Product Growth Hacker is the Product Manager 2.0

The function of Product Management has been very critical in small and large organization across industry. There are many definitions of Product Manager; I am sure you have heard these “the product CEO”, “liaison between marketing and development”, “the domain owner” and many others.    

The one I like the most is Product Soul. A Product Manager is the Product soul. In fact, the soul, in many philosophical and mythological traditions, is the incorporeal and immortal essence of a living being. Soul is immortal. Product Manager’s function is immortal.

Until now, the role of Product Managers has been to drive the vision, strategy, design and execution of their product.

The vision articulates how the world will be a better place if you succeed. A strategy details exactly how you will dominate your market. A vision should be stable but the strategy needs to be iterated and refined until the product fits the market. Strategy focus on the following 7 components: problem to be solved, target audience, competition, acquisition & retention plan, KPIs, and monetization. A Design delivers a useful, usable, and delightful experience to your customers. Persistence execution ultimately determines whether you will make your vision a reality. Execution is not PJM, but doing whatever it takes to get things done.

In today’s world, where the technology speed has reached extreme values, where competition is fierce and solutions are quickly available and replaceable, a product manager is transforming herself into a product growth hacker.

Growth hacking is a mindset at which a Product Manager must approach problems.

A product growth hacker lives at the intersection of marketing, product, and data.

A growth hacker finds a strategy within the parameters of a scalable and repeatable method for growth, driven by product and inspired by data.

The essential characteristic of a growth hacker is creativity: her mind is the best tool.

Traditional marketing channels often mean high cost per acquisition and low life-time value due to high saturation. A growth hacker looks beyond adwords or SEO for distribution.

The end goal of every product growth hacker is to build a self-sustaining marketing machine that reaches millions by itself; however, growth hacking is a process, not a formula. Growth strategies cannot apply to every product in the same mix. Growth is never instantaneous. Growth doesn’t happen overnight.

Careful, the word “growth” may mislead many. Growth hacking doesn’t mean just to grow the user base. That is called spamming, it is totally different, almost the opposite of growth hacking and, pretty fast, it will negatively affect the business.

Growth hacking focus on real growth, not on one-time users. Growth is not just about getting as many users as possible, but about helping to get the product experience awesome and ultimately capturing as large a user base as possible.

Growth hacking boosts your product adoption only if the product produces value to your customers therefore make sure your value proposition is real, the product is growing organically, and users are voluntarily engaging with it on an ongoing basis.  No matter how good you are in bringing your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) near to zero, the LTV (Long Term Value) should be the main focus of the product growth hacker.

Now, the product is ready for take off. Now a product manager is ready to become the Product Growth Hacker.