 Good afternoon everyone. I am Deepika Desimilli and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to the afternoon sessions of ProductCon 2023 and also to 411 on product-led growth. I'd like to thank ProductSchool for having me back on stage here today and also to the lovely audiences who have thrown me so much love and kindness the last time I was here. I'd keep the intro to me very short because I am sure you want to hear from the amazing panelists here today. I have nearly two decades of experience in product in B2B, B2C, and B2B2C products and I am currently the SVP at King, as Mika said, and I'm a PLG enthusiast. I'd really love to learn how customers, how we can acquire customers and monetize through the product itself. And as we've had some amazing talks today about PLG from Francisca and Carlos where they have defined it and rightly defined it by saying that PLG is a means to acquire, retain, and monetize customers through the product by developing the right loops and habits. Not just that, they've also defined it by saying it's a parallel activity to sales and marketing. However, product sales and marketing need to work hand in glove to make it possible. So with that, they also spoke about frameworks, tools, and mindsets to enable PLG and we are so lucky to have these amazing experts who can help us talk about their frameworks and tools and how they can enable PLG. And with that, I hand it over to Louis to introduce himself. Hi, everyone. Good to be here. I'm Louis. I head up the solutions team for user testing across our international markets. So I run a team of consultants who advise organizations on how to embed human insights across the product development cycle. I've been in this space for around about a decade now and I'm lucky enough to have experienced some of the challenges that we saw firsthand. So in terms of product growth, how do we help organizations achieve this? I think it's first the worth thinking about some of the challenges that organizations face. And that's really that there's a lot of guesswork in our development cycles. And that can become a really big challenge when we think about one of the principles of product growth, which is all about how do we generate value very quickly for our customer? When I say guesswork, that might be looking at analytics and actually thinking, oh, why did people drop off at this place? That might be we've built out a prototype and we might be thinking, I think this solves the customer's problem, but does it actually? And then we pass it to engineering and it can get really expensive to rework that. The other one, if you're a product manager, and I think there's probably a few of you in the audience, is how do we prioritize our roadmap around the customer and actually see what's the biggest requirement for them in terms of our development? And all of these challenges, all of this guesswork amounts to reworking our product development cycles. And for most organizations, this can be up to 50%, which is a huge amount. And what we do at user testing is we help mitigate the risk of that product development by introducing customer feedback at every stage of the process, and not just in discovery, through design and launch as well. And that's me. So I'll hand over to Yuri. Yeah. Hi. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. My career started in R&D actually in product. And then after a few years, I moved more to solution engineering. So today, I'm running the sales engineering team of Sysense internationally. Sysense is an embedded analytics platform, which means that our customers usually are B2B SaaS providers that want to have an offering of analytics to their own product. So usually what would happen is you would start by developing your own kind of homegrown analytics that you would show to your customers. At some point, your customers are going to demand more, more activities, more kind of capabilities, AI-driven type of advanced analytics. And then you would hopefully talk with someone like Sysense, where you can embed our components within your platform and expose that to your customers. So it's more on the OEM aspect of analytics, of exposing that to your own customers. Where it touches on LPGL is mostly when we see our customers taking the offering of analytics, when they show it to their customers, some kind of a feature gating, even giving kind of a taste of analytics, kind of the more basic analytics of drilling into information and getting some alerts and all kind of relatively basic visualizations and then saying, okay, if you want to go to that next step, if you want to take, if you want to have access to forecasting and to trend analysis and to AI models, then you need to go through maybe another level of subscription. So it's really taking features and especially analytics, because almost every product today, every B2B product is producing tons of data. And you want to make the data available to your users. And by using these different analytics tool, you can actually expose different features and then slowly kind of upgrade the user through them. Over to you. Yeah, so everybody, my name is Jake. I lead the sales engineering teams for our international business at Quantum Metric. Like Lewis, I've been in the software in SaaS space for about 10 years or so, which is just about enough time to see some really cool transformations, one of those being product-led growth, of course, and seeing that. In a previous life, I worked very closely with companies like HP Software, which I don't know if exists anymore. I think that was sold off, but Semantic, McAfee, RSA, Zscaler, which was a really fun one to see. But in my current life, I've been with Quantum for about four years, starting when we were a company about 80 and now about 500 and kind of seeing the transformation there and how we've done product-led growth as well. As far as how Quantum is applicable to PLG and the folks in the room, I'll just frame it as just kind of the problems that we see and what we solve for. We see some of the biggest challenges with digital experiences and product-led growth being kind of one, trying to avoid death by 1,000 paper cuts, as we call it, the kind of friction points that needle your users every single day and then ultimately you. The second being kind of making sure, and I'll speak about this a little bit later, I think, but making sure that everyone knows they're working on the things that matter the most, which can be incredibly challenging. And then the third is bridging the gap and expertise to be able to do those two things really, really well, because it's incredibly challenging to do really well. But I'll spare you the pitch on Quantum, but basically we give companies a very structured way to do all those things really, really well. Thank you guys for such a quick round of intros and what you about