[On Demand] Product Management Webinar: Growth Product Management

Megan Saker: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. Welcome to the latest ProdPad webinar. So today Janna is going to be talking about how to do growth product management before we kick off. I’m just going to do a bit of housekeeping. We are going to allow time at the end for a Q and A.

If at any point during the webinar you think of a question, you can, you’ll find a Q& A box at the bottom there on your Zoom control bar. Just add your question in there and we will come to them all at the end. Please feel free to use the chat throughout the webinar. Comment, share LinkedIn network with your peers here.

That’s available to you at all times. We’ve got an hour. So, yeah let’s kick off. Also to say before we do, my name is Megan. Hello. I’m the CMO here at ProdPad. And we’ve also got Rich here on the team. Rich, you want to say hello? 

Richard Cawkill: Hello, I am part of the commercial team. I will keep an eye on the chat for any of the questions that are popping in there to answer those as we move through the [00:01:00] webinar.

So yeah, feel free to get those in and we will answer them in due course. 

Megan Saker: Yeah. And I will introduce Janna in a second who needs no instruction really, but I will nonetheless. Before I hand over to Janna, let me just explain for anyone new to ProdPad, what ProdPad is. So we are a product management platform, a complete product management.

Platform allowing product teams to manage and communicate their roadmaps to run their idea management and indeed to gather and analyze customer feedback to inform that decision making. Yeah, ProgPad is enriched with AI, some of the most powerful product management AI tools out there to help you understand best practice, to work as an assistant to save you a whole bunch of time.

To help you be a better product manager and drive better results. So ProdPad is a tool that is built all around making sure that product teams, [00:02:00] their outcome is focused and indeed the primary outcome being growth. So segue right into Janna. Thanks. So Janna Bastow is a product management guru, inventor of the Now-Next-Later roadmap and CEO and co-founder of ProdPad.

So, who better to talk to us today about driving growth with product management. So Janna, over to you. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. Hey, thanks so much for the warm intro and thanks everyone for being here. So what are we going to talk about today? We’re going to talk about why growth roles in general are booming, where it all comes from.

We’re going to talk about what growth product management is, how we interpret this and how we drive growth as a product person. And we’re going to be diving into how to build a growth led product. product strategy or sorry, a product led growth strategy, same diff, whatever words how to set growth oriented goals and how to establish [00:03:00] a process to deliver on that growth.

And then the other really key thing we’re going to be talking about is how to prove your growth credentials really sell yourself as a growth product person. So we’re ready to dive in. So the thing that I want to dive into here is first talking about the boom in growth roles. You’ve probably noticed that there’s been this explosion in growth roles, particularly over the last few years.

It seems like every other company is on the hunt for growth product managers or growth leads. You might recognize this. It was, I first spotted it in Lenny Richesky’s newsletter. He had a whole bunch of data showing how growth oriented roles are just outpacing all the others.

It’s the fastest growing in the product and tech space. So what’s this telling us? Well a couple of big things. First, it’s clear that growth is a top priority for most companies today. It’s this focus on growth that is driving a demand for product roles that don’t just. [00:04:00] Deliver features, but actually drive measurable, impactful outcomes.

And. Second, whether you’re job hunting or looking to solidify your role in your current org, being able to prove your growth credentials is going to be essential. So, yeah, it’s really key to keep this in mind. Now, one thing that I want to do before we dive too deeply is just get a sense as to what you are all, what situation you are all in.

Let me just pull up a poll here. What best describes your interest in growth product management? Let me get this launched. Can anybody tell me if that poll is working?

No, Janna, I’m not seeing it. Hold on. I pressed launch there. Okay. There it is. Press launch is even harder. There we go. Double click. I’m good at tech. All right. I’m seeing the answers coming in now. So are people more likely, are [00:05:00]people here looking to land a growth role now? Are they in growth specific product roles right now?

Is it that you don’t have growth in your title, but you’re expected to drive it? In your role already. Or is it that you’re looking to prove to leadership that product management is a growth engine for your business or something else? Let us know what drove you here. And we’d love to see that in the chat and I can see the chat lighting up right now.

So let me get that open as well.

Richard Cawkill: New questions on what actually is a growth product manager. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. And I definitely want to dive into that because honestly, when I first started seeing a growth product manager, it gave me this sort of head scratching moment. I was like, what is this now? Is this different from what we’ve been doing anyways?

I think this is a really good point. And I think, like others, it’s really important for us to understand what. Companies are looking for when they say a growth product manager and how we identify as if it is such a key thing [00:06:00] that they are looking for, right? Is this just a rebranding of what we’re doing already?

So that’s what we’re diving into. So we’ve had a whole bunch of people answer. Thank you for that. I’m going to end this poll, and I think I can share these results. So I don’t even have to share, I don’t even have to read them out to you. But as you can see, it looks like most people, basically 50 percent of us here, don’t have growth in our job titles, but are expected to drive growth in our current role.

And followed by the need to prove to leadership that product management is a growth engine for a business. So that’s actually really interesting. What that sort of says to me is that growth is something that people are already doing, which sort of leads to my existing hypothesis that this growth product management isn’t a new role.

