Growth PMs (Growth Design Monthly)

March/April 2022

Hi Readers,Whose job is growth? Marketers? Product managers? Or even the sales team? As a growth designer, you’re a hybrid and your identity can merge with all of these functions. Growth seems to attract movers and shakers who are less concerned about high design and more focused on applying the craft to tangible outcomes.If you feel like a product manager, it might surprise you to know the feelings are mutual. I’m a product manager who sees themselves as part user experience designer. I give you permission to let go of neat disciplinary division of labor and embrace your growth team members in all their messiness. Letting go of some dogma around the trifecta of product, engineering, and design functions is ok. Because truly growth is where all three naturally overlap, and growth benefits from people like us who don’t fit neatly into boxes.Yours in line blurring,Rosemary KingSenior Product Manager, Spotify

We’ve long been taught that the three main disciplines are oppositional forces that achieve greatness by negotiating creative tension, but that’s fairly exhausting. Maybe we need to start seeing each other as fellow travelers on a quest and we can share more of the work than not. 

When backpackers go on a group trip, they don’t each carry their own supplies. They split everything between packs. For example, each backpacker will carry either the poles, base, rainfly, or stakes of one tent that they all need to sleep in at the end of the day. Maybe the metaphor isn’t “negotiating” how we build the tent as it's often portrayed, but how we can divide the load in unexpected ways to carry it up the mountain.

Becoming a Hybrid

User research is the gateway to embracing user experience as a shared task for growth work. In my first job in tech, I had the opportunity to set up a continuous user research program owning it end-to-end: operations, data collection, synthesis, ideation, and feedback integration. My eyes were opened to the full human-centered design process, and how user context and deep user knowledge help product teams make better decisions at every stage of the development process. This became a signature of how I manage, and a non-negotiable for whatever organization I joined.  

Quantitative and qualitative research is the bedrock of growth design. Both are strong tools for cross-discipline convening and influencing. Collaborating on research can have a transformational effect on the people you bring into the process. However, including many stakeholders in research is a lot of work, but it’s also the main way to create more hybrids like yourself who care about the shared user and business value. 

I saw a meme once posted by a designer that said “It’s called user experience not stakeholder experience.” The reality of bringing a lot of people along on the research journey is that it creates storytelling overhead for designers, which is why there has been a recent backlash to user research with people saying that it has become “UX Theater.” So we have a contradiction. We want to expose a broad array of colleagues to research without it becoming a burden that slows us down or burns us out. Enter: Product Managers. Designers can entrust part of research to product managers allowing for large programs to be sustainable.

To effectively work with growth product managers on research consider the following areas of delegation:

• Let PMs Drive Ops that Speed Up Evidence Gathering - Consider empowering the PM setup processes and systems that make running continuous research and experiments easier. This is one of the key value adds to having a PM who intimately understands this work, they should be able to understand how to structure operations around it so that it can be easily repeatable from recruitment, synthesis, dissemination, and driving feedback into backlogs.

• Ask for help in sessions and beyond - Research is exhausting and is at its best as a collaborative exercise. Having a bought-in PM means that you can have more than an automatic note-taker for customer interviews. Having done research solo myself, having a built-in collaboration between UX and PMs is a game-changer, but you can’t be afraid to ask for it and you must be willing to share your sources and credit.

• Presenting research and sharing glory - Encourage PMs partners to share out research findings and present them across the organization. This can make designers more credible when the work is properly attributed. It’s more powerful when someone else is championing the strength of user research rather than the designers themselves, which can be seen as self-serving. Trusting product managers with the research message and as messengers will require letting go of control, but the reward is amplification.

Managing Pitfalls

It’s all good to talk about trust and being partners on a journey, but there are challenges. Product managers can be positioned as leaders on growth teams where designers are often not. Then there are different experience levels between growth product managers and designers. Good communication practices, an investment in creating psychological safety on the team, and regular retros between PM and Designer can be ways to start overcoming this imbalance.

Continue Reading About Pitfalls @GrowthDesigners.co → 

Conclusion

There is a natural overlap between the UX and PM roles, especially given the business focus of growth design. There are times when the two work extremely closely with each other, and times when they diverge, but must still communicate and remain aligned as delivery moves forward. It's worth making PMs feel welcome in design work flows and vice versa because you don’t want job titles to get in the way of having that magic of a colleague that understands, can empathize, advocate, and do the work with you. 

Perhaps, it’s worth recognizing that the jobs most of us are in didn’t even exist five to ten years ago. So why cling on to dividing lines between product and design? The way forward to build supportive relationships on growth teams is through sharing research responsibilities and credit, developing a reflection practice, championing each other and the experimentation mindset.

About the author

Rosemary King is a Product Manager, Leader, Advisor, Coach, and Trainer. As an intentional generalist, she has worked for companies that range from early-stage start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. She lives in Southern Ontario, with her dog Freddy Mercury Jr. and is one of those cold water surfers you hear about. 

✍🏼 🎨 Art and editing by Molly Norris Walker.  Vector art based on the work of Spencer Camp. Pitch us: [email protected]

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