How To Growth Hack Even If You’re Not A Growth PM

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Hannah Clark: If you were a little skeptical when you read the title of this episode, I don’t blame you. The concept of growth hacking is a little divisive these days since it was such a buzzword before AI exploded. And I get the hesitation; on the surface, the term growth hacking sounds like this too-good-to-be-true, one-size-fits-all cheat code for an impossibly nuanced challenge. But in reality, effective growth hacking is actually highly bespoke. It’s about zeroing in on exactly where people are getting value from your product, and transforming it into a growth engine so effective, it almost feels like cheating.

My guest today is Samantha Hepler, Principal Product Manager at Procore Technologies. Samantha’s background as a director of product management, founder and CPO and product leader have given her a lot of vantage points to observe how growth really works and the myths that send well meaning orgs astray. We sat down to dig into tactics that leverage your product’s most valuable features to generate sustainable growth over time. Let’s jump in.

Welcome back listeners. If you’re joining us for the first time, I’m Hannah Clark with The CPO Club, and we are a community of tenacious product leaders here to share the weight of scaling your product. Our members are SaaS-focused PMs genuinely in love with their work and are driven to help others succeed. So if you want to hear more about that, head on over to theproductmanager.com/membership.

And today let’s get on with our show. We’re speaking with Samantha Hepler, and we’re so excited to have you with us. Samantha, thank you so much.

Samantha Hepler: Hey, thank you so much for having me.

Hannah Clark: So can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you are at Procore?

Samantha Hepler: Yeah, sure thing. So I began my product management at a company called Stemmons Enterprise out of Houston, Texas. It’s a SaaS platform aiming to be an enterprise grade notion for real estate verticals. There I really took a comprehensive approach. I set best practices, I spearheaded strategic roadmaps, oversaw product teams, and launched our professional services division.

My focus was always on accelerating our time to value, carving out market niches and enhancing our go-to market strategies, which ultimately improved our engagement with reselling and implementation partners alike. Stemmons, I really got to embrace my entrepreneurship journey with SeekerPitch.

It’s a company I founded and I took that product zero-to-one. The venture wasn’t just about building a product, but really understanding deep user needs, connecting job seekers and recruiters in innovative ways. And eventually I had a successful exit in May of 2022. SeekerPitch is now in great hands, continuing to push along today, but definitely learned a lot of lessons along the way.

After SeekerPitch, I popped on over to Kong, where I help direct a team to leverage our API management platform Kong Konnect beyond just its core functionality. So really, the value add features of the product focusing on our user engagement and retention through strategic feature development and honing in my skills around product led growth and a largely enterprise sales led organization.

So I influenced everything from not just product strategy, but also cross functional alignment with sales and marketing. And most recently, I’ve transitioned to, as you mentioned, principal product manager at Procore and focusing on a platform functionality around workloads and helping our customers experience automations and reducing time around executing processes in the construction industry.

So happy to come full circle back into real estate and really am enjoying my time at Procore so far.

Hannah Clark: That’s great to hear. Oh, congratulations on the new role.

So today we’re going to be focusing on growth hacking, even if you’re not officially a growth PM. So to start us off, what would you say a lot of orgs are getting wrong about growth strategy?

Samantha Hepler: When it comes to growth strategy, I think many organizations, particularly those at series C or D stage with consistent revenue, often get a couple of things wrong. And I preference it like that because if your company and you just launched, in the last six months, you probably are a little too early to be considering a growth strategy.

And then growth strategies really change at a different stage you are in the company. So, so really honing in and that sweet spotter on series C or series D. We start to see that executives really become disconnected from their customers, they’re so focused on their competitors, their investors, visions of the future, high level strategies, and they lose sight of what truly matters around understanding user behavior and needs.

If you honestly look at the early days of any successful company, its founders are deeply entrenched with their customers learning directly from them. But as the companies grow, each new product hire creates another layer of separation between leadership and the end user. So you start to see a distancing that leads to decisions that are out of touch with actual user experience.

And the second thing I’ll say is like at this stage, companies often have the financial resources to make significant investments, but they don’t always allocate these resources effectively. They might build a large sales team or heavily invest in conferences and believe that these will drive massive growth.

Like we have the money to burn, let’s burn it. And you know what? I’ve been at a company where the CEO put a huge emphasis on something as trivial as collect as many email addresses at this conference as you can. Thinking this was a key growth strategy. And I mean, we were giving away swag. And so if all they had to do is give us an email address, they don’t really care.

