I joined Mural in Februrary 2021 as the VP Product Growth. At the time of hiring this role we were ≈600 people and somewhere around our Series C or D.

When hiring for this role I was in the midst of growth the Product Growth org from 2 PM's, to more that were focused on specific parts of the customer journey. I originally hired a PM on monetization, and one to cover the other parts of the customer journey. Today we are at 1 Group PM, 2 Senior PM's, and 1 PM. Across the entire company including core product the product team is around 40 people.

My top 3 recommendations hiring for a growth pm:

1. In the interview process you need to push on what "growth" means to someone. It might mean something dramatically different to them. You need to dig into the strategies and frameworks they are leveraging when they think about growth.

2. Look for insatiable curiosity and be a lifelong learner. This is really critical for growth roles and really hard to teach in my opinion. The person needs to be really interested in the "why."

3. Get really good alignment with the interview panel because of #1. Your internal team might also have a different definition of growth. If they aren't on the same page, it will lead to a mis-hire. Invest in a solid plan and set of interview questions.

Mural started as a very sales-led company and still is for a lot of purposes. A couple of years ago, they made the strategic choice to develop self-serve revenue and it was a big reason they hired me.

I am the leader for the self-serve revenue number and P&L. I'm responsible for creating a strategy and reporting on it.

Every model has pros and cons. The cons in this model are in a company where the majority of revenue is still coming from the sales org, it can be hard for people to justify financial planning and resourcing. You have to focus on helping people understand the connectivity between the self-serve business and the sales-led revenue otherwise self serve can get the shaft.

One of the questions I go through when hiring for this role is do I want someone with specific experience or more of a generalist?

I think about this through the lens of two things:

1. The complexity of the specific area the role will be focused on. An area like monetization is very complex and is more of a specialized skillset. Versus something like activation or acquisition where that specific experience is not as required.

2. The state of the business and org. In times where headcount is more abundant and plans were more certain, I might hire more specialists. Otherwise, I'll hire generalists who can be more versatile across areas.

This JD is written more towards the generalist growth pm vs the specialized.

I find that evaluating cross-functional collaboration ability is extremely hard in an interview process. It is critical for the role, yet you don't really know how they will act until they get into the actual environment.

The Product Growth pillar existed when I joined. There was a Dir of Eng, Dir of Design, and a handful of engineers in place. The pillar has navigated through many iterations of the operating model and org chat. The plan was to have 4 different product growth teams - acquisition, activation, monetization, and engagement. We got halfway built out then had to rethink and reprioritize multiple times due to the changing macro environment. The plan evolved from having 4 highly specialized teams to 2 teams that provided more flexibility across the customer journey.

Product growth roles are extremely competitive even in a down tech market. You tend to find two buckets of talent:

1. People from Meta and rest of FANNG or established growth teams.

2. Those from early pre-PMF companies.

Finding those with experience in the scale phase between those two things is tricky.

The challenge with those from established growth teams is that they've tended to only operate in environments with well-developed tools and practices. They can talk to the talk really well, but struggle to work in an environment where you don't have the same access to the tools/people/data.

The challenge with the early-stage folks is that they haven't gotten far enough in growth work to have experience on the big problems

One thing to keep in mind are internal hires. One of the PM's on the team was an internal hire who had no prior growth experience. They were a senior director in the customer success org and had been wanting to move into product. They had been managing a team, been using Pendo for outreach to customers, knew the context of the business and customers really well, and was very motivated and smart. I ended up choosing that person over an external candidate from the Instagram growth team who seemed great on paper but I had doubts on the cross-functional collaboration piece.

In times like this (2023) when the market is volatile, one of the things I interview for is resilience. I want someone who is willing to work on broader things and demonstrated the willingness to pivot focus and go through team changes.

Lauren Schuman

I wrote this job description when Mural was rapidly scaling and needed a PM with wide expertise within the growth discipline, as opposed to specialized experience.

Mural background

The Product Growth pillar is responsible for building a 

 that drives Online ARR growth. We do this by leveraging qualitative and quantitative insights to formulate and quickly test hypotheses and learn and iterate to uncover new opportunities.

As Senior Product Manager, Growth, you will work alongside other Growth Product Managers to grow our Online ARR. You will own the strategy, roadmap and execution for part of the customer journey for new self-serve members, as well as some of the tools that help enable the scaling of product-led growth across the organization (eg - experimentation tooling).

Build out the strategy for self-serve users (free & paid) in partnership with other Growth Product Managers and Growth Marketing

Collaborate with a product team of developers, designers, and product analysts

 to deliver high-quality experiences that lead to desired outcomes

Run experiments to increase targeted KPIs and share those learnings across the company

Partner with analytics and research to better understand what drives your KPIs; be a subject matter expert on the topic

Be able to speak to trends in your KPIs and how your team's work is moving the needle

Contribute to the refinement of our overarching self-serve strategy

 (PMs, EMs, Product Designers), suggesting ways in which we can be more effective as a pillar and team

The top candidate will have the following skills:

5+ years of Product Management experience in B2B or B2C SaaS products; website & product preferred

Proven track record delivering tangible business outcomes

Previous experience running A/B tests (Optimizely experience a plus)

Proven track record of effective collaboration with product teams and cross-functionally

Experience working in a high-growth company with fast-paced decision-making processes

Strong communicator & collaborator; excellent English written and verbal skills, proactive

Proficiency in analytics tools (Heap, Periscope, Google Analytics, SQL, etc)

Worked with remote collaboration software

Experience working at a fully remote company

Senior Product Manager, Growth Job Description at Mural

Senior Product Manager, Growth

YOUR MISSION

ABOUT THE TEAM

ABOUT THE ROLE

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