Discover the business development funnel stages for Product Management

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hi everybody um my name is japna um nice to meet everyone um today i'm going to speak to you about growth product management what what it means what it is what i do and towards the end i'll share a couple tips or things i've learned thus far working in both core product and growth product and i hope that it's all helpful to you all if you are thinking about working on growth or if you are an aspiring pm trying to figure out what type of product you want to do um i believe this this will be very helpful to you before we get started i just want to give you all a little intro of who i am um as i mentioned my name is japna i am currently a pm on the growth team at dropbox and i've been on the growth team for about two and a half years now and i've moved around in different areas within the broader growth organization at dropbox and so i have a ton of experience there and prior to that i was at a digital health startup called neurotrack um i worked on both car product and growth product there um and um uh we basically helped raise a series series b while i was there with um with cosla and social capital um so very exciting to work on that product as well and then prior to these companies that are on the screen i've also worked in hardware um in a b2b setting working with large large customers large enterprise customers so i have a variety of experiences um and i still have um a lot more to learn but um hopefully what i've learned so far will be helpful to you all and i've also listed here my contact information um for linkedin and twitter so if you um are just curious about my background or want to get in touch and connect or have questions after this um please don't hesitate to contact me via those channels so a bit about what is actually in this presentation um essentially i'll start off by giving a little bit overview of what it what growth really means it's a term that's thrown around a lot and means a lot of thing to a lot of people so um i just want to level set with you all what what it means to me and um my colleagues and and how we think about it um then i'll go into um what problem areas uh folks who work on growth actually think about on a day-to-day basis and then lastly as i mentioned um i'm gonna share with you some principles how i think about growth and growth product so starting off what is growth it's a mindset and it's a mindset that is focused on how to sustainably grow a business which sounds very vague but um it actually means and looks different to a lot of different types of companies or different types of products um and the reason i say it's a mindset is because anyone can learn how to think about growth or how to have a growth mindset if you just um put in the time to do the research and really align your goals against growth um it's a discipline that shows up across various different functions it's highly cross-functional i've listed a couple functions that um are more common nowadays to see people specialize in growth um product someone like myself um growth design growth marketing a lot of other areas are also popping up and so you'll see a lot of folks specialize in growth in these various cross-functional areas and that's because growth is very it's highly cross-functional highly cross-disciplinary and if you have a team of experts in different areas all working towards the same goal that's aligned with growth you you essentially have a growth team um which is wonderful to work on and lastly i'll point out that growth i alluded to this earlier but growth means a lot of things to a lot of different companies or a lot of different types of products and that's because the strategies to obtain growth are different um depending on what type of company you are what type of type product you have or what type of business model you are employing um so for example you may be a small startup and you may be asked to work on growth as well as being asked to work on other things and you have to make trade-offs as to what goals you actually execute against and how you balance working on growth versus other types of goals or you may work at a different company that has a ton of resources um like myself at dropbox where you actually have dedicated growth teams thinking about growth um for a much longer period of time so this looks different um at different places but um it it's the mindset it's a discipline and um if you take the time to learn about it and you'll be you'll be able to employ it at your own company for this presentation i'm focusing on product load growth as i mentioned i have a background product and a background in specifically an expertise in growth and product led growth and so i want to share with you all what that means um to me and to folks that i work with and product led growth is simply how you can use your product to drive sustainable growth for your business so things like your product experiences the value your product gives to users um and as i mentioned the rest of the presentation will just focus on what it means to work on growth goals or growth objectives within a product team um so stepping back a little bit and you may wonder well what do product teams do and if you just think about the responsibilities of a product development team they are usually within one of these three buckets bucket number one is building out net new product value or enabling net new use cases for users bucket number two is improving current product value or the use cases that you're currently addressing with your product and bucket number three is about helping as many users as possible realize the product's value as quickly as possible um so as a product development team you might be asked by leadership to do one of these three things or help prioritize against one of these three things um so as i mentioned depending on the company the stage the product um you could be one team trying to understand um how you should evaluate growth goals over um core product goals or um you would just be focused on one of these buckets and so just to give a little taste a core product team or a feature team might be spending most of their time on either bucket one or two and a growth team might be spending most of their time on either bucket two or three and so again it really depends on the company the type of product and the growth level levers that are available um for your business model for your product type that really helps define um what opportunities you really have and uh where you might be spending your time and what those trade-offs are um so moving forward i want to speak to you all about the growth funnel um and what that means is um uh what are the problem areas um most common problem areas that growth