Editor's Note: Do you wonder why there are growth product managers? What is the current situation for product managers? How do I become a Growth Product Manager? In this article, the author starts from these three questions and leads everyone to understand the growth product manager more deeply, come and learn together!
The article is divided into the following three parts:
- Why are there growth product managers?
- Analysis of the current situation of growth product managers.
- How do I become a Growth Product Manager?
First, why are there growth product managers?
Growth product managers stem from the professionalization of the concept of "growth hacking," a concept first proposed by Sean Ellis in 2010, sparked by an Andrew Chen blog titled Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing, as more and more Silicon Valley companies recruited growth hackers, formed growth teams, and achieved great success.
This emerging profession is getting more and more attention from the Internet people, and in 2015, Fan Bing's first edition of the book "Growth Hacking: User and Revenue Growth Secrets for Startups" introduced this concept system into China, detailing the practice cases of growth hacking at home and abroad from the five aspects of the pirate indicator AARRR.
Early evangelists defined "growth hacking" as: growth hacking, a group of people who use data-driven marketing, market-oriented products, and implement growth goals through technological means. They often understand both technology and user psychology, and are good at being creative, bypassing restrictions, and solving the early growth problems of startup products through low-cost means.
I learned about the above history when I first joined the growth product manager, but I also had a deep question in my mind: Was there no growth before the concept of 'growth hacking'?
Shi Yuzhu's brain platinum brainwashing marketing has attracted a large number of users, and the creative advertising of madman Ye Maozhong has also brought huge sales to advertisers.
The answer is often seen on zhihu: because the Internet has bid farewell to the era of traffic dividends, in the fierce competition at the moment, it is necessary to refine the operation, and enterprises pay more attention to user growth, resulting in this position becoming more and more popular. But before the Internet era, commercial competition was also fierce, such as the field of health care products, small household appliances and so on.
The Logic of Chinese-style business is: a small number of people smell the blue ocean market opportunities and get rich profits, then many people will follow the trend of imitation, the blue ocean market instantly becomes the Red Sea market, the price war becomes a big killer, when the price drops to no longer be low, it begins to show a variety of moral bottom line lower limits, such as cutting corners, counterfeiting and inferiority. At that time, commercial competition was so cruel that it did not give birth to the position of "growth product manager", so it shows that competition is not the essential reason for the growth of product managers.
So I tried to look at marketing growth from a broader time span, learned about Kotler's marketing theory, and realized that the marketing development process was from extensive to refined, from product-centric to user-centric.
Philip. Kotler's Marketing Revolution 4.0 mentions that marketing is currently divided into four stages:
Stage 1: Meet customer needs – product-centric. When demand outweighs supply, one of the most advantageous means of marketing is to spread the word. Among them, the most interesting is the development history of CCTV Biaowang, when Confucius Banquet Wine won the first CCTV Biaowang with 0.31 billion yuan, and the advertisement of "drinking Confucius Banquet Wine, doing the world's articles" made this unknown enterprise become a well-known brand in the country for a short time, and sales increased explosively
Stage two: attract the customer's heart - consumer-oriented, need to appeal to consumers emotions and image - the birth of the brand. When the relationship between supply and demand is in a balanced stage, marketing begins to focus on product selling points, build brand awareness, and focus on specific consumer groups.
Stage 3: Cater to the customer's mind - cooperative, cultural, spiritual marketing (value-driven). The supply has exceeded the demand, the market competition is extremely fierce, such as the dilemma encountered by Lei Jun when he created Xiaomi, the high-end mobile phone market has been occupied by brands such as Apple and Samsung, and the low-end market has been divided by "China Cool Union" and a number of copycat machines.
Xiaomi's marketing slogan "Born for Fever" quickly gained a sense of identity from target users by promoting corporate product values and quickly gained rapid growth of the brand.
Stage 4: Help customers realize their self-worth. Through digital user behavior, enterprises can more comprehensively and quantitatively gain insight into user needs, tap into users' deeper demands, and organize production and business activities around users' needs and values.
The conclusion is: in the market environment of oversupply, with the fierce competition and the full arrival of the digital era of mobile Internet, the use of new technologies can better understand user needs and refined operations, so as to win the business victory, the traditional human operation has not been able to meet the efficiency requirements and technical requirements, so business owners have appeared the need for more professional positions: growth product managers.
