 Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining me today to talk about product-led growth. This is Sashi and you guys might already be familiar with who I am from the LinkedIn post. So anyway, today we're going to spend some time talking about product-led growth, why this is important for PMs and how some of the successful companies and products that we know of today have used some of the techniques and frameworks I discussed today to drive that growth. We will dive into the core parts of what is a product-led growth strategy and then we'll talk about some of the effective strategies to use to build a good product-led growth. So I'm product director Expedia and I lead the shares at Expedia. Before this, I was at a stock about today to drive growth for my product. I've been doing product management for about 10 years and most of which has been building consumer products. So I've worked on some really successful products like Amazon Alexa as well as Launching Edge. And here are some details. I have my email here as well as the LinkedIn profile link. So feel free to connect, reach out if you have any questions. Let's dive in. So as I said, the on the agenda we have today, spending a minute about product-led growth is growth can mean different things to different people. And so we'll talk about when we say product-led growth, what am I referring to by product-led growth and what does product-led growth actually stand for. We will strategy and then we will look at how to build an effective product-led growth strategy. And as I mentioned, I'll be using Dropbox for our case study to see how some of the concepts that I introduced today earlier in the talk, they have used in building a successful product and a company. Whether you're a growth PM or just a product manager working on any product really, growth is every product manager cares about. You know, you want your product to be used and whether it's about user adoption, whether it's about driving an additional ARPU incremental revenue or just re-engagement from existing set of customers. It is something that all product managers think about. We'll see in the talk today is that a lot of the concepts and techniques that I discuss can be used regardless of whether you're working on a B2B product or a B2C plus don user acquisition or retention. All of the things that I talked about today can be used as a product manager for driving growth. I will talk about my experience, how I use some of these techniques today during my work at Alexa as well as cloud kitchens. Okay, so let's talk about what product-led growth is. Product-led growth essentially is a business strategy where your product is the center focus for driving the company's growth. So in traditional business models, companies rely on marketing and sales to drive product awareness and adoption. Whereas in case of product-led growth, your product itself is the center focus of your growth strategy for the company. And so what does that mean? Really, it starts with building an intuitive, you know, valuable and a user-friendly experience where the product practically sells itself. This is what the essence of a product-led growth is. It's about creating a product that's not just functional, but the one that also creates a really great user experience. This positive user experience becomes the catalyst for growth where a satisfied user naturally starts advocating for your product and thus driving that adoption. At the core of the product-led growth is the idea that a great product leads to growth by fostering customer adoption and loyalty. When users find your product to be useful and they can see that their daily lives or the problems that they have to work with are becoming easier as a result of your product, they are going to become the spokesperson for your product and talk about it to their friends and their colleagues. Think about from your personal experience itself of some of the products that you like and really love to use, whether it's digital products or physical products. Like if you use a product that really solves the problem and it's easy to use, you will then go and talk about it to your friends. And that is really in a nutshell what product-led growth strategy is. It is about building an intuitive product that solves a customer problem, is easy to use and creates sort of this viral loop from your customers which drives organic product growth, hence creating a self-sustaining strategy for growth. Take Dropbox as an example. If you remember when Dropbox came out, it was really solving one problem which was giving you access to your files across different devices. And to get started on Dropbox, it was really easy. You just had to enter your email, the account is created and boom, there you go. You have 2GB or 4GB, whatever model space you got, right? And so think about that intuitive and onboarding experience. It's so easy to get started with. And further in the talk, I'll talk about some of the other strategies that Dropbox used to drive that growth. But that's an example of how from the right from the moment you use the product, the experience is so intuitive and easy to use that you immediately become a sticky customer and then you go and talk about it to your friends and other people, thus driving the growth for the product and generating more users and customers. It is really about creating that mindset shift from, hey, I want to sell this product to identifying that customer problem, solving it in a really intuitive way and creating this great customer experience which then translates into product-led growth. Now let's look at the building blocks of product-led growth strategy. The first one is user-centric approach. User-centric approach is really the heart of product-led growth