Become a Growth Product Manager

Description

You will learn how to build acquisition funnels, identify core customers, and optimise growth loop models during the Growth Product Manager Nanodegree programme. Then, you'll learn how to analyse your results and tweak your strategies. Following that, you will learn activation theories for lowering time-to-value and friction for both B2C and B2B product users, as well as retention theories for building audiences and increasing engagement. Finally, you will learn the intricacies of monetization, from developing pricing strategies to determining optimal price points using pricing metrics.

Syllabus:

Course 1: Growth and Acquisition Strategy

Introduction to Growth and Acquisition Strategy

• Learn the basics of acquisition and growth strategy

Acquisition Funnels and Growth Loops

• Build the initial acquisition strategy using funnels and growth loops
• Learn how to apply various types of growth loops to their acquisition strategy depending on the product/market or model
• Learn how to apply the dynamics of network effects and further boost acquisition leveraging the network effects when/where applicable 

Measuring and Optimizing Acquisition Performance

• Identify key performance indicators critical for the acquisition strategy depending on the product/market/ business and ways to measure them
• Perform qualitative and quantitative research and optimize acquisition strategy accordingly
• Learn how to optimize/improve acquisition using product line expansion and layering
• Understand the nuances of market saturation and ways to overcome this challenge

Defining the Audience and Channel

• Understand end to end how acquisition strategy fits into the overall growth model and which market/product/ channel/model fit is a crucial foundation of a successful acquisition strategy
• Define target audience, develop personas and understand market segmentation principles for successful niche domination
• Define the acquisition channels which work best for the product/business
• Learn how to apply behavioral psychology in customer buying decision process to improve the design and facilitate micro-conversions to increase acquisition, retention and stickiness

A/B Testing at Scale

• Understand major building blocks of a successful A/B test and apply A/B testing framework aiming to increase acquisition
• Learn common challenges of A/B tests and ways to address them
• Apply best practices when forming an A/B test hypothesis, performing research, and analyzing the test data to achieve statistically significant results

Project: Unleash Growth “to the Clouds”

• In this project, you will serve as the growth product manager for a B2B cloud infrastructure offering, developing an acquisition strategy to increase product signups. You will define acquisition funnels and corresponding KPIs to measure based on a dataset of quantitative and qualitative product characteristics provided. You will then recommend growth loops to optimise them and increase signup conversion. Finally, you will develop a hypothesis and propose an A/B test to increase product acquisition.

 

Course 2: Activation and Retention Strategy

Optimizing the Signup Flow

• Measure click-through percentage and drop-off percentage through the sign-up flow
• Remove unnecessary friction from the sign-up process
• Propose experiments to run using the action, outcome, theory framework
• Apply the ICE framework to prioritize experiments

Defining the Activation Funnel

• Identify if the setup, aha, and habit moment and metric lead the user to long-term activation.
• Calculate the number and percentage of users activated through the funnel
• Conduct different segment analysis to determine which type of audience performs well through the activation funnel 

Conducting a Retention Cohort Analysis

• Increase engagement via use-case, frequency, intensity, and feature adoption
• Determine casual, core and power users
• Create a retention chart to view average retention per cohort over time

Analyzing Impacts of Churn Rate across the Business

• Map different lifecycle state of users: resurrected, retained, dormant, and active users
• Calculate Lifetime Value (LTV) based on Churn Rate of user base
• Propose experiments to improve activation and retention to control churn

Project: Let It Grow

• You will be the growth product manager for productboard and Slack in this project. At productboard, you will optimise the sign-up flow to ensure that as many users as possible convert and that any frictions along the way are removed. Using the quantitative dataset provided, you will determine the activation funnel, create a retention curve, and conduct a churn analysis at Slack. Finally, you'll recommend experiments to improve the sign-up flow, activation funnel, retention curve, and churn rate.

 

Course 3: Monetization Strategy

Fundamentals of Monetization

• Learn the parts of a balance sheet that are impacted by product strategy
• Understand concepts and corresponding metrics such as cost of goods sold, gross profit and margin, operating expenses, operating profit and margin
• Understand the goals of a growth monetization strategy
• Learn the basic moves made by any strategy
• Understand the basic blocks for building a monetization strategy
• Learn the scorecards that are used to evaluate the monetization strategy

Buyer Targeting

• Differentiate between different buyer personas, such as consumer vs professional
• Learn the nuances in motivations of different buyer personas and how that informs the targeting strategy
• Survey the channel mix for acquiring new customers to identify the right channel for each persona and develop tactics suited to each persona and channel combination

Path to Purchase

• Identify the different stages in the “Path to Purchase” and how it is optimized for paid conversion
• Understand the tradeoff between adoption, conversion, and revenue, to set optimal targets aligned with business goals
• Learn the impact of UX design on the path to purchase and the leverage of buyer psychology on purchase conversion
• Develop the first scorecard for monetization to understand conversion efficiency
• Calculate the KPIs behind user and customer acquisition: cost per acquisition (CPA) and customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Premium Value

• Learn methods to identify what constitutes premium value for a buyer persona and how that translates to business value
• Apply tactics to amplify premium value identified for each persona
• Develop the second scorecard for monetization to understand the economic efficiency of acquiring customers using the unit economics model
• Calculate Lifetime Value (LTV), or the value that a new customer brings to the business over their lifetime, and how it further improves new customer acquisition
• Learn how to balance the LTV : CAC ratio, or monetization strategy between spending the right amount to drive new customers and the LTV brought in by that customer
• Understand the importance of recovering the CAC as soon as possible to optimize the payback period

Pricing

• Learn what a pricing metric is, how it maps to the customer’s premium value and its importance in aligning incentives between buyer and seller
• Distinguish between the different pricing metrics commonly used in tech products, such as usage based, per seat, per active user, and per feature
• Decide an optimal range for the price amount using the Van Westendorp method
• Combine the practical learnings from previous lessons to build a pricing plan that optimize for market share, revenue, profit, retention, and upsell
• Develop the remaining three scorecards for monetization that inform about the growth of the business and help forecast revenue and market share
• Learn how to build a growth accounting model for both customers and revenue.
• Learn how to calculate the KPIs for customer and revenue growth, such as churn rate, quick ratio, net dollar retention, expansion revenue and contraction revenue

Project: Priceless Penny

• In this project, you will use the skills you learned in class to create a monetization model for a post-revenue B2B SaaS company, and then generate hypotheses about potential changes to the monetization strategy. You will create monetization models for this business using a provided description of the company, its product, pricing scheme, and a dataset of recent customer transactions. Based on these models, you will develop a few hypotheses for changing the pricing metric and pricing plans in order to optimise the business' monetization strategy. Finally, you will devise an experimentation strategy to test these hypotheses.

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