It’s just a new title for a role. So, let’s dig into this concept of growth product management. Is it a new specialty within product management? And actually I’d argue that it isn’t. Growth product management isn’t a separate discipline, it isn’t this new thing [00:07:00] that’s, that suddenly we’re doing what we weren’t doing before.

It’s all product management. It’s what we should have been doing all along. It’s what most of us probably were doing So why do we sometimes hear growth PM as if it’s this distinct role? I guess it’s because traditionally some companies, not all of them, but some companies, we know the ones sometimes saw product managementas more of a project management role focused on outputs and basically shipping features.

And there were product managers out there who were, out there, not focused on growth, focused on building other stuff and it wasn’t impactful and it wasn’t outcome driven. And Modern product management is outcome driven. It’s about making sure that every feature or every initiative or every project actually delivers results, whether that’s, user engagement or retention or revenue or other metrics that drive growth for the business.

And so as product managers, our role inherently dry [00:08:00] does involve driving growth. So whether you’re called a growth PM or regular PM with a growth focus is something that regardless of the title It’s something that you need to consider as to whether it’s a new title or not, right?

Or whether it’s a new discipline or not. I think a lot of this has come out of a lot of the difficulties that have been hitting companies lately in that they haven’t been hitting their growth targets. And so they’ve said. Great. If we slap a growth title on there, is that going to help teams now focus on these growth goals that we weren’t hitting before?

And maybe it’ll help, maybe it won’t, but this looks like it’s more of a rebranding of the existing work that should have been making the difference in the first place. Now, I also want to touch on product led growth versus sales led growth, because I think it looks different depending on the type of team that you’re in.

So by that, Product led growth is where the product experience itself is the primary growth driver. This is ideal for [00:09:00] self service or more viral models where users can experience the value right away. This approach tends to have lower acquisition costs. It tends to have a shorter time to value and generally just encourages organic user adoption.

Whereas sales led or more hybrid growth is more common with high touch or enterprise focus models where the product supports the sales funnel with focus on lead qualification, expansion and retention. So PLG. Tends to be the one that’s incredibly scalable with potential for viral growth, lower acquisition costs and that sort of thing.

I’m going to be focusing more on PLG approaches today as they’re the ones that tend to be increasingly popular and more scalable. Sorry, I’ve got a cat in my way. Hi everybody. This is Orion, and he’s being a menace if you can’t hear him in the background. Hi Orion. All 

Megan Saker: You get on the floor.

Janna, just to Jeremy, said that’s a cat. It’s a very large cat. That’s a cat. Janna’s [00:10:00] got two very large cats. But just to say on the sales led growth point, we’ve got a question from Paul and from James really about what you can do as a product person when you’re in a sales led sort of organization and model.

So we’ll definitely come back to that. And that’s a question that we’ll dive into during the Q& A. That’s a great one. 

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really fair point. And let’s touch on that sort of thing too. Cool. I want to dive into it first, stop eating that. All right. You guys keep an eye on that cat.

Okay. All right. So, what I want to do is first dive into the pillars of product led growth. And so what does that look like? First we’re gonna be talking about building up a product led growth strategy. Then we’re going to be talking about establishing a high velocity process, right?

So growth PMs and whether we’re called growth PMs or not, what we should be doing is testing, iterating and adapting fast. This is what allows us to learn. [00:11:00] So learn what drives growth so that we can improve and iterate and get to the point that the final growth levers really quickly and then really importantly focusing on the key metrics.

Growth isn’t about vanity metrics. We’re talking about the things that actually drive the bottom line. So activation, retention, metrics that actually genuinely reflect user and business value. And of course, these will differ for your business, but there are some core ones we can look at.

So let’s dive into each of these with a little bit more detail. And also pull out some case studies as well. So the key with a growth strategy is to align your product experience with your growth goals to make sure that your users really quickly see the value of your product.

So it’s all about time to value or time to their first wow. So, prioritizing their user experience from day one, your onboarding process should. Immediately show new users how your product makes their life [00:12:00] easier or better. You should be designing for adoption and retention.

So every step in the user journey should encourage engagement and make users want to come back. And you should be mapping this out in a user journey process where you can say, here’s where customers see us. These are the different touch points. Here’s where we can improve it, or here’s where we could impress on them what our value is and how we’re going to solve this particular problem for them.

And focus on the full user journey, right? So from very first exposure from when they meet your product from, whatever it is that you would introduce them to on a landing page or your homepage or wherever to longer term usage, right? Make sure that each one reinforces your product value.

So, Slack’s onboarding is a great example of this. If you want a case study they use interactive guides and tips that are set up to get people figuring out how you use the product right away and communicating it right away. New users are walked through what channels are like features like channels and [00:13:00] direct messaging and notifications.

And what they’re actually doing is using the product, but also showing you through. But basically they’re showing you the value of the product as you go. And this approach gave them really high activation and retention rates because users really quickly saw the benefit of the platform.

