This document outlines the "10 Commandments of Product Growth" to help product managers stay on track with growing their products. The commandments include finding product-market fit, having a clear north star metric, focusing on user retention before acquisition, discovering the "magic moment" for new users, prioritizing user activation over acquiring new users, understanding key metrics and data, accepting failures as learning opportunities, guiding marginal users, utilizing feature discoverability testing before creating new features, and maintaining an open mindset of continuous testing and improvement. The goal is to provide a reference guide for growing products at any stage from launch to maturity.
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These 10 commandments of
Product Growth are a perfect
reference guide to help you
stay on track, wether you’ve
just launched a product,
or had it in the market for
years.
Are you following the
10 Commandments of
Product Growth?
4. In order to be able to grow your
product properly, you need to
understand the product and the
market fit.
If you don’t have product-
market fit, you’ll never grow
your product to its true
potential, and it’s easy to
believe you have it when you
don’t.1
6. Your North Star Metric is a
single metric that leads your
product.
Everything you do should
influence your North Star Metric
in some way. If it doesn’t, it
gives you a reason to question
if the tasks, features, changes,
ideas, etc, are really helping
you move forward with your
product.
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8. The rookie mistake is to
instantly put all your efforts into
acquiring more users. More
registrations mean a better
product, right? Wrong.
Fix the leaky bucket before you
try to increase your acquisition
efforts. If your users aren’t
retaining, you’re throwing away
value. It’s harder to get churned
users to come back than
acquire new ones.
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10. At what point does a first time
user have their “aha” moment
within your product?
Know this, and use this. This
is the point the value of your
product clicks for the user.
Bring this to the forefront of all
you do during acquiring and
activating your users and you’ll
find it easier to engage with
them.
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12. Growth doesn’t end with
acquiring a user.
Define what an activated user
is within your product, and
strive towards that. It will make
sure that you are correctly
attributing your acquisition
sources to good, quality users
for your product.5
14. It’s easy to get caught up with
too many metrics. Analysis
Paralysis can creep up on you.
Make sure you understand your
user flows, and with your North
Star Metric, develop the main
KPIs that lead to your North
Star.
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16. Growth isn’t about making a
few optimizations within your
product here or there, it’s about
constant change.
You should be constantly
testing. Not every test will work,
but the failures will help guide
you in the future and make the
wins even more successful.7
18. The product and features have
all been developed from the
ground up for one type of user
— your whales. These are the
ones who already use most of
the features and are heavily
engaged.
This strategy keeps your whale
users happy, but by focussing
on your marginal users you
are diversifying your client
base risk. When it comes to
your whale users, just a small
increase in users can have huge
effects on your bottom line.
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20. We all have ideas. We can
throw up new feature ideas for
our products at any time. But
feature overkill isn’t the way to
win.
Features need to be optimised
and presented at the correct
time in the users journey.
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Growth never ends.
It’s all about creating a
reiterative process.
Use your data to identify
opportunities, validate
the results of your tests,
document and then do it
all over again. What works
now may not work in the
future and what fails now
may work in the future
