You need product & marketing chops

Working in growth, you need both product & marketing chops to be effective.

Most people are skilled in one functional area. But it's rare to find someone with experience in both.

It's not easy to break into a totally part of the business. Most get blocked.

I came from the marketing side of growth, and I've been fortunate to pick up some product management skills over the years.

Here's how I navigated the change.

The beginning of my career was working in demand gen and marketing ops roles. I was your typical data-driven technical marketer.

My job was to get signups.

Over time - through lots of data collection, experimentation, channel exploration, and iteration - I worked on projects that did.

But many of those signups dropped-off quickly after entering the product.

They were churning, not converting.

I was frustrated. And curious why...

After investigating, many new accounts quickly got lost or distracted.

They didn't know where to go. What to do. They didn't receive much value.

The details were different - but the behavioral patterns were familiar to what I saw on the website. When we were doing CRO.

Too much friction. Not enough value. A one-size fits all approach - when segmentation was needed.

I wanted to take the same system I'd learned (that worked to increase signups) to increase activation of those new accounts.

User onboarding.

I was excited to work in product. But immediately blocked by the product team.

"Why would a marketer lead product work?" they said.

And they were right, I didn't know how to ship product or work with engineers.

But I really understood the problem. And I had learned how to solve other conversion challenges.

With the advice of a mentor, I called a meeting with the management team.

We watched Fullstory sessions of new users. Bad ones. We saw them get stuck. Get lost. Get frustrated. Leave and not come back.

We reviewed data that highlighted how often those things happened. And talked about some approaches which could make an impact.

The meeting was tense.

Soon after that day, I became more than a marketer.

First, engineering help for a few onboarding projects I had flagged with management.

Eventually, that morphed into a cross-functional team focused on the most important growth challenges. User onboarding. Conversion from free to paid. Pricing optimization.

This story is mine - but the takeaways are universal.

If you're interested in taking on something new - identify a problem preventing the business from growing.

Get really close to the problem. Understand it more than anyone else. Then suggest solutions.

The person closest to the problem, tends to be trusted with the solution.