In the early days of the mobile Internet, there was "growth" but no "operation" abroad, and "operation" did not appear in China, which is worth thinking about.
Foreign Internet is led by the elite class (geeks), generally advocating technology-driven, advocating engineer culture, relatively speaking, the domestic Internet development is relatively late, many times are "West learning east copy", it is easy to rush to a certain outlet, competition is extremely fierce, and technology-driven awareness is weak, Internet infrastructure is slightly worse, so it can only be "eight immortals across the sea to show magic", so there is a "operation" basket, what can be packed inside - the surface is disorganized, but in fact, after combing through is ever-changing, It is very dependent on the personality and experience of "people", and the disadvantage is low standardization and great uncertainty.
With the rapid development of the mobile Internet, enterprises continue to accumulate technology and precipitate user operation experience, enterprises pay more and more attention to the construction of growth teams, through the construction of digitalization, gradually get rid of relying on personal experience to make decisions on business operations, so "growth" has gradually risen.
Second, the current situation analysis of growth product managers
Next, we will analyze the current situation of growth product managers from the following five aspects:
- Grow the responsibilities of a product manager.
- Grow the skill requirements of product managers.
- Increase the salary of product managers.
- Grow the job prospects of product managers.
- Recruitment requirements of businesses.
1. Increase the responsibilities of the product manager
In order to better understand how companies position the responsibilities of growth product managers, let's look at three more typical JDs, which are derived from the latest job descriptions of growth product managers by Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba.
Tencent - Senior Product Manager, Wealth Management User Growth:
ByteDance - User Growth Product Manager (Data Labeling Direction):
Alibaba - outbound traffic undertaking products:
Although the recruitment responsibilities of each company are different, in general, they are mainly divided into four types:
(1) Responsible for customer acquisition through marketization
Focus on the early and middle stages of the user life cycle: user acquisition, taking into account user activation and virus spread, through the operation of each channel and conversion rate optimization and a/b testing, to achieve the effect of maximizing the number of users. More common is the product manager of advertising growth, mainly responsible for large-scale customer acquisition;
(2) Responsible for customer acquisition through product force
Focus on the middle and late stages of the user life cycle: activation and retention, through the embedding of growth and virus propagation mechanisms within the product, a/b testing to optimize the critical path, improve the utilization of functions, so as to maximize active users;
(3) Responsible for obtaining customers through technical means
Emphasize the background of engineers, to have a deeper understanding of technical means, mainly focusing on: SEO, API, collection, UGC, big data, virus transmission, a/b testing, etc., scale to promote the boundaries of growth;
(4) Responsible for building growth system tools
Provide general marketing capabilities, marketing data acquisition and analysis capabilities for multiple businesses. The online functional modules of common marketing middle offices include general-purpose marketing tools (card coupons, point systems, event games, etc.), push tools, activity monitoring tools, marketing data boards, etc.
In addition to the above growth functions, growth product managers also need to take into account the functions of "product managers", such as: combined with the market competition situation and business development situation to set development goals and stages, and disassembled into executable paths, can get phased results with the team more efficiently. Organize and coordinate design, development, testing, marketing, operation and other related team resources, and promote cross-departmental collaboration to achieve the goal. Responsible for product work related to increasing user volume & order volume.
According to a 602 job posting announcement analyzed by GrowingIO in 2019, they found that "data analytics" became the first point of responsibility for growth roles, followed by "operations around the user lifecycle" and "increased activity". At the same time, "deep and unique understanding of the Internet" has become the most frequently mentioned job requirement, followed by "curiosity", "Growth experience" and "execution".
For all the growth product manager positions, they analyzed the job descriptions and found that the most mentioned keywords were, in order:
This also confirms the description of the above 3 positions: growth product managers need to support or be responsible for business indicators, find growth points at all stages of the user life cycle through data analysis, and achieve growth goals through cross-departmental collaboration and rapid experimentation.
2. Increase the skill requirements of product managers
The hard-natured abilities of growth product managers can be summarized into a three-level skill pyramid.
(1) Base layer
Includes an understanding of the fundamental theoretical framework of growth and basic data analysis skills. This is an essential basic skill for growth.