And so this approach was completely misguided. It was the cost of brand awareness ultimately did not provide the compounding returns we anticipated because we weren’t targeting the right personas, nor did we have the proper growth engine in place to even, let’s say any of those email addresses did convert to, Oh, let me go and check out your product.

We didn’t have the growth engine in place to provide that immediate value for them to want to keep returning or use our product more. Essentially, it’s like pouring fuel in a fire. And if you don’t have that sustainable growth engine to keep that fire burning, it fizzles up. So instead of these short term tactics, what’s really needed, in my opinion, is focusing on building that sustainable growth strategy that continuously fuels the company’s expansion in a way that’s sustainable and sustainability being the key term here.

Hannah Clark: I can absolutely see how a little bit of swag does not a long term customer make.

So how should PMs, especially regardless of specialization, be thinking about growth?

Samantha Hepler: I read this LinkedIn post that really stuck with me recently, and unfortunately I cannot recall the author or I would give them credit. But essentially it was about not giving up as a startup founder, and it was telling the story of this founder who had talked about how they were turned down consistently by investors who just didn’t get their vision or they said, Google’s going to do it.

So why would I invest in you doing it? Google’s definitely going to do this, but the founder kept going. They stuck to their guns. They eventually succeeded. And looking back, this founder realized something. They were never competing against Google. They were competing against a product manager at Google is what they said.

And so own your numbers. There’s no reason you shouldn’t know exactly how much revenue your product area generates. Track its growth. Understand the projections. Set those clear monetary goals and don’t wait for your VP or your director to hand this to you. Oftentimes we see leveling in organizations where the PM is really focused on the features and the groundwork and then you’ll see a director come in and present the numbers and there’s a disconnect here.

It’s fine if the director is presenting them, but you should know them like the back of your hand. It’s your job to drive that revenue with your product. So you better know your numbers cold. And thinking like an owner, act like the CEO of your product. Even if you’re a platform PM, which by the way is what I’m doing right now.

And don’t see necessarily a direct line to revenue, get creative. It’s not an excuse to sit back, figure out those indirect ways that your product is driving value. So some of those key metrics that we can look at besides revenue, you’ve got natural frequency, which is how often do users engage with that part of your platform.

Core action. What are the key actions that deliver value from your product? And then how sticky is your product? So that’s user retention. How often are users coming back? And then you can change the levers or optimize your engagement to continue to expand your growth engine.

So that’s my two cents on that one.

Hannah Clark: I appreciate how prescriptive that is too.

So with that in mind, how should PMs, regardless of their specialization, be thinking about growth for their organization?

Samantha Hepler: Yeah, it’s definitely a mindset thing for me. I recently read this LinkedIn post that stuck out about a founder who was taking their idea to a bunch of investors.

And one of the biggest things that they heard and the reason why they were rejected in their fundraising round was Google’s going to do it. And the founder, looking back was like, and he finally succeeds and he didn’t give up. It was like, I never felt like I was competing against Google. I was actually competing against a product manager at Google.

He’s right. 9 out of 10 times, you’re not up against a growth-minded PM. And I think what makes a growth-minded PM is they actually look at their area of business as if they’re like a mini CEO of their product area. If these PMs are at a company where you have product market fit, you have customers, you’re not struggling for funding, you have a winning hand to exponentially grow your product area. You just got to figure out how.

Hannah Clark: Alright, so this is interesting.

So what are some of the growth tactics that PMs can actually implement?

Samantha Hepler: Yeah, there’s quite a bit. One of my favorites are growth loops. I have to very much credit the team over at Reforge led by Brian Balfour.

If you’re newer to product management or looking to uplevel your skills, I highly recommend a lot of their content over there. But this is essentially where I learned my foundational understanding of growth loops. and essentially my entire life I’ve heard about funnels. Funnels are, the user journey.

They start here, they go here, and then once they go here, then they finally swipe their credit card, and now they’re a customer. And that’s the user journey, and we want to focus on optimizing the funnel. And quite frankly, you’ll see a lot of old school leaders really have that funnel mindset and perspective.

Where I think funnels are good for are optimizing some user experience, but otherwise funnels create strategic silos. Marketing handles the top, product takes the middle, sales deals with the bottom. And essentially you’ll have a division often fragmented across the user journey that makes it less cohesive and effective.

If everybody’s got their own strategy, how can possibly be working together? So what you see with growth loops is a self sustaining and holistic approach to get compounding returns on your investment. So essentially, what a growth loop is made of is three parts. You have an input, you have a new user, they take an action, and an output that feeds back into the input.