strategy. It is about understanding your users' pain points and behaviors. If you understand your customer's main problem, then you'll be able to empathize with them and then you can focus on building a product that solves that core problem. And user-centric approach is not just about solving the problem, but also the user experience itself. It's about creating this experience where the customer is able to achieve their goals from the product without having to face any friction. The next one is product adoption and onboarding. Onboarding is another important one. It's really about creating this seamless way for the customer to get started with using the product. This means not loading the sign-up flow with a bunch of information that you really don't need. Think about some of the products that you use where you can really get started by giving your email address as an example. Experience and being very careful about getting them to the product experience as soon as possible without front-loading them with all these other things that are really not needed. And so that's one part of it, but there is more than that. In addition to making the onboarding seamless, the first set of screens that they see, the tooltips, the introductory video, the clear instructions, letting them know how they can access tutorials if they have to come back later and check something out. So that's another part of the PLG. Now, once you have figured out the core customer problem to solve and you've built this experience that is less fructive to use and super easy for the customer to get started with using your product, you've laid the foundation at that point. At that point, it is really about getting the data to iterate further on the product. So I'll talk about like an example from my work at Cloud Kitchen. At Cloud Kitchen, my team built analytics products that helped restaurant owners understand how their food delivery business was doing. So it was really about sort of looking at the sales, identifying the trends in the sales, figuring out which menu item was selling the most, which channel was performing the most and so forth. Anyway, it was a bunch of data presented in charts and stuff where the restaurant owner can look at this and have better operational strategy when it came to running their restaurants. And this was a web product. One of the customer discovery sessions that I led, I realized that a lot of our customers were not using our product because their lifestyle made it harder for them to use the product on a regular basis. What I learned was that a lot of these restaurant owners by definition are mobile, meaning they're not sitting in front of their desktop or laptops all the time, you know. Most of the restaurants and owners have one or two restaurants or maybe multiple restaurants and they're going back and forth. They have to deal with their out of potatoes or one of their staff member did not show up and things like that. So by nature, these people are mobile and so expecting them to sit in front of a computer and do this analysis to figure out what is the most operational strategy is really not the right thing to do. What I realized was we are missing the customer sort of daily life, like what their day looked like. Once I sort of understood that, hey, the core problem is that these people are always mobile and they don't have an easy way to access our product. Actually pivoted our strategy from just having a web product to building a mobile app for our restaurant owners. This was me sort of understanding that the core of the problem is not that we are not giving them the charts or the data that they want. It's that we are not meeting the customer where they are. We are building this product on the desktop, whereas the customer is really on the move all the time. Once I had that insight and I was able to empathize with our restaurant owners, I sort of pivoted towards, hey, we should go build a mobile app. That mobile app really focused on one or two problems. Instead of having this gigantic amount of sheets and all the data loaded in mobile, my first version of the mobile app was very much focused on just showing them the sales throughout the day. Not just that, the onboarding to the mobile app was super easy. All they had to do was download the app, enter the email address, and then log in information because they are existing customers and boom, they are on the dashboard which shows them the core data that they look for on a daily basis. Just by doing this, just taking the existing product on web and removing, taking some of the features from the product, not even the entire product, taking some of the features from the product and offering it on a mobile form drastically changed the adoption for our product. We went from having anywhere like 15 to 20 percent of weekly active users slash monthly active users to more than half our customer base were now using our mobile product on a daily basis. That's how impactful that was. We didn't invent new features. We did not invent any new strategy or anything. It was really about sort of understanding that customer problem and building that problem by understanding where they are, what their daily lives look like. Once I had that, I used data that we collected from user interviews, feedbacks, app reviews, and then further iterated on adding new features. So that's what data-driven iteration is. Data-driven iteration is the idea that once you have identified the core problem, you've built a seamless experience for the customers to get onboarded, you then use data to further fine-tune that experience and identifying new problems, new features that needs to be added to bring those customers back into the product. Whether it's about new features, whether it's about sort