the day job of growth, because growth touches everything — marketing, engineering, design, data, sales, support. Here's what I've found works: Shared problem, separate solutions: Start every quarter with cross-functional alignment on the problem — not the solution. If marketing thinks the issue is brand, sales thinks it's pricing, and product thinks it's onboarding, you'll never align on initiatives. I usually run a half-day workshop at the start of each quarter where we look a ...Read More

I love this one — kickstarting growth for an early-stage product is fundamentally different from optimizing growth at scale, and a lot of frameworks don't translate. Don't kickstart growth before product-market fit: Hard rule. If you don't have evidence that users come back on their own — retention curves that flatten, "very disappointed" scores above 40% — you don't have a growth problem, you have a product problem. I've seen too many seed-stage teams hire a "growth person" to drive top-of-funn ...Read More

This is one of the trickiest parts of running a growth program inside a company — and I'll be honest, you can never fully isolate experiments. But you can get close. Centralized experiment registry: Every experiment going live anywhere in the product gets logged in one place — owner, hypothesis, audience, dates, expected metric impact. At Superhuman we used a shared review process (slower, high quality/control); at Nuvemshop we use a more structured tool and a centralized place to updates (faste ...Read More