What is the difference between Product and Growth? Isn’t growth part of product? And why am I posing this question here?

A lot of candidates gravitate towards a Growth practitioner's mindset by default when talking goals and metrics. Sometimes that is helpful, for example, in strategy prompts.

However, for Design and Execution questions, proceed with caution. I see a lot of candidates saying the goal of a design question is “acquisition”. Of course, a new startup wants to acquire customers, but its goal is about solving a user need, not the abstract category of measures we call acquisition.

As this is a goal-related problem, I see it happening in execution answers as well. In your strategic setup, it is okay to acknowledge a startup will focus on acquisition. Still, the goal and metrics need to be more focused on solving a user problem or pain point than acquisition for acquisition's sake. If you solve a user problem, you are setting yourself up to acquire customers.

If you are applying for a Growth-specific role, you want to show both a growth and product approach.

What I See

When preparing for design case and execution case questions, I see a lot of PMs falling into the Growth-always-wins trap. What I mean is when setting goals and metrics, they jump to pirate metrics (AARRR). They appear to be on autopilot and justify it for every startup scenario.

“The AARRR metrics framework, also called pirate metrics or the AARRR funnel, is a set of metrics used to track and influence critical user behavior that can lead to business growth. The acronym stands for acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue.”

There are two core problems here:

1. Metric Category as Goal: Most candidates say acquisition because we are a start-up but they can’t give me a real metric with the crucial three parts. If they say, acquisition is measured by “# of users who spend at least 2 mins completing X core activity”, then it is okay, but 99% of candidates don’t.

2. Generic Growth Metric: If they do give a metric them might say Daily Active Users but they don’t tell me what constitutes Active.

When I give you a product design question, I am looking for you to go beyond the memorized set of metrics that typically measure growth funnels (or growth loops). I want to see you talk about metrics that measure the fundamentals of the product and how it solves a user need.

Think About It

The following is a high-level list of acquisition metrics:

• Number of new users

• Traffic sources (e.g. organic, referral, paid)

• Acquisition cost

• User acquisition cost (UAC)

• Return on Investment (ROI) of acquisition campaigns

• Lead generation rate

If you list any of these as your North Star Metric, how does it show you are thinking about deciding if you built the right feature for the right types of users who will stick with your product?

Back to The Start

I started this piece by asking:

• What is the difference between Product and Growth?

• Isn’t growth part of product?

• And why am I posing this question here?

Yes, growth practitioners focus on products that solve user problems, but they are more focused on bringing the customers in and creating a great onboarding experience. A product team will understand the users problems and build out the features to solve those problems.

Growth product managers reduce barriers to value, which means that they enable customers and users to quickly find value within the core product. In other words, growth product managers are most effective when there’s already an existing product that hasn’t yet been optimized for growth. - Product HQ

Yes, a PM, Growth is going to think about how to improve the product and place the product in the right channels for the right users. But when we are talking about product design, we want to know if our feature suggestion is resonating with the users.

I asked this here to help candidates who are on autopilot think more about how to measure product success in an interview.