First, master the basic theory of growth, which has the following most classic thinking frameworks:
Pirate metrics, AARRR models, including acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, referral;
Polaris indicators, through the five criteria (experience the core value of the product, reflect the degree of activity of users, reflect the company's development in a good direction, easy to be understood and communicated by the team, with operability and pilotity) to find the most needed Polaris in line with the company's current stage, with clear and unified data indicators to guide the company's development, help employees clarify the priority of tasks, enhance team cohesion and combat effectiveness, while also guiding growth experiments, taking into account the iterative effect.
The growth model, which distills and summarizes business into a mathematical formula, thinks about growth in a comprehensive, simple and structured way, and consists of three parts: output variables (generally Polaris indicators), input variables (those main variables that affect Polaris indicators), and equations (relationships between variables). There are three main steps to building a growth model: defining the Polaris indicator; mapping the user journey; and building a growth model.
User psychology, according to the user's decision-making psychology at different stages of growth AARRR, considering the decision-making speed, attention level and psychological resources required for decision-making and other factors, decide to adopt the corresponding growth strategy.
Growth experiments, setting growth goals, generating an experimental hypothesis, designing the experiment, analyzing the results, and seeing if the hypothesis is right or wrong. If it's right, put the hypothesis into practice; if it's wrong, correct the hypothesis and move on to the next experiment. One of the essences of the growth methodology is to design experiments and measurements as accurately as possible according to the principles of scientific experiments, thus establishing a "develop-measure-learn" feedback loop.
Growth process, setting growth targets→ focusing areas→ generating ideas→ ranking in order→ developing experiments→ analyzing data→ application results, gaining insight into new growth ideas based on experimental results, and so on.
Second, master the ability of data analysis.
Growth product managers are naturally highly dependent on data, because almost every task that growth hackers perform every day is inseparable from data, because setting Polaris indicators, building growth models, analyzing user data, and finding growth opportunities. It is unique in that it creates a "develop-measure-learn" feedback closed loop, starting from the data to generate insights, forming hypotheses, going online testing, analyzing the results, and then feeding the experience directly back into the next round of data analysis and testing.
Here is a brief list of several data analysis methods for growth entry for your reference.
Funnel: Simply put, tell you how many people will be able to "accompany you to the end" when a user completes a multi-step process, and at which stop everyone gets off. How many users at each step can move on to the next step is called the conversion rate of that step. Funnel is a great thinking tool for analyzing user registration, activation, and retention.
User segmentation (cohort): The most common application is to call users registered in the same time period as user cohorts, tracking their activity after one month, three months, and half a year after registration; at the same time, vertical comparison, the user group registered in a certain month of this year, its retention rate has not improved compared with the user group registered in the same month last year.
User segmentation: Users can be grouped according to different characteristics, such as demographic information by gender, age, and geographical location; by registration source such as natural registration, paid promotion users, users recommended by old users, etc.; by registration time such as new users, old users, recall users after loss, etc. Grouping can help you see not only averages, but also distribution maps, identifying opportunities and vulnerabilities from comparisons.
Trend Analysis: Track whether the trend of key indicators has risen or fallen? In general, I very much recommend making a data panel that lists the various pirate indicators of AARRR and the conversion rate indicators of some key processes, and monitors and observes the trend in real time.
Qualitative data analysis: When many people first get started doing data analysis, it is easy to find answers to any question from the data. In fact, if user research and qualitative data analysis are used properly, it is a very cost-effective research method. Many times, data can only tell you what it is, can not tell you why, at this time through questionnaires, interviews, user surveys and other models, the collection of qualitative data, often can play an unexpected result.
In addition, there are more common analysis dimensions: event analysis, retention analysis, distribution analysis, user path analysis, interval analysis, attribution analysis, and web thermal analysis.
(2) Professional layer
This layer specifically refers to each person's professional strengths, such as programming, user experience and design, advanced data analysis, copywriting, channel operations, etc. This layer is the foundation of a life, and it is also the "specialty" that distinguishes it from others when doing growth.
Growth itself is a cross-functional function, and people of different backgrounds, whether they are product managers, or marketing/operations, programmers, analysts, designers, can find "transferable capabilities" in themselves and effectively apply them to growth.
