The 5 types of Growth Product Managers
Which profile are you?
Hey, Pierre-Jean here 👋 Welcome to this new edition of The Growth Mind, where I share Product & Growth strategies, case studies & expert insights.
Today, we discuss the 5 types of Growth Product Manager roles, deep diving into their:
Main objectives
Typical projects
Skills needed
Who is this role for
⏱️ Reading time → 5 minutes
Need support on Product Growth? See how I can help
[Sponsor] How mature is your digital experience? Amplitude’s framework helps you find out 📊
Building a great product isn’t just about adding features. It’s about how well your teams, processes, and tech work together to create great digital user experiences.
But it’s always hard to properly understand where your company stands. That’s why Amplitude released a 4-step framework to evaluate your digital maturity.
This framework helps you assess your strengths across 4 key pillars:
✅ Strategic alignment – Are teams working toward a shared vision?
✅ Organizational readiness – Is data at the core of your decision-making?
✅ Operational readiness – Can teams move fast with automation and insights?
✅ Technology readiness – Is your stack built for scale and innovation?
The good news? They built an interactive assessment, so you can get your score and recommendations.
What is a Growth Product Manager? How does it differ from a “classic” Product Manager role?
First things first, a bit of history → The legend says that the concept of “Product Manager” was first introduced in 1931 (yes, you read it right) by Neil H. McElroy, an advertising director at Procter & Gamble (P&G). He was at the time outlining the need to have someone owning the development and distribution of a product or a brand.
Practically 100 years later, the world has changed a lot, and every tech company now has a Product team with one or several product managers. While the role of Product Manager is clearly established within the tech ecosystem for 10+ years, the Growth Product Manager role is relatively new.
As you can see below, the role started to get some interest around 2016, but it clearly bumped between 2020 - 2022 👇
Why? It coincides with the rise of Product-led Growth → Companies adopting a growth model where the product is the main acquisition, engagement, and monetization driver.
While PMs were before responsible for building the product, and not growing it, the approach changed a lot with Product-led Growth. Which explains why the role became so popular over the past 4/5 years.
The main differences we can see between a traditional PM and a growth PM are the following:
Traditional PMs focus on building the right product (core features), while Growth PMs focus on ensuring that the product grows.
The traditional PM focuses on users’ needs first, while the Growth PM focuses on business metrics first (even if both are closely correlated).
A traditional PM tends to rely a lot on user feedback and qualitative analysis, while a Growth PM is mainly driven by quantitative metrics.
Growth PMs operate on short cycles, experiment more, and prioritize impact over perfection.
Of course, this isn’t binary. Some PMs integrate growth work into their scope, so it’s not pure science and it depends a lot of the company structure, culture and context. But understanding these nuances is key to framing a Growth PM role.
The 5 Types of Growth Product Managers
1/ Full-Funnel Growth Product Manager (aka The Generalist)
🎯 Main objectives
Own and drive growth across the entire AARRR funnel, from acquisition to monetization. Prioritize initiatives with the biggest impact on the business.
📌 Typical projects
Audit the entire user funnel, identify drop-offs and map growth opportunities
Lead cross-functional growth initiatives
Build gross loops across acquisition/activation/retention
Manage SEO, CRM, onboarding or pricing experiments
🧠 Skills needed
This role needs a strong ability to work across marketing, product and data → A true full-stack mindset. Expect a lot of coordination/stakeholder alignment as you’ll work on several part of the funnel, sometimes with other teams.
Other classic PM skills like data analysis, prioritization and understanding business objectives are key.
👤 Who is this role for?
Perfect for first Growth PMs in early-stage startups → Generalists who like to touch everything and have a true full-funnel vision.
You might work on the onboarding flow, redesign the pricing page and launch a paid campaign the same week.
Great for those who want to maximize learning and ownership, but be aware: you’ll go wide, not necessarily deep on a single part of the funnel.
2/ Acquisition Growth Product Manager
🎯 Main objectives
Drive top-of-funnel growth by leveraging product levers and marketing assets to bring qualified users, at scale.
