“The most important thing that companies get wrong about growth is expecting one group or person to do it. It’s an entire company initiative, even if you have a growth team. I think, you have to expect that everyone in the company at some level is responsible for growth.”

— Joel Stevenson, CEO Yesware.

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What is Product-led Growth (PLG)

Product-led growth (PLG) is a “business methodology in which user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven primarily by the product itself”.

The Product-Led Growth Collective is a community-driven platform. Leaders in product development use it to share the latest ideas, strategies, and real-world lessons from their journey towards PLG. It serves as a collaborative hub for advancing the PLG movement.

“Voice of the Product” is a video interview series by the PLG Collective, featuring strategic leaders from top product-led companies. These interviews offer deep insights into how PLG is being implemented across different functions. These include customer success, sales, product, marketing, engineering, and design.

In Season 2 of the series, eight product-led leaders answer eight critical questions on PLG, including:

1. What do companies get wrong about growth?
2. When should you use people over product?
3. When did you first hear about product-led growth?
4. Flywheel or funnel? Or bowling alley?
5. How do you navigate change successfully?
6. What changes in SaaS are you most excited about?
7. What does the future of product-led growth depend upon?

Each episode tackles one of these key questions. It provides actionable insights, and explores the challenges, learnings, and transformations that come with adopting PLG.

Product-led growth is more than a strategy—it’s a cultural shift that requires every team member’s alignment. Industry leaders highlight that PLG is most successful when every department works in harmony. The goal is to create a user experience that drives adoption, value realization, and ultimately, business growth.

Everyone in the Company is Responsible for Growth

In Episode 1 of Season 2, eight interviews are presented, answering the question: “What is the biggest mistake in expecting growth?”

One of the key points: “Everyone in the company is responsible for growth at some level.”

Check out the video at the link for more details.

The next chart from the 2023 Product-Led Experience Report by Appcues illustrates this idea. It compares the contribution of various functions within a company to user engagement. All revenue related departments play a role in engaging users. Product teams are leading at 67.23%, and customer success (62.71%) and marketing (60.45%) are following closely.

Key conclusions:

1. Cross-Functional Engagement is Key: User engagement is not the responsibility of a single department. It requires collaboration across multiple teams, including product, sales, customer success, marketing, and more.
2. Product Teams Lead: Product teams are the top contributors, indicating that a well-designed product is crucial for effective user engagement.
3. Customer Success and Marketing are Major Players: Both departments significantly impact user engagement. It highlights the importance of a seamless customer journey and consistent communication.
4. Sales Involvement is Lower: Sales contributes relatively less (35.8%), suggesting that companies may need to focus more on integrating sales into user engagement efforts.

What Companies Do to Improve Product-led Experience?

This chart from the same research presents the areas companies plan to invest in to improve their product-led experience.

The priorities include:

• Making Features Easier to Access and Use (69.49%): Companies are primarily focusing on making product features more accessible and user-friendly to drive engagement and enhance user satisfaction.
• Gaining Better Clarity on User Engagement (61.58%): Understanding how users interact with the product throughout their journey is a significant focus, showing an effort to align products more closely with customer needs.
• Efficiency and Self-Service Improvements (59.32%): Many companies are prioritizing self-service and improving efficiency, aiming to make the customer experience more autonomous and seamless.
• Providing a More Personalized Experience (42.66%): Personalization remains an important area. Companies are still striving to make their offerings feel tailored to individual user preferences.

User experience and usability are top priorities, with the majority of investments aimed at simplifying access and improving feature usability.

How to Measure a Successful Product-led Experience?

For most organizations, retention, time-to-value, and activation rate are the cornerstone top experience KPIs/metrics for determining a successful product-led experience. The emphasis is on getting users engaged quickly, delivering immediate value, and ensuring they stay engaged. This is a clear indications that user-centric growth is driving the product strategy for many companies.

• User Retention Rate: The most critical metric for defining a successful product-led experience is user retention rate. 26% of respondents rated it as a top metric, with 55% considering it the number one or two metric. This shows that keeping users engaged and retained is the primary objective for most organizations.
• Time-to-Value, or how quickly users perceive value from the product. It is also a high priority. 26% rated it as a top metric and 50% rated it in the top one or two metrics. This highlights the importance of getting users to experience benefits swiftly, which is key to driving adoption and satisfaction.
• Activation Rate, which measures how many users engage with key features. It is equally significant, being prioritized as the top one or two metrics by 50% of organizations. This indicates a strong focus on getting users to realize the core value of the product early in their journey.
• NPS and Support Tickets: Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the number of support tickets. They also play a role, being considered top by 13% and 9% of respondents, respectively. This suggests that while customer satisfaction and support efficiency are important, retention and activation metrics take precedence.
• Other Metrics: Only 2% of respondents consider “other” metrics to be significant. It suggests a broad industry consensus on which metrics matter most for a product-led strategy.

Conclusions

Companies often fail to realize that growth is an entire company initiative. Everyone, regardless of their role, is responsible for it.

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business methodology where user acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention are all driven by the product itself.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) and NBM4 align through their focus on customer-centric innovation and scalability. PLG drives growth by letting the product itself lead user acquisition and retention, reducing friction in adoption. Similarly, NBM4 emphasizes the creation of digital business models that are easy to scale and engage customers directly. Both advocate seamless user experiences, continuous product improvement based on customer feedback, and efficient revenue growth without traditional barriers.

Cross-functional engagement is key for PLG, and product teams lead in user engagement.

Companies plan to invest in:

• Making features easier to access, gaining better clarity on user engagement.
• Efficiency, and self-service improvements, providing a more personalized experience.
• Improving overall user experience and usability.

Key metrics for a successful product-led experience include:

• User retention rate.
• Time-to-value
• Activation rate.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Support tickets.