There’s actually a really good teardown of this. I pulled together a number of different teardowns and case studies. I didn’t put the links in here because that would get messy, but if you want them just say case study and we’ll send you the case studies afterwards and we’ll get those over to you.

But I find it really interesting to take a look at how other people have done this and, I guess steal the best ones and apply them to our own products. So, that’s one really good case study on that. Another one is how do I want to take a look at how you do a high velocity growth driven process, right?

So this is around making sure your team is set up for rapid experimentation. Are they able to test new ideas really quickly to gather insights without Over committing [00:14:00] resources to every time they want to run a test. Are they enabled to see data on what’s been working? What’s been not working to inform decisions and refine their next iterations?

Do they have a cycle of testing and learning? as part of their ongoing practice to adapt and evolve. So a really interesting case study on this. Again say case study and we’ll just ship this over to you. Facebook love them or hate them. They’d have done some really cool stuff with their newsfeed.

Going back to 2006 I found this case study on it where they shipped their first newsfeed in 2006. And back then it had lots of User backlash. Apparently, they’ve been doing this for years. So instead of abandoning the feature their team was set up to just rapidly iterate based on feedback as well as behavioral, like engagement metrics and over time, they’ve transformed the newsfeed into essentially the central component [00:15:00] of their experience.

And obviously this has contributed hugely to engagement and the platform’s growth. Again, really interesting case study on this with examples of what they’ve changed over time, but it wasn’t exactly what changed that’s interesting. It’s the fact that the team was set up to make these changes, that they were enabled to, move quickly, have the data, have access to do these changes, and were able to, over the course of the years, iterate it into what it became.

So, It’s all about making sure your team is set up to do that sort of set of changes. Some more really interesting case studies here, some to show off like rapid experimentation. So A B testing is another way to do this. Humana has a really good example here where they wanted to improve engagement with their site banners.

So they did A B testing. To compare the original banner with a variant that had a call to action text and their variant and they go through how they did it, but basically it had a [00:16:00] 433 percent increase in click through rates. So it just showed the difference that you can make with A B testing.

And having different variations and improving on them bit by bit. What impact that can have on engagement when done properly. So that’s a really powerful one. Hypothesis driven development. There’s a really good case study by or on the folks at LinkedIn. The people you may know feature, which recommends connections based on your existing network and profiles.

So. Basically, LinkedIn hypothesized that recommending potential connections would boost user engagement. So they developed this feature and the testing on it increased user engagement in a way that allowed them to prove that hypothesis. And there’s a case study on this that shows how they went about setting that hypothesis, testing it and iterating on that from there.

So again, another really interesting case study on this. And then MVP testing. Everyone knows the MVP. One [00:17:00] really interesting one is Spotify’s Discover Weekly. I bet everyone here has played with Discover Weekly. I absolutely love it. It’s a great Great feature, tool, product, thing, whatever. And so, they wanted to see, they wanted to test the impact of personalized music recommendations on user engagement.

And so they did this MVP, they did it in a really smart way where they set up these curated playlists each week for users based on listening habits. But they cut down how they were going to do that in their MVP. So the case study goes into how they do that. And basically it led to this significant boost in engagement satisfaction and gave them the confidence that they could roll this out on a much bigger scale.

And it’s now, of course, one of Spotify’s most popular offerings. So another case study there. Again, if you want those let me know and we’ll ship those over to you. But just some really interesting examples about how companies weren’t afraid to test. They use rapid experiment experimentation to gather data.

Make decisions and [00:18:00] drive growth. And so, all these things that I’ve talked about here existed before growth PMs were a thing, right? But I think what is really key here is for us to learn from case studies like these. And say actually, I did something like this as well. Perhaps I am a growth PM after all.

And here’s what we’ve been doing. That is growth PM like and here’s how product management is, in fact, a growth role. And using these examples to show. How we as product people and our team or our division or our function as product is in fact growth product management after all. And if you’re not doing this stuff, then you need to be because it’ll help your company grow.

All right. So let’s talk about how to set meaningful goals and metrics to track what’s going to help you grow. So I’m a big fan of OKRs. So OKRs are at a high level. Goals aligned with your company strategy. And, if you don’t have alignment with your company strategy, you need to [00:19:00] pin this down, right?

Go find the execs in your company who are holding this information and pull it out of them, right? Because if you are And this might have actually been one of the things that happened over the last few years, where product managers ended up going off and building other stuff, and the companies were expecting growth to happen, and there was this miscommunication between the company strategy and the product strategy, when the two should be in lockstep, right?

If the company strategy was to grow, but that wasn’t communicated clearly, and the product was just going off and doing stuff then obviously there was going to be a disconnect and the product wasn’t going to help the company grow. Or if the company wasn’t clearly stating that it needed to grow, even though the product team was saying, hey, we’re not growing, we’re in trouble, then again, the company itself was going to be in trouble.

So you need to have really clear alignment with the company and clear understanding as to what makes the company grow. What does growth look like? And how is the product strategy tied to that? We have a [00:20:00] really good article that is Gazelle? Oh, Megan, you have to remind me of her full name, wrote for us recently about company strategy versus product strategy.