For example, in the past, you used to do content operations, and developed strong copywriting, product positioning, and storytelling skills, which you can use when you do social media ads, landing pages, product A/B testing, emails, etc.
For example, when you used to come from data analysis, your natural advantages play a role in analyzing user behavior data and experimental results, and you may understand the problem more deeply and thoroughly than the average growth hacker.
When looking for growth positions, you should also combine your own expertise to find the right products and companies. For example, if you have a programmer or big data background, when looking for a growth position, you should measure whether you can use these capabilities, such as products with large user data, platform products, and have the opportunity to grow through API (application programming interface)/integration and other engineering-driven ways, which should be a priority.
For example, if you have been an interaction designer in the 2C field for many years, to a consumer product growth team using A/B testing for user experience optimization and driving growth, it is a choice that can maximize expertise. If you run to an enterprise-level 2B software company to do growth, you can experience new industries, but many user-oriented design experiences may not be so applicable.
(3) Channel layer
This layer contains specific hands-on experience with the channels available to you when doing growth. The characteristics of the channel layer are that the changes are very fast, the rules of the search engine often change, the social platform is often new, and last year's hot channels may be less popular this year, which is the norm.
When it comes to channels, you may think of traditional external distribution channels, such as social networks, advertising, email, etc. My personal view is that from a growth perspective, external distribution channels are just as important as growth mechanisms within the product.
I imagine them as two battlefields: first of all, through external channels, from the flood of information and countless competitors to grab the attention of visitors, to attract them to the product; when the visitors are converted into users, and then through the internal design and mechanism of the product, users can quickly experience the core value of the product, encourage them to share externally, and remind users to come back and see often through various retention mechanisms.
So for a growth product manager, the more channels you have at your disposal, the more complete your arsenal will be, and the more you can selectively use weapons based on product and market characteristics and the stage the company is in. The main channels are classified as follows:
- User acquisition channels: mainly refers to traceable and quantitative online customer acquisition channels, such as social platforms, online paid advertising, search engines, content operations, virus spread, mutual promotion and cooperation, etc.;
- User retention channels: mainly refers to the channels that you can contact when visitors are converted into users, such as email, mobile push, in-product information, SMS, messages, etc.;
- Product channels: In addition to the core functions of the product, such as Google's search, WeChat's circle of friends and short messages, it also contains the so-called "growth and retention functions" part, such as landing pages, registration and activation processes, notifications/messages, gamification incentives, SEO, in-product virus mechanisms, etc. In-depth understanding of these areas, it helps growth hackers to effectively interact with users through the medium of the product;
- Traditional channels: This is a plus channel, although traditional media is not in the main toolbox of growth hacking, but if you happen to have some knowledge of these channels, it will also come in handy after the company grows bigger, such as media (TV/radio/print), PR, branding, sales, cooperation, etc.
In the skill pyramid of the growth product manager, the basic layer is the foundation of the entry, which can be mastered through short-term learning and practice; the expertise layer is in the middle, which is the foundation of settling down, and this layer of skills needs to be polished for a long time to form its own unique "selling point"; the channel layer is at the top, which is the battlefield where users and competitors are confronted when doing growth, but the change of the channel layer is also the fastest in the three layers.
Therefore, from the perspective of personal development, it is best to specialize in several mainstream channels (Tencent, Baidu, Toutiao and Taobao), dabble in other channels, and actively try new channels to form a T-shaped skill layout with both depth and breadth.
3. Increase the salary of product managers
According to the data provided by The Company, the average monthly salary of growth product managers is 29.4k (Remarks: year-end bonuses, equity options, performance, etc. are not in this range), and the treatment is significantly higher than that of ordinary product managers, belonging to the middle and high income groups. However, from the perspective of wage change trends, there has been a downward trend in salary in recent years, the root cause is that the dividends of the Internet industry have gradually disappeared, the supervision has become larger, and the general environment market is not very good.
In addition, as more and more people join the growth product manager camp, the supply of talent is gradually greater than the market demand, which is also a major reason for the decline in salary.
Compared with the impact of academic qualifications on growth product managers, the average college is 23.8k, undergraduate is 29.5k, master's degree is 33.5k, growth product manager is a good choice for colleagues with poor academic qualifications.