of improving a certain experience, that's what data-driven iteration is. The next one on the block is using freemium and free tile models. What this is really about is some products, you know, and this could vary from product to product, but some products really creating an experience where user can get started and they get a preview of your product. And, you know, think about Canva as an example, right? Somebody who is looking to actually edit a picture or create a nice, you know, slide deck or stuff, they're most likely not going to go download Canva and start using it or like go for pay for the product right away. But by having a freemium product where you let them edit one image or two images, help them sort of get a taste for the product, which then, you know, you can use to convert them into a paid user. Similarly with free trials, you know, having a free trial for a product, you know, gets your product into people's hand where they use it for certain amount of time, whether it's three days or a week or a month. And once they are used to using this product and they realize that this product actually solves a real problem for them, they are more likely to pay for your product and become a customer, versus if they did not have that free trial or they did not have the opportunity to use the product for free. So that's another effective strategy in sort of using your product to drive growth. The next one is viral loops and network effects. Viral loop is the strategy of giving your existing user or a customer an incentive to talk about your product or share about your product, whether it's social media or word of mouth. Take Dropbox again as an example. Dropbox really did an amazing job with the viral loop. If you remember with Dropbox, once you signed up as a customer, if you brought any of your friends to use the Dropbox, then you got 2GB in additional storage as well as your friend did. Now that is a great loop wherein as a referrer, you get some bonus as well as the new customer who is coming on board is getting a benefit or so. It's like if you're able to create two-sided incentive like that, that's obviously a great loop. But that's just not that. It's also about take Viral, the game that became super popular. Another example of how it got a lot of user adoption was they created this network effect wherein once you played the game, it encouraged you to share how you did on that particular day on Twitter, an example. And people saw that and then other people wanted to come talk about it and brag about like how they got the word right. So that's another example of how you can use now these small strategies like sharing on social media or incentivizing your existing user to talk about your product to drive that organic user adoption and acquisition. Next up is in product marketing and upselling. This is really obvious, but this is this notion of like whether you're doing freemium, whether you're doing a B2B product or a B2C product, having sort of banners in your product that talk about new feature releases or I don't know, like change of certain models or things like that is another way to sort of get people to learn about new features that you're launching or new products that might be coming. You can also use in product messaging to upsell new features. In the Cloud Kitchen's example that I already talked about where the mobile app, where the mobile app is what we use to bring a lot of these customers to use the app on a regular basis. Actually in the mobile app, I would talk about new features that the company was launching. For example, we launched a way for the customers to manage their promotions on Grubhub or Uber Eats. I would talk about that as a banner in the app and that drive the signup for that additional SaaS service through the product. So that's another sort of strategy that you can use that once you have product customers using your product, you can use the in-product messaging whether it's notifications or banners or things like that to upsell them to new features or new revenue streams for that matter. That drives additional revenue from these customers. So I already talked about Cloud Kitchen's and how I used some of the techniques from the last slide to drive adoption and growth for our product. But let me actually just bring all the different pieces together from the previous slide and how I use this, how I use some of the things to drive an end-to-end growth at the company. So as I mentioned, the first step was identifying this user need that they want to be able to actually be connected to the restaurant in terms of what's going on when they are mobile. And so once I had that insight, I said, okay, the desktop product is not where this is going to work. We need to pivot to having using mobile as our strategy to drive growth. Then I built that, identified that mobile. Next up was then sort of designing this onboarding experience. And the first thing that we did was once the customer logged into the app, the homepage was just a dashboard of how each of these different restaurants were doing, what was their sales, total number of orders that we're seeing by taking them directly into the data that they cared about the most that they were looking for quickly, like not additional screens, no additional clicks. As soon as you log in, you give them what they're looking for, that most of them are in problem. On a daily basis, track sales, track orders made that they immediately were able to extract value from the product. The next step was using the data and talking to the customers and identifying that what else are some of the things that they wish the app did for them. And I learned that they would like us to tell them if there is anything that goes wrong with their restaurants at