Every great journey begins with a map and a mission. In the world of Growth Product Management, we're not just building features or shipping code - we're navigators on an expedition, searching for golden opportunities to drive business value. But how do we consistently discover and capitalize on these opportunities? And beyond that, how do we know where to dig?
Here are 6 essential steps to ensure that you go from opportunity to measurable impact every time:
- Define your metrics and know exactly what "gold" looks like for your business
- Map your opportunities and build a comprehensive view of where value might be found
- Choose your focus areas and decide which areas deserve immediate exploration
- Design targeted experiments and decide precisely where and how to dig
- Analyze results deeply and understand why you were able to strike gold or not
- Update your strategy and evolve your map based on what you've learned
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Define what your 'gold' is
Before you begin your expedition, you need absolute clarity on what success looks like. Many Growth PMs make the critical mistake of chasing metrics without questioning whether they're pursuing real gold or just polished rocks. While your OKRs might point you in a general direction, it's your responsibility as a PM to determine which metrics will genuinely drive business value.
The best metric is relevant and movable
- Relevant = there is a clear link between the metric and what ultimately matters for your business (ex. MRR)
- Movable = the metric is close enough to your work that you can observe movement through your experiments
There are two essential qualities that every worthy metric must possess. First, it must be relevant - there should be a clear, direct line between your metric and what truly matters for the business. A good example of this is Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR). Second, it must be movable - the metric needs to be close enough to your actual work that you can see the impact of your experiments and initiatives. Without both qualities, you risk investing precious resources into metrics that look valuable on the surface but don't contribute to real business growth.
Map your opportunities
With your definition of gold firmly established, it's time to create a comprehensive map of where that gold might be found. This is a critical step that many Growth PMs rush past - without a complete view of your world, you risk becoming trapped in a single area, meticulously digging in a depleted mine while vast riches lie undiscovered elsewhere.
Creating this map begins with expanding your perspective. Look at your product world through multiple lenses: examine your funnel steps to understand the customer journey, study different user personas to identify unique needs, explore various surfaces where users interact with your product, and consider all the levers you could pull to drive growth.
A useful approach to identifying opportunities: ‘What’, ‘Who’, ‘How’, ‘Where’
| WHAT are we trying to achieve? |
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| WHO are our target audiences? |
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| HOW can we make improvements? |
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| WHERE can improvements be made? |
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Once you've conducted this analysis, build a structured framework to organize your understanding. Most often, this takes the form of a conversion funnel - tracking user progression from initial trial starts, through billing screen views, to payment entry, and finally to purchase. If you're charting unfamiliar waters, your existing analytics dashboards and funnels can provide a valuable starting point.
But a map without data is just an artistic sketch. Fill your framework with real numbers to illuminate which areas are thriving and which are struggling. Then dive deeper - examine the actual user journeys, explore specific features, and analyze key screens that align with your funnel stages. This detailed investigation often reveals hidden opportunities that surface-level metrics might miss.
Sample journey map
Finally, challenge your initial assumptions. Your first map is rarely your best. Segment your traffic in different ways, consider radically different approaches to defining opportunities, and be willing to break down and rebuild your framework. The best Growth PMs know that a good map, like any valuable tool, requires constant refinement.
Steps to mapping your opportunities
- Step 1: Look at your product world through multiple lenses
- Step 2: Build a framework to organize your understanding, ex. a conversion funnel
- Step 3: Fill your framework with data to identify which parts are performing well or poorly
- Step 4: Dig deep into the components that align with your funnel
- Step 5: Continue to refine your framework
Choose your focus areas
With your map in hand, it's time to make strategic choices about where to focus your exploration efforts in the coming quarter or year. This decision isn't as simple as picking the areas with the biggest drop-offs - it requires carefully balancing three critical factors.
3 critical factors to balance:
- Likelihood of finding gold based on your past experiences and accumulated knowledge
- Engineering effort required
- What are the greatest opportunities for learning?
First, consider the likelihood of finding gold based on your past experiences and accumulated knowledge. Then, weigh the engineering effort required - particularly when exploring new areas, which often demand significant upfront investment. Finally, factor in the learning potential, as new areas typically yield more valuable insights that can inform future explorations.
A proven strategy is to venture into at least one new area each quarter, increasing this pace when you're exploring entirely new problem spaces. This approach prevents you from exhausting any single area while ensuring you always have fresh opportunities to pursue when returns begin to diminish.
This strategic selection process begins with comprehensive research. Analyze your funnel drop-off data, review past experiment results, conduct experience audits, gather qualitative feedback, and study competitor approaches. This multi-faceted analysis helps identify areas with the greatest potential for improvement.
Next, dig deeper to understand the true size of the opportunity. Remember, you're not yet planning specific experiments - you're evaluating broader areas like specific parts of your funnel (trial starts versus conversions), different surfaces (in-product experiences, commerce platforms, admin hubs), or distinct customer segments (such as users with multiple products).