teams really um identify with and try to execute against and this is actually a funnel that you'll probably see in all across the internet um but i put a little bit of my own spin on it which i'll speak to in just a moment um and the one amazing thing about this funnel is it's actually cross-functional or cross-disciplinary so earlier in this presentation i talked about all the different disciplines and functional areas that could work on growth and the amazing thing is that everyone usually works across this function usually works towards these goals and understands um the user journey uh using this framework so it really helps align all the different functional areas working on growth to to this funnel um so i'll explain the funnel um and then i'll explain my you know japanese little nuanced version of of the funnel and so it starts at the top with acquisition which is really about driving traffic to your product through various channels and pretty simple basically just how do you get someone through the door then comes activation which is really about delivering value to a user for the first time or delivering new value to existing users so how do you get somebody um hooked on the product or um really understanding that konko aha moment that we talk about a lot in product then is retention which is uh how do we build habits how can we continue to devel deliver value to users through repeat usage and repeat behavior making sure that someone is going to stick with you for the long term and then we have expansion which is about okay you have your existing users how do you employ various growth loops to obtain even more users expand your user base and then lastly is monetization which i've um kind of put on the side here next to activation retention expansion um because monetization is really about earning revenue um in other versions of this funnel you'd see monetization at the very bottom which um essentially implies that you can't monetize your users until all of your users have traveled through this journey um all the five steps but actually there are quite a lot of um you know new business models and new product types that um are getting more and more common where you can actually start to monetize your users earlier in the journey for example um trial first experiences where you get users new users that you've just acquired into your product right away um now having monetization earlier in the journey doesn't mean that you get to skip the other steps um you you know the journey doesn't end with being monetized and what i mean by that is if you monetize a user as soon as you've acquired them you still have to do the work to activate them to retain them and to drive expansion so it's not a mutually exclusive motion um which is why it's kind of drawn horizontally on the side here you still have to make sure you do all of those steps if you want a healthy user base and that opportunity to retain and expand for the long term so i'm going to walk through each of these in a little bit more detail and give you a high very high level overview of common problem areas or themes that you might come across if you're working in each of these areas starting with acquisition which i mentioned is how do you get someone through the door how do you drive traffic to either your product or your website through all of the different channels and so to to name a couple uh common problem areas or themes that you might be looking at or you might be trading off um one is about quantity versus quality of users so what i mean by that is if you open up your top of funnel you usually get on average a lower quality of user they're not qualified they don't know much about your product they may not be the perfect fit but you're getting more in so you have to do a little bit more work and to figure out if they're the right fit um or what product is the right fit for them and that leads me to the second bullet which is about speaking to your customers jobs to be done um making sure that you understand what um jobs people who are uh what jobs people have when they're coming to visit your product your website what have you however they're required um and ensuring that your communication your messaging matches um a solution that addresses that job uh and then again that brings me to the next bullet which is about enabling discovery of your solutions and products how is someone who just came through the door able to get around the house and then lastly um helping that user self discover and evaluate all of your products and offerings so they can make a confident decision um so i've listed a couple sample metrics in this slide and the subsequent side about you know a couple success metrics or sample success metrics that you might want to look at or evaluate if you're working in a space i won't speak through them bullet by bullet and because there's just a ton of information out there that you can look at but i just want to give you a sense of what types of metrics you might actually look at and it's here in this presentation as a starting point if you want to if you want to start that research so next is activation um again to reiterate activation is about delivering value to a user so that they can get that aha moment or really unrealize that value so they they understand why you have built this product and are asking them to use the product and will eventually understand why you're asking them to pay the common problem areas or themes that you might want to look at if you're working on activation is what value is the user interested in receiving from you in the first place so it goes back to what we talked about previously about jobs to be done what solutions do you have to best address your user's use case um when your user used the feature or used the product did they get it did they receive the aha moment um if not why not um and if they did then is it good enough for them to come back to you um so how valuable is the value that you've just provided and so this is a tricky area because um activation means again means something very different for for different types of products and especially if you have multiple products um but it's certainly an interesting area and very very important um to lead into retention which brings me to the next slide retention um if you've you know successfully activated a user um you're hoping that they're retaining and engaging with your product longer term and repeating that habit over time so if you're working on retention or you're trying to understand retention of your product a little bit better a couple questions you might be interested in researching and understanding are um around your products and the features are they creating the habits that um would essentially ensure that the user is going to engage with your product longer term