So let’s take an incentivized viral loop, for example. A new user joins your product, they earn credits for inviting friends, and this incentivizes them to bring in more users who then do the same, creating this kind of self perpetuating cycle. So your investment would be, okay, let’s invest in a product feature where someone can earn credits and let’s tie that into monetization and so forth.

That’s the investment that you’re making to sustain this incentivize viral loop, in itself sustaining or a paid acquisition loop. You run an ad that drives users to your site. If the conversion rate is high, the revenue generates funds for more ads, bringing in more users. And by the way, if those users aren’t converting and you’re spending a ton of money on ad spend, that loop probably isn’t effective for your growth strategy.

And I’d say, the last thing to think about is when implementing these growth loops, you want to select 3 or 4, some are going to work, some are not going to work. And I think if growth stagnates at any point, you need to re-examine your playbook there. And the biggest thing I would say about growth loops is if you’re listening to this and you’re like, I’m at a sales-led enterprise SaaS company, like this is inapplicable to me.

This is a fall on my sword. Growth loops are not just for PLG or B2C SaaS companies. Growth loops can and should be applied B2B companies as well. I mean, if you’re not considering how to implement growth loops at an enterprise level, you are missing out because while larger companies can afford to move slower and they’ll eventually maybe figure some of this out, they could have an opportunity to move faster if they implemented this kind of growth loop mechanism here.

So we’re grabbing an example here is that enterprise company could implement a knowledge base around use cases for their product. They could create a content creation viral loop where thought leadership articles are shared within the industry driving inbound interest. And product teams go further by pre-configuring these use cases within the product, reducing time to value for new users.

This not only speeds up onboarding, but you have the self sustaining loop where you’re investing in thought leadership, that’s then creating brand awareness that, that people are sharing and you’re getting inbound calls into your sales organization. Now you’ve got a growth loop at an enterprise organization.

And so by thinking strategically and implementing these growth loops tailored to your business, you now have compounding, like I said, compounding returns on your investment.

Hannah Clark: Yeah. I’m really glad that we’re talking about product-led and sales-led growth and that, it’s not necessarily either or. But now that virtually everyone is jumping on the PLG bandwagon, how do you see the future of sales-led growth? Do you think that there’s still a place for it?

Samantha Hepler: Oh, yeah. I don’t think that everyone is necessarily jumping on the PLG bandwagon. Although, you’re right. It is certainly a hot topic, but it’s very product specific. So if you’ve ever listened to Elena Verna or reading her content, she’s a leader in the growth space.

From what I can tell, she’s extremely sharp and really just seems to always call things as they are. And what she explains is that sales-led growth and PLG serve different purposes based on the complexity of the use case that your product is solving for, or the problems that your product is solving for.

So like take, for example, sales-led growth typically deals with more complex use cases, and they’re coming at it from like a company wide problem that requires a tailored approach, requires a very skilled salesperson to come in and help paint that vision and that journey for them. And so, for example, I hope I don’t mispronounce her name, but Christina Cacioppo is the founder of Vanta. And what Vanta simplifies SOC 2, HIPAA, and ISO compliance for companies who are trying to achieve any of those compliances.

She actually started the company with an Excel spreadsheet addressing these complex issues for entire organization before she actually built her SaaS company to solve these problems. But the point being from the very beginning, even with an Excel spreadsheet in her hand, it never made sense as she started to build out her product to build it in such a way that it could be PLG from the start.

And even today, layering in PLG into a company like Vanta, I imagine would be extremely difficult to go from sales-led back to simple use cases and have that PLG. It’s not impossible. It’s certainly done quite a bit, but not easy to do where she would want to maybe pull from PLG is those growth loops that we just talked about. Now, that SalesLab.

Now, on the other hand, you have PLG is all about self serve. How intuitive is your product for very simple use cases? Take Notion, for instance. Notion is that internal operations platform you can sign up for today as an individual, get activated and immediately solve a problem. This is very self serve, and ultimately, that problem that’s solving for you, you might have your team join, and then that could lead to an enterprise acquisition, and all of a sudden, you have gotten your enterprise contract, but it was through that PLG motion.

And so, I think the key thing is here, not to think of these strategies as mutually exclusive. But rather view PLG and sales-led growth as separate paths that could overlap and help each other depending on where the company is.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. I suppose when you think about it that way, sustained, sustainable growth looks different according to the product and the objectives of the business.

So how should product managers be working with product marketing and product enablement to support sustained growth?