one of these platforms, they would like to actually get real-time notifications. So I built real-time notifications. So it's like you take the first set of users that you have that are really sticky and you ask them, hey, what else are things that you value that you would like to see in the app? And once I had that insight, you add that feature. Once we have a starting app, a set of features you add based on the feedback, I actually started to talk about other sort of SaaS services that my company provided, whether it's subscription to the marketing product, subscription to the labor product as an example. And they would learn about it, about these other subscriptions online in the mobile app, and they would go subscribe to it. They would sign up for these services. And this actually generated more revenue from the existing set of users. Next up in the strategy was like, how do you sort of take this product and bring new customers to the company? And one of the things that I was considering before I moved on was then taking the app and letting anyone sort of go download it and use it. And so really the crux here is sort of like, as you can see, to drive more revenue from existing customers, as well as bringing new customers to the company, how that small shift in using mobile as a hook drove all these different things, which ultimately that in more revenue and more for some of the products and features that the company offered. So going back to sort of like, how do you like take these strategies that I discussed and use that to generate an effective product-led growth? It could really be sort of broken down into maybe at a high level, these three things, freemium and free-tile models, viral loops and network effects in product marketing and upselling. And as you saw from my example at CloudKitchen, I've used all of this in some capacity to drive the incremental customer growth and incremental revenue from existing customers. So let's actually unpack each one of these and see what they mean. Freemium and free-tile models. This is about offering free version of your product so customers can try it before they make a decision on should I pay for it or not. Can wise an example, that does that. The second one is showcasing the value of the product during the trial period. As I said, you know, giving the customers a window to use the product without charging them for it is another way to sort of get your product introduced to the customer, have them get a feel for it and see if it solves their problem. And if it does, then they're most likely to actually become a paying customer. Take ESPN plus, Disney plus, HBO, they all use the strategy right where in you sign them up for one game or like one match. And once they start using it, they realize how easy it is to watch this video on the go or whatever it is. And then they're more likely to actually convert from being a customer for the trial period to an ongoing subscription. Similarly, you know, converting free users to paying customers is really all about once you have this product during a trial or whether it's a free version of it, identifying the new set of features that they would be willing to pay for or identifying what was the most sticky problem that your product is solving for them and then solving it so that these customers will be like, okay, I want to pay for this because this is a problem that this product does a really good job solving for me, right? So that's, that is in a nutshell of free management and free trial models is essentially using a version of your product that you give to your customers to use for free for a limited period or a limited set of features. So the ones they know and are familiar with your product, they're more likely to become a paid customer, whether it's a subscription or whether it's a one time purchase. Second one in an effective strategy is the viral loop and network effects. Again, viral loop, I kind of talked about already is this idea of creating referral programs and incentives. Dropbox did this, you know, if you take it Instagram as an example or TikTok as an example, once they make a video, they're sharing it on the social media platforms, right? And so chasing them on social media platform, you know, organically drives discovery for a new person who watches a TikTok video and they are no more likely to go to download the TikTok video or go make a video, right? So it's using social media, it's using a referral program as a way for people to discover and learn about your product in product marketing and upselling. As I talked about in the, the freemium and free trial models, once you have a customer using the product, you know, using the messaging features or notifications in the app, you can drive upsells to other features, you know, so for example, somebody might come in to edit a picture as an example, but you can limit them to say, hey, you're only limited to three pictures, but if you want to edit more than three pictures, then you have to pay for it, right? So you can always sort of find ways of upselling them to new set of features or unlocking a bunch of other capabilities. Once you have this customer through a freemium or a free trial model, and this essentially leads into this idea of like, you know, maximizing the customer lifetime value, which is unlocking sort of one benefit for them and then using that sort of interaction and the stickiness of the customer to drive incremental value from your product. So let's bring all these concepts together. I think Dropbox is a great example of a product that has used a lot of these strategies that I talked about to build not only a great product, but a great company. You know, if you think about Dropbox, sure, Dropbox makes a lot of other products other than