intrico.io

View Original

Traits of a Growth PM

Wendy-Lynn

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.

Template

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:

  1. Rate yourself 1 to 5 on each of the key traits

  2. Hide your response

  3. Ask your manager to fill out their column

  4. Then reveal both answers

  5. Look at the average responses and total score

  6. Focus discussions on the areas where you disagree on your progress