Kevin Manley

I've helped generate growth as a product manager and marketer: acquisition, activation, usage, retention, and referral. I gravitate toward finding the biggest levers for growth; sometimes they're in product, and sometimes they're in marketing. I’ve worked with B2C and B2B SaaS, lead generation, eCommerce, and nonprofits to improve and optimize growth. By leveraging experimentation, personalization, and statistical analysis, I’ve helped product and marketing teams look for new opportunities, build growth models, accelerate product development, maximize user engagement and growth, improve efficiency with a better growth and analytics stack, and develop a culture of experimentation. If it involves experimenting on growth, I love to dig in and look for opportunities. - Growth Forecasting - Growth Tech Stack - Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) - CRM integration - Monetization & Pricing Strategy - Increasing Product-Market-Fit

• 

  Conversion rate optimisation

  Good growth leaders are broad on many topics and deep in a few areas. CRO is one area where I am very deep. As a growth consultant I’ve personally launched hundreds of experiments and been a part of many more. I’ve run CRO experiments through all stages of the funnel; in for B2B and B2C SaaS, lead generation, eCommerce, and nonprofits. **Tip: Think about CRO as learning about your customers, and validating hypotheses to fix customer pain points (not your own) and the wins will follow.

• 

  Design / UX

  There are many great ways to approach improvements to design and user experience. I tend to look at it through the BJ Fogg Behavior Model framework, and how improvements to design and UX can increase growth: Motivation, Friction (ability), and Triggers. Mapping these opportunities to the customer journey will help prioritize the most impactful design changes.

• 

  Growth marketing

  Too often I see teams approach growth hacking as cloning some tactics they read from a playbook. This typically leads to low impact initiatives. *Tip: Start with a Goal Tree Map, and reflect on the user journey, thinking about each touchpoint (or potential touchpoint) as a lever you can pull and improve your top goal. If you were the customer, what would increase motivation, reduce friction, or trigger you to return and refer others?

• 

  Mindset coaching

  Increasing growth velocity can seem insurmountable at times. Experimentation velocity is critical to increasing the speed at which we find and exploit growth opportunities.

• 

  Pricing strategy

  I have worked on SaaS pricing strategy for several companies in both B2B and B2C, and I’m happy to share best practices and strategies to price both new product launches and optimize existing product pricing and packaging.

• 

  Product analytics

  I have spent a lot of time interpreting and implementing web-app product analytics for consumer, SMB, and B2B SaaS, and have some experience with mobile app analytics as well.

• 

  Product management

  While it often makes sense to have a dedicated growth team, every product manager should be a practitioner of growth, and every digital marketer should strive to be a strong product manager. Leveraging experimentation and the painted door approach can significantly speed up the product development cycle, and improve UX, engagement, retention, and growth.

• 

  Product market fit

  If your product doesn't have at least one market that has strong retention, no growth strategy or tactic will be effective. Stop and get Product-Market-Fit (PMF) first. Once you have PMF and some repeatable growth patterns generating new business reliably, then it may be time to expand it to new markets / use cases.

• 

  Remote work

  I’ve worked remotely for about 6 years, including with international teams on the other side of the world. Happy answer any questions, and share any tips, tricks, and best practices. The ability to leverage asynchronous communication is key. If one member of the team is remote, then everyone must be able to operate like a remote team member.

• 

  Technology and tools

  I've helped develop and improve the growth stack at a few companies. I've made a lot of mistakes that sucked up precious time. The effort you put into your growth and analytics stack depends on the stage of your company. Happy to chat, help you avoid traps, and identify opportunities for improvement.

• 

  Amplitude

  8 years of experience

  I have used this as one of my core analytics tools for a few years. It is a very powerful product for a point-and-click BI tool, but there are some "gotchas" if your not paying attention to your implementation.

• 

  Google Analytics

  14 years of experience

  Have used GA for many years to analyze and optimize traffic and conversion for different business models. Great for top of funnel, and for linear user journeys, but not the right tool for protracted tracking and non-linear user journeys.

• 

  Hotjar

  13 years of experience

  Hotjar is a great tool for helping to add color to analysis. Heatmaps and (well tagged) recordings can drastically improve customer journey analysis and split testing analysis.

• 

  JIRA

  13 years of experience

  I have frequently used Jira for product management and project management. Solid tool for product management. Can often be a bit frustrating to set up properly, but once setup, it is incredibly powerful.

• 

  Mailchimp

  12 years of experience

  Developed and launched email nurture and retention campaigns while for both consumer and business customers. The suite of tools and functionality in Mailchimp has grown a lot over the years.

• 

  Mixpanel

  5 years of experience

  Have used Mixpanel in different roles over the years to analyze, segment, and optimize customer journeys for Apple and Android applications. While not as robust as Amplitude, Mixpanel does a great job helping to make analysis more available the whole team.

• 

  MySQL

  13 years of experience

  At Nowait resources were tight and taught myself MySQL, building a database on a home server to learn, so I wouldn't have to wait around for someone else to help analyze our data.

• 

  Optimizely

  10 years of experience

  As a growth consultant, Optimizely frequently hired me to help their new customer launch an experimentation program and get started with Optimizely. It's a great tool, and if price isn't a big issue, you won't go wrong with Optimizely.

• 

  Salesforce

  13 years of experience

  I have a love-hate relationship with Salesforce. It is a really powerful CRM when you add all the integrations and add ons, but the costs add up quickly, and building custom integrations often requires developers who understand the gotchas poor data architecture in Salesforce creates.

• 

  Segment

  10 years of experience

  I am a huge fan of the power of segment in the growth stack. For most of us, our core business is not analytics tools or data management. Outsourcing these functions to segment is one of the easiest ways to get a reliable and performant growth stack quickly.

• 

  Trello

  13 years of experience

  I have frequently used Trello for product management and project management. Solid free tool for managing tasks in a kanban style. Good amount of plug-ins to help improve usefulness and workflow.

• 

  Zapier

  13 years of experience

  Huge fan of Zapier and the power it can bring to hack stuff together with duct tape and bubble gum. Fantastic tool that has saved me hundreds of hours with leads flows as well as product management flows.

• 

  SaaS

  Helped several B2C, B2B, and B2SMB software companies grow through conversion rate optimization and pricing strategy, using experimentation and analytics.

• 

  E-Commerce

  Worked with several e-commerce companies to improve analytics, optimize product product pages, optimize search result pages, improve site architecture, and ultimatly improve ARPU and AOV.

• 

  Consumer Applications

  Helped several B2C and Consumer software companies grow through conversion rate optimization and pricing strategy, using experimentation and analytics.

• 

  Enterprise Software

  Helped several B2C and Consumer software companies grow through conversion rate optimization and pricing strategy, using experimentation and analytics.