some frequency whether it's daily or weekly or monthly whatever is right for your product are your products actually doing that switching costs switching costs basically mean how difficult is it for your user to use a competitive product if they are retaining and the switching cost is high they're more likely to retain because it's too much trouble to switch another question you might ask is how do i continue to deliver product value to my users either by improving the current value i provide and getting the product to be stickier and more useful or introducing that new value like new use cases or new jobs to be done that i can address so those are different areas that you might want to look into or research to see if you can develop strategies around that and then lastly what does it mean to retain it is retaining even good so one of the things that i look out for that i alluded to a little bit earlier is what is the right metric for your product um some products um are meant to be used very frequently and some of them are not meant to be used very frequently so what is the definition of a healthy user and what is the right success metric for your product if a user is healthy that's great if a user is not healthy why are they not healthy what can you do to help them next is expansion and so you might have heard about growth loops and growth loops look very different um depending on the type of loop that you employ but essentially the the the gist of it is how do you use your current user base to get more users into your product into your acquisition funnel um so what are those growth loops and what's inherent to the product what are things that users would be likely to do and engage with if you don't have any growth loops um how can you build them in a couple of this examples kind of look like um you know team invites if you have a product that is about collaboration or productivity how do you get more co-workers in to the product group invites referrals bonuses um incentives things of that nature and understanding how how you can either acquire net new or reacquire existing users that maybe have lost some engagement with you and so that's what expansion is about and lastly monetization how do you earn revenue from your user base i alluded to this earlier in the funnel or my take of the funnel um where in the user journey is the right moment to monetize your user a lot of this depends on where the user is at with his or her journey with you um how confident are they in your product and and ensuring that you can kind of understand that before you maybe uh upsell them or put a lot of ads in front of them uh there's also a lot of conversations about what's the right monetization model um there are lots of monetization models um in in my space uh for example like a product like dropbox you know we're thinking about is freemium the right motion or is trial first the right motion um how much is self-serve versus sales assisted a lot of those questions need to be thought through depending on the product that you are um working on or the business model that you're trying to um execute against um what does the user need to make a confident purchase decision what kind of information um is it enough to just look at the website is it enough to talk to somebody is it enough to do a trial um what what would actually help them move from the acquisition part of the user journey to the activation part of the user journey to retention because that's the piece where that confidence changes and that's the piece where you need to figure out where's the right spot to monetize um and how can a user organically discover the value and pay for it um this is especially important in freemium models where you can use part of the product and maybe discover either premium features or a bundle of features that they can get in a paid plan uh how do you make it how do you make it more about the value that you're giving a user instead of spamming a user with ads right we've all we all know about what it what it is like to have a bunch of ads all the time when you're using a product and so how can you make sure that you're striking the right balance next up is the growth product principles now these aren't any official principles that are crowdsourced from all of the growth experts in silicon valley it's simply a set of principles that um i've amassed through the the years i've been working in product and growth as well as from my co-workers folks i've directly worked with and things that we pay attention to at a regular cadence in our actual job we talk about them we we put them at the very top of our documents to make sure we're holding ourselves against these principles and i want to share them with you and because they are opinionated and they certainly can help you get some perspective on your projects and if you have growth goals or objectives on the horizon so the first one core product and growth product are more similar than different um a little spicy and there's a lot of information out there about how growth is completely different um than core product and you have to learn all these new skills and um you know if you haven't done growth before it's going to be super tough um sure they are a little bit different but i actually like to concentrate more on the similarities than the differences um because it it it feels less daunting and i also want people to especially people in product to not feel hesitation or feel nervousness about trying something new but excitement and give confidence that you can do it um as i mentioned earlier growth is a mindset it's a discipline it is not like a completely different job um you can certainly um learn these things and employ them in your current job if you wanted to um so digging diving into this a little bit more um why i think this and why my co-workers think this is um they actually require the same fundamental product concepts um between the two core and growth but the way i like to think about it is that they need to be applied or flexed in different scenarios or contexts and so for example what is the same between them um if you worked in core product or if you're working with product you will have to start um projects with discovery um what are the problems what are the research what research methods do we need to employ to discover more about the problems what what do we know what do we not know everything is grounded in customer needs and customer problems and we want to make sure that every project starts off that way that's similar second you develop hypotheses once you do the research you work together with the cross-functional team to set a vision and define a strategy to achieve that vision that's also similar both teams do that third you define how to measure success in context of your goals now the definition of