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📅 GEEKS OF THE WEEK

5 bookmark-worthy links:

• Roblox is Already the Biggest Game In The World. Why Can't It Make a Profit (And How Can It)?

• Why SEO is a Game of Poker, Not Chess

• How Gong used design partners to prove a bet on AI in 2015

• Founder-Led Content: Lessons From Reclaim’s Henry Shapiro on Authentic Engagement

• Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2024

One other link of interest - a former colleague from Snyk who now leads the self-serve business at dbt labs is hiring a Senior Growth PM. Awesome opportunity 🚀

🧠 GEEK OUT

The 5 Most Underrated Skills of Amazing Growth PMs

There are often-overlooked skills that I’ve found can make the difference between average and great Growth PMs.

While everyone (including me) talks about subjects like experimentation and data analysis (which are crucial, don't get me wrong), there are some less-discussed abilities that can truly set you apart as a Growth PM.

The most amazing Growth PM’s I’ve worked with have seemed to have all of these things in natural abundance, but the truth is they’ve worked hard to master them.

Levelling up in these 5 skills will make you a better PM and help you drive more impact in growth.

1. Systems Thinking

First up, let's talk about systems thinking.

B2B SaaS is often complex. I’ve shared my thoughts here before on ‘whole product thinking’ - how in PLG every touch point a user has with your brand should be considered as part of your product.

As a Growth PM, you're not just optimising isolated features or experiences. You're managing a series of user interactions, each influencing the others in subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) ways.

The non-systems thinking Growth PM would jump to improving onboarding as a solution to low activation rates.

Meanwhile the Growth PM with system thinking skills will map out the entire user journey, from awareness to sign-up to long-term usage to reveal several interconnected factors:

• Acquisition channels and user quality

• Onboarding UX

• Email notification frequency

• Dashboard design

• Integration complexity

• Documentation clarity

• Customer support touchpoints

• …

Instead of just working on the onboarding flows, the holistic solution could also include implementing a series of coordinated changes:

• Different acquisition channel prioritisation

• Simplifying the initial integration process

• Redesigning a dashboard to highlight actionable data

• Adjusting email frequency based on user engagement levels

• Creating contextual help documentation accessible directly from the dashboard

• Working with product specialists to reach out to users who hadn't reached an important activation milestone within x days

To cultivate this skill:

• Practice mapping out your entire user journey, identifying key touchpoints and their relationships. Be on the lookout for dependencies and interaction effects.

• When planning changes, always consider second and third-order effects.

• Regularly collaborate with teams outside your immediate sphere to understand broader business impacts.

• Use causal loop diagrams to visualise complex relationships in your product journeys.

In product and growth experiences, everything is connected. A change in one area can have unexpected consequences - both positive and negative - in another. By honing your systems thinking skills, you'll be better equipped to navigate this complexity.

2. Behavioural Psychology

Understanding what makes users tick is invaluable for a Growth PM.

Knowing the principles of behavioural psychology can help you design more compelling user flows, create stronger habit loops, and ultimately drive better outcomes across all of your growth levers.

As an example, you might leverage the Zeigarnik Effect (which posits that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones) in your onboarding flows, drawing visual attention to incomplete progress in a set of steps/actions that you want new users to take. And you might send email reminders to reinforce that state of incompletion.

Interestingly, there’s strong synergy here with the Endowed Progress Effect which states that people are more likely to complete a goal if they feel they've already made progress towards it.

Most onboarding checklists use both of these principles, but it’s typically useful to lean on them in other surfaces (empty states, emails)

And check out a previous Product-Led Geek post exploring the use of the Loss Aversion principle to drive higher trial conversions:

To level up in this area:

• Study books such as "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman, "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg, and “Hooked” by Nir Eyal.

• Analyse successful products through the lens of behavioural psychology. How are they tapping into fundamental human motivations and biases?

• Run A/B tests that specifically target different psychological triggers and measure their impact on user behaviour.

• Conduct qualitative studies on user motivation and decision-making processes.

• Consider taking an online course in behavioural economics or consumer psychology to deepen your understanding.

3. Storytelling with Data

We all know data is important. I’ve written a lot about it in the newsletter. But the truly underrated skill is the ability to weave that data into a compelling narrative.

As a Growth PM, you're not just crunching numbers - you're convincing stakeholders, inspiring your team, and driving organisational change. The ability to turn dry metrics into an engaging story can be the difference between a good idea gathering dust and a transformative initiative getting the green light.

