Jackson Hsieh

Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork, Upwork

Content

How do you see growth product manager versus a business development or pure sales roles ? Differences and Similarities ?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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. *......Read More

2032 Views

What do first time growth product managers get wrong, and how do you recommend avoiding those traps?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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 ......Read More

1480 Views

What KPI's do you share with core product managers? How do you divide responsibilities for these KPI's?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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 proces......Read More

1272 Views

How is the role of product growth manager different from other product managers?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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 P......Read More

1064 Views

What skillsets do you look for in growth product managers?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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 ......Read More

982 Views

Can you go over your interactions with other teams (Data, BI, etc...) to obtain the data you need to steer your product? Or do you discover your own data and build your own insights independently?

Jackson Hsieh

Upwork Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork • August 26

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 c......Read More

924 Views

Credentials & Highlights

Senior Director Of Product @ Upwork at Upwork