what you do. So let's go to the questions now. For any B2B, B2C, or any consumer enterprise products, as much as it is about testing and learning, it is sometimes cost a lot if we launch the wrong feature and it can cause a bad engagement with our customers, right? So how can product led growth organizations mitigate the risk of bad decision making in their product development cycles? Lewis, let's start with you and hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, really good question. I mentioned that metric earlier around within product development about 50% of what we're spending is actually allocated to rework. And I actually spent time with one of our customers a couple of weeks ago, and they actually said for 2022 it was about 80%, which is a huge amount of waste. When we think about product led growth, it's all about how do we bring value to the customer as quickly as possible. So everything that we launch doesn't really work out. That exposes us as organizations to risk and chair. And I think when we think about what drives that rework, there's a couple of stats that I wanted to share with you. So for product managers in the room, and put your hands up if you agree with me, 55% of the time you're frequently having to guess when making product decisions. So who's awake after lunch? Does that relate to product managers? Quite a few hands up. So quite often you don't actually have that information from the customer around their need and why they've got a specific challenge when you're building it. And historically, that's because it's taken a long time for us to get customer feedback and introduce that. Whereas technology now means you can actually get at the speed at which you're moving and developing. So whether that's agile in a two week, three week sprint, whatever that looks like. So actually having that customer next to you can help you make higher confidence decisions, which actually reduce some of that risk we spoke about. Then for any designers in the room, 62% of high fidelity prototypes, they actually never see the customer. So what we're doing is we're building out these amazing prototypes and figure more envision whatever it might be. And then we're passing them over to engineering. At that point, it gets really, really expensive, right to rework it and fix because that's the most expensive part of the development cycle. And if we can start to introduce these really important phases, not just at discovery, but also when we decide what we're building, how we prioritize that, how we design experience and iterate around the customer, we're actually massively reducing the risk of what we're building. That's great to hear. And then we can all get this help. Jake, do you would you like to add this? Yeah, so as far as bad decisioning around products, so it's probably a topic that's been talked to death a little bit. So it's from my perspective, it's a bit of the hippo problem. And if you're not aware of what hippo is, right, it's just the highest paid person's opinion. And I think there's a place for the highest paid person's opinion. I mean, I really do. I think I mean, there's a lot of like, there's a lot of amazing companies and amazing products that have been put out there by the highest paid person's opinion. But it starts to get very destructive if it gets a little bit too much of kind of controlling all the decisions. And I've seen this with my customers and I've seen that even in the organizations that I've worked with. And it's about making sure, I was kind of talking about it before, which is making sure that we're working on the things that really truly matter the most. And there's no substitute for just a really rock solid business case on data and evidence when trying to convince the organization to come along for a journey on something that you're pitching or proposing, right? And it's there's no way to kind of get past that hippo without it. And it can be really, really challenging. I think the way that it's been done in the past, you kind of have these, a lot of us have these very high-level analytics solutions that are capturing data on kind of the key metrics that we're tracking. But if they're not performing or if they're not performing as well as we want, what questions do you even ask the data? And where do you even start? So, yeah, there's a lot of things that we can do out there. But I think for me, it's about really trying to find a way to combat that hippo problem. And like I said, there's no substitute for just having a rock solid business case with data and evidence to pack it up. So now we know that we need to make good decisions. We can have help. So what do you guys think the biggest barrier to PLG is? Or what is the one thing that stands in the view of organizations achieving PLG? Jake, I'll go back to you to understand. Yeah, so for me, I think it's kind of getting lost in the obsession of the product and losing a little bit of focus on the actual customer on the other end of it, as well as kind of the bigger grand goal, right? You don't ever want to be doing product-led growth just because you read about it and thought product-led growth was great. So it's, you kind of get into a situation where we decide, well, we're going to have a product-led growth business and we're going to go product first and then you just kind of get hyper-focused on that and how do we tweak this and how do we measure this and that type of thing, but you got to be really focused on what is the ideal customer profile of your business in general and then who's the ideal customer profile for that product-led growth motion. And maybe they're the same thing, maybe the same thing, but as I think is your technologies become more complicated that they aren't. So it's kind of narrowing down what those are and then constantly bringing them back into your decision-making process, like I was saying before, and I know Lewis, I think probably you would agree with that, which is don't let the business get carried away with making product decisions because it's going to be a really fancy feature and a really fancy product. Make sure that it's actually going to have a measurable impact on the business and like I said that you can support that with evidence. And Liz, do you want to add to that? Yeah, I think Jake mentioned their measure or impact and it's important with product-led growth that everyone in the organization is consistent and it's amazing when you go and you see an organization and you say okay how do you bring value to your customer and you get 15 different answers and you're like okay we need to work on that. So getting everyone on the same page and part of that is avoiding as much as possible, you're never going to completely avoid it, but internal bias which I think you mentioned as well earlier Jake. And I think part of how you can avoid internal bias is