What is Growth Product Marketing and how is it different? What are ways a PMM can demonstrate expertise in Growth PMM?

Growth Product Marketing focuses on driving feature adoption, activation and retention while Product Marketing is focused on the initial product launch and go-to-market moment.

The primary goal of Growth Product Marketing is to help customers achieve the "realized value" of the product and maintain "ongoing value" to prevent customers from churning. This is accomplished through ongoing tactics such as implementing growth experiments, executing adoption campaigns through channels like SEO, SEM, email marketing and in-product adoption, creating viral loops (like a referral program) and using data and analytics to optimize their efforts.

While a Product Marketing Manager is responsible for leading the development of the go-to-market strategy for a product, which includes establishing product-market fit, creating positioning and messaging, competitive analysis, content creation, sales enablement, pricing and packaging, and basic product adoption measurement.

Growth can mean different things in different orgs. In some orgs, a growth person owns acquiring new users (with performance marketing or ads, and so forth). In other orgs, growth helps with proposing and testing different growth levers (e.g., an invite-a-friend option in-app, adding signup-for-free CTAs to collaboration opportunities such as an email a Calendly meeting invitee receives). Sometimes, growth owns the lifecycle marketing from signup to first-time user experience in app to emails and in-app messages weeks after the user signups.

Growth product marketing generally helps with one or more of the above. At InVision, I helped with all of the above.

I recommend getting your feet wet in growth PMM by offering to share a KPI with a department/staffer helping with one of the above. For example, you could go to whomever is in charge of acquiring new free users and offer to share a KPI (perhaps write social-ad copy) of theirs for the upcoming quarter. You could go to a product manager owning in-app growth levers (invite-a-friend call to action button) and offer to help with some customer research around what they're doing. Approach your email manager and offer to help test various experiments around the initial emails a new sign-up receives. 

Traditional Product Marketing and Growth Product Marketing should be complementary functions. When done successfully, a Growth Product Marketing team will be more focused on rapid experimentation and growing user engagement metrics, and less focused on product development and product launches. And vice-versa for the traditional PMM team. Both teams will still engage in consumer insights, research, analytics, and planning activities equally. 

That said, both teams will likely do all the activities listed above, but the mix of those activities will look different. 

I'd propose something like this.

Growth PMM

• 60%: rapid experimentation and growing user engagement metrics
• 20%: product development and product launches
• 20%: consumer insights, research, analytics, and planning

Traditional PMM

• 60%: product development and product launches
• 20%: rapid experimentation and growing user engagement metrics
• 20%: consumer insights, research, analytics, and planning

Growth Product Marketing is an emerging role, especially impactful at companies that have a strong Growth Product arm. As a Growth PMM, you should be mapped to a Growth Product team and support the team in the same ways that a traditional PMM does. As a Growth PMM you’ll be working closely with the Growth Product team on experiments, tests, and research to improve user metrics. As a point of distinction, I wouldn’t expect a Growth PMM to be doing a ton of “big launches” for core products.

To demonstrate expertise in Growth PMM, I would lean into your ability to analyze data to understand opportunities for growth and pair that with your deep understanding of the customer. You’ve got to be data-driven, understand the fundamentals of experimentation, and have solid marketing channel performance chops. That's what will set you apart in Growth PMM.

Growth product marketing is a specialized type of product marketing that focuses on driving the adoption and growth of the product by leveraging data, experimentation, and optimization to identify and test new growth opportunities. 

Growth product marketing is different from traditional product marketing in that it is more data-driven, focused on experimentation and optimization, and focused on identifying and pursuing growth opportunities, rather than just launching and promoting the product.

Answering the second question, there are several ways that PMM can demonstrate expertise in growth product marketing:

• Shine in the understanding of data and analytics
• Being able to use the data insights to identify and test new growth opportunities
• Being comfortable with experimentation and optimization
• Have a "growth mindset" and be willing to take risks, learn from failures, and iterate quickly
• Have excellent relationships with other teams

Overall, growth product marketing is an important part of any product development process, as it helps to identify and test new growth opportunities, track user engagement, and measure the impact of the product. PMM with a passion for data and testing can definitely take on growth direction.