Samantha Hepler: It all goes back to owning your product like a CEO. Your product marketing and product enablement teams are your go-to market counterparts. And frankly, because many product managers don’t think from that macro perspective, unfortunately, we’re starting to see a shift in hiring now, or you’ll see, I just saw one a few days ago.

They’re looking for general managers now, not just product managers. Leadership is realizing, well, if I call it a general manager and it’s a largely product role, but then all of a sudden they are in charge of the revenue. They are in charge of the go-to market success. They take full ownership of that product area.

So PMs again, have a real opportunity to shine. If they start thinking like a general manager, because that is what you are. That is what you have earned the right to be. So when launching new features and growing your product, think about your marketing strategy and your product enablement strategy for the sales team and think about it in such a way that is scalable.

So, again, pardon any mispronunciation, but Karri Saarinen is the CEO of Linear, and he recently wrote something about how his company ties marketing tiers to their feature releases. And so what this does is depending on the feature size, I’m paraphrasing here, and I know nothing of his internal operations, but based on my interpretation of what he wrote is you’ve got big features, medium features and small features, and they are each tagged to certain marketing tier, so nothing ever falls through the cracks.

Marketing knows exactly their plan that they’re going to carry out depending on the tier of the feature. And then similarly, Airbnb has just recently restructured their organization to move their product team into more of a product marketing manager role. And the reason for this is they don’t want their PMs limiting themselves in what they actually build because I’ve got limited resources or I’ve got, certain things on my road map that I have to make sure I hit.

No, they want their PMs to think like their product enablement team and their sales team is what’s going to sell. What is the feature that’s going to blow our customers away? And once they think like visionaries, they can actually then back in to their features. So collaborating closely with your product marketing counterparts and your product enablement counterparts are going to be really key to making sure that your go-to market is strong and also you’re developing the right features and can communicate how those features solve problems, not actually just what cool things that feature does at face value.

Hannah Clark: Okay. So now that we’re talking about features and value of features, let’s talk about feature factories. So in theory, in order to become a feature factory through the pursuit of growth, we’re trying to appeal to as many users as possible. What’s your take on that?

I feel like I have a sense of what your take is, but I want to hear you say it.

Samantha Hepler: Yeah. I think feature factories happen so much more often than we admit. Again, and those companies right in the middle before they see that IPO success where they have money to burn, have hired a large engineering team and they’re like, unfortunately, it is typically because of the executive team.

It is VPs of product and CEOs have their head in the clouds trying to keep up with competitors and they compile a list of features that they deem essential to stay competitive. And as a result, teams scrambled to deliver these features often without any clear strategy or understanding of their impact ever having a conversation with their customers.

I have worked at companies where I’m required to have 20 customer conversations a month and at companies where I probably talk to my customers, this was earlier in my career, but I probably talked to my customers once a month if I was lucky. And so eventually, these companies, hopefully those who make it will realize that nobody have IPOed by trying to keep up with competitors. They IPO by creating disruption, just how you got to where you are today, that CRD, you created disruption, you have to continue to disrupt. You don’t need to chase table stakes of what your competitors have.

So that’s what causes the feature factory. And so instead of a feature factory, I really recommend combining that customer feedback with very strong data analysis that allows you to understand not only your growth metrics, but have that quantitative growth model and really understand not just your market, but your customers.

So you also have to have that qualitative aspect. And you can cohesively craft your road map from there. You should be willing to stand by your road map and explain why every single feature is there from an output perspective. What output is it going to have? Not what features is it going to give me, but what is it going to do?

What impact is that going to have? And so it’s not just about catching up with competitors or aiming for a spot on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant. That’s just a misguided approach. So I think you focus on the data, you understand your unique market position, and you commit to a strategic roadmap, and then that’s how you create that meaningful disruption and sustained growth by staying in your lane, focusing on what you’re good at, not what competitor B is doing over here.

I mean, don’t have your blinders on completely, but they shouldn’t be looking to your right the entire time.

Hannah Clark: And I guess that ties in also with this notion of identifying, your core action that drives revenue or that keeps customers retained.

So how can product managers isolate the core action within their product that is most correlated with retention?

Samantha Hepler: Yeah, it’s a good question because it builds on like, okay, well, if I’m not a featured factory, well, what am I building? And I think oftentimes, there are products that provide so much value for so many different personas that they don’t understand how to isolate your core action. And I actually don’t necessarily believe that if you have a lot of different kind of value propositions and different personas that the core action, you’re always going to have one, you’re probably going to have multiple.

