Learnings from a Product Management AMA

I recently got an opportunity to attend a Product Management #AMA virtual meet up. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything.

In this meet up, a product leader is invited as a guest speaker and everyone interested about products and how they are managed can ask questions in the chat window which the host would let the guest briefly touch upon.

These are really interesting sessions for two reasons:

  1. You get to meet and learn from great product leaders
  2. You get to meet fellow product enthusiasts

The recent session focused on “Product Growth”

Let me share what I learnt from this interesting session:

  • In this SaaS based economy, there is no growth without retention. Customer retention is paramount to growth. Retention is possible only when a product delivers value.
  • Understanding growth is fundamental for a Product Manager before embarking on a product development journey. This could mean understanding how the product would help the organization or the customer grow.
  • There are few exponential growth strategies that one can adopt for growing a product:
    1. User Focused – User drives your growth . Ex: A Referral Program
    2. Content Focused – Provide relevant content to drive your growth.
    3. Every content that you surface is indexed by google driving you more leads.
    4. Spend Focused – Advertising and Buying Ads. A caveat to this strategy is that this should never be your only growth strategy. The reason being with time, your spend cost would go up and you will start losing out on more attractive customers.
    5. Focus on pricing: A strategy of changing the pricing from monthly to Annual can help make a difference to the payback period.
  • OKRs – (Objectives and Key Results) are only effective when you have empowered teams. The product manager should work in collaboration with Marketing and Analytics teams.
  • Innovation is key especially when you maximized optimization of the current product iterations. Google’s Moonshot analogy is a great point. You often see start-ups are more valued than existing players because of their focus on innovation.

To summarize, Product Growth is a mindset and Product Managers need to constantly think of ways to create this growth.

Hoping to share future learnings.

Stay Well and Stay Safe.

Originally Posted On: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/1-learnings-product-devaguptapu-emba-b-tech-eng-cscp-cspo-/