A product manager in the Audienti ‘Growmance’ Slack channel read a blog post of mine about remote work management and DMed me to ask a few questions about breaking into growth marketing:

I’m a product manager interested in changing careers to growth marketing. 
I’d like to learn more about your job as VP of Growth at Crowdbotics.

-What does your day-to-day look like?
-What parts of the job do you enjoy the most?
-What parts of the job do you dislike the most?
-What resources do you use to learn and get better?
-What steps do you recommend for someone to do to break in from the product side?

I’m asked these questions every so often, so I’ll recap the answers here:

What does your day-to-day look like?

As VP of Growth at Crowdbotics, I manage our Marketing, Sales, and Product teams. Every week is different. Day-to-day I’m typically checking in on,

Marketing – Ad performance, writing and editing content, making sure any number of projects are advancing to completion.

I want to make sure we are filling the top of the funnel with enough leads and app users from various channels to hit our downstream targets, then optimize each of the steps along the way with consistent, compelling messaging, ultimately aiming to drive down cost per acquisition.

Sales – Reps are tracking towards targets, lead volume and quality is steady, handoff from Sales to our Pro Services team is going smoothly.

I want to make sure we are tracking towards revenue targets with consistent pipeline activity and the reps have the tools they need to succeed. Marketing Ops and Sales Ops end up under my umbrella so I am making sure different platforms (CRM, MAS, payment processing, financial reporting, web analytics, etc.) are communicating with one another.

Product – At Crowdbotics, Product is a cross-departmental initiative and my focus is specifically product marketing. I’m most interested in the free-to-paid user journey. My time is spent  working with PMs to optimize our early App Builder experience developing product-enablement content such as emails, knowledge base, blog posts, forum moderation, release notes, and so on.

I want to make sure users are having a positive initial experience, we’re building functionally that will increase time-to-value, convert free users into paid users, and increase visibility of the product through successful customer app deployments.

A ‘growth’ role may or may not span all these areas at different companies.

What parts of the job do you enjoy the most?

I like that I get to have my hands in a lot of different areas. I’m closely collaborating with all the departments in the company and getting to experiment with new technologies. For me, the most rewarding part of a growth role, especially with startups, is building a process, executing on it yourself, then handing it off new members of the team and watching the machine operate without your assistance.

I come from a marketing background, and ‘growth’ roles are the logical conclusion of the trend towards ‘revenue-driven’ marketing — shifting the perception of marketing from a cost-center to a profit center. You want to work on what matters. The best way to do this is to have a panoramic view of the businesses’ operations, especially the reporting for all of these areas.

What parts of the job do you dislike the most?

At a startup you are usually still searching for product market fit — even if you already have some degree of significant traction. Many of your campaigns and efforts will fail by no fault of your own simply due to the company naturally adjusting focus based on what’s working.

For instance, the content you are hoping to rank 3-6 months from now could very well end up not being relevant by the time it gets organic search traction because you decided to focus on a different audience segment. A well-executed strategy doesn’t guarantee success.

This just goes with the territory, though. 🙂

What resources do you use to learn and get better?

Most of my learning has been by ‘doing’.

I’ve worked in a wide variety of marketing and media-related roles including startups, agency digital, radio, newspapers, in-house CPG brand management, crisis communications, running a small marketing agency, building and scaling a local business, and so on. I draw from all these areas each time I work on a project.

I like the idea of ‘skill stacking’ — combining normal skills of which you might have 80%-90% proficiency in a way that they become a force-multiplier. Being knowledgeable enough to communicate with specialists in different areas or, better yet, take the ball and run with it if you need to, is always helpful, even if you are not an expert yourself.

The best way to learn ‘growth marketing’ is to find someone doing what you are trying to do and see if you can emulate a version of their strategy.

I use the BuiltWith Chrome plugin very often to see what technologies a website or web app is using. I sign up for trials, click-through onboarding flows, take screenshots of layout and design I like, skim message boards and newsletter for interesting threads and product launches, and so on.

Very often, I start a project or campaign by looking for a product doing what I think I want to do, then adapting the relevant components of their strategy to my particular needs. Inevitably, what you end up building will turn out different from the projects from which you draw inspiration and you’ll learned some useful things for the next time around by the time you’re done. I’d recommend experimenting frequently with small, time-boxed campaigns and projects (for your company or on your own) taking advantage of free trials to get a feel for different technologies you might want to leverage at a larger scale.

What steps do you recommend for someone to do to break into growth from the product side?

The first thing I would recommend is to try building a dashboard unifying all the different departmental KPIs for your company. In the process you might find that some metrics may not be obvious or well-defined, some data may be messy or siloed in different platforms, some existing are updated by hand, etc.

Inevitably, you’ll have to ask a lot exploratory-type questions:

• Why do we do it this way instead that way?
• How does this part of the business work?
• Why does this particular metric matter?’
• What are the capabilities and limitations of this particular platform
• Why is there a gap in the numbers here?
• Why is there a difference between these two data sources?
• Etc.

You’ll learn a lot doing this.

The next step is to then start thinking about potential improvements:

• How might we do this more easily, quicker, or achieve better results?
• What if we did A instead of B?
• How might we improve 15% by next month? 2x by next year?
• How can we answer the question that came up in our All Hands meeting with this data?
• Etc.

‘Growth’ as job function can mean a lot of different things, but it’s ultimately about tying together different revenue-generating areas of the business together.

Another thing you can do is write and publish blog posts. This could be on for your company or just for yourself. The more effectively you can communicate your ideas in written form, the better.

The hardest parts about writing for most people are,

1. Opening up a blank document and stating to type. It’s always easier to procrastinate.
2. Hitting publish, and thus now being open to criticism

The only way you build the mental muscle needed to overcome these hurdles is through practice.

The final thing I would suggest is just being curious and asking people specific, pointed questions about what they are knowledgeable about. Be a good ‘asker’, then sit back and be a good ‘listener.’ You can learn something from anyone if you ask the right questions. You can learn a lot from an expert if you can frame a question the right way and give them the space to expound.

I’ve had the benefit from working with some very talented people over the years. Second to ‘doing’, asking them how and why they are doing what they are doing is how I’ve learned the most.

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This post Breaking Into Growth Marketing originally appeared on williamwickey.com.