Fadi 

Megan Saker: Ozamami. I’ve just put it into the chat there so you can all see that if you’re interested, but yeah, super interesting about how business strategy and product strategy should not be two separate things and how to not even align, how for them to be one and the same.

Janna Bastow: Yeah. Bye. 

Megan Saker: Bye. 

Janna Bastow: Perfect. And so, yeah, this is a really good guest post that we had written, I guess, earlier this year. Also, if anybody’s ever interested and has an angle let us know, cause we are open to taking on interesting guest posts like this. So, this is just one of many.

Our blog is full of really interesting insights written by us internally, as well as other thought leaders in the space. That’s enough about the blog for a minute. So, OKRs. So, your objectives should be tied to your company’s strategy, and they are typically your high level more [00:21:00] qualitative measures, whereas your key results are tied to your company’s strategy.

objectives, which are your, they’re the, how you measure success. These are the needles that you need to move, right? They should be specific and measurable. And so in growth terms, you might have things like, increase your user activation rate from X to X or reduce churn by X percent or grow revenue by X, right?

So there might be various things like that, that are specific about. Your goals, but don’t be afraid of tying OKR specifically to growth goals that are important for the business, right? We shouldn’t be shy about the fact that we as product people are a growth and revenue driver for the business.

And therefore our metrics should be growth and revenue driven, right? Yes, we’re here to delight customers and help them solve problems, but we’re doing that because that helps them. Spend money with the business and encourage them to stick around longer, which is more valuable for the [00:22:00] business.

So if that’s the measure that we are being measured by, then we need to note that down so that we know what’s working on, what’s not working. Delight is just the means by which you achieve that. And that’s just. Totally great. But we need to measure and make sure that it’s aligned with what the business is trying to do.

So, if you want to dive deeper into these metrics, because that was just a super high level dive into it. I’ve got you covered with a resource that lays out the most important metrics for product people. This is the complete product. list of KPIs for product people. Cause we know that growth isn’t one size fits all.

Feel free to grab a download of this. We’ll happily send this out to you and you’ll get a copy of this. So it basically covers every metric that you might need from activation to retention to revenue, plus lots of others. You can find this and lots of others. Guides like it at ProdPad.com/downloads. Really great resource for any of you who are thinking about refining your growth strategy or going into the new year. I know we’re only six weeks away from new year, so I bet many people are working on their OKRs right now. Hands up if you’re working on your OKRs right now.

Megan Saker: We also have, actually, I’ve just posted it in the chat, in addition to this, which is a great big, a complete list of product management KPIs from which you can pick your chosen. Don’t make the mistake of tracking everything and prioritizing everything. We’ve also got an ebook which has a whole bunch of example product OKRs to help you, to help kickstart your thinking.

With examples. So that’s in, I’ve just posted that in the chat as well. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. Very cool. All right. And I hope you’re keeping up with the chat. So just glanced over and it says there’s like a hundred new messages. So I’m going to catch up on that when I take a breather. So, where am I going from here?

Right, I was going to take the time to show you through how [00:24:00] to actually put these growth objectives to in action. So I’m going to show you how to do this as part of your day to day as a product person. And of course, I’m going to show you how to do it in ProdPad

So let me just share a different screen here. They’ve changed zoom a little bit and it’s throwing me right off. All right. 

Megan Saker: That is why I rarely, very carefully make sure I 

Janna Bastow: share the right tab because it’s that time of day when all my tabs are open. Okay, cool. All right. I’m now in my demo account of ProdPad.

Oh, cool. Check it out. We just did a release too. We release it every week in here at ProgPad. So there’s always something new here. I’m just going to take this new release. Sometimes twice a week. Sometimes twice a week. Yeah. Do we know what was released this week? Anything good? I probably should have checked the release notes.

Oh, hey buddy. Can you get [00:25:00] your butt out of my zoom window? Thanks bud. Yeah. Go that way. There we go. All right. Cool. So, all really key things is and the reason why we do this now, hey, he wants to see too. All right. So really key thing with managing your your objectives is to keep them really close to your roadmap.

So, in ProdPad, what we do is we think about them as like the flip side of your roadmap planning, right? Same flip side of the same coin. So you’ve got your roadmap on one side, but you’ve got your OKRs. Right on the other side, right? They’re connected one to the other. So you’ve got your OKRs here.

You’ve got your roadmap here and you can dive from one to the other and the two are just really tightly connected. It also allows you to see any of your roadmap. cards, each of your roadmap cards are basically the problems that you want to solve and allows you to tie them back to the objectives that you are, sorry, my cat’s jumping on my [00:26:00] keyboard.

Get off.

There we go. Allows you to tie your high level initiatives to your objectives, right? So you’re able to say here’s the problem we’re looking to solve, and here is the high level the reason why, right? What we’re actually trying to get out of it, the objective that we’re trying to solve here.

