What is growth product management?

Growth product management is a process implementation approach that focuses on consumer-centric market data to realize objective-specific activities that achieve high product/service-related revenue growth. Consequently, a strong focus on numbers is a distinctive trait of this business strategy. An array of consumer-centric metrics are at the core of objective-specific, product/service-centric, and growth-oriented initiatives.

Growth Product Management Metrics

The increasing importance of growth product management roles is an inevitable outcome of the current volatile data-driven consumer market. In this regard, the successful implementation of a strategy based on this business approach requires a product/service development team with a considerable inclination towards consumer-centric and product/service-specific market data, i.e., quantitative and qualitative statistical data metrics on product/service-centric, user-defined market performance.

Improvement task force members need first to acquire a solid understanding of the contextual significance of key consumer metric concepts. These consumer-centric market data concepts are represented by the acronym AARRR, i.e., Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue.

Acquisition

Acquisition metrics depict levels of product/service-centric customer brand awareness and engagement. These include statistics on real-time clicks, live comments, etc., per advert/video/photo posted on various social media platforms, i.e., Facebook likes, YouTube video comments, Instagram video/photo likes, Tweeter retweets, etc.

Activation

Activation metrics show how many customers confirm they perceive value in a product/service offering. They do so either by subscribing to a service or buying a product through real-time statistics on sales performance for various distribution channels, such as brick-and-mortar stores, e-commerce websites, affiliated online stores, etc.

Retention

Retention metrics reveal the effectiveness of customer reward programs in retaining new and long-time customers,e.g., real-time statistics on active subscriptions to customer loyalty initiatives, i.e., discount vouchers, promotional discounts, one-time offers, etc.

Referral

Referral metrics display platform-specific customer traffic arising from existing/long-term customer referrals, i.e., platform-specific customer-lead numbers generated by either direct(owner-defined) and indirect(customer-initiated) referrals, e.g., referral customer traffic from blog sites, social media referral campaigns, etc.

Revenue     

Revenue metrics encompass a wide array of statistical reports on revenue-centric activities, i.e., the various product/service monetization strategies, e.g., online product sales and service subscriptions, in-store product purchases at brick-and-mortar stores, sales conversions from customer-specific product/service marketing activities, i.e., e-mail pitching, telemarketing, etc.

Once every product/service improvement team member is comfortable with deriving the context and revenue-centric impact of all five core metrics, the success of a product/service growth product management strategy is sure. The distinctive association of the acronym ‘AARRR’ with the stereotypical pirate throaty “Aarrr” is also worth noting that growth product management metrics are known as ‘Pirate Metrics.’

Growth Product Management Take Away

Growth product management essentially involves realizing two revenue-centric goals, namely:

• To actively realize product/service improvement initiatives that recognize the new product or service users, i.e., achieve new customer sales conversions.
• To actively ensure that existing customers of a product or service remain loyal to the brand, i.e., establish strong brand recognition and loyalty.

Ultimately, success in realizing growth product management revenue-centric objective requires a consumer-centric focus that actively utilizes real-time consumer-focused market data.