The key components of Product-led Growth

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So, if product-led growth is basically the same as building a good product, what key components need to be present to drive the success of this model, regardless of what you call it? In my opinion, building a strong product requires the following considerations:

Minimize friction

I could be charitable and say that customers are busy. They don't always have the time to sort through the features or knowledge base to discover the value of your product if you don't do it for them.

But the reality is that we are often lazy. We want things explained to us and we want to know if a particular product will work for us as quickly as possible.

That’s where minimizing friction comes in. Friction inhibits usage, and it certainly limits adoption within organizations. Here are some of the ways it manifests in the product:

- An overly complex registration process

- Lack of onboarding and/or activation training to get new users up to speed quickly

- Asking users to do too much, too fast

- Unnecessary functions or steps

- Limitations that prevent multiple users within an organization from collaborating effectively

These aren’t the only types of friction that impact your product, and they clinical nurse specialist email database don’t apply universally. Building customer teams and implementing analytics tools that can identify friction points within customer usage patterns can help identify where these issues might be limiting your product’s growth.

Demonstrating value from the beginning

Failing to demonstrate value up front contributes to friction, but minimizing friction isn’t the only reason you should care about proving your value up front. A positive initial experience is also crucial to both converting new customers and building the kind of word of mouth that will get them to recommend you to others.

If you can make a product easy to use and make its appeal instantly obvious, you're likely to succeed, whether you call that product-led growth or not.


Using features and products to drive demand

Kyle Poyar, VP of Market Strategy at OpenView, emphasizes the role that features play in driving product-led growth:

“Companies with a PLG strategy (think Slack, Expensify, Atlassian, and Dropbox) rely on product features and usage as their primary drivers of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. It is through this strategy that companies can grow faster and with less cash. They forgo spending large sums on traditional marketing and sales activities. Instead, they rely on the products themselves to supply a pipeline of satisfied users to convert into paying customers.”

For me, this veers a little too close to an “if you build it, they will come” mentality to really stand on its own. Having great features won’t serve your company’s growth if people don’t know you have them (or can’t access and use them efficiently).

The challenge, however, is figuring out exactly what customers need, and serving it up on a silver platter isn’t as easy as it sounds. Different users have different needs and different workflows. What customers or needs will the product you develop support? Will you even be able to gain meaningful insights from your customers about what they need if the solution you envision doesn’t yet exist?

It's an oversimplification to say that features and the product alone can drive demand. But being proactive in asking for customer feedback and mapping their ideas to in-app actions should give you some insight into the needs they have for your product to be successful.

Sales and marketing "layer" in product use

One thing I like about the idea of ​​product-led growth is the potential it has to change marketing conversations.

In the past, many sales and marketing teams have operated independently of product and customer groups. I'm glad to see the prevailing wisdom shifting to recognize that these silos don't really serve anyone, and I've seen many situations where sales and marketing seem to be telling a very different story than their products can deliver.

Stop if this sounds familiar: You read about the benefits of an app on their website or talk to a company's sales rep about their product. But when you actually try the product, what you're seeing doesn't really match what you were told, and it doesn't match what you expected.

It’s a recipe for user frustration, but it’s also all too common when sales, marketing, and product teams aren’t aligned. But thanks to today’s technology, sales and marketing teams have a huge opportunity to leverage the data produced by the product to improve the timing of key sales conversations or deals.

For example, marketers today can trigger an upsell offer when users take specific actions in the app, while sales can be notified to reach out and offer personalized onboarding when a second user with the same company email address logs in.

Product-driven companies have the opportunity to let the value their solutions provide play a more active role in everything from development decisions to marketing campaigns. When products are built to provide obvious, accessible value, everyone wins.