And you can also attach various key results to these as well. So I’ve got my high level. Roadmap card. I’ve got a high level of my objective here. But I can also dive into these and see the key results that are attached. So I can see that I’ve got this particular problem that I’m solving, why I’m solving it what problem, what goal I’m trying to get towards.

As well as how on track I am with this particular problem with this particular needle that I’m trying to move. And then with any of my initiatives, I’m able to set target outcomes as well as actual outcomes. I’m able to outline what I’m hoping [00:27:00] to get out of this as well as what actually came out of this.

And I can do that at the initiative level, as well as at the product level. That’s right at the idea level. So I can dive into this idea. And I can see that this idea is that we’ve got a target outcome of getting 15 percent adoption rates. I’ve got space in here to track the actual outcomes. I can see that it’s currently in progress, in development, and it’s attached to this particular card, along with a bunch of other things that are in progress with it.

And this all lives on my roadmap here. Oops. On my roadmap here. There goes my cat again. Alongside the other potential ideas that we might be tackling to solve this particular problem. And then at any point in time I can take this idea and I can say Okay, we’re finished with this one. This is now being completed, and this is in my list of completed things, and I can track what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, right?

So here’s something that we [00:28:00] completed earlier, and I can see the actual outcomes, what was completed, and how we did with each of these different things along the way. So what it’s basically allowing me to do is track from the very beginning, what problems we were looking to solve, what the target outcomes were, and what we got out of it.

What it’s also allowing me to do is see this picture from, new ideas. And this view as to how things are progressing, whoops, how things are progressing all the way through to things in development, as well as really crucially creating space to track, what we’re measuring as successful and what actually was successful.

So again, back to filling in the, finding the space, creating the space to track those target outcomes and actual outcomes.

Megan Saker: And that’s really important that a growth focused product management team, product [00:29:00] manager, isn’t just shipping, release, you release something to production, job done. It’s about having the post development workflow stages that mean that absolutely as routine you are testing you are measuring results and having a completed roadmap view.

So at any one time you can demonstrate to anyone in the organization, this is what. the outcomes were this is what we have delivered and this is what on our main roadmap we will be delivering in terms of growth focused outcomes. Excellent. I 

Richard Cawkill: I think I’m hearing from the market as well that linking those outcomes through to discovery is just becoming ever more important for, it’s more of a commonality now.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, absolutely. All right. So, all right, so we’ve done that and I’ve also got the cat out of the way. That’s [00:30:00] great. So. Let’s move on. All right, great. So what we have here is another takeaway for everyone. Anybody here, is anybody here looking to optimize their product processes? We have a guide here that you can download.

We’ll send out to you and it will allow you, it’s going to give you the guide on how to, Outline your product processes and where to optimize them, how to set up a really solid workflow and how that aligns with what we’re talking about here today. Setting up a really smooth growth by growth process,

and we’ll come back to that. If anybody missed that, I wanted to touch on this last piece here. So, now that we’re driving growth. It’s really important to show it off, right? Make sure that people see the impact that you’re having, right? So, as you are building your products.

Start a log of your wins, [00:31:00] right? So I showed you case studies of other companies who have had wins. Undoubtedly, each of you have had other wins, chances to have run experiments and boost key metrics and things like that. So start a log, a little digital notebook somewhere that every time something happens where you’ve moved something in the right direction keep it as like a personal case study file where you document things like, Boosts and activation or retention or whatever it is, right?

Use this. You can go back to refer to whenever somebody needs to be reminded of the value of what you’re actually doing. Whenever you need to tie those wins to your company goals, you want to be able to showcase. Your experiments in your outcomes. So highlight specific experiments that you ran, the ideas that you tested and those actual results.

ProdPad is a great place to capture that information. But also capture some of this information in your personal wind file, because this is the type of thing that you might carry with you, not just for that one particular company, but this is going to help you fill out your [00:32:00] CV as you move from place to place.

Because if you’re rebranding as a growth product manager, cause that’s what. It’s called nowadays you need the stats to back it up. And this is what you’ve been doing all along. Make sure that you’re tying this stuff to the company goals. So frame your successes in terms of how they’ve contributed to the broader company goals.

So talk about, if the company was trying to get from here to here or be the X or Y talk about how your product impact was having an impact on those larger. that bigger picture. It shows that you’re not just hitting random targets. It shows that you’re aligned with and informed with what the business actually needs.

Really highlight any cross functional work. So, make sure that you’re clear about the fact that growth isn’t a solo job, including these examples where you worked with teams like marketing and sales and customer success to hit those growth outcomes and get testimonials and feedback for yourself.

Maybe this is in the form of LinkedIn recommendations for yourself, or maybe this is in [00:33:00] the form of just asking for bits of feedback that you get via Slack and you paste into your personal case study file for holding onto later. But ask for feedback after successful initiatives, after successful launches get these internal shout outs and they go a really long way in building credibility for your work.

You never know when you’re going to need this sort of file, this set of information where you can use this to build a strong story for why you are a really strong growth product manager. So just summing up the main takeaways here. So growth product management, what do we think?

