Lesson: Growth with Josh Elman

Step: #8 Growth vs Product: How does growth affect your product and its development?

Growth inside of a company is really a dedicated set of product management, engineering, marketing, design, building features that help people who aren't using the product yet to start using the product. The rest of the product team is about people who are using the product, should be able to have these experiences better, deeper more richly. And growth is really everybody else who's not using my product, what are the features we need to build for them to help them get to the point where they're using the product really, really well. So that usually means a combination of logged out experience that motivates you to sign up, the flow of what happens when you sign up and then all the tools that you build for users who are currently using the product to nudge and get people who aren't using the product as much to come back in and use the product.

So you're really building features on those things and then you're aligning that with marketing efforts whether they're SEO, any paid ads, any other campaigns that you're building the right landing experiences for all of those in all the different ways that you want to help something grow. So growth is just a dedicated effort what I say is taking all the un-washed mass's who should be using your product and figuring how to build tools and build software and build features that get them using it.

There are a lot of people that run around and say that they're product people or product management. And really the goal of being a product person is to help catalyze the people around you who are producing the actual tangible artifacts; writing code, building designs, writing copy for marketing sites to coalesce around a vision and hone it to really get the right product out to users.

A product person isn't necessarily somebody who has only great ideas or only is able to like write a really good spec, but is really somebody who can do all the in between stuff, is able to help coalesce an entire team find the great ideas, represent the user really, really deeply, and help that entire team get the mission done.