AMA: Clockwise Head of Growth Marketing, Kacy Boone on Growth Product Marketing

This is such a great example about how you can’t necessarily take a standard playbook and apply it to every company. The dynamics of team size, resourcing, stage of company, all factor in to how you approach defining the role of your team. To answer your question, it starts with finding ways to align your quarterly (or ideally bi-annual & annual) goals and getting clear on the unique value each team brings to the table. The last thing you want is to have competing time and resources, so you want both teams to be really proactive about sharing goals, priorities, and roadmaps in order to ensure you’re not duplicating efforts nor have competing priorities. Secondly, I think it’s important that there’s a shared understanding of the unique value each team brings to the table. In growth marketing, you’re going to have experts on channel strategy, performance, and distribution. In product marketing, you’re going to have experts on positioning, voice of customer, competitive differentiation. Get clear on that as a team. One last super tactical idea for you, I love a shared team brainstorm ahead of mapping goals and programs for the quarter. On the product marketing side, you could compile some research on customers, share the product roadmap, or do a competitive deep-dive to inform that brainstorm and help set up your teams to be aligned from the start. Hope this helps!

Product marketing is deeply aligned to the product team and is focused on maximizing the adoption of the product suite. Product marketing can also be split into “inbound” and “outbound” functions depending on the stage of the company. Inbound being responsible for research, strategy, and insights to inform product roadmap decisions while outbound is responsible for launches, sales enablement, messaging, and distribution. At a smaller company, product marketing is responsible for both inbound and outbound but their focus on either might shift depending on the stage of the product. Growth marketing is composed of channel experts that are focused on various stages in the user funnel and closely linked to revenue. Growth marketing typically has a variety of functions and it may differ from company to company. For my team, growth marketing includes paid acquisition, demand gen, website optimization, lifecycle marketing, and events. Growth marketing is also typically responsible for the “execution” of marketing work. E.g. building emails, ads, in-product notifications. The overlap exists where growth marketing and product marketing may both want to drive the adoption of a feature (for example, through lifecycle automation) in order to improve core user metrics. In those cases, product marketing and growth marketing should work together to inform strategy and growth marketing will likely take on the execution.

Growth Product Marketing is an emerging role, especially impactful at companies that have a strong Growth Product arm. As a Growth PMM, you should be mapped to a Growth Product team and support the team in the same ways that a traditional PMM does. As a Growth PMM you’ll be working closely with the Growth Product team on experiments, tests, and research to improve user metrics. As a point of distinction, I wouldn’t expect a Growth PMM to be doing a ton of “big launches” for core products. To demonstrate expertise in Growth PMM, I would lean into your ability to analyze data to understand opportunities for growth and pair that with your deep understanding of the customer. You’ve got to be data-driven, understand the fundamentals of experimentation, and have solid marketing channel performance chops. That's what will set you apart in Growth PMM.

At my current company, Clockwise, we’re focused on acquisition and monetization mostly. We’re a new product and there’s still lots of room for growth at the top of the funnel so we’re prioritizing efforts like nailing paid acquisition strategy, driving demand for the sales team with events and content launches, and experimenting on the user lifecycle to improve monetization. We have incredible net revenue retention organically, so there's not a need for us to focus on retention at the moment.

If there’s a Growth Product & Engineering team that has enough work to support a growth product marketer, then I’d say it makes sense. Their work and scope should be closely mapped to the roadmap of the Growth Product team. Typically will be focused on experiments to improve core user metrics through product adoption, rather than big GTMs / product launches. 

There may be times that a product marketer has qualitative goals, but I’d say product marketing (in my experience) has had quantifiable goals more often than not. I think it’s good practice for both growth marketing and product marketing to think critically about how they are driving value to the business that ultimately moves product adoption, user engagement, and subsequently revenue. More tactically, I’ve often seen growth and product marketing create shared goals on user engagement metrics (e.g. increase user activation by X%) or on product adoption goals (get X% of active user to adopt XYZ product).

I think the core definition is still the same but in pure B2B you’re going to have a much stronger emphasis on sales enablement and think of sales as one of your core channels for communicating with customers. In PLG or B2C, you’re going to have a stronger emphasis on communicating directly to users via marketing channels. In PLG, you’ll still have sales enablement as a core part of your responsibilities, but there’s more of a balance of your time spent on direct-to-user communication and sales enablement.

1. Get a good handle on your funnel metrics 2. Identify areas in the funnel where there is disproportionate dropoff 3. Once you’ve narrowed in a bit on where in the funnel you want to focus, talk to your customers. Get feedback on what hurdles exist and what might overcome those hurdles. 4. Brainstorm, scope, and prioritize experiments. I usually like to have some small quick wins complimented by bigger bets. 5. Measure, learn, and iterate. Keep going until you see an impact :)

Make sure it makes sense first! Do you have a Growth Product team to pair up with? Is Growth well resourced at your company? Is there already a Product Marketing team? A growth marketing team? I obviously have lots of questions in order to be helpful here, but I think reading through the other answers here on this AMA might also point you in the right direction. If you answered yes to the questions above, then I would start by making it crystal clear what the Growth PMM team will do, establishing swim lanes, and get lots of feedback from cross-functional stakeholders. If you want to follow up with more details, I’m happy to provide thoughts. You can write me at [email protected].

Totally! I’ve helped multiple growth marketers make this jump before. You’ve already got the marketing channel performance chops, so I would lean into that. If you’ve built out a strong understanding of what messaging works for your audience, that can also be highly applicable to product marketing. In terms of areas for self-development, I've found that those moving from growth to product typically need to shore up their customer research & insights skills, as well as crafting positioning and messaging.