How to pitch a growth role to senior leadership

Highlights from the Product Growth Slack

Exciting news!

I am going full-time on Product Growth at the end of this month.

Why did I do it?

1. Catapulting to the top 10 of the paid tech newsletters was eye-opening. The paid newsletter’s metrics exceed most SaaS businesses and has passed the ultimate test: it has mostly grown by word of mouth.

2. I love writing for you all. The 80K+ free subscribers and multiple thousand paid subscribers are some of the smartest, kindest I have worked with. Hello, my many thousand bosses!

What does this mean for you? Even better - and more - content. The 50+ hours a week I was spending on Apollo are now yours.

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Today’s Post

One of the most exciting parts of the Product Growth subscription is our paid Slack community.

I’m really excited to be even more invested in this community now that I’m going full-time!

Here’s 7 highlights of wisdom from the community already:

1. How to pitch a growth role to senior leadership

2. Does Apple show that A/B tests are overrated?

3. How to deal with the stress of the PM job

4. The pyramid of great interview answers

5. Improving an already great PM resume

6. Re-working a cold e-mail

7. Appreciating the journey

The community is the place for you to get resume reviews, cover letter advice, and cold e-mail advice:

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1. How to pitch a growth role to senior leadership

Community member Jan Bisaga asked:

I recently had a job interview where the interviewer asked “How would you pitch a growth role to senior leadership?”

Here’s how community-member Stads suggested to respond:

If I were pitching a growth role, I think I’d assume that’s already a given, and I’d focus on what’s distinct about growth vs. core product.

I’d explain that whereas core product work is focused on creating new value, growth is focused on unlocking value you’ve already created but haven’t been able to capture. Often, growth is easier to experiment with and easier to measure, and therefore delivers more frequent successful outcomes that are small but compound quickly.

You wouldn’t want to focus on growth if you haven’t yet achieved product-market fit, but once you have, it would be a shame not to leverage growth to squeeze the most out of everything you’ve built.

Here’s what I would add:

I +1 everything Stads said, and share my own structure for answering this question:

• Framing the role

• Invoking competition

• Citing specific areas of value

• And ending with social proof

It sounds like this:

Growth is to product as a catalyst is to a chemical reaction.

Growth doesn't change the fundamental composition. But it significantly accelerates the process of value creation.

In today's competitive environment, it's mistake to miss out on the opportunity.

Growth PMs can help create a model of what's actually driving the business and accelerate that.

They can set the bar for shipping fast and an experimentation culture.

And most importantly, they can move metrics across the product in a way feature PMs wouldn't.

Growth has had a significant impact everywhere from Slack and Facebook to Hubspot and Microsoft.

It's worth trying here.

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2. Does Apple show that A/B tests are overrated?

Yes.

I know that may surprise you. Let me explain…

80% of A/B tests are not successful, per experts like Ronny Kohavi.

Given that, A/B tests do three destructive things:

1. They slow down ship rates by a factor of 5

You go from 100 to 20 ship announcements. This makes the team feel like it's not shipping a lot, because most companies graduate more than 20% of features they work on. Most companies do more like 90%.

2. They make it harder to plan beyond the next test

You don't know which features aren't going to work, but you know it's most. So you don't build for 5-6 year visions for a feature. By then, you know many turns will have been taken that change your plans. Heck, that happens even when you plan quarterly

3. They add a latency to graduation

A/B tests inherently mean you need to wait till key metrics get to stat sig. This adds a lot of latency to the overall process of moving towards a product vision. This is a subtle but very real cost I've come to appreciate more the more senior I've gotten.

What's the antidote to this? Make PMs responsible for the bottom-line metrics, not the A/B test results.

When you do this, you align incentives away from proving impact with A/B tests and actually moving metrics.

Nevertheless, I still recommend you A/B test most things! I recommend you eat problem 3 for the sake of learning.

But - you be generous with graduating things so that you can keep moving the vision forward. Don't have counter metrics that are too strict.