actually bringing the customer into the room. So you might have somebody who's been at your organization for 10 years and thinks they know everything, or maybe somebody's come from another industry, but it's always worth thinking okay what would the customer say about this? How do we bring them into the room? And I think technology has now moved to a point in which any decision you're making you should be able to bring the customer into from that perspective. So I would add two more things on top of what Luis and Jake said and that's more in the context of organizations that are doing transitioning from more traditional established sales marketing-led growth into product-led growth either as a complete transition or in the middle of transition or becoming some kind of a hybrid. So this is more looking from the executive side of things. I think one thing is that US product owners you need to make sure that they understand that it's not just throwing out a free trial with the button that says if you click here you can subscribe, right? There's a whole ecosystem within the organization that needs to change all the way down to things like even the support team you know in the past or in existing kind of sales-led organization if you're opening a ticket with support and you're not in a paying customer you're going away going to go way back in the queue but with product-led growth you might think wait a second if I can measure that this customer is actually they're not a customer yet but they're just on the verge of maybe upgrading then the whole the whole kind of flow within support would be different. So I think that's one thing that realizing if you go up kind of to your management you say okay we need to go in that direction and they just say okay so just you know do a free trial what's the problem and then they need to understand there's much bigger at stake so that's one thing and the other one also looking at that from the angle of the executives is the I think there is a feeling of loss of control right because in traditional sales and marketing you know one of the main thing that you do is you need to have a lot of control if you're a salesperson you need to know the stakeholders you need to know the customer you need to know at least two or three people that you can talk to with the customer side and exactly how they're using the product and how are you going to do the upsell and how are you going to do the the cross sell everything has to be everything has to be controlled that's the whole methodology and and with product like growth you're giving out some of that control and for anyone on management they get scared because they want to have the numbers and they want to know exactly when something is happening. So I think one of the ways for product owners to mitigate that risk not exactly a risk but maybe this concern is to start or continue to talk the language that these executives understand so at the end of the day if you're a SaaS B2B business no matter how you sell your product you're going to be measured by the same metrics churn annual recurring revenue or even a churn of revenue anything that is measuring today B2B kind of SaaS B2B businesses is still valid so everything that you do every feature everything on the roadmap every strategic move on the product side it has to die to tie somehow to these metrics and it has to be obvious to your managers in what direction they're going right so I think I think these barriers of the expectation of okay there's something really kind of cool now called the product led growth what does it actually mean for my organization how me as a CFO what does it mean in the way that I can forecast you know how much revenue or how much churn I'm going to have I need to be able to have the conversation with the product leaders so that they I don't feel you know as an executive that they're kind of living in their all ideal world and I have to deal with the numbers so matching these kind of two areas I think it's very important to overcome these barriers thank you and I think we mentioned SaaS a few times let's change shift the focus to B2B products so what are some of the challenges in the PLG approach when you go to like B2B products and when you're developing complex B2B products how do you overcome them have you seen yeah yeah I think I think it's you know at the end of the way a product is a product but obviously with B2B and the more upmarket you go in terms of the complexity of your product then I think it's going to be a bit harder in terms of or you need to think more about the the PLG approach so I'll mention two things the first one is and that's something that's relevant for every product which is the time to value right so you want to shorten the time that you actually give some value to the user whether again it can be a B2C but it can be a B2B in the context of B2B the more complex the you know the product is and I can say that from the science perspective of our own product for our customers when they evaluate us analytics is a complex product right so in order to get value fast you need to make sure that when you present that to the user you're directing them into the right feature that are going to highlight your differentiators because you know they're evaluating you and maybe they're evaluating five-year competitors and if the experience in the first couple of weeks or the first month is more or less the same because to be honest you know there's not much of a variety between products today you need to make sure that your highlights and your differentiators are showing up relatively quickly so you can reduce the time to you know to time to a time to a value in traditional sales it's a bit different because you have a sales manager sitting on the neck of the prospect and feeding them exactly what they need to look at and there's a POC and there's an RFP and there's a lot of things that are going to direct that prospect into the right differentiators you don't have that luxury sometimes with PRG and then you need to kind of direct the user into that into that area so you can you can overcome the challenge of complexity and time to value so that's one thing and and and the other thing is again when you go and you want to go upmarket you know this you know you have this ten pounds ten dollars a month and then all the way to click here to talk with us for enterprise license the more complex the solution is the further away you are from the decision makers right so the team lead let's say that you're developing some kind of a B2B product that is helping I know helping R&D teams right so the team lead that can expense maybe a hundred pounds a month for his team is very different from the person that's going to sign the 50k deal right and you need to be able to help that team leader take the kind of the outcome and take the value