Product Led Growth
Product Led Growth (PLG) is a business methodology that positions product as the main driver in the customer’s journey. This means that product is involved involved in every stage of the customer journey, and this journey starts as soon as a customer engages within the product.
Why is PLG important ❓
🔘 Scale faster and Low Costs : It’s seen over time that companies can scale faster and more efficiently while keeping costs low, when they adopt the PLG strategy.
🔘 Builds better customer relationships : The relationship with the customer also strengthens and compounds over time.
🔘 Makes companies data-driven : PLG strategies help your organization make better, data-driven decisions
How does PLG looks like ❓
PLG differs from the more traditional funnel mentality, where marketing engages the customer first, then sales, then product. In this model, only after a prospect becomes a customer is the product able to influence retention and expansion opportunities.
Product-led growth encourages users to explore the product (for free), with minimal barriers. The product itself can begin to accelerate the customer journey to reduce customer’s time to value, improve retention efforts, and ultimately drive more revenue. So, with this strategy, the product sells itself.
OpenView Blake Bartlett first invented the term “product-led growth in 2016 — and it’s proved to be the secret behind the success of End User Era companies like Atlassian, Dropbox, and Slack.
When we say, in PLG product is main driver of customer journey it implies frome customer acquisition, activation, adoption, retention, to scalable expansion. Let’s look into each briefly -
🔵 Acquire — getting users into product often through free trails or freemium
🔵 Adopt — driving trail customers to fully onboard
🔵 Retain — Encourages them to renew
🔵 Expand — put the product at centre of revenue growth strategy
Example from PLG certification 💜💜
Next question that pops up, is how can we bring into practice 🤔
How can we implement PLG in companies ❓
✔️ The whole company must come together to rethink which metrics and tactics drive sustainable growth. It is very important to understand what KPI company wants to focus on and how the product metrics can drive those.
✔️ Post this we need to observe how our users act. Are they getting value from the product ? Our efforts will be towards implementing strategies to reduce the gap between a perceived value user has of product and the value your product actually delivers
✔️ After this it’s all about engagement. Keeping users engaged and invested in product. The idea behind this is to know users but also engage them through sticky features and new value, that ultimately generate renewals.
✔️ Lastly, continued iterations which is key to expansion. This means tweaking the strategies to best engage with users changing needs.
♨️ Examples of PLG Companies ♨️
Let us take a look at a few companies that have the strategy right and how they are utilizing it to their benefit.
💠 Datadog : it is a monitoring platform for cloud-scale applications and is beloved by the developers they serve.
💠 Slack : it is a team collaboration platform, now a true household name.
💠 Calendly : is a meeting scheduling tool that allows people across and within organizations to find mutually agreeable meeting times.
💠 Dropbox : the file storage and sharing system. It is an easy-to-use product for collaboration and sharing.
💠 Figma: it is, the vector graphics editor and prototyping tool. One of the loved products by designers.
💠 SurveyMonkey : they are the leaders in conducting web-based surveys.
💠 ProductBoard: it helps bring transparency to a company’s product management process. A collaborative product for everything from feedback to real-time discussions.
Tip : Read more about the PLG and feel free to check PLG certification by Product School 💜
⦿ References : The Whole Product Community ⦿
👋🏼 👋🏼 Until next time 👋🏼 👋🏼
