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Mind the Product

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Creating metrics that matter

A case study: Launching a product process in a project-based company

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

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Stakeholder Management

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Senior Product Manager

Kyle Lubieniecki

Sylvia is a growth and analytics professional with a passion for using the intersection of data, engineering, and marketing to fuel business results. She's currently the GM of Shopify’s Start product line, where she is tackling the problem of creating more entrepreneurs in the world through education, community, and tooling. Previously she was the VP of  Product &amp; Growth at 500px, one of the world’s largest photography platforms. She's held past roles at Google, eBay, OANDA, and ScribbleLive, and has a Masters in Predictive Analytics from Northwestern University.

Sylvia Ng

<p>As a product professional, your company is looking to you to meaningfully change the bottom line. But are you getting the results you want? Or are you putting in countless hours only to feel like you’re not making enough progress? If you want to seriously develop a product growth competency, how do you ensure success instead of just haphazardly launching new products and features? In this ProductTank Toronto talk, Sylvia Ng shares her eight-step framework for product growth developed from being part of teams at Google, eBay, and 500px to show you how to meaningfully scale your company.</p>
<p>Growth should be a mindset. A growth mindset is a mindset of learning, experimentation, iteration, failing fast, looking at the full funnel, and leveraging data in decision making. However, this string of words can be easily misinterpreted. Being flexible and failing fast could easily mean “chase the next silver bullet”, the idea of “let me try something and see what sticks” leads to a tangle of experiments, and “let me run a few programs and I’ll figure it out” often means a lack of goal setting and a lack of understanding of what works. Worse yet, over time you’ll have to put in more and more effort to manage the tangle of programs, which can burn out you and your team. So how do you build growth in a sustainable and predictable way?</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a breakdown, in eight high-level steps, of how you can approach the solution by putting more structure and process into how you think about growth:</p>
<h2>1. Stage Your Company</h2>
<p>Know what stage your company is at; whether you’re trying to launch your first MVP, trying to get product/market fit, trying to get product/channel fit, or trying to scale beyond that (you’d be surprised how many people don’t know).</p>
<h2>2. Know Your Strategic Goal</h2>
<p>Are you going after users and engagement, monetization, or profitability?</p>
<h2>3. Model the Funnel</h2>
<p>Get dirty with your data and map out your user journey with conversion rates. Segment as much as you can (new vs existing users, different lines of business, etc), look at CAC, MRR, LTV and so on, and from there identify what opportunities lie before you.</p>
<h2>4. Define Your North Star Metric</h2>
<p>Set your company’s north star goal, ideally something that quantifies the magic moment when your users&#8217; experience your product’s core value and are hooked for life. Your data from the previous step should help you here, hopefully whatever you pick is highly correlated with long-term customer retention.</p>
<h2>5. Create a Prioritization Grid</h2>
<p>From the previous steps you should know your goals and opportunities, so place all the opportunities into a prioritization grid and start prioritizing ruthlessly. Have each row in the grid as an opportunity, then in the columns rate each opportunity in terms of cost, time to market, resourcing required, and whatever other criteria your team deems important. The hardest part of this is getting the team to align on the criteria and importance of each opportunity, but it’s well worth the effort.</p>
<h2>6. Set Targets</h2>
<p>Take the top few opportunities in your prioritization grid that you want to address in the near term, and set yourself some targets. Targets are important for you to track progress but more importantly they motivate your team and allow you to get a sense of what your team is capable of. You want targets that are bold and challenging, but not so far out there that they’re unachievable and demoralizing.</p>
<h2>7. Work on Execution</h2>
<p>Create an execution process that makes sense for what you’re trying to tackle; define sprints and stand-ups, determine how often you review your prioritization grid, set up different streams for optimizations vs larger creative launches, tie goals with performance reviews, celebrate wins on a regular cadence, etc. Sylvia is a big fan of OKRs and recommends you take a look at implementing them if you don&#8217;t already use them.</p>
<h2>8. Develop a Multidisciplinary Team</h2>
<p>Create a minimum viable team that functionally contains product, engineering, design, data, and marketing (it doesn’t have to be five separate people, you can collapse or expand as you require).</p>

core/freeform

Reduce risk, fail faster: Experimenting across the product development lifecycle

An 8-Step Framework for Product Growth by Sylvia Ng

Kyle Lubieniecki

Sylvia Ng