📌 Typical projects
SEO: building scalable assets (template libraries, dynamic pages)
Social sharing, referral and viral loops
Optimizing sign-up flows and landing page conversion
Paid channel integration with product (e.g. trial targeting by intent)
🧠 Skills needed
A good marketing sense is needed.
Technical skills will include SEO, CRO, product-led growth techniques, experimentation, copywriting, funnel logic.
👤 Who is this role for?
Ideal for builders with an acquisition mindset, and marketers who’ve crossed into product.
Important: this is not a Growth Marketing role. The focus is on product-driven acquisition, though the boundary with website optimization is thin. Expect a hybrid scope across product & marketing.
3/ Activation/Onboarding Growth Product Manager
🎯 Main objectives
Help users complete the full activation path (set-up, ahah and habit moments) faster and reduce activation drop-off. A role especially critical in SaaS and mobile products.
📌 Typical projects
Mapping the activation funnel and key drop-off points
Designing personalized onboarding flows (by user type, intent, etc.)
Creating checklists, templates, product tours
A/B testing welcome screens, tooltips, and empty states
🧠 Skills needed
A lot will be about optimizing onboarding, so CRO (conversion rate optimization) skills are super important. You should also master user segmentation, onboarding psychology, UX thinking, data analysis, experimentation.
👤 Who is this role for?
Great for product thinkers with a strong empathy for user onboarding friction. Expect to work on flows, templates, in-app guidance, maybe even webinars. If you enjoy crafting paths that turn new users into power users, this one’s for you.
4/ Engagement & Retention Growth Product Manager
🎯 Main objectives
Boost long-term usage and minimize churn. Help users build habits and stay engaged throughout their lifecycle.
📌 Typical projects
Designing lifecycle CRM: emails, push, in-app messages
Building habit loops and feature nudges inside the product
Segmenting users by behavior (e.g. dormant, power users)
Cohort analysis and churn forecasting
🧠 Skills needed
A strong empathy and user sense is needed for this role. Skills include lifecycle marketing, behavioral segmentation, habit-forming design, CRM channels, and product analytics.
👤 Who is this role for?
For PMs who love retention curves and behavioral data.
You’ll operate at the crossroads of Product, Data and CRM. Among all Growth roles, this one gets the closest to a traditional PM, focused on long-term value and sustainable usage rather than short-term wins.
5/ Monetization Growth Product Manager
🎯 Main objectives
Maximize revenue by optimizing pricing, packaging, and conversion paths toward paid plans or upgrades.
📌 Typical projects
Experimenting with paywalls, trials, freemium vs premium logic
Building monetization flows and upgrade nudges
Defining pricing strategy, price points and elasticity tests
Improving the pricing page UX and plan visibility
🧠 Skills needed
This is likely the most business-oriented role, so you need to be good at mastering figures and understanding the business impact of product initiatives.
You’ll need a strong business sense, data fluency, experimentation, pricing psychology and design sensitivity.
👤 Who is this role for?
Perfect for data-driven PMs who want direct impact on revenue.
This is the closest you’ll get to the business core: pricing is one of the highest ROI growth levers. If you enjoy balancing revenue with UX, this is your spot.
Wrap up:
These roles are not always siloed, and that’s the beauty of Growth. A single Growth PM might own both activation and engagement, or handle acquisition plus onboarding, depending on team size and product maturity.
Each Growth Product Manager role will be different depending on the product type, company stage, and culture. But the scope you’re owning strongly defines the skillset needed. Understanding where your growth challenges lie is the first step in shaping your role as a Growth PM.
You can either decide to specialize or stay more generalist. Both options make sense. And it’s never 100% fixed, you can transition from one role to another.
Need help with Product Growth? Here are 2 ways I can help you:
Fractional Growth PM: Need senior guidance and execution on Product Growth, without hiring a full-time PM? I help you by joining an existing squad or as your first Growth PM.
Product Growth Sprint: Looking to move fast on a critical Product Growth challenge with focused execution? I help you on a custom 2 to 4 weeks mission on the following challenges:
Fix onboarding & activation drop-offs.
Work on monetization to increase free-to-paid conversion.
Build a scalable growth loop.
→ Available in French 🇫🇷 and English 🇬🇧