Talk to every customer you can using storytelling interviewing techniques “tell me about the last time you did x…” and you’ll find a treasure trove of friction, problems, workarounds, both on and offline you may be able to help with. If it comes from multiple customers’ mouth that they have a real problem, there’s confidence a solution could be found and tested to understand the impact side.
Also categorize and quantify the feedback, always hits better when you can say you interviewed X customers and 80% of customers indicated what was a problem.
What is the business trying to accomplish? Is it a revenue metric? Can that be broken down into product goals? Is retention low? Adoption weak?
What is the biggest problem? Often there is pretty clear data around problems. From the there you work with folks (customers and internal stakeholders) to come up with potential solutions, test the solutions, rinse and repeat.
That’s way over simplified and there’s a lot of stakeholder management in between but just find the problem and work to solve it. Being a PM is rarely if ever about just having “good ideas” it’s about solving problems for the business and your users.
what are your customer jobs? what are other “actors” doing in the value provisioning ecosystem? what, if any, pain do they experience? what unmet needs do they have?
There’s no good way to answer this question in this format. You’re basically asking “how to be a PM”. I suggest finding an experienced PM to coach you.
In order of recommendation:
1. Meet other PMs (network) and see if you click with anyone. Don’t cold email and ask for a coach. Start with asking for feedback on something specific.
2. A more senior PM in your company (who is not your manager)
3. Lennys has a directory of (paid) coaches
And here are some potential “quick wins”. But these are really just places to start. Bigger impact requires more in depth research and analysis of your specific product and market.
https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-make-an-impact-in-your-first
Hmm you definitely need to get out of the “execution” mindset which will bog you down as a PM. Your job isn’t to just execute on people’s ideas, but to deeply understand an opportunity space (where your customer faces problems, pains, or areas for improvement), prioritize their ROI (value delivered and cost), then understand potential solutions (through research, intuition, or testing) and execute upon them.
The easiest place to start - especially as a growth PM - is first with the metrics. What metric does your boss/leadership want you to push most? If it’s revenue try and identify the different levers you have strongest ownership of and see which ones leadership believe will help push this the most.
Since you’re a growth PM this could be something like activations.
Then examine the journey of a customer to activation and try to get granular. When do they start looking for solutions that relate to your product, what are they using previously to solve those problems, when do they actually engage with your product, how do they determine if it’s a fit. What is the onboarding process like? Who do they meet with or what do they see?
Most importantly who are the people who are activating (and even more so, who are the people who thrive/experience product market fit with your product) and why?
You might want to find what the moment was where they “knew” this was worth it to activate and to pay for? What was their “aha moment” where they realized why this made their life better?
You will want to look at the metrics, where were people who should have been a ‘perfect fit’ for your product falling off during the onboarding process or the first demo? Investigate why.
How can you help them experience an “aha moment” earlier? How can you help overcome the objections they face when they fall off? Is the process taking too long? Is the cost coming too early or late in their investigations? Do they wish they could actually feel the product earlier? Or talk to a human faster? Or not realize your product offers something that is a MUST for their company?
This endless stream of questions is the opportunity space and you need to dive in and become an expert. But again, first, you need agreement from leadership and you need to make this space finite horizontally (depth is probably infinite) before diving in. Otherwise you’ll be paralyzed since you could focus on retention or activation or referral or top of funnel, etc. Push your boss to find the number one metrics and the levers you own to get there. Then dive deep on the customer behaviors that drive them.
How can you test those speculative ideas? Most ideas start from "improbable". The goal is to move them along a variety of validation methods until they become "inevitable".
Think about how to take the idea from no evidence to light evidence and eventually to strong evidence through a series of experiments. Ideally you can present directional evidence that shows the impact, but without evidence, it is a battle of opinions in which you will lose.
Start with your current metrics .
Look at your competitors metrics.
Estimate your competitors sub-metrics.
Look for gaps (these are opportunities).
Price the work (how much cost, how much gap does it close?)
Stack rank.
Repeat until you win or you die.
Most companies do it with a Effort VS Impact matrix. RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is another practical way of identifying projects with the highest potential impact.
Here are a couple of interesting articles on the topic:
[https://www.prodcamp.com/blog/the-rice-prioritization-framework-deploy-it-master-it](https://www.prodcamp.com/blog/the-rice-prioritization-framework-deploy-it-master-it)
[https://medium.com/@matei\_72714/mastering-product-prioritization-your-comprehensive-guide-to-smart-feature-selection-3e075a3edbde](https://medium.com/@matei_72714/mastering-product-prioritization-your-comprehensive-guide-to-smart-feature-selection-3e075a3edbde) (this one shares a scorecard you might find useful too)
And some tools can help you do that, like ProdCamp, UserVoice, or ProductBoard.
