Traits of a Growth PM
Sometimes Growth Teams can be chaotic at best. The PM feels caught between the product teams and the marketing teams with a leader who isn’t giving clear direction on what to prioritize. The PM can find themselves questioning:
Am I focused on the right thing?
How do I push back without losing my job?
Are we really working on the right thing?
How do I build a good relationship with Marketing?
Before worrying about those questions, it might help to better understand your job responsibilities and skill sets. Reforge has built a great list of Growth PM Skills that can help you sense-check your situation. They are broken down into four key areas:
Communication & Influence
Strategic Communication
Team Leadership
Stakeholder Management
Growth Execution
Channel Fluency
Experimentation
Productizing Learning
Customer Knowledge
Instrumentation & Data Fluency
User Psychology
Creative & Narrative Development
Growth Strategy
Growth Loop Modeling
Capital Allocation & Forecasting
Prioritization & Roadmapping
I highly recommend reading the original Reforge Article here.
Sanity-Check
Growth PMs have to handle more than an average amount of cross-functional push and pull. They need to convince partner product teams to work with them and experiment on new features. Meanwhile, they are also working with marketing teams who themselves often feel overwhelmed and undersupported with no direct engineering team to execute on plans they are excited about.
If you are feeling overwhelmed. Triage your work and focus where you need to most immediately and slowly get a handle on the rest later. Try focusing on improving one competency at a time until it all comes together.
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If you are having a hard time getting on the same page with your manager on what your roles and responsibilities are, try using this tool to baseline and monitor your progress.
How to use it:
Rate yourself 1 to 5 on each of the key traits
Hide your response
Ask your manager to fill out their column
Then reveal both answers
Look at the average responses and total score
Focus discussions on the areas where you disagree on your progress
