Is Growth Hacking Essential for Product Managers?

Add a new dimension to product management - 'growth' and you become a growth hacker. Let me try to define growth in a single sentence without being superfluous. To put it simply, 'Growth' is a tangible increase in (certain) metrics that determine your online presence. And, what would 'Growth Hacking' mean? When I was a kid, I was told that hacking is a way to find a shortcut, a creative way or an unforeseen method to penetrate a functionality on a web application without following the conventional way. This unconventional way would have to fail the application in its traditional usage. That said, Growth Hacking when applied to a portal or online application would mean discovering alternate or underused ways to increase the popularity in terms of downloads, visits, usage, retention, etc. Unlike conventional ways of marketing, these ways will be experimentative in nature.

Does a Product Manager have to learn 'Growth'?

Isn't growth an inherent component of product management? When you work on any product as a product manager, you are responsible for its success. Success is measured by means of KPIs or metrics. These metrics are often indicators of user behaviour such as new visits, repeat visits, bounce rate, exit rate, page views, sessions, etc. Automatically, when you work as a product manager, you should be looking to study, analyse, define and launch new features depending upon these key metrics. A feature that strengthens your product's user base and increases growth is the priority for a product manager. A visionary product manager not only adds useful functionalities to the product but also introduces features and adopts go-to-market strategies that would increase the user base.

Where does 'Growth' fit into the daily schedule of a Product Manager?

Let's first sketch a regular day in the life of a product manager. From conducting an early morning standup to prioritising a day's work, from sprint planning to writing acceptance criterion for user stories - the tasks are many. But the term 'Growth' per se begins in the lifecycle of a product at the very inception of the product's requirement gathering phase. To elicit requirements, the product manager must be focused on growth. Growth begins at the surveys, discovery workshops, market research and competitive analysis phase. Every product manager must start early and adopt practices that are in sync with bringing more users to the platform.

Once the product development is underway, the product manager should look for ways to develop the product in a way that if there is user feedback later, those can be accommodated and the product can be improved. The product manager must remember to install analytics and measurement tools at every step of the application. The development should go hand in hand with best practices of SEO and the marketing team should be involved in providing the most optimum content to display on the application.

Now that development is over ...

And the most important part begins after the product development is over and we step into the marketing phase where the team brings the product out to the market. The product manager should analyse traffic, study data relevant data points, consider key metrics to improve and then make an action plan to strategize growth. The product manager should work alongside the community & reputation management, sales, customer support and alliances & partnerships teams to work on go-to-market strategies, obtain market feedback, reduce churn and promote popularity.

Moral of the Story:

Now that we've almost understood where to differentiate between a product manager and a growth hacker, we have come to realize that the line is a very thin one. A product manager always has to step inside the shoes of a growth hacker if s/he were to successfully design, develop and launch a product. During every phase of a product lifecycle, there is an element of growth ingrained within it. It there becomes crucial for every product manager to learn the tricks of growth hacking and marketing. Also, recruiters who hire for product management functions should look for growth hacking skills as a mandatory skillset within product managers that they are looking to hire in a B2C product company.