of your product take it upmarket or not upmarket up upstairs to his manager and tell her look we need this product and the CFO she doesn't care that you added a flashing background but if that team lead comes back and says you know what this product is actually making my team more efficient now she hears something that she can relate to okay it's actually saving us money so so I think again you need to remember that with the and again that's really also something that the management needs remember that they're getting further away from the decision makers and you need also with testing tools and measurement tools making sure that you actually have visibility and giving the tools for your users to go upstairs to their managers and kind of tell them okay we need to actually invest more in that license these are probably the main things that I would see actually one more thing that I just forgot you need to play nice in the ecosystem right again the more complex the the product is and especially in b2b you're never sitting there alone your product also always needs to play nice and the story I think of of how google kind of got into the space of of microsoft with google kind of the whole google suite is they didn't just start and said okay you have to drop everything you have to drop outlook you have to drop everything and just use us because they know that people love outlook they actually started by giving plugins into outlook and they slowly got these users to understand that okay I can do a lot with google docs and plug into outlook so if you know that you're part of an ecosystem create the integrations create the api's and show the user that they don't have to drop everything that they've been used to use and they can start using you kind of gradually so that's another way to overcome that challenge amazing so Liz do you guys have some experience yeah we have a lot of b2b organizations and I think the thing that's tough with b2b organization in today's world is that your customers will compare the experiences they have with you to the experiences they have in their b2c life and if we think about product like growth really it's companies like king that are the pioneers of this with candy crush right we download a free game we get addicted we spend loads of money in that game b2b companies would love if that happened every single time so I think when when you're doing your benchmarking it's important not just to look at your competition but what other product like growth organizations doing really well how can you grab some of that stickiness factor that they have and embed that into your product and I think that the thing to also think about from a b2b perspective is are you entering a competitive market where your user is super educated they can pick up your products and run or are you trying to make a splash in a new market where you need to educate them and how do you educate them as they go through that product experience so that's the find that moment to value that Yuri was talking about and that that can be really difficult to get that balance really the only person who can answer that question for you is your customer so again it comes down to how do you bring your customer into those those pieces where you're thinking not really sure how this is going to work for them one big example of this in in SAS companies is the pricing page like you you guys all work as a product manager or a designer or something like that how many of you have gone to a SAS companies pricing page and thought don't actually know I don't understand this at all and typically they've only got five seconds to articulate the value of that and that comes in as part of that educational piece too and Jake is there anything you'd like to add yeah I think so from a different perspective I guess I think it goes back to something I was saying before which is what is the overarching focus of the company and how does PLG drive you towards that outcome or you said something earlier about how you know product like growth isn't just about throwing a button on the site that says free trial and giving you full access to the platform I've actually seen a lot of those discussions had like we should have a free trial we should put that out there and it's like yeah to what end and you know from a B2B perspective it's all about again what is your ideal customer profile and what part of the market do you want to capture right some of the things that I think I think the traps that I've seen is from a product like growth perspective and this is totally okay if this is just what you want to do that's great but I've seen a lot of situations where where companies that want to start with product like growth model end up getting trapped a little bit in SMB and mid-market again not a problem if that's what you want to do but if you want to break into the enterprise that can be really challenging and I hesitate to even say this and apologies if there's someone from these companies in the audience but I remember reading an article you know 2016 or something like that where I think the founder and the CEO of Slack had said yeah we don't need sales people actually we're good no no sales people and then I read about a month later that they hired their first VP of sales you know because when you think about it I mean I I've never worked for Slack but I gotta imagine the challenge of an absolutely viral product I remember downloading it when it came out and saying what is this thing what are people talking about but imagine going head to head with Microsoft who already has multi-million contracts with your technology organizations and say you know we have this thing called Microsoft teams and we're just going to throw it in for free and to be able to build kind of a viral nature with a product in an enterprise organization like that without the relationships it's incredibly challenging so anyways to go back it's kind of about what is the overarching focus what are you using the product led growth motion for is it fit for your ideal customer profile and if it's not make sure that you're appropriately supplementing with the sales words and the folks in the organization that can help you to get to that so yeah I mean thank you guys the valuable valuable insights guys I've certainly liked a lot from you guys today I know there are many tools I could use there's many sort of experiences I can tap up to so I'd really like to thank you guys for spending the time with our audience today once again guys there's Lewis from user testing there is Yuri from Sysense and there is Jake from quantum metric they all have stalls at side and please tap them up have a good discussion if you have more questions they're here to answer and thank you for your time here today and that's the end of the panel thank you thank you awesome job thank you to our panelists