Finally, engage with your engineering teams and other stakeholders. Understanding technical constraints, potential blockers, and required investment early helps prevent pursuing promising opportunities that aren't currently feasible. These conversations should also explore the relative potential for both immediate impact and future learnings.
Steps to choosing your focus areas
- Step 1: Analyze which opportunity areas might have the most improvement potential
- Step 2: Determine the total addressable market (TAM) for different opportunity areas.
- Step 3: Involve your stakeholders to understand investment required and any blockers or constraints
Decide where to dig
With your broader strategy set, it's time to get specific about where exactly to dig - in other words, which experiment to ship. This decision requires careful calibration of three critical elements that often pull in different directions.
The first consideration is maximizing your chances of success. This means leveraging every insight at your disposal: diving into analytics, absorbing customer research, reflecting on past learnings, and engaging in thoughtful discussions with teammates. Each of these inputs helps refine your hypothesis and strengthen your experimental design.
Second, and equally important, is maximizing the learning potential of your experiment. The best experiments aren't just one-off successes - they're stepping stones that inform multiple future initiatives. When evaluating potential experiments, prioritize those whose learnings could be applied across many other areas over those that might succeed but teach you something applicable only to that specific situation. The goal is to build a compounding base of knowledge that makes each subsequent experiment more likely to succeed.
Finally, there's the question of engineering effort. While it's tempting to minimize scope to ship more experiments quickly, this approach can backfire. Too small a scope might doom an otherwise promising experiment to failure, creating a false negative that steers you away from valuable opportunities. Here's a practical way to think about scope: ask yourself, "If I run this smaller version and it fails, would I still want to try the fuller version?" If the answer is yes, you're probably better off including that additional scope from the start. If no, then the smaller scope is likely sufficient.
A good place for you to collect all this information and analyze it is Jira Product Discovery, a tool purpose-built for prioritization and roadmapping.
3 considerations for where to dig
- How do maximize chances of experiment success?
- How to maximize beneficial learnings for future experiments?
- How to minimize engineering effort?
Analyze your results
You've run your experiment - now comes what is arguably the most crucial phase of the entire process: understanding the 'why' behind your results. This step is so vital because your most successful experiments rarely stand alone. They're typically either extensions of previous wins or refined versions of near-misses. The real power of experimentation lies in your ability to turn one success into ten by deeply understanding what drives positive outcomes.
This phase requires close collaboration with your engineering and analytics teams. Together, you'll dig deep into the post-experiment data, examining both the funnel metrics and the granular details of user behavior. The goal isn't just to determine if the experiment worked, but to understand precisely where, how, and why it succeeded or failed.
Post-experiment learnings template
The questions you ask during this analysis are critical. Work with your engineering and design teams to explore where improvements could drive even greater impact. For successful experiments, probe deeper: Did you exclude any user segments that might benefit from this change? Are there similar experiences elsewhere in your product where this solution could apply? Are there underperforming segments where additional iteration could unlock more value?
As a Growth PM, your role in this analysis cannot be delegated. While you'll rely on your engineering and analytics partners for data and technical insights, you must be deeply involved in interpreting what that information means for your product's growth trajectory. This also allows you to communicate that meaning out to stakeholders. Take whatever time is necessary to extract meaningful insights - these learnings will form the foundation of your future successes.
Update your strategy
With your experiments complete, zoom back out to update your map. Like any good navigator, you need to regularly incorporate new learnings into your understanding of where the gold lies. Every 3-6 months, take time to reassess your opportunity landscape - your successful digs will have revealed patterns about where value truly exists, while unsuccessful explorations will have ruled out less promising areas. This ongoing refinement of your map ensures each new expedition benefits from all your accumulated knowledge.
Beware of these common pitfalls!
As you navigate these waters, watch out for these common hazards that can derail even experienced Growth PMs:
- Beware of mistaking a single continent for the whole world. It's easy to zoom in too close, investing heavily in one area while missing abundant opportunities elsewhere. Like a navigator fixated on a single coastline, you risk exhausting diminishing returns when richer veins of gold lie just over the horizon.
- Resist the urge to start digging without a map. While you might stumble upon occasional wins, random exploration leads to fragmented, haphazard learning. Each experiment should be part of a larger, coherent exploration strategy.
- Never dig without a clear hypothesis. Each experiment needs a specific, well-reasoned rationale for why it should work. Without this clarity, you'll struggle to understand the true causes of your successes and failures, making it impossible to replicate wins or learn from losses.
- Don't rush through your analysis of results. The actual behavior of real customers, observed at scale, is your most reliable guide to future success. Take the time to understand the 'why' behind every outcome - these insights are often more valuable than the immediate results themselves.
