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

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 ...Read More

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 opportun ...Read More

Off the top of my mind... 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.  Data-minded - you have to be comfortable with data and have the curiosity to seek more data.  Understanding digital marketing is a plus but not ...Read More

Great question.  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.  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.  Sometimes the responsibilities ...Read More

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 t ...Read More

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 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 te ...Read More