I remember presenting the data behind our new activation metric at Snyk. Instead of just showing charts, we framed the analysis in the story of a typical user's journey, punctuated with key metrics. This narrative approach helped everyone from the C-suite to the dev team understand and buy into the new metric, and it’s implication in our growth strategy.

To improve your data storytelling:

• Practice creating data visualisations that highlight key insights at a glance.

• Learn to craft narratives that connect metrics to real user experiences and business outcomes.

• Start with the ‘why’ - before diving into the data, establish why this story matters.

• Tailor your stories to different audiences - what resonates with the CFO often won’t work for the engineering team.

• Humanise the data - use customer quotes, user personas, or specific examples to bring your data to life.

• Use comparisons and benchmarks - provide context for your metrics. Is this number good or bad? How does it compare to industry standards or your past performance?

• Simplify - for each slide or data point, ask yourself: "What's the one thing I want my audience to remember?" Focus on communicating that core message.

And if visuals are relevant to support your narrative, choosing the right chart to tell your story can make the world of difference.

This quote from PJ Milani (check out his Visual I.D.E.A.s newsletter) really nails the point.

And here’s a brilliant cheatsheet from @SteveFranconeri to help you choose the right visualisation for your data:

Lastly on this one, a shout out to one of the all-time greats in visual storytelling - Edward Tufte. If this topic interests you, grab some of his books, and if you get a chance, attend one of his live lectures.

4. Cross-functional Collaboration

In the world of PLG, silos are the enemy of growth. The ability to work effectively across teams - from engineering to sales, marketing to customer success - is absolutely crucial.

As a Growth PM, you're often the bridge between these different functions. You need to speak multiple languages - translating user needs into technical requirements, or turning sales insights into product hypotheses.

At Snyk, some of our best growth initiatives came from insights from x-functional collaborations. For example, working closely with our customer success team helped us identify key team-level dynamics at enterprise customers that we could leverage in improving our onboarding flows and NUX.

To enhance your cross-functional skills:

• Know who’s who - make a collaboration map that helps you think through (then remind you) the most important relationships. (don’t solely function on your / growth’s relationships - learn how other teams collaborate)

• Get outside - regularly schedule catch-ups with teams outside your immediate orbit.

• Learn the basics of each team's function and their key metrics.

• Empathise - learn what’s important to other people and teams.

• Practice 'translating' your ideas into terms that resonate with different teams.

• Set shared goals x-functionally, and collaborate to achieve them.

• Invite folks from outside growth to your impact and learnings reviews.

5. Minimal Viable Testing

In growth, the ability to quickly turn ideas into minimally viable tests is invaluable.

This skill is about finding the smallest, quickest, and most cost-effective way to validate (or invalidate) your growth hypotheses.

Experiments are relatively expensive. To learn faster in order to grow faster you need to become adept at finding cheap ways to test your hypotheses.

Forget fully-fledged features and pixel-perfect designs.

The best growth PMs can focus on distilling their idea down to its core essence and finding creative ways to test it with real users as quickly as possible.

This approach allows you to rapidly learn, iterate, and make data-driven decisions without overinvesting in unproven ideas.

The goal is to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible, with the least amount of effort. Be scrappy, creative, and relentlessly focused on validating your hypotheses.

By mastering this skill, you'll be able to drive growth more efficiently and effectively.

To level up your minimal viable testing skills:

• Practice breaking down big ideas into small, testable hypotheses.

• Get comfortable with imperfect, "rough around the edges" tests - focus on learning, not perfection.

• Adopt a mindset of ideas being disposable - don’t get attached to them.

• Build a toolkit of rapid testing methods that you can quickly deploy for different types of hypotheses.

• Foster a culture of experimentation in your team, where failed tests are seen as valuable learning opportunities, not mistakes.

Wrapping Up

There you have it - the five most underrated skills for a Growth PM.

The best Growth PMs make it all look easy - understanding complex systems, diving into user psychology, telling compelling stories, bridging organisational divides, and rapidly bringing ideas to life. But they’ve inevitably worked hard to develop those skills over time.

While they might not be as flashy or as commonly talked about as some other aspects of the role, mastering these will make you a better Growth PM.

So, which of these skills do you think you need to work on?

Or do you have another underrated skill to add to the list? I'd love to hear your thoughts - just hit reply to this email or leave a comment on the web.

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THAT’S A WRAP

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Until next time!

— Ben

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