How to Get Started in PLG: Mindset (Part 1 of 3)

Empathy, Generosity, Instrumentation

Video and Written Versions Included Below

So you want to build a product that sells itself?

First step: get in the right mindset.

Next, dedicate 5-7 of the very best people you have (take them off of their current assignments).

Then work on it for 3+ years.

Sound too hard? Then it won’t happen for you. Want to shortcut it? Not gonna happen. Check out these three legends’ ARR growth during their initial years.

These companies had fully dedicated and undistracted teams working on product-led growth. They were staffed with undisputed “best and brightest” product and engineering talent. If they were only able to achieve minimal ARR through the first 3 years of iteration and effort, how would you “beat” that without your own fully dedicated team of best-and-brightest?

But look what happened with these companies once their iterations and incremental improvements began to kick in.

This kind of non-linear growth doesn’t happen in purely human-led business—it can’t. Human-led GTM scales more linearly, even when executed at its highest level. This type of non-linear growth is the prize that gets us all thinking we would like to explore product-led GTM for our own businesses.

If you are also interested in considering PLGTM, this series may be for you. This is Part 1 of a 3-part, high-level overview of what is required to get started on PLG. This piece focuses on Mindset, Part 2 focuses on Talent, and Part 3 focuses on Timeframe.

Mindset

In a product-led GTM motion, we rely on the product to market itself, sell itself, renew itself, expand itself, or some combination of the above.

These interactions are explicitly between the product and the user—no human assistance required.

This means the user must be motivated to get something done, convinced that a particular product or feature will help them, and able to make sense of the product or feature and succeed without any outside help.

Since our company (the product company) has no person in the room with the user as she discovers and adopts the features that help her accomplish her work, we are fully reliant on the product to guide and assist her along the way.

Developing this type of product is far more difficult than developing a product that relies on human assistance at each step of the customer journey: marketers, salespeople, implementation personnel, support specialists, and customer success managers. Our product has to succeed without any of those human assistants.

This type of product development requires specific and deliberate focus on the three first principles of Product-led Growth (PLG):

1. Empathy

2. Generosity

3. Instrumentation

1. Empathy

When PLG product managers approach the prospect of designing a new feature or product, they start by developing a deep understanding of the end user, her situation, her objectives, her context, her emotions, her environment, her constraints…. We call this deep understanding Empathy.

Every person you know is trying to make progress in their life. It is our job to understand and be able to articulate the situation in which a person—trying to make progress—would benefit from “hiring” our product or service. Clayton Christensen calls this the “Job to be Done” (JTBD). (More on Christensen’s Jobs Theory here.)

This sounds like an obvious approach, but it’s surprising how often product designers design for a category or a person rather than for a job.

Designing for a Category…

If we believe we are in the “Yoga Studio” business, we will build a better Yoga Studio. Better location. Better design. Better services. Our focus might be on out-designing our competitors and developing a superior offering. We might market our Yoga Studio as better than other Yoga Studios.

…vs. Designing for a Person…

Designing for a person might have us targeting a 30-35 year old women who live in the suburbs.

This might cause us to treat all members of that segment like potential customers, and to neglect people outside that segment.

If we’re thinking about our customer, we might try to win her over to our studio vs. other yoga studios with advertising, promotions, and a superior product.

…vs. Designing for a Job

Designing for a job might have us targeting the occasion when a person feels overwhelmed by the demands of life and needs a chance to unplug, reset, connect with their inner self, and gear up to re-engage with reality.

This might lead us to focus on anyone feeling overwhelmed, since they have the Job to be Done of “resetting” or recovering from the sense of being overwhelmed.

What else could someone “hire” to solve the problem of feeling overwhelmed?

• A movie

• A game night with friends

• The gym

• One of my Yoga Studio competitors

Now that we know why someone would hire our product, we can look for those occasions when our product makes sense as an answer to the Job to be Done, and we can position it correctly.

You don’t have to be a 30-35-year-old suburban woman to feel stressed out and in need of rejuvenation. That’s an occasion, not a certain type of person.

In addition, we can now design our service better. If the point is to disconnect from the demands of life and reset, maybe we can play soft music in the studio. Maybe we have essential oils and dim lighting. Perhaps our instructors speak softly. Maybe we upgrade the changing room to include a steam shower, comfortable seating and clean towels. Maybe we are careful to hire instructors of all body types, so we don’t further stress out our clientele by inviting discouraging comparison.

