How to Get Started in PLG: Talent (Part 2 of 3)
Q: Is this a good project for my product team? A: No
Video and Written Versions Included Below
That subtitle isn’t exactly right… but you will indeed need more than a “project” mindset, and you will also need more support than just in Product. Let’s dive in.
Assuming we have gotten into the mindset described in Part 1, and assuming we want to design and develop experiences that will speak to our customer in a way that allows her to make progress on her Job-to-be-Done all on her own, we will need a few specific skillsets to pull that off.
Marketing can help us find and attract the customer,
Design can help us design experiences that speak to the customer,
Engineering can build and test those experiences and build in instrumentation that helps us measure them,
Analytics can design experiments and interpret the results, and
Product can organize and prioritize the work of the team toward an overall set of goals.
If we need Marketing, Design, Engineering and Analytics, that clearly goes beyond the scope of a typical product team. Yes, Product and Engineering and Design already work together every day. But not Marketing. And typically not Analytics.
Not only do we need to assemble the right skill sets, we also need to move quickly. To make progress tuning the experiences we are building, we need results from experiments as fast as we can get them. Every improvement in conversion is like gold when we build a PLG flywheel, and those improvements come by way of experimentation. Each experiment requires a design, a build, and a test. When we get results we like, we incorporate the new experience into our overall flow permanently, and when the experiment doesn’t deliver, we deprecate it.
Growth Team
A Growth Team is a construct built specifically to solve the problems outlined above.
Typically, companies are organized into functions: Sales, Marketing, Product, Engineering, etc. This organizational structure serves us well, except when it doesn’t. When the task is PLG, it is impossible to work effectively across silos. Consider the following scenario:
Product Manager: “I want to test a new account creation flow.”
Designer: “Let’s go! We can do the research and design this quickly”
Front-End Engineer: “I’ll be happy to build it—what do you want me to trade off that I’m currently working on?”
Marketer: “I’m not sure we can do that from the homepage. The homepage is kind of like our main face to the world, and we just re-did it. I’d have to talk to my boss, but It’s unlikely she would want to redesign anything on the homepage.”
Back-End Engineer: “I can’t give you direct access to new account creation functionality—we haven’t built APIs for those functions, so you’d be accessing our core code. Building new APIs is a whole ‘thing’ around here—we have an architectural review committee that approves all API designs. If you want, I can hard-wire you in, but probably not until next sprint or the sprint after that… I’m heads down right now.”
Analytics: “Happy to help. Let me know when you have some data to analyze.”
Traditional organizations were not built for rapid experimentation. The proposed experiment in the example above would likely take months to deploy and measure. Meanwhile, we need to be launching new experiments weekly.
Growth Teams are designed to address these issues. In order to facilitate rapid iteration, Growth Teams are built cross-functionally, including Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing and Analytics. It is important that members of this team are dedicated. If the engineer is “on loan,” she will work on this stuff when she can, but ultimately she will do what her “real boss” wants her doing—because ultimately that is her path to good performance reviews and promotions.
Indeed, if we want to facilitate rapid iteration, we must minimize distractions and roadblocks. We need a dedicated team, whose only job is to work on PLG initiatives… dedicated Product, Engineering, Design, Marketing and Analytics.
Reporting Structure
The efforts of this team will be organized and run by a Growth Product Manager (Growth PM). She is a member of the team—doing research, building schedules, designing experiments, etc. And she is also the manager of the team—coordinating efforts across Design, Engineering and Marketing to deploy new functionality, and working directly with Analytics to measure the results of the new functionality deployed.
Who completes the annual reviews for these team members? The Growth PM. Where is their first loyalty? The Growth Team. It can be difficult to get out of the “lending” mindset and into the “dedicated” mindset, but these team members are not “on loan.” They are permanently dedicated to the Growth Team, complete with a new reporting structure.
Where does the Growth Team report? This is a critical decision. The Growth Team should report to a C-level executive, who has enough power and influence to break down barriers and pave the way to success. When Marketing is having trouble making “room” for a Growth initiative on the home page, this executive clears the way. When Engineering can’t easily give access to back-end functionality, this executive negotiates a solution. The executive who sponsors the Growth Team must have the respect of her peers, and she must be willing and able to protect the team, give them space to work, and help them access what they need across the organization to accomplish their work.
The Growth Team does not work on core product—that is the domain of Product. The core product team continues to deliver on product roadmap, independent of the Growth Team. Could Growth report to Product? Yes, a couple of important provisos. First, it only makes sense for the Growth team to report to the top Product executive? Why? Because we need his or her clout and sponsorship when negotiating the company-level coordination required to make Growth work. Second, it is imperative the sponsoring executive can effectively keep the team insulated from the daily demands of core product roadmap delivery.