It’s not really a separate specialty, right? It’s been here with us all along. It’s a core part of good product management. It’s just focusing on the things that are helping the companies grow. Yeah. What we should be doing is using a high velocity process to test, learn and iterate quickly. We should be setting growth focus goals and metrics that directly impact the business.

And we should be [00:34:00] keeping a record of these growth wins and learning to demonstrate the impact so that we can stand out in the sea of these new growth product managers and make sure everyone knows what the impact that we do have. So on that note, Oh, go on Megan. 

Megan Saker: Yes. 

Janna Bastow: No, 

Megan Saker: I’m just going to add on that final point about proving the work you’re doing and proving your growth results.

I’ve put it in the chat, but we’ve got another, I keep banging on about eBooks, but we have got another eBook about how to prove the ROI of product management and in there, there are a bunch of different calculations you can run and the practical steps. To put hard numbers behind the results that you’ve driven.

So I would take a look at that if you haven’t already. And that would be particularly useful when it comes to proving your growth, prudent credentials. 

Janna Bastow: Excellent. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. 

Megan Saker: No problem. 

Janna Bastow: All right. All right [00:35:00] hopefully Megan, you and Rich have been keeping an eye on the chat and can run me through any questions or if anybody’s put anything in the Q and A, having a look now.

Yes. And, 

Megan Saker: and 

Janna Bastow: feel free 

Megan Saker: While we’re doing that now, if you’ve got any more questions everyone just add them in to the Q& A box. But one of the things we briefly touched on, we said we would come back to it. There were a couple of questions about what happens if you are not in a product led growth organization, and that actually you’ve got an enterprise product and a sales led enterprise motion.

How can you as product management impact growth?

Excellent. All right. So certainly one of the things I was thinking about there is of course, an enterprise customer can still churn and can still go. So, a sales team can work absolute magic to [00:36:00] bring in an enterprise customer. But the reality is the experience. of the product, when the actual users, who often in enterprise organization, right?

Aren’t the buyers and aren’t the decision makers. If their experience in the product doesn’t live up to it, then you’re going to have a churn situation. Also, expansion is the absolute lifeblood of any enterprise sales organization. And. Expansion can, is absolutely one of the core ways in which a product team and the decisions they make in the product can fuel revenue growth.

Janna Bastow: Yeah, such a really pertinent point. Thanks for that. 

Megan Saker: Great. Okay. So, we’ve got another question here. I’m a senior product manager without an MBA. So I think there’s a question, I think we, what’s your thoughts on the need to have an MBA, Janna? But the question specifically is, do you think a [00:37:00] digital marketing specialization will help to move into a growth PM role?

Yeah, 

Janna Bastow: Really good question. So, I don’t think the MBA is required. I’ve certainly never needed one and most product managers I know don’t have an MBA. Will digital marketing specialization help? I think having Transcribed by https:otter.AI insights on how digital marketing works will certainly help because I think it creates a bit of a digital marketing.

You’re working very much with rapid iteration and language around top of the funnel and that initial user engagement and some of the A B testing of The positioning and the messaging and things like that, finding those levers that get people in and paying attention to your product, which actually can be some of the things that can be most impactful with your product itself.

I think a lot of product managers get really tied up in building stuff that are for the the more advanced users or for users who get really deep into the product when actually a lot of [00:38:00] the times the the space that needs the most work are is the stuff that’s right up front, right in getting users to initially find and understand the product, right?

Getting them past that initial onboarding and activation and actually. Digital marketing, a lot of that, some of it’s quite mechanical around setting up ads and campaigns and A B testing and stuff like that. Some of that will be useful, but a lot of it is around translating positioning into messaging that.

Works for users, and that is actually really key to understanding a good product as well, because it’s about understanding those initial touch points and thinking about your product, not just as the features that they’re going to be using down the line, but how your product itself brings people in.

So yeah, it certainly could be helpful. Definitely like to hear from anybody in the room, anybody here has a digital marketing background and now doing growth product stuff. 

Megan Saker: Yeah. So Caroline has [00:39:00] said that she moved into being a PM from a digital marketing role. I would say that the person is anonymous, so sorry, we’re not ignoring your name.

We don’t know it. Currently you’re a senior product manager. So whether you need to, you should really have everything necessary to prove your credentials as a growth driver. From the work you’ve already been doing up to now. And you asked that question right at the beginning of the webinar, actually.

So I’m hoping that some of the things Jan has outlined, particularly around how to gather your proof and to build a sort of portfolio of the growth initiatives that you’ve done, the things you’ve changed in your product and the results that they drove I think that will be the most impactful thing about getting a growth product.

Manager job rather than a sort of a marketing certification on your resume. Excellent. Other [00:40:00] questions. Steve asked a question. How do you reconcile internal tool development against external growth? 

Janna Bastow: Ah, yeah, great question. So, there’s always going to be internal initiatives, right?

Whether that’s internal tool development or internal processes or other things that just need to be done in order for your company to move faster and to get things done. And they’re still important to be done, right? And it’s not like everything you do is going to be the thing that drives users to your door and makes them pay you more money, right?

