AMA: Uber Head of Growth Programs, Riders, Sreenath Kizhakkedath on Growth Product Management

Product led growth is evolving as a new principle within many organizations. The concept is to build an amazing user experience that does all the growth. You are not considering user experience and design after building the functionality. It is a key requirement to ship the experience rather than just functionality. This also means that you continuously analyze data on engagement and conversions and constantly make changes to improve all these metrics. 

A traditional product manager is responsible for a specific set of features and functionalities in an application. They focus on building the functionality with great UX. A Growth Product manager looks more end-to-end and identifies opportunities to deliver incremental growth. Let's take an eCommerce website application. A feature product manager might be responsible for the checkout experience. They will be thinking more about building capabilities in checkout (like supporting new payment types). A growth product manager will take more of an end-to-end customer journey perspective and think about capabilities like driving more awareness for other related products in the checkout experience, increasing the average order value, increasing customer engagement and conversion on the checkout pages, etc. A growth product manager focuses less on building a specific component in an application rather more on the customer journey, conversions etc., across all application components. 

Let me answer this more broadly. For any organization, it's important to have alignment across the different functions, including Product Management, Operations, Design, Engineering, and Data Science. You wanted to have a small leadership team that works very closely with shared KPI's and goals. Then the question is more around what projects to work upon to meet the KPIs. This is typically done through a lightweight prioritization framework. There are many industry standards for sprint management and prioritization. The key is to ensure there is the right leadership team with aligned priorities.

Growth product teams are primarily responsible for incremental revenue in consumer applications. They are also accountable for internal metrics that directly correlate to revenue. Examples would be engagement metrics on a page, conversion metrics, user acquisition, retention metrics etc. It's hard to define the most critical metric. A lot of that depends on what the growth team is responsible for. Incremental revenue is a good metric a growth team should own.

Marketing and growth product managers work closely in a collaborative and well-functioning organization. Marketing focuses more on the Go-to-market activities, campaign management, customer journey, acquisition campaigns, etc. Their key metrics are revenue and cost of customer acquisition. The growth product manager shares these KPIs with marketing. The product manager gathers insights from these campaigns and works closely with engineering to build product capabilities that accelerate growth. Together they work as a cross-functional team with shared KPIs.

During the initial stages of the product (launch/product-market fit), the product manager is responsible for Growth. If you broadly think about the different product stages - as MVP, then Product-market fit and then scale. I would recommend adding a Growth product manager when you are ready to scale. 

This is a tricky question. Lots of program managers struggle with prioritization and impact analysis. They also struggle to get alignment on the prioritization across among the stakeholders. Some of the best program managers are good at understanding customer cohorts, their behavior on the application, and what they like & dislike. Not understanding customer behavior leads to bad (or gut-based) product decisions. Almost always, it comes down to first principles. Good product managers invest time learning the customer.

Good at data and insights Ability to identify growth opportunities Ability to quickly test hypothesis Ability to hack through and come up with exciting ideas (big & small) Relentless focus on execution & results Good at product design and User experience Strong team player as this is a heavily cross functional role

This depends on the stage of the product. If the product has a solid product-market fit, the KPIs would be around User growth, Engagement, Retention & Revenue. Its always a best practice to have shared KPIs across both roles. With respect to responsibilities - a core product manager will continue to own the functionality of the product (capabilities, reliability etc). The growth product manager is always thinking of driving awareness, usage and engagement on the product.

The roadmap process is no different from any other product manager. They work closely with marketing, engineering, design, and data science to create the roadmap. There are sprints & prioritization processes for all features. They are focused on continuous experimentation and learning - which is an input into the prioritization process.