When HubSpot decided to build PLG from scratch in 2014, they carved out a Growth Team similar to the team described above, and they had that team report directly to the CEO, Brian Halligan.
When MongoDB needed to build PLG into their already-functioning business, they gave the task to a new VP of Cloud Products and GTM (essentially a Growth Product Manager), Sahir Azam, who was “sponsored” by the CEO.
When Unity Software made the transition from sales-led to self-service, the CEO hired a Director of Self Service (Jesus Requena), and allowed him to assemble his own team of engineers, marketers and product people to build up the self-service line from $0 to $20M.
In each of these cases, the head of the Growth Team had direct sponsorship from a C-level executive (the CEO in these cases), who could make the necessary resourcing and access decisions to ensure the team would succeed. And in each of these cases, the resulting PLG motion ended up exceeding the core business in terms of growth rate, overall size, or both.
Staffing the Team
We’ve laid down some ambitious design parameters for this team:
Dedicated
Autonomous
Reporting to a C-level Executive
These are difficult decisions to make in any company. You shouldn’t rush these decisions—they need to be made with conviction and executive-level support.
The good news is, this team need not be large: 5-7 people total.
1 Growth PM
1-2 Growth Engineers (ideally full-stack, or one front-end and one back-end)
1 UX Designer
1 Growth / Performance Marketer
1 Analyst
The harder news is, these team members must be “best-and-brightest” people—truly exceptional. And you have to select the team not only for raw talent, but also for a certain mindset—a Growth mindset. It is quite likely that the best marketer for this team is also the best marketer at your company. Ditto for engineers. How can you possibly justify taking your very best talent off of what they are doing today, and putting them on a three-year-long PLG journey that won’t post metrics that move your company’s business for that entire three-year span?
This is where executive commitment comes into play. If you don’t have strong enough executive sponsorship, you will not be able to staff this Growth Team with internal candidates, because those candidates’ bosses won’t let them go.
In some cases, you will decide to source candidates externally. Growth PM is often a position that needs to come from the outside. The Growth PM lays down the tracks, sets the pace, and prioritizes the work. If none of your internal PMs have operated in this way or at this pace before, I suggest you either invest heavily to get your Growth PM educated, or hire a pace-setting Growth PM externally .
If you decide to name an internal candidate, get them up to speed quickly. If they have never operated at this pace or in this manner before, there are many resources to help them get up to speed. Besides this site (Product-Led GTM), there is Reforge Academy, Leah Tharin’s course on Maven, and other specialty resources and sites:
If you decide to hire from the outside (for any of these roles), shoot for the moon. Of all the teams you have at your company, this team has the potential to set the pace and the culture for your product-led and customer-centric strategy. You seriously want best-and-brightest here. At Winning by Design we have a hiring framework called High (oc)TANE Hiring, and we have developed job descriptions, an interview process, and a competence assessment for each role on the Growth Team. I will be writing about High (oc)TANE Hiring in a future post, but if you need help in the meantime, please message me.
Measurement
Part 3 of this series is all about measurement and timeframe. The short answer is you will see leading-indicator metrics in year 1, and you will see the beginnings of ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) in year 2, but not until year 3 or 4 can you expect to really start seeing traditional SaaS metrics like ARR, Gross Retention, and Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
This game is all about setting up for a steep angle of attack. The setup takes a few years, but then the angle of attack is impressive when you get it right. Remember these examples from Part 1 (Mindset)?
Keep these examples front and center in your mind as you consider the progress your team is making. Remember, these were indisputably “best-and-brightest” teams, who were 100% dedicated to building PLG. And nevertheless, they worked for 2-5 years before they started seeing gravity-defying growth metrics.
Final Thoughts
Part 1 of this series covered a PLG Mindset: Empathy, Generosity and Instrumentation. Part 2 covered Talent—how to build and manage a Growth Team. We of course have much more detail in the forthcoming book, Product That Sells Itself, published by Stanford University Press.
Product-led GTM (PLGTM) is a mindset, a business philosophy, and a set of GTM strategies and tactics that can change the trajectory of your company forever. Not only can PLGTM give you an advantage over your competitors today, it can help you invest in your future (more on that here).
These three posts deliver the hardest news about how to invest for a product-accelerated-growth version of your future. It doesn’t get any harder than this from an executive standpoint: 3 years, $3M and 5-7 of the best-and-brightest people at your company. Once you have your head wrapped around that, the rest will seem easy.
Go be amazing!
XOXO,
-db