Since we know are not solving a fitness Job to be Done or a social Job to be Done or an “I want to look good” Job to be Done, we can tailor the solution to solve the reset Job to be Done.

We may not even call it a Yoga Studio. It could be a Wellness Studio or an Escape Studio or a Yoga Retreat or something that speaks to the occasion on which a prospective customer would deem it advantageous to hire our service to help them make progress on their Job to be Done.

Reaching this level of understanding of our potential customers and their jobs requires interviews, shadowing, prototyping, and iterating. We will continue this research until patterns begin to repeat, and we know we have discovered the core Job to be Done. At this point, we can begin designing—from a point of deep Empathy.

2. Generosity

Once we know our Job to be Done, and we have developed what we believe is a good solution that our customers could “hire” to help them make progress on that job, we give it to them. For free. We let them experience the Impact our product has on their own Job to be Done, no strings attached.

You know the products in your life who have shown up at the right time with the right solution to help you solve a problem. You’re probably especially aware of the ones that didn’t require payment or commitment until well after you were convinced this was the product for you. DropBox, Notion, Netflix, Calendly, Canva—these are all solutions with very compelling free versions that allow you to experience the product before purchasing. You may have even joined a Yoga Studio for a free month before committing to a paid relationship.

This is not feigned generosity. We are not tricking customers. We are genuinely trying to help customers solve problems. This mindset is important, because it determines what we put at the center of our focus. In this product-led strategy, we are focused on optimizing the experience for customers, who are trying to make progress. If our customers are experiencing Impact with our product, monetization will come.

3. Instrumentation

With none of our employees in the room while a customer discovers and adopts our product or feature, how will we know how it’s going?

Instrumentation.

We need the product to track what is working and what is not working and communicate that back to us. We do this by instrumenting key events in the product so we can see where a customer is getting hung up or confused.

If we see people getting stuck at the activation phase, we examine the experience and look for ways to make it easier. We launch experiments that help test different experiences, and we measure results based on signal we get back on the new flow.

We use instrumentation and experimentation to iterate our way to a user experience that allows customers to succeed on their own, without help from us. We call this the “self-service happy path.”

Does that mean we cannot deploy humans to help along the way? No we can deploy humans. But in this product-led GTM strategy we won’t make human assistance a required part of the journey. Self-service is the default, instrumentation helps us tune that experience to be as frictionless as possible, and then we choose where and when to deploy human assistance for reasons we decide.

Talent

In Part 2 of this series, we dive into the type of talent you will seek and dedicate to this endeavor. Your team does not need to be big (5-7 people), but it needs to be dedicated. This is typically the hardest decision for any organization to make. The best people are already busy on the most important initiatives at a company. So suggesting we pull them away from the “most important” initiatives and dedicate them to a 3-year experiment invites all sorts of resistance. But if you want a shot at getting PLGTM to work for your company, you will have to do exactly this.

Furthermore, you will need this team to be autonomous. They cannot retain formal ties to their former teams—they need to have freedom to singularly focus on the objective of getting PLGTM up and running within your company.

Time

If Mindset and Talent weren’t tough enough, our impatience in pursuing business outcomes might just be the thing that prevents you from launching.

In Part III we dive into the timeframe of building and tuning PLG for your organization. The short answer: 3+ years.

We don’t have to wait 3 years for any outcomes, just for ARR outcomes. Along the way we will measure other things, and Part III looks at those also, and how to sequence them.

Parting Thoughts

Product-led GTM can architect scalability, sustainability and durability into the revenue stack. But just like anything worth doing, it is difficult, and it requires investment. Very few organizations are able to achieve growth rates like those above, and the ones who do represent the very best of product-led organizations.

Some companies who started out sales-led recognized the opportunity to launch product-led GTM and have successfully retrofitted PLG after they already had ARR > $100M (HubSpot, MongoDB and Unity are three examples I profile in my upcoming book, Product That Sells Itself).

All successful PLGTM companies I have worked with or studied have displayed a common pattern, outlined in this three-part series: Mindset, Talent, and Time.

It is doable, and it is worth it. The question is, will your organization make the required investment to execute on this strategy? $3M and 3 years and best talent—that is the requirement. I hope you will do this. I believe you can. I have studied the patterns of success so you can have a roadmap. Product-led GTM is the future of revenue, and you still have time to be on the cutting edge.

Let’s go!

XOXO,

-db