There are going to be things that are tied to enabling your company so that they have the processes in place so that they can do that sort of stuff, right? And so ultimately what’s really important is that the. Top level company goals are defined, and if those top level company goals are defined as, specifically goal growth things then everything underneath [00:41:00] that, these, those, these OKRs or your goals beneath that should cascade down and should justify those.

And if there are internal tools that will make a substantial difference to that, then they should be justified and work should happen on those, right? They shouldn’t happen just for the sake of it, just because you have spare product people to go work on stuff, but no one has spare product people anymore, right?

So, but generally speaking what you should be able to do is make the case for it, right? Make a business case for it and point out that, if you don’t have this internal tool. If the process is not working, then you’re going to have to hire three more people in order to do this thing, which is going to cost you this much more or you know you’ll end up losing this many leads because X happens, or whatever happens.

I don’t know your internal tool is but there’s probably some effect of not having this internal tool and reason why you need to have it. And if you make that case and you’re able to ladder that up the top level goals, then it does contribute to [00:42:00] your growth or, likewise, it ends up dragging your growth down.

It means that you’re not able to grow because you’re moving so slowly doing all your processes manually or whatever it is. 

Megan Saker: Great. Thanks for that. We’ve got actually a couple of questions around OKRs. That seems to have seems to have hit hit a 

Janna Bastow: OKRs always hit a thread, a nerve, always at this time of year as well.

That’s what I’m 

Megan Saker: looking for a nerve. Yeah, absolutely. So Ashraf who’s super quickly downloaded our our bunch of example product OKRs and has looked at the different categorizations we’ve given them. So, for example usage, retention, velocity, productivity type OKRs, etc. Question is, do you advise different teams having different OKRs or just being aligned on the OKRs, I assume it means the company OKRs, to provide focus and to avoid silos?

So, for [00:43:00] example, there could be one or two OKRs. across all teams. And the objective is something that the product team, marketing, engineering, sales team, they all buy into. And then the key results are collectively agreed things that need to be done to move the needle. And then each team contributes to that.

Janna Bastow: What’s your thinking there? Honestly, I’m not dogmatic about this, right? I think it really depends. It depends on the context of your team and how your team is structured, how your team works together right now, how big are your teams, how much work have they got on their plates and, how much throughput is expected for them.

If you’ve got large teams, separate teams working on separate products, then it probably makes sense that you can divide them up a little bit and have them tackle their own sets of objectives and say, okay, this team, you go tackle this sort of problem area. And you’re measured by these sorts of things.

Whereas this team, you go off and. Tackle this area and their [00:44:00]objectives and their OKR is really only meet up when they cascade back up when they meet back up at the top level OKR other times it might make more sense that they actually do have shared objectives, but they are working on, different initiatives that are tied to different to, to different key results, right?

So they’re both working on the same objective, but one team’s working on this initiative that should move it. This team’s working on this initiative, or sometimes it makes sense that they’re actually just working on moving slightly different needles, but all attacking the same initiative under the same objective.

It just depends on the size of the team. What sort of things you’ve gotten flow what’s worked for you in the past as well. I like to think about how a product team works. The structure of the team, the process that you’ve got, think of that as a product itself, something that can be iterated upon, right?

So you’ve got a process now, depending on how it’s working, run a retro. Learn from that. Outline what’s working, what’s not working, and then iterate on it. [00:45:00] You’ve probably done OKRs in the past, and so, are those working for you? Were there too many? Were there not enough? Was it not clear?

And then change it, right? Go more granular or less granular. Run them more frequently or less frequently, depending on what makes sense for the team. Iterate and get better and better at it as you go, and you’ll find the level of granularity and the pacing that works best for your particular team.

And adjust as you go as a company, just because one process works for one team does not mean it’s going to work for your team. 

Megan Saker: Thanks, Janna. Colleen has posted a question here. A bit of info on her context. So we do not have a product team before creating her position. She has no real reference tools and only a small amount of training.

I’m also pulled between executing releases. of parts and machines and the creation of new products all by myself. So how does she balance this? She has the responsibility for nine separate machines, nine separate [00:46:00] products sold globally, and she’s struggling to keep pace. Oh, 

Janna Bastow: Colleen, I feel your pain.

Colleen, you’re all right. Okay, you’ve come to the right place, you’re amongst friends. Okay. So, first of all, take a deep breath and remember that you’re not gonna be able to do everything yourself. In the face of enormous piles of stuff that needs to be done, you’ve just got to prioritize ruthlessly, right?

And by balance, it means sometimes taking some things off the plate so that you can balance the right things, right? And sometimes that means pointing out that some things just won’t get done, right? And so, of the things that are on the plate right now, what things are really important that need to be done in a reasonable amount of time, right?

If you’ve been at this for long enough, you should have a sense as to what can be done in a a sprint in a month, in a quarter, in a year and then, be realistic [00:47:00] about your expectations for what you can do in the weeks and months ahead. And set those expectations accordingly, right?