Growth product managers are still mainly concentrated in first-tier cities: the north, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, which is consistent with the regional competitiveness distribution of product managers. The salary data for industry distribution does not look quite right, but the industry category ranking as a whole is in line with the "gold content" distribution of the Internet industry (except for real estate).
4. Growth product manager's job prospects
With the increasing competition on the Internet and the advent of digital transformation in traditional industries, more and more enterprises are in urgent need of growth-oriented product managers. In the context of stricter supervision, enterprises are always facing the torture of the soul: how to survive.
"Traffic growth" has become an urgent proposition. But it is difficult for growth product managers to have explosive growth, because the overall market of the Internet industry is not very good, and many companies have "run away", or are on the verge of "running". Under the dual effect of smaller market capacity and larger demand from enterprises, the position of growth product manager can only maintain a difficult and gentle upward trend.
5. Recruitment requirements of enterprises
Growth product manager positions are not very friendly to low education and novices, and companies are more willing to recruit growth product managers with 3-5 years of sufficient executive experience to quickly solve the growth dilemma faced by enterprises. In fact, the Internet is becoming less and less friendly to product white, with the shrinking of HC, companies are more inclined to recruit experienced talents to solve problems quickly, and are less willing to spend time to cultivate new people.
3. How to become a growth product manager?
Growth product manager belongs to the emerging vertical track of product manager, and there is no systematic and standardized learning and growth path, becoming a growth product manager generally has two types, one is to grow up in practice, such as having a mentor in a large factory to guide how to become a growth product manager step by step, and summarize the precipitation growth methodology from practice.
The other is the wild growth product manager, who first reads various articles, books and online courses to master the basic knowledge of the growth product manager, and then "fights monsters and upgrades" in small and medium-sized factories to continuously improve the precipitation growth methodology.
Because growth product managers are not a mature subject, most practitioners, although engaged in growth product managers, are difficult to become T-type talents, often just focus on a certain growth sector, such as advertising growth product managers, marketing growth product managers and so on.
Most of the articles on the Internet are about very shallow growth knowledge, the gold content is low; online courses are also uneven, such as Liang Ning's growth course, which sounds enlightening, but it is difficult to apply to actual work, the growth training camp of the three classes and other online courses are more literacy, helping to establish the framework cognition of the growth system; growth books, Qu Hui's "Silicon Valley Growth Hacking Practice Notes" is very well written, very worthy of careful study, Fan Bing's "Growth Hacker" is also worth looking at, other books can be quickly flipped, Supplement the blind spots of personal knowledge.
As a growth product manager practitioner, I have been thinking about how to learn growth knowledge more systematically, after all, it is difficult to participate in every growth section in the work, and the real work is more to play the role of a screw. In the process of self-study, I fully felt the following points of heartache:
- I have read the books, but it seems to be the same as not reading them, because I have forgotten them after a long time;
- Online courses are on, understand but do not mean that they can be actually applied to work, most of the online courses are shallow taste;
- Fragmented time to read a lot of articles, but also collected a lot of insights (many are repeated plagiarism), very basic after reading to forget, it is difficult to string together systematic knowledge;
- Learning is very fragmented, it is passive to accept information, although there is practical experience, but the theoretical foundation is weak, and the depth and breadth of thinking are lacking.
After a period of exploration, I formed the following learning concept and plan:
- The learning idea is: in accordance with the logic of "total score", first establish a framework for increasing knowledge system, build overall cognition, and then learn in modules, and finally review and fill in the missing knowledge system;
- The learning plan is: first deeply and comprehensively understand the growth product manager position, sort out the growth knowledge system framework, build the growth learning skill tree, list the learning order of each module and develop the corresponding learning plan, and organize each link into an article to deepen the understanding by outputting their own inputs.
Next, I will produce a series of articles around the growth skills, my original intention is to continue to consolidate their growth skills through writing, so I will output a long and tiring article, the reading experience may not be friendly, after all, it is difficult to calm down in the fragmented era to read in-depth articles, often fast-food articles are easier to harvest traffic and attention, unfortunately, my goal is not for traffic, but to be able to really improve your skills, if you are also interested in growth, welcome to discuss and grow together.
Preview, the next article will introduce the framework of the growth knowledge system.
This article was originally published by @San Diego and is not reproduced without the permission of the author.
The title image is from Unsplash and is based on the CC0 protocol