Product-led growth does not mean product-centric development
With all the hype surrounding the product-led growth strategy, people are confusing terminologies. By focusing too much on the product, we are losing our users. Here is how I see it from a designer’s perspective.
What is product-led growth?
Product-led growth is a go-to-market strategy that optimises for users doing everything on their own in the product. From the customer’s perspective, this is a type of self-service experience. This is opposed to a sales-led growth strategy in which a company hires salespeople to proactively sell their product to the market. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, however, hence the ‘led’ part. The key here is relying on potential customers to experience the value themselves through some sort of freemium, then make a purchasing decision on their own. During their exploration of the product, they will be displaying all sorts of helpful behaviours for your sales team to better qualify their leads with.
A product-led growth strategy is generally more suited to low-cost products. This is because investors care a lot about the cost of acquisition, i.e. how much it costs your organisation on average to get a new customer. If that customer isn’t going to pay all that much over their lifetime (think 5 dollars a month), then you don’t want to spend so much on expensive salespeople. If you, on the other hand, are selling large value contracts, then having experienced salespeople will help you get them better. With a product-led strategy, you will generally be going for a large, broad market (like the entire world). With sales led, you will be limited to how many salespeople you have.
The easy way to tell if a company has a product-led growth strategy of some degree is whether on their website they primarily have a ‘create account’ or ‘request a demo’ call to action. If you have ever just wanted to try a product out, but were forced to go through a sales rep and demo, then you would understand why PLG works.
For example: Notion, the popular note taking tool, employs a PLG strategy very well. As you can see in the image below they have “Try Notion free” as their primary call to action and “Contact sales” is secondary to that.
In contrast to Notion, Usertesting.com does not employ a PLG strategy. As you can see in the image below, their primary CTA is “Request trial”. Having gone through this process with them before, I know first hand that they require you to talk to a sales person first. After your trial has ended, their sales rep contacts you for a chat where they first reveal their pricing. Only once you have seen their pricing do you understand that they are only targeting large contracts, hence PLG not being a relevant strategy.
What does this have to do with design?
“But this is what we have product managers for.” I can hear you saying. Although your product managers should all be well versed in the nuances of PLG, this still affects designers and their work. One of the key things in design, is to know what you are optimising for and why. If you and your colleagues are unable to answer that question, then there is a high chance that you will be tailoring it for something completely different. If your company has explicitly adopted a PLG strategy, then everyone needs to understand the nuances, especially that PLG is not the same as product-centric development.
So what’s the problem?
When people don’t understand what PLG is, then they don’t understand what it is not. By only hearing the title over and over again, they make assumptions as to what it is. They then spread misinformation and before you know it, everything is product-led, including the way teams are organised, the way UX is done, and even the way you get to put marmalade on your bread at the Monday meeting.
And if things are product-centric, then they are not user-centric.
Product-centric cultures tend to form organically. It seems to be due to the laziness of the human condition, that tends to default to the simplest model to comprehend. We seem to always default to our own self-centered perspective, as empathy seems to be something so hard to do. I guess that’s why UX designers exists and are so valuable.
Most product development departments are organised by product area or feature, i.e. each team has a clear mandate over which parts of the product they are responsible for. Sounds good, right? Although this makes for more efficient design and development, it usually results in a siloed, incoherent UX. This means that when it comes to project scope, teams tend to focus on one page or part of a page and are unable to look at the entire flow. They break their work up into different parts of the product, not different user experiences, which of course means the user suffers for it.
So how do we solve this?
As UX designers, it is our responsibility to champion the user and make sure they are not being swamped out by product-centric thinking. To do this we need to first educate ourselves and observe what is really happening in our unique situations. We then need to educate others and bring their awareness levels up. Then lastly, we need to bake customer centricity into the entire product development process, meaning not just the design tools but the management and leadership ones too. The brutal truth is that there is no easy way out of this, but I am confident, that as designers, we can make a difference.
