Congratulations, you've been hired to do Growth!

Fine-print here.

While it's good news that more early-stage companies are hiring a Growth Product Manager to do this PLG thing, many leaders still need to understand the role of a growth PM.

Part 1:
Imagine this: You've been hired as a Growth PM but lack the resources to do any experimentation. Founders/leaders are skeptical of you testing things and blocking crucial engineering resources. You are frustrated, and before you know it, you start looking for a job elsewhere.

If you are starting a new Growth PM position, this is what you need to get right to avoid the above situation :

1. Alignment on your role
I cannot stress enough how important this alignment is. The thing is, startups only know growth = more customers.
A startup leader might think about growth in terms of either acquisition/ lead generation/ adoption/ more recurring revenue, etc. It is your job to clarify what their perception of this role is.
As a Growth PM, your focus should be driving self-serve conversion, adoption, and maximizing revenue. You are not directly responsible for lead generation.

2. Defining product KPIs
The next step is to align on how the product defines certain KPIs such as activation, adoption, engagement, etc.
Do not assume that the company has a clear definition of these indicators. You'll be surprised to see how few companies have data-driven and company-wide accepted definitions of these KPIs.
A big part of your role is to collaborate and align on these definitions with stakeholders and make them widely accepted.
These KPIs will be what you optimize when you run growth experiments.

3. The customer journey
As basic as this sounds, I've observed how few PMs use Hotjar to outline the customer journey. Do you know the drop-off points in your customer's journey? If not, what are you optimizing for? You might have little time initially to get the entire customer journey right, but you can start with your goal for the quarter and work backward. Use the Amplitude chrome extension to chart product data and find the drop-off points in the customer journey.

4. Self-serve data
It's common for early-stage companies to have limited data resources. You may not have the luxury of a dedicated analyst. Learn to self-serve data in Amplitude / Mixpanel, request cohort data in tableau dashboards and funnel charts. These are good starting points for building some hypotheses for early tests.

5. Getting small wins
Also, did I mention you do not have all the time in the world to do the above? A big mistake you can make is waiting for clarity and more direction or a high-level alignment. No one is coming. This is where you need to use that customer journey you created in step 3 and start executing on some low-hanging fruits. Make those minor tweaks, show results, build credibility, and then move on to the larger bets.

Part 2:

Now imagine this: you're entrusted to do PLG, and you assume a big part of your role is to run multiple experiments, be best buddies with your data analyst, and hack away at things. You are going to increase the conversion, adoption, trials, etc. But what if the product doesn't have a free plan or a trial? 😟 Oh, not the role you signed up for?

Here's what you can do if you find yourself in this situation.

1. Launch. Don't test.
   
   Being product-led doesn't always mean your product has a free trial or a free plan. Although it is arguably the best way to experience a product, remember that you have limited resources. So if your product doesn't have a free trial or freemium, what's the best way to ungate the product experience? Create a video tour of your product and put it on the marketing site. If this improves people booking demos, that's a success! You can use this to validate that a free trial or freemium approach might work for your product and BUILD a free plan or trial.
   
   Also, PLG, at its core, is being user-led. So if your product has a free sign-up, but the checkout experience is terrible or customers only adopt one feature because the in-app discovery of other features is bad… maybe that's what you want to fix first. This is like building any other product feature and might not need a test. So, a Growth PM doesn't always have to run "experiments."

2. Setting up analytics.
   
   You could have a free trial and a free plan, and customers can self-checkout. But you are not tracking any events. Because at the time the product was built, data was overhead and not necessary. But now, you don't have any data being tracked to gather insights and measure any KPIs. As a Growth PM, you are responsible for building the necessary tracking of events in the customer journey - sign-up, FTUX, and checkout flow. Be a champion of good data tracking, measuring the success of critical flows, improving those, and verifying those improvements worked.

3. Let's get testing.
   
   Maybe you are the lucky one. Everything above is set, and you need to optimize the sign-up flow and increase conversion and other growth metrics. So, where do you look for ideas to test? Your safe bet is looking at competitors who have a similar model. Try to correlate things that they do well in the area of the product you want to improve and the experience downstream. Build hypotheses based on your product data and launch some quick tests. Ideas can also come from internal teams - Support / Sales / CS - build strong relations with these teams so that you know the areas that can be improved.
  

What has been your biggest challenge starting as a new Growth PM?