AMA: Upwork Senior Director of Product Management, Jackson Hsieh on Growth Product Management

Great question. 1. One important piece of knowledge is that EVERY PM is responsible for having a growth mindset. Growth PMs are NOT the only PMs responsible for growth. 2. Growth PMs are defined differently from company to company, and some companies don't have titles called Growth PMs. The most common Growth PM team that I've seen is usually responsible for user acquisition. This means they own the product features that help users have a smooth onboarding experience. 3. Sometimes the responsibilities go deeper in the growth process where they are responsible for user acquisition, engagement, retention, and referrals. However, in most cases from my experience, every PM owns a certain piece of the entire product but their responsibility is to contribute to a certain segment of this growth process. For example, I ran a team at 23andme called the Engagement team, where we owned the homepage experience, and our goal was to get our users to engage with our product more often. The more they engaged, the more opportunity we had to upsell them. 

Avoid artificial growth! A good growth PM or a good PM, in general, will only look for sustainable growth opportunities. There was this one time at Yahoo when a bad growth PM said to me, "let's grow video consumption by auto-playing every video on every page." This is a horrible idea because you will grow video consumption at the expense of user satisfaction, and time spent. Doing these types of trade-offs is NOT "growing," it's "trading". A good growth PM would say "hmm let's find real opportunities where videos are not present but should be." 

Off the top of my mind... 1. You MUST understand the difference between artificial growth and sustainable growth. For example, if you ran a publisher site like CNN, and your growth PM idea was to grow revenue by plastering the entire page with Ads, that's not sustainable. You might see revenue initially jump but your users will eventually leave your site. 2. Data-minded - you have to be comfortable with data and have the curiosity to seek more data. 3. Understanding digital marketing is a plus but not a must. You should know some common business sense like if your cost per acquisition is more than the LTV that the user brings, then you have a problem. 4. Being able to work cross-functionally - Growth PMs often find that there are growth opportunities beyond the product they own. Therefore, they have to be good communicators and able to work with other PMs to get work done. 

There is usually one Northstar metric for the entire company, but each team comes up with its own KPI that feeds into the Northstar metric. For example, in a growth process where you have user acquisition, engagement, retention, and referrals, each team might be responsible a piece of this process that all end up contributing to growth. For example with Airbnb, their Northstar is "nights booked". However, they have one team with a KPI to grow user visitations, and another team's KPI is growing the number of listings. Their KPIs might be different but they both contribute to the Northstar metric of Nightly Bookings. 

Great question. It really depends on the phase and type of project you're working on, and what questions you're trying to solve. A couple of examples: For zero-to-one projects 1. The initial idea - The goal at this stage is to find the problem you want to solve. How you get there is by collecting and reading data from multiple sources such as feedback from customers, industry trends, marketing analysis, and competitors' insights. You work with various teams to get this such as your customer care team, marketing team, and product marketing team. 2. Research - Once you've figured out the problem you want to solve the next step is usually deeper research. This includes collecting both qualitative and quantitative. One important type of qualitative data gathering is user research, and this is usually conducted by a user researcher. The research should provide you with more insights from the perspective of the customers. Regarding quantitative data, it's usually up to you, the PM, to know what good proxy data can be used to answer some of your questions. Once you've defined the data you're looking for, you usually work with your analytics team to collect the data. Existing ongoing projects 1. Funnels and Dashboards - Post launch of any new project, you want to track how your product is performing. We usually work with BI to track the economics from a high-level perspective, but we work with our analytics team to monitor each part of the funnel to give us insight when a metric changes. 2. A/B Testing - When you want to make improvements to an ongoing project, PMs often have to conduct A/B tests. We usually work with A/B test specialists that's a part of the analytics team to help validate and set up the test. Then after the test is complete, the specialist will then debrief us on the outcome. 3. Questions lead to more questions - as a PM you'll often find out that one insight will lead to more questions, which leads to more investigation. This is common practice and staying curious is a virtue of being a good PM. 

I see them as partners working together for a common goal to help grow the company. The main difference is that they each have their own responsibilities that contribute to this common goal. * Sales Manager - their responsibility is to directly engage with the customers to close deals. * Business development (BD) - is usually responsible for making new partnerships where 1+1=3. * Growth PM - is responsible make the features that support smooth onboarding, referrals, discounts etc. Analogy (best i can think of right now) - We are a real estate developer with a goal to sell multiple homes we've built * Sales - they bring potential buyers of our house (the product) * BD - they find gardening vendors so that we can charge you an HOA fee * Growth PM - they build the electronic signing documents, and keyless entry lock to insure buyers have a smooth transaction