Why Every PM Should Know Growth
I spent years as a growth marketer before I ever touched a product roadmap. Ran paid media. Built attribution models. Fought with finance over incrementality. The whole thing.
Then I moved into product management and realized something immediately: most PMs have no idea how users find their product.
That's not a criticism. It's a blind spot baked into how the role is taught. Every PM course covers discovery, delivery, prioritization frameworks, stakeholder management. Almost none of them cover acquisition.
The Gap Is Expensive
Here's what happens when a PM doesn't understand growth: they build features in a vacuum.
They'll redesign an onboarding flow without knowing what the ad promised. They'll prioritize a feature because users "requested" it in interviews, not because it moves a conversion metric. They'll launch something and then ask the marketing team to "drive traffic to it" — as if traffic is a faucet you turn on.
I've been on both sides of that conversation. It's painful every time.
When I was running growth, the PMs I loved working with were the ones who asked: Where are these users coming from? What did we tell them before they landed here? What's the drop-off between signup and activation?
Those PMs shipped things that actually grew the business. The others shipped features that sat there.
What Growth Teaches You
Growth marketing isn't a bag of tricks. It's a way of thinking about the full user lifecycle, not just the in-app experience.
Funnel discipline. Every stage has a conversion rate. Every rate is a lever. When you internalize this, you stop asking "will users like this feature?" and start asking "which conversion rate does this move, and by how much?" That's a better question. It has an answer you can measure.
Speed over perfection. The growth playbook is built on rapid experimentation. Ship something small. Measure it. Kill it or scale it. PMs who adopt this cadence build momentum instead of waiting for the "right" solution. I've seen more value created by fast iteration than by perfect specs.
Attribution thinking. Understanding where value comes from changes how you prioritize. When you can trace a user from first touch to activation to revenue, you make different tradeoff decisions. You stop building for the loudest stakeholder and start building for the highest-leverage stage of the funnel.
This Isn't Theory
My career path went growth → ecommerce → product. Every step built on the last.
Growth taught me how users find products. Ecommerce taught me what makes them buy. Product management gave me the framework to prioritize all of it.
When I'm making a roadmap decision now, I'm not guessing at impact. I know which channel brings the highest-intent users. I know what the landing page promises. I know where the funnel breaks. That context makes me a better PM than any certification would.
The Practical Version
If you're a PM who hasn't spent time in growth, you don't need to switch careers. But you should do three things:
Sit in on a media buying meeting. Look at the channel attribution report. Ask your growth team what the biggest drop-off point is between ad click and product activation.
Then go look at your roadmap and see if any of your current priorities address that drop-off.
If the answer is no, you've found your blind spot.