Let’s start by stating the obvious: shouldn’t Product Management (PM) be always focused on growth? Is then Growth PM a thing?
Recently there’s been a lot of focus on Product Led Growth (PLG), and rightly so, since the business landscape has evolved to facilitate rapid market growth jump-started by capillary solution marketing followed by quick customer adoption.
This is particularly true for Cloud solutions, the area
where my experience lies and the focus of this piece: the barriers to entry – or even to create – solution markets have been lowered by the ability to build and sell new products.
Cloud platforms like Google Cloud or AWS have made building and deploying cloud solutions much faster and easier, and scaling, once customer adoption takes off, instantaneous.
On the customer acquisition side, reaching prospects is also easier, and finding and closing the right customers has evolved thanks to analytics and to a focus on growth that has made blitzscaling part of our dictionary (although my editing software is still trying to autocorrect it).
Finally, the prevalence of Agile development and the advancement in containers and microservices can make a dent in percent of time Engineering spends on “technical debt”, thus freeing up more resources for innovation.
This leads us back to how Product Management can help growth: by finding the best way to foster innovation. Innovation and growth are tightly linked, but are they one and the same from a product standpoint? We may all agree that higher innovation translate into higher growth in the long term, yet does maximum innovation result into maximum growth? Turns out this is not a yes/no answer, and it’s exactly the balance that Product Management can help drive.
Product Management is the art and science to manage innovation, a balancing act between long term vs. short term goals, between the tactical and the strategic. While every company is different, for Sales today’s request from the latest prospect, or the product reason why the last deal was lost are life and death; Marketing wants to follow the latest trend and analyst insight, Customer Success sponsors today’s customer change request above all else, while Engineering tends to adjust into a predictable rhythm.
The main reason why startups find it difficult to move along the different 10x growth stages is because these conflicting priorities tend to absorb all available capacity, yet may fail to reach critical mass into any direction. Also, they rarely lead to strategic changes that enable the next innovation and 10x revenue leap.
The key Product Management mission is therefore to balance priorities across the company, make the right choices that lead to maximum long term revenue, hence sustained growth, while effectively introducing strategic evolution.
In this blog series I’ll walk thru an approach to tackle this exciting challenge, and a set of tools and practices that can be adapted to a wide variety of Cloud and non-Cloud solutions.