Topic 1 — What is Product Marketing and Growth?

Goal: Understand what product marketers and growth managers do.

Lesson 1.1 — The product nobody heard about

Imogen's first week at Verdana, the product team ships a redesigned booking calendar. It's faster, cleaner, the kind of upgrade studio owners had been asking for. Devesh, the product manager, is proud of it. Three weeks later, Imogen pulls the usage numbers and almost nobody has touched it. The thing got built. It just landed in silence.

That silence is the whole reason her job exists.

There are two separate jobs hiding inside every product. One is value creation — actually building the thing, which Devesh and the engineers own. The other is value communication — making the right people understand it, want it, and choose it. A brilliant product nobody hears about or understands will fail just as surely as a broken one. Product marketing and growth own that second job.

Imogen came from local radio and podcast producing. She spent years finding a story and holding an audience that could leave at any second. Turns out that's most of the job. The new part is tying that craft to funnels, experiments, and revenue — which is what this whole course is about.

Building the product and getting the world to care about it are two different jobs. You're learning the second one.

Lesson 1.2 — What a Product Marketing Manager actually does

So when the new booking calendar shipped into silence, what should have happened instead?

Someone should have owned its story. That someone is a Product Marketing Manager (PMM), and their core job is to make the market care. A PMM owns three questions about the product: who is it for, what problem does it solve, and why is it better than the alternatives? Then they bring that answer to market — the announcement, the messaging on the website, the talking points the sales team uses, the way the product gets introduced to the right people at the right moment.

Hollis, Verdana's Head of Growth and Imogen's manager, puts it to her like this: the PMM is the bridge between the product and the customer. On one side sits a feature — "you can now reschedule a class in two taps." On the other sits a studio owner like Brigid, who owns Iron Fern and doesn't care about taps. She cares that she stops losing members who got annoyed when rescheduling was a hassle. The PMM's job is to translate the feature into the benefit Brigid feels, and make sure it reaches her.

If Imogen had been doing that job during launch week, the calendar wouldn't have shipped into silence. There'd have been an email to existing studios, a short in-app note, a line Wren in sales could drop into demos. The product was ready. Nobody made the market ready.

Lesson 1.3 — What a Growth Manager actually does

Hollis has a different obsession than story. Open his laptop on any given morning and you'll find a spreadsheet titled "experiment backlog" — a ranked list of ideas, each one a small bet on getting more studios to sign up, activate, and stick around.

That's the heart of the second role. A Growth Manager works to systematically increase users and revenue through data-driven experiments, across the whole customer journey — from a studio owner's first visit to the website, to signing up, to running their first class through Verdana, to paying, to telling another gym owner about it.

The method is a loop, and it always runs in the same order:

1. Hypothesize — "I think studio owners drop off at sign-up because we ask for billing details too early."
2. Test — build a version that asks for billing later, show it to half of new visitors.
3. Measure — count how many in each group finish signing up.
4. Keep what works — if the new version wins, ship it to everyone; if not, throw it out and learn from it.
5. Repeat — pick the next item off the backlog.

The mindset is closer to a scientist than a traditional advertiser. A brand advertiser trusts taste and a big creative idea. A growth manager assumes nobody's intuition is reliable — including their own — so everything becomes a test and the data decides. Hollis has killed his own favorite ideas more than once because the numbers said no. That's not failure to him. That's the job working.

A growth manager treats every idea as a guess until the data votes. The data wins every time.

Lesson 1.4 — Same goal, different emphasis

If both roles are about connecting a product to people, how are they actually different?

Think of it as where each one leans. The PMM leans toward story, positioning, and launches — the words, the narrative, the moment a product meets the market. The growth manager leans toward experiments and metrics — the relentless testing of what nudges a number up. One is more writer and strategist. The other is more analyst and tinkerer.

	Product Marketing Manager	Growth Manager
Core job	make the market care	grow users and revenue
Leans toward	story, positioning, launches	experiments, metrics
Main question	"why should this person want it?"	"what change moves the number?"
Default instinct	craft the message	run the test

Here's the part that trips people up: the two roles overlap heavily, and at a company Verdana's size they're often the same person. A great launch (PMM work) needs a measured result (growth work). A winning experiment (growth work) usually hinges on better words (PMM work). Imogen does both, which is exactly why this course teaches both — many of the jobs you'll apply to blend them into one title like "Product Marketing & Growth" or "Growth Marketer."

So don't treat them as rival careers. Treat them as two muscles of one job.

Lesson 1.5 — Where the role sits, and who it's for

There's a reason this work feels like standing in the middle of three conversations at once. It is.

A PMM sits at the intersection of product, marketing, and sales. Watch Imogen on a normal Tuesday. She's with Devesh in the morning arguing over which part of the product is the real "aha" moment worth highlighting — that's product. She spends the afternoon rewriting the website's headline so it actually sounds like something Brigid would say — that's marketing. Late in the day Wren forwards her a real objection from a prospect ("looks like it's built for big chains, not a two-room studio") and she drafts a response the whole sales team can reuse — that's sales. Three teams, one person translating between them so the product lands with the right audience at the right time.

Which is why this is such a strong pivot for career-changers. The role rewards two things: the ability to communicate, and comfort reading data. If you come from marketing, communications, content, sales, or journalism, you already have the first one — Imogen's radio years were basically a decade of audience research. The data side is learnable, and this course walks you through it. You don't need to have been technical. You need to be curious about people and willing to let numbers correct you.

That combination — part writer, part strategist, part analyst, part coordinator — is exactly the shape of the job you're stepping into.

Worked example — One feature, both roles in motion

Verdana decides to add automated payment reminders: when a member's card is about to expire, the studio can have Verdana text them automatically. Watch how the two roles show up on the same feature.

Wearing her PMM hat, Imogen owns the story. She doesn't announce "automated payment reminders via SMS." She talks to Brigid first and hears the real pain: "I hate chasing people for money — it makes me feel like a debt collector instead of a coach." So the launch message becomes "Get paid on time without the awkward conversations." Same feature, but now it speaks to who it's for and the problem it solves. She writes the announcement email, the in-app note, and a one-pager Wren can use in sales demos.

Now wearing her growth hat, she doesn't assume the launch worked. She runs an experiment. Half of new studios see the reminders feature highlighted during setup; half don't. Two weeks later she measures: did the highlighted group turn on reminders more often, and did those studios keep more paying members? The numbers come back — the highlighted group activates the feature 22% more, and Hollis greenlights making it part of the standard setup flow for everyone.

One feature. Story and experiment. The PMM made the market care; the growth loop proved what actually moved the number. That's the combined role in a single week.