Startups are moonshots, trying to launch products to the stars. You build your rocketship (product) and launchpad (initial users). You’re ready to take off, so you hire a “Growth Marketer” to lead your Marketing team. They fill your ship with fuel and keep coaxing extra juice out of the engines. But, you never reach Mars... You forgot your pilot.
“Growth” skills have become the trendy skillset among early startup Marketing hires. At the time of this writing, roughly 45% of seed-stage Marketing roles on AngelList are “growth/content/acquisition” roles, and most of the rest are generalist Head of Marketing roles emphasizing those disciplines. Less than 15% are Product Marketing roles. That number should be much, much higher.
Others have already made the claim that Growth Hacking Is Bull, or that Growth Hacking Is Failing Most Of Us. However, Growth Marketers are invaluable team members, and you should always have someone rigorously conducting growth experiments. If you want to reach the stars though, you better aim your rocket the right direction — this is what Product Marketers excel at. Hire them first.
Growth Marketing provides the fuel, Product Marketing sets the course
Before going any further, let’s define what these two disciplines are, viewed through the lens of the basic “7 P’s of Marketing”, which are Product, Price, Place, People, Positioning, Packaging, and Promotion.
Growth Marketing, more than anything, is about a mindset — it’s highly iterative marketing in which new (usually digital) channels are rigorously tested and optimized via a technical, analytical, and tactical approach. Looking at the 7 P’s, Growth Marketing’s focus is probably 70% Promotion (paid ads, social, direct response marketing, virality, etc.), 20% Packaging (testing product enhancements related to Activation/Retention like new signup flows, etc.), and 10% Product. Growth Marketers are predominantly specialists who are very good at discovering and optimizing a few really efficient customer acquisition channels, usually digital.
Product Marketing is more generalist and strategic, with more of a focus on “classic” Marketing skills. Fundamentally, it’s about understanding your customers’ needs, how to bring your product to that market, and most importantly how to stand out. This encompasses customer research, positioning, messaging development, and holistic go-to-market strategy. This responsibility requires focus on all 7 of the 7 P’s roughly equally, with slight emphasis on Positioning, Price, and Packaging, and provides a broader viewpoint of the entire business.
Growth Marketers focus on customer usage to build systems of growth acceleration, while Product Marketers focus on customer motivations to provide the vision which informs that growth. This is a subtle difference, which may be better explained using the old SAT analogy format…
Product Marketing : Growth Marketing
as
Product Management : Engineering.
Now, most startups will hire several engineers before hiring one product manager, so you may be confused at the analogy. However, in most startups, the CEO or other founder is the de-facto product manager. Since there’s generally little skill overlap between the early technical team of a startup and the Marketing team, building out that side of the business is much like a startup within the startup. As such, building your Marketing team without a Product Marketer onboard means you’re basically starting a company without the CEO in place first.
“First master the fundamentals” :
Hiring Product Marketing is hiring for scalability
Larry Bird must be a Marketing guy. Product Marketing, above all else, is about the basic Marketing fundamentals of understanding customer motivation and how messaging/product drive behavior. In my experience, this gives them a clearer grasp of how to leverage a broader variety of channels effectively. Their broad Marketing acumen, and creative development skill, generally also makes them capable of executing average-to-above-average Growth Marketing initiatives (although don’t get me wrong, a great Growth person can still out-duel me on most digital channels). As Andrew Chen of Uber points out:
Technology changes, but people stay the same.
Growth Marketers tend to be experts in the technology, but Product Marketers are experts in persuading people. Unfortunately, Growth Marketers, largely coming from technical backgrounds, tend to have weaker Marketing fundamentals, and get caught up too much in Marketing fads. Your first Marketer will probably be around for a long time in a leadership role, which makes it critical to hire someone with strong fundamentals and broad Marketing acumen.
Another dirty little secret is that if you’re an entrepreneur who’s grown a company to the scale where you have the means, and need, to hire a full-time Marketing person, chances are you’re already pretty good at Growth Marketing. Remember that part where I said Growth is a mindset? That means that while a dedicated expert will be much better at it than you and your already-stretched-too-thin team, early growth is achievable while handling it yourself, having a Product Manager/Engineer focus on growth experimentation, or bringing on a decent consultant (there’s lots of these). Remember, you’re still most-likely doing things that don’t scale at this point.