clouds, file storage and sharing, but majority of its revenue actually comes from the from the Dropbox. So this is an example of a company that use product and drove a lot of these, these growth. So let's actually look at each one of these, right? So from, from first one, simple onboarding to instant value creation. What were they trying to do? They were just looking at solving a customer problem of enabling customers to access files across devices. And they created this very seamless way for anyone to get started. Enter email address and boom, there you are. You get two gigabytes of space and you can now sort of move your files and keep your files here. That's like unlocking the value for the customer right away. Now once you have that, they created this viral loop wherein you as a customer can share your referral link. And if a new person joined Dropbox, they would get additional storage, you would get additional storage. So they created this two-sided incentive, which means that they didn't need salespeople to go talk about Dropbox. There are existing customers who talk about it because they benefited from talking about the product. But one thing you know, I remember is that no matter how great of a viral loop you create, the first step is still very important. If the onboarding, the adoption and the usage of the features are not intuitive, then that customer is less likely to actually go and talk about their product. So while it may seem that, hey, throwing free features or throwing free things that customers would enable them to go talk at it, but really sustainable viral growth, you need to make sure that the product itself is a good product. It does its job right and it's easy to use. Then FreeMeme model, they also use this FreeMeme model, right? So if you remember, you know, initially you get Dropbox, you get a certain amount of storage. And if you want more storage than that, then you have to pay for it, right? So that's another way of like, had they started with like, hey, sign up for Dropbox, pay X amount of dollars and you get X amount of GB space in cloud, less likely for people to buy in that idea. But having them get started with the product, get a hang for it, increase the chances that a customer could come for free and then pay and become a paid customer. So that's another way of sort of driving your revenue growth by using your product, not sales, but driving your revenue growth through your product itself. Again, in product upselling is sort of having these customers, you know, subscribe to the premium plan from the product itself. So it's not that, hey, you have to call our customer care or email us on, we can give you additional storage, but building that feature wherein becoming a premium customer, getting awareness about that premium feature are things that you can learn organically in the product itself. Believe it or not, this seems very intuitive, but it's really not something that you will see with a lot of products. There are definitely a lot of products, not necessarily popular for this reason, because they fail at some of these simple things wherein they will let you use the product. But if you want to add an additional channel or like an additional subscription, they would rather have you email or call their customer care center to add on to that, for that add on. That is not the right way to do it. Like, you know, an easy way to drive your revenue growth from an existing customer is just making sure that it's easier for the customer to sign up for that premium plan or that additional, like upselling is really critical to driving that organic growth internally as well. And then like user experience iteration as well, you know, Dropbox did a great job. They started with launching a service for file storage. But if you think about it, over time, they have really stayed connected with the customers and identified what are the things that the customers want from their product. And they've added things like, you know, editing files directly in the Dropbox, or whether it's about offline sync folder on your desktop or laptop so they can see their files locally or not. These are all sort of, you know, the data driven iteration to drive these new feature sets, right. And so that's, so like that's why I think is a great example of a product and a company that really used its product and used a lot of these techniques to drive, you know, user acquisition, translating those users into more customers, taking those customers, increasing revenue from that existing system set of customers, but either by either making them a paid customer or by selling them to a premium plan and like that ongoing iteration. So yeah, so to conclude the talk essentially, product led growth is at the heart is really about understanding who your customer is, what their pain points are, and then building a product that is solve that core customer problem with a very intuitive customer experience. And it's super easy for the customer to start using it. And once you sort of have figured out the core customer problem, you solve the customer problem and it's easy for the customer to go download and use your product, then using the data on, on iterating the feature set of the product, whether it's about new set of features or other things. And then as I talked about, you know, using the viral loop strategy or creating network effects, you know, the free model, free model are the things that you use to drive that ongoing adoption. So with that, you know, concludes the talk, I hope this was helpful for you guys to understand what a product led growth strategy is. And I hope you guys will actually use some of these frameworks I discussed in your products in, in creating growth that's led by product. Thank you for joining.