And so if product managers are actually listening to this, it’s really important to understand the core action for your area. So the first thing that you want to do before you even get to core action is make sure you understand the natural frequency of your product. So Airbnb might be once a quarter when someone books a house while for Instagram, the natural frequency could be hourly.

So once you understand your natural frequency, you can begin to make some hypotheses around what is my core action. So, for example, on Pinterest, the core action could be, is it searching for something? Is it pinning something? Or is it actually clicking on the link and going somewhere else? I don’t know what the core action is, but I know that if I say, Show me, do customers stick around longer if they search, pin, or click?

My bet is that it’s pin. If they’re pinning and they’re creating boards, they’re probably going to come back and look at their boards later. And that’s where you want to optimize. My goodness, remove all barriers to entry and allow users to pin as easily as possible. I was in Colorado a few weeks ago and I spontaneously decided, let’s stay longer.

Tomorrow, let’s find an Airbnb and let’s stay for another week. So I go on Airbnb, they’re single sign on with Google, and I quickly message a host and I’m able to book something if I’d like. In contrast, I was like, well, I’m going to check Vrbo. Why not? Well, their interface showed me hundreds of booked listings showing the label booked next to each one, creating unnecessary resistance to me hitting that core action of clicking the book button.

And I mean, this experience could not underline the importance more of optimizing your product to make the core action frictionless. If the VP of product over at Vrbo is listening to this, please, consider that I want to book stuff on your website. So something else to consider is that what if you’re a platform PM?

What’s my core action? You can apply this model to any part of your product. Imagine that you’re in charge of notification and that’s a platform PM feature. You need to make the best notification experience that anybody’s ever seen. How often do people set notifications? What are the types of notifications?

Which ones are more effective? What is the core action of your notification engine? It’s probably turning them on. And your goal is to drive users back to your product, getting them to engage with your notification platform and to perform those core actions repeatedly. If they have turned notifications off, you have turned and you’re part of the product.

And as a mini CEO, it is your duty to figure out why you have that churn. What is annoying about your notifications that a user is coming and saying, I don’t want to look at any of them. And so ultimately, the approach that I’m saying is, you got to look at not only your core action and your retention and your frequency.

But then all of this can start to tie into when you hone in on that core action, how can I start to put growth loops in place to optimize that core action even greater? How can I change engagement levers to get people to coming to perform that core action? The longer someone’s on your platform, the more they see value, the more they keep coming back, the more opportunities you have to monetize that user in the stickier product is. That’s what you want. That’s growth.

Hannah Clark: Excellently put, I have to say.

Okay, so now that we’ve covered a lot of practical ideas and prescriptive advice around growth, what is the worst advice you’ve ever heard with regards to driving growth?

So now that we’ve covered a ton of practical ideas and prescriptive advice around growth, I want to come back to your anecdote from earlier in the show when you talked about, the conference where folks were giving email addresses in exchange for swag.

What’s the worst advice that you’ve ever heard with regards to driving growth?

Samantha Hepler: I don’t know if I’d call it the worst advice. I might answer it just a little bit differently. And I’ll say this when you’re thinking about building zero-to-one, there’s a lot of different ways to do it. And I think the build it and they will come, that’s not true.

And so I actually, referring back to the Vanta founder, she sold her product before she even ever built it. And I think that’s one of the biggest key elements to growth. You’ve also got another founder who I just was reading about the other day who won’t touch a company unless they have access to like getting at least a million people to view their product.

You can build the best product in the world, but if you can’t get it in front of people, you’ve wasted energy. So I think really when you’re thinking about taking your product zero-to-one, the best advice that I can give rather than the worst. I’ve tried it almost every other way is not only know your customer, but see if you can secure them before you start building.

You do not need to build a product in order to get customers. If you are solving a big enough problem, if you put some scotch tape around a piece of paper and it is the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen but your problem is big enough and you have people willing to pay you to solve that problem, then you probably have strong indication that then you should start building.

Hannah Clark: Awesome. Well, this has been super insightful. I really appreciate all of the insights that you share with us today, Samantha. Where can people follow your work online?

Samantha Hepler: Right now I’m on LinkedIn and I attempt to post weekly, so definitely follow me there and we’ll see how that grows. Right now I’m very much heads down at Procore and focused on getting ramped up.

I’m excited to be there. I’ll say this even as a 24 year old company, they still operate in a massively agile fashion. Their culture is crisp and exciting and their investment in their customer and product are unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. So that’s my focus right now, but definitely hit follow on LinkedIn, follow along with those weekly posts and, yeah, thank you very much.

Hannah Clark: Yeah, thanks for joining us.

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