Every company is stretched right now. And so, in the face of having all this stuff stack up, just what has to give is the fact that you’re not gonna be able to get everything out in Q1, you’re just gonna have to say, Hey, I’m gonna prioritize it. Which of these things is most important?

You get to choose for the things for me to focus on in Q1, is it one of these products? Is it just the top layer of these products? Is it one particular, you want me to just focus on, the very initial onboarding? Is it, just on, the upgrade experience, what is it that I can do that’s going to make the biggest difference?

And get that alignment and get that buy in from your execs, from the rest of your team, and just focus on doing that thing. And that’s the best way that you can win in a no win situation. 

Megan Saker: Yeah, I find a sort of start, stop, continue exercise really useful. So, go to your leadership team and say what are the [00:48:00] most important strategic objectives that we want to achieve as a business.

What are the important needles that we want to move? Once you’ve got that, which there’ll be overjoyed that you’re coming to them and asking those sorts of questions that will assure them that you are commercially minded and that you are focused on the overall business objectives, then look at everything on your list.

to what extent completion of that project, completion of that initiative is going to impact those things. And then based on that, run a sort of start, stop, continue, where you suggest, look, I’m going to stop doing these things, because as you can see, the impact is not great, is, is not great enough.

I’m going to continue. to do these things. And then maybe I’m going to start doing things a bit differently and start doing this here. And if you frame what you’re going to do and not do around what they want to achieve as a, as the leadership [00:49:00] team of the organization, then they can’t really complain about that.

Yep, exactly. But we feel for you, we feel for you Pauline. Yeah. What do you reckon, Janna, have we got time for more questions? We are on the hour. Yeah, 

Janna Bastow: go on. We’ll take a couple more because I know that there’s a good number of questions in here. 

Megan Saker: Okay. James asked a question: how can a sales led product team then incorporate metrics such as adoption into OKRs?

Thanks, guys. Thanks. Thanks. 

Janna Bastow: So a sales led team is about getting the customer from the initial exposure to the product to the point of making use of the product. Adoption in that case depends on. whether you’re in a true sales led or more of a hybrid led process, right?

So hybrid led being that somebody can start [00:50:00] a trial or they do have the ability to use the product beforehand versus a true sales led where oftentimes they only see the product in through the lens of a sales team or sometimes through sales engineering type teams just depends on how the process is done, but.

The product team can actually play a really key role here and sales enablement, because what it’s really doing is making sure that the value of the product is seen really early on, and you can actually create just like you do a free trial for your customers, you can create really convincing demos or sandbox environments or import tools or, things that help get it.

Your initial users from your initial prospects from the point of going, Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to be able to trial this thing to the point of saying, Yes, I’m now ready to pay for this thing and move forward with it. Typically speaking, when you’re talking about truly sales [00:51:00] led orgs.

You’re probably talking about BU2B, generally harder to onboard type tools. So there’s probably a bit more of a concierge aspect to it. So there’s probably a little bit more of handholding aspect to it depends on the product itself, but there’s things that you can do to put aspects of the product out there so that you’re either your sales teams your technical sales engineer type folks or even you as the product person, if you’re pulled into that process can get this in front of them and help with that that adoption process.

Megan Saker: And of course, often the sales team will be talking to the initial decision makers when the deal is first struck. But if it’s an enterprise sale, there will, a B2B enterprise sale, there will be teams of users that have to then join the product post sale. And it’s absolutely about how the product performs that will [00:52:00] that will help lead the adoption metrics.

So the adoption metrics are absolutely within your wheelhouse as the product person and have every right to be in your OKRs for sure. 

Janna Bastow: And James followed up and said would you say that development of those services would at least be part of what the PM defines, even if it’s a different team developing and delivering?

And I would say, yes, in my experience, that’s what I’ve seen. That might be partially because the product manager gets their hands in everything as opposed to it being strictly what the product manager does. But yeah, I would, it’s definitely what I’ve seen is product people very much helping with that end of the process. 

Megan Saker: D Wonderful. We are now a solid five minutes over time. But Janna, thank you so much for all the insights. Thank 

Janna Bastow: you all are coming along. If anybody missed that download earlier, we have this guide here on optimizing your processes for growth. So grab that.

And in the meantime, a huge thank you to everybody for jumping in with your questions and for sticking [00:53:00] around. Good to have a chat with everybody. 

Megan Saker: We will email everyone the recording, give us a couple of days, and we’ll include the links to those case studies so you can have a look at those and geek out over all of that stuff.

All right. So, wonderful. 

Janna Bastow: And for anybody who wanted to jump in and take a look at ProdPad Rich posted his link earlier jump in and grab a demo with him. He’d be happy to show you through. 

Richard Cawkill: Yeah, I’ll drop that in the chat now as well. And similarly, if there’s any further sort of questions around what we talked about today, any conversations around linking outcomes and OKRs through to roadmaps and discovery work, any stuff around that, always keen to hear how people are doing it and perhaps how we can better support that with ProdPad as well.Janna Bastow: Wonderful. All right. Well from myself and Orion here, who’s just off screen. Thank you all and see you next time. Bye now. Bye for [00:54:00] now.