Growth Hackers Gone Wild:
Lean in to growth hacking too hard too early, and you’ll regret it later
Growth hacking is insanely valuable when done at the right time (usually, after greater scale than you’d think), the right way. It also poses a significant long-term danger if allowed to run rampant too early.
Growth Marketing, by its very nature, is somewhat resistant to strategy. The fundamental principal of growth hacking is throwing experiments against the wall and leaning into whatever sticks (which is not, by the way, a strategy). While there may be sub-strategies focused on testing channels within a more narrowly-defined realm, ultimately the goal of growth hacking is to optimize individual channel performance to create an optimum performing channel mix. Unfortunately, this is limited by campaign-level performance measurement capabilities (which tend to be shorter-horizon and campaign-specific), and by campaign targeting capabilities (which tend to be demographic or behavioral, rather than psychographic). If you’re not simultaneously running broader brand campaigns to crystallize overarching company positioning (which, if you’re small, you likely can’t afford), this can result in measurable long-term damage to the company’s brand positioning, messaging, and creative assets which is hard to reverse.
Using a hypothetical (and exaggerated) example to illustrate this point… Say Snapchat had been purely focused on growth hacking in its early days, with no strategy or clearly defined positioning around visual communication. They may have recognized that acquiring kids 14–18 from Facebook ads (demographic segmentation = bad) was super efficient. Thinking they’ve found the golden goose, they focus most of their efforts on optimizing for that group and discover that ads messaging “the best way to sext!” were most effective. Clever growth hackers that they are, they keep adjusting their website, app store description, ads, and product onboarding with sexting-based copy/imagery to push this high-converting message… Oops! All of a sudden, parents hear about the hot new app among their kids and get out the pitchforks and torches, Apple takes them off the app store, growth slows, and investors bail. Game over. Crafting a long-term positioning around visual messages being a more emotive way to communicate insulated them from that outcome, and created a larger market opportunity.
Another common pitfall is losing focus due to campaign-level success. Discovering your individual feature-based messaging is super effective in ads, you may try to message all the things your product does on your website, but then too late realize that your website has become a muddy mass of feature-based messaging, rather than clear differentiated positioning. At that point, nobody knows how to describe what your company does.
There’s more examples, but you get the point. A Product Marketer’s job is to set clear, compelling strategy and message. It’s far easier and cheaper to put strategies in place up-front, than to try to fix poorly developed positioning (Marketing’s version of “technical debt”). Launching from a place of strength will also accelerate your growth testing efforts; it takes a lot less optimization effort to get to a 30% conversion rate if you start from 20%, rather than 10%
Product Marketers do it all, and exert greater leverage
Remember that analogy I made between PMs and PMMs? One great engineer on a product team can have a monster effect by developing a killer new feature, but a great product manager exerts higher leverage by understanding why that feature was killer and then focusing the whole team on a subsequent roadmap, thereby improving everyone on the team’s impact moving forward. Product Marketing is similarly a high-leverage function within an organization — acting as a mini-CEO on the Marketing team.
A great Product Marketer, because they sit at the intersection of product, growth, and communications can exert positive influence across every facet of the business. Developing better pricing (don’t leave this to Growth Marketing), helps improve profitability from every activity the organization performs. Creating a clear go-to-market strategy gives the entire company a roadmap to rally behind and helps keep teams aligned through the craziness that is a startup. But most importantly, they’re conducting consumer research, and crafting a clear, differentiated positioning along with compelling creative assets. Great creative grounded in a strong, differentiated position is worth its weight in gold — it creates better performance across all acquisition channels, it informs better product roadmapping, and it builds defensibility into the business model. These activities touch the whole organization, and have tremendous impact, even if it’s less immediately apparent than developing a new acquisition channel with a sub-$1 CAC.
Many startup founders, as Engineers, have a bias towards “hard skill” Marketers, but it’s important to resist this bias and focus on those who can execute, but do so strategically; thus exerting greater impact on the org as a whole.