success may be different but you still have to go through the process of defining and aligning with your cross-functional partners next do you develop prioritization frameworks that end up leading into roadmap creation and that is also very similar that's a motion that many product managers hopefully all product managers actually do but should do and then lastly you execute you execute with a highly cross-functional team um you negotiate dependencies with other teams um because you want to make sure you're as successful as possible so these motions are all very similar those are kind of the fundamental um product motions and both types of teams have to do this and it's my belief that strong product managers or product leaders should be able to do both of these and should be able to flex between one or the other given changing business needs or changing business priorities because businesses do change and you need to essentially be able to be flexible enough to adapt to those uh different changes ideally so when i look at product leaders that you know i want to work for i would look for this kind of ability second is um be data informed and not data driven um again a spicy one um but i think the term data driven um has been very popularized mostly because in the past there are a lot of teams who might not be comfortable with using data or may need to brush up on analytical skills so there's a there was a movement to be data driven because it's important to use data when you make decisions um i think there are teams i have seen and spoken to or given advice to who only listen to data and only listen to quantitative data and don't necessarily think about um the user experience or the qualitative experience the customer experience um so uh you know i've seen swing i've seen teams swing one way or the exact opposite and um this is really just a reminder to make sure that you're marrying all of the information you have the qualitative information and the quantitative information and so you're thinking about why you would move a metric why a metric would move in a certain way or how does that impact the user experience what does a user feel like in that situation and get the entire picture um before before making decisions third you are accountable for user experience this is kind of similar to number two but digging a little bit deeper on accountability a lot of folks seem to think that um growth teams do tons of terrible things for user experience and you know maybe employ dark patterns or uh employ other patterns that are misleading to users um that's that's not sustainable growth um and growth teams are accountable for user experience um just as much as core product teams so again that's why you need to think about the quantitative and the qualitative before you make before you make decisions and all types of teams have to face trade-offs between business objectives and customer objectives i think i've seen um at least in the companies i've worked for that growth teams tend to face these trade-offs a little bit more often but that doesn't mean we aren't accountable for them um you are accountable for them so make sure that you're thinking about the user experience as well number four throw out vanity metrics um this one i think is is probably very agreed upon i alluded to earlier in this presentation that the success metric for your product um could be totally different for a success metric in a different product um and you know some products are meant to be used super frequently some are not used super frequently that doesn't mean that it's not valuable or that you don't have a healthy set of users so make sure that the metrics that you use to define success make sense for your product and for your goal a lot of companies or articles a lot of companies throw out some articles out there about how they increase this or how they increase that but sometimes i feel that what they're talking about are just vanity metrics and they don't necessarily indicate success so one more tangible example very hypothetical example not a real company that i will give you is uh if your team has a goal to drive signups overall signups you could as a team just put your sign up form on your first page and then everyone who comes in from your acquisition channels will probably just sign up um so that's great you've driven signups what does that mean now it means you have a ton of unqualified signups and users who have signed up for your product you don't actually know what problems you solve or what features you have or how to even use your product so now you have more work to do to to actually um properly acquire them and activate them and so you know to me having a ton of signups for a company like that doesn't necessarily mean anything um so just make sure that you aren't reporting on or um focusing on vanity metrics as your main success metric make sure your success metric takes into account um all of these different uh things that make sense for your product and goal and the last principle that i have to share with you is uh number five achieve product market fit first um so this is again a mistake i see a lot of small teams make and a lot of small companies make with the focus on growth like growth grow your product grow this grow that um a lot of um products or companies that that i'm advising um haven't necessarily achieved product market fit yet and they try to grow and it's a waste of money because essentially you're spending money to acquire a bunch of users who if you don't have product market fit are going to churn out of your product relatively quickly they don't retain they don't engage they don't get the aha moment maybe they're not the right customers to be targeting um and you've wasted a bunch of effort working on growth um when you really should have been honing your product and figuring out product market fit um so my my uh my advice is please make sure you have the product market fit first before you grow and you can build your growth strategies on top of what your actual product market is and that the growth strategies are about sustainable growth and sustainable essentially means that it does need to fit otherwise otherwise those users just don't sustain on your product um so that's it that's all i have to share with you today uh i hope this was helpful um to all of you and for those of you who are thinking about um you know working on growth goals or becoming a growth pm um i'm happy to share any more thoughts um if you have any questions or you just want to connect as mentioned before feel free to contact me either through linkedin or twitter um or um or other channels if you can find me um and i will try my best to to respond to you and um i hope this was helpful and thank you very much for for listening to me and taking the time out of your day