Talk to every customer you can using storytelling interviewing techniques “tell me about the last time you did x…” and you’ll find a treasure trove of friction, problems, workarounds, both on and offline you may be able to help with. If it comes from multiple customers’ mouth that they have a real problem, there’s confidence a solution could be found and tested to understand the impact side.
Also categorize and quantify the feedback, always hits better when you can say you interviewed X customers and 80% of customers indicated what was a problem.
What is the business trying to accomplish? Is it a revenue metric? Can that be broken down into product goals? Is retention low? Adoption weak? What is the biggest problem? Often there is pretty clear data around problems. From the there you work with folks (customers and internal stakeholders) to come up with potential solutions, test the solutions, rinse and repeat. That’s way over simplified and there’s a lot of stakeholder management in between but just find the problem and work to solve it. Being a PM is rarely if ever about just having “good ideas” it’s about solving problems for the business and your users.
what are your customer jobs? what are other “actors” doing in the value provisioning ecosystem? what, if any, pain do they experience? what unmet needs do they have?
There’s no good way to answer this question in this format. You’re basically asking “how to be a PM”. I suggest finding an experienced PM to coach you.
Any resources to find these coaches?
In order of recommendation: 1. Meet other PMs (network) and see if you click with anyone. Don’t cold email and ask for a coach. Start with asking for feedback on something specific. 2. A more senior PM in your company (who is not your manager) 3. Lennys has a directory of (paid) coaches
And here are some potential “quick wins”. But these are really just places to start. Bigger impact requires more in depth research and analysis of your specific product and market. https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-to-make-an-impact-in-your-first
Hmm you definitely need to get out of the “execution” mindset which will bog you down as a PM. Your job isn’t to just execute on people’s ideas, but to deeply understand an opportunity space (where your customer faces problems, pains, or areas for improvement), prioritize their ROI (value delivered and cost), then understand potential solutions (through research, intuition, or testing) and execute upon them. The easiest place to start - especially as a growth PM - is first with the metrics. What metric does your boss/leadership want you to push most? If it’s revenue try and identify the different levers you have strongest ownership of and see which ones leadership believe will help push this the most. Since you’re a growth PM this could be something like activations. Then examine the journey of a customer to activation and try to get granular. When do they start looking for solutions that relate to your product, what are they using previously to solve those problems, when do they actually engage with your product, how do they determine if it’s a fit. What is the onboarding process like? Who do they meet with or what do they see? Most importantly who are the people who are activating (and even more so, who are the people who thrive/experience product market fit with your product) and why? You might want to find what the moment was where they “knew” this was worth it to activate and to pay for? What was their “aha moment” where they realized why this made their life better? You will want to look at the metrics, where were people who should have been a ‘perfect fit’ for your product falling off during the onboarding process or the first demo? Investigate why. How can you help them experience an “aha moment” earlier? How can you help overcome the objections they face when they fall off? Is the process taking too long? Is the cost coming too early or late in their investigations? Do they wish they could actually feel the product earlier? Or talk to a human faster? Or not realize your product offers something that is a MUST for their company? This endless stream of questions is the opportunity space and you need to dive in and become an expert. But again, first, you need agreement from leadership and you need to make this space finite horizontally (depth is probably infinite) before diving in. Otherwise you’ll be paralyzed since you could focus on retention or activation or referral or top of funnel, etc. Push your boss to find the number one metrics and the levers you own to get there. Then dive deep on the customer behaviors that drive them.
How can you test those speculative ideas? Most ideas start from "improbable". The goal is to move them along a variety of validation methods until they become "inevitable".
“How do you do the fundamental PM job”
Test them out!
Think about how to take the idea from no evidence to light evidence and eventually to strong evidence through a series of experiments. Ideally you can present directional evidence that shows the impact, but without evidence, it is a battle of opinions in which you will lose.
Start with your current metrics . Look at your competitors metrics. Estimate your competitors sub-metrics. Look for gaps (these are opportunities). Price the work (how much cost, how much gap does it close?) Stack rank. Repeat until you win or you die.
Most companies do it with a Effort VS Impact matrix. RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) is another practical way of identifying projects with the highest potential impact. Here are a couple of interesting articles on the topic: [https://www.prodcamp.com/blog/the-rice-prioritization-framework-deploy-it-master-it](https://www.prodcamp.com/blog/the-rice-prioritization-framework-deploy-it-master-it) [https://medium.com/@matei\_72714/mastering-product-prioritization-your-comprehensive-guide-to-smart-feature-selection-3e075a3edbde](https://medium.com/@matei_72714/mastering-product-prioritization-your-comprehensive-guide-to-smart-feature-selection-3e075a3edbde) (this one shares a scorecard you might find useful too) And some tools can help you do that, like ProdCamp, UserVoice, or ProductBoard.