Joining us is Nastia Root, project manager at Google and also a Darden alumnus. Thanks for joining us Nastia. >> Good to be here. >> You are a Growth PM at Google. Can you talk a little bit about what is a Growth PM? What is that job? >> Sure. Growth PM is a main objective, for growth PM is not to add features as a lot of other PMs. It's more of increasing your user base, trying to grow your product, implied by the name. But generally, it increases all your files from the top to the bottom. >> Got it. And one question I bet you get a lot is how is it different than marketing? >> For me it's really different because my idea is not to find the way to market my product but to grow. So it's about taking a feature and experimenting with it. If I add specific item to the sign up flow will it increase conversion? Will it increase user flow? Will it help to sign more users? And you kind of take the whole funnel and you find the items in each part of the funnel where you can do better. And marketing mostly concentrates how can we reach users and what else is in front of the users. >> And, I mean, could you talk a little bit more about the objectives of the Growth PM and how you define success in the job? What the projects look like? >> Sure. The main objective convert as many users. And the bonus, we cannot ask actually keep the happy users in your product. Not to let them leave. But I think because key success for me was always seeing that we have more users coming in, we have more users going for the product, more users converting. You always can compare yourself to comparable products and see how they convert and we do it frequently. We take comparable products then we can see the conversion rates and conversion offers in the market and then kind of compare the different products one to each other. >> And you've been a PM at several different companies in different capacities. How would you say being a Growth PM is the same, is different, than other PM roles you've had? >> As I mentioned, the biggest difference to me was, I'm not running after features, I'm running after users. And that's the main difference. Because before, with every single company, we took a piece of the product, or we took a new product to market, we looked at the functionality, at the features. What we wanted to achieve, what the pain point. Here we know the pain point. It's already basically sold. Now we're making it better. Now we're trying to bring more users and understand why the users are signing or not signing up, and how we can make it less painless for them, how we can make it better. What is in the product which will make users to stay? And generally how we're going to attract more users to the product. As well as the focus of specific feature or specific change to the product itself. >> And for the PM that's considering a role as a Growth PM, what would you advise them to consider? Both in terms of, is it the right kind of job for them and also, how should they prepare themselves for if they do think that? >> I think PM on the growth team or Growth PM depends on your company how you define it. I wouldn't want to be as my first PM roll, because I think I would miss all of the fun of creating new features and taking product to the market. There is something very magical in seeing your feature being born and seeing it being born and successful. And I miss it sometimes. It's a different drawl. On the growth side it's very real. It's very much each user adult times if it's providing a product of revenue, it adds to the revenue. And you see this needle moves up. And it's almost of graded section. From preparing, I build it on the standard data. I build it to extract from the data which you're looking for. Even simple things like SQL I had to brush my skills. That was helpful, just basically running queries and seeing where we are. How users are doing, where, which part of the final they're dropping. And this gives you more ideas how to get better. Beside that I think that's the main factor which is very different from quote unquote regular PM. >> And one thing we like to close with on these is a top three list. What are your top three tips for being an effective Growth PM? >> I think it's the same as for most of the PMs. Be able to build relationships with people around you especially groups who may be dependent on other teams which are not under your responsibility and you need to be able to negotiate with them and make them feel allied. Be very good with data, at least as good as you can. So, again, you can look at the data and get the right information out of it. And the third, just be there for your team. I think it's, again, same for every single PM not related to growth, but make sure your engineers are working with you is the best they can. You are their best friend, not the enemy, and it's super important for any PM to understand. >> Some great perspective on the job of being a Growth PM from Nastia Root at Google. Thanks for joining us Nastia. >> Thank you.