The Power of Product-Led Growth Strategies for Cultivating Advocates
The competitive landscape is more intense than ever for technology businesses, particularly SaaS (Software as a Service) companies. Traditional marketing and sales tactics with long lead times, heavy financial investment, and a demanding need for human resources could be more efficient. Not to mention, thanks to the viral effects the internet provides, modern users are incredibly savvy. Gone are the days when software is instantiated within an organization via a top-down approach. Users will be vocal about the products they do, don’t like using, and don’t settle for less than the very best.
In this new world, how do you as a business compete and break out of this vicious cycle of traditional sales and never-ending marketing spending?
Here when product-led growth comes into play. PLG is an emerging concept revolutionizing how businesses attract, retain, and grow their user base. To build a successful SaaS company today, you must understand product-led growth and build it into your business and product from the very beginning.
This blog post will cover what precisely product-led growth is and how you can implement it. We will also look at some real-world examples from my own experience and notable companies so that you can apply what you see here starting today.
What Exactly is Product-led Growth?
Product-led growth is all about prioritizing the end-user experience so that your target users advocate for and instantiate the product themselves. Product-led growth is a bottom-up approach to product growth. Traditionally, SaaS products are notorious for being clunky, challenging to onboard onto, and lacking modern UI/UX best practices. I won’t name any names, but I’m sure you can think of a few popular SaaS products that fit this bill.
These products are adopted by an organization in a top-down way, so the end-user has little say about whether they want to use them. As someone who’s worked at dozens of technology organizations from early stage-startup to major corporate tech companies, I can personally attest to the difficulties these types of products bring to the day-to-day work of an end-user. A modern-day design principle is to build to “delight” — it feels like these technologies are often doing the exact opposite. When building consumer products, we never overlook the end-user experience like this. Many SaaS products and companies have become complacent, relying on top-down adoption and neglecting the end-user because, ultimately, they have had no say in whether they want to use and continue using the product. Ironically, companies that had this complacent approach are some of the products getting most disrupted over the last few years by product-led growth forward competitors.
With product-led growth, the end-user becomes the product’s adopter and number one advocate. Think of software engineers within a company starting to recommend the version control tool they enjoy using the most or customer success members vouching for a new CRM (customer relationship management) tool. Employees have much more say in the direction an organization takes than in prior times, so these users can now ensure your product grows and retains its user base.
How to Implement Product-led Growth
There are a few things in mind if you are looking to implement product-led growth strategies for your product. First, it’s crucial to create a culture of being customer-centric. The mindset everyone on your team needs to have is that end-user customer feedback and pain are not to be shoved aside. This can be a bit of a mindset shift for some SaaS companies, especially those that are more mature in their stage of life. Investing in User Research within your design and product teams is one way to do this. Ensure that end-user usability testing, research, and feedback are part of the product life cycle. You may also want to create ways to generate end-user feedback, like product surveys and pulse checks.
It is also vital to help align your teams — especially across product and merchant-facing organizations. You may want to ensure your end-user support is as robust as your merchant contact support on the customer side. Ensure that your product and customer success teams are closely collaborating and aligned on the goal of putting the end user first in decision-making. You also may want to ensure that there are OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) around more than just sales and growth but also about end-user satisfaction or product design.
I have experienced firsthand how disjointed it can feel within a SaaS product organization if these expectations need to be communicated clearly and well-aligned. I once owned a developer product where the end-users (developers in this case) were complaining about a few features. However, the sales organization was pushing ahead full steam and continuing revenue success on a higher level. The developers were upset with the issues in the product and were finding it very difficult to complete their work in an efficient manner. It felt like the product and customer success organizations were not moving in the same direction. Half of the company’s leadership wanted to pour more money and resources into sales and marketing to grow the product from the top down, whereas the other half wanted to slow down and figure out exactly how to build a delightful product for our users so that we could be the go-to favorite for our developers and outperform the competition. After a lengthy investment in competitive analyses, we aligned the company on product-led growth and demonstrated that this was why our competition was outperforming us. It is a mistake for a SaaS organization to neglect its end-users.
More Examples from the Real World
Humans have more ways to communicate and exchange information than ever before. This trend is lending itself to the growth factor for product-led growth companies becoming even stronger. Companies are almost going “viral” — something many of us could never have imagined for SaaS products in particular.
One of the most stark examples of this in the last few years is Zoom. Zoom seemed to boom out of nowhere during the pandemic. Of course, the broader circumstances of remote work expedited this growth, but Zoom also made it a point to be an end-user-first company. The product is free to use, and onboarding takes less than a few minutes. The product can be directly accessed by end-users and easily integrated into tools like Google Calendar — no lengthy sales or onboarding process is needed. Zoom also created features they knew end-users would love. Probably my favorite example of this is Zoom backgrounds. It’s a seemingly frivolous feature, but something that can also serve a real need, like when your house is not in a great condition for working. These backgrounds took on a viral life of their own and, as something most competitors don’t offer, kept end-users coming back for more. Of course, Zoom was able to monetize this interest with its enterprise offerings ultimately successfully.
I also love the example of Figma. Figma was built by and for designers and their end-users and quickly replaced other tools used for years. Figma spent years doing in-depth user research and design to create features that almost have a cult following by designers. Simply put, these features are what designers themselves actually want and need to do their jobs, not what a higher-up far removed from these end-users thinks is best for the organization. By creating a tool that designers love to use and advocate heavily for, Figma was able to develop advocacy within their target users with less additional lift on their end to make a sale.
Final Words
By putting the product at the forefront of your business strategy via product-led growth, you can unlock a flywheel that is not only more resource efficient than before but also more effective in growing your user base. Product-led growth may go against the grain of everything we’ve been taught and done in SaaS so far, but in this brave new world, it is a necessity to be competitive. So take a look at how you and your team members are thinking about your product, and vow to put the end-user first at all costs starting today — you won’t regret it.
