 Thank you, Product School, for having me over. Hey, everybody, I'm Hershey, like the Hershey's chocolate from Gainset PX, and I'm super excited to talk to you all about ways product managers can use journey maps to achieve outcomes, which I'm sure a lot of you are already doing. Keep your comments, inputs, questions coming in the chat. I'd love this opportunity to learn from you all as well. Here's a little bit how we're going to spend the next about 30 to 35 minutes together. Let me know in the chat if this agenda sounds good or there's anything else you'd like to discuss, but a little bit starting with intros and I have a fun icebreaker for you all. I'd love to get to know you all a little bit. Then we'd go into a introduction of the product-led growth flywheel that we've developed here at Gainset along with user journey, importance of user journey, going into driving better time to value through the product and then spending some time in understanding how can we leverage personas to drive adoption journeys at scale and lastly, touching upon a little bit of cross-functional team metrics as I know that's always a big topic for a lot of the companies. So let me know what you guys think about that. Meanwhile, here's a little bit about me. I am a post sales leader at Gainset PX. I manage all of our Gainset PX sort of customers, book of business and four functions all into me, services, support, customer success and options scale or sort of center of excellence. I've been with Gainset for about three years at this point and I am also a product-led growth author which you can download the book on the link mentioned, product-led success professional hard book. It's also on Gainset website and I am a big believer in an evangelist of PLG. Prior to this, I've worked with and for several Fortune 500 companies including Facebook, Ernst & Young and managed accounts like DHL, Adobe, Don Bradstreet, Splunk, et cetera. And I have worked very closely with our founder, Mikia Lawn which you guys may have heard from before on product school around developing some of the product-led growth playbooks, best practices, building customer success foundations up for a product line here at Gainset. And well, that is literally my day job. I love to DJ outside of work and teach Zumba over the weekend as well. So well, that's a little bit about me. Here's a nice because I'd love to hear a little bit about you all and get to me all better. So please put in chat and introduce yourselves with your old company and go for joining the session. And if you want a free vacation for a week where would you go? I would probably go to Australia that's been on our bucket list for a while. That's where I would go. So as you guys keep putting your answers in the chat let's kick off the session here. So starting with the product-led growth flybies sort of we developed here at Gainset. So on the left you will see the traditional typical marketing funnel which most B2B companies follow. So starting from the top as you know it's the customer acquisition not sort of prospect acquisition starts at the marketing level with marketing content or MQL as they call the marketing qualified lead. So as you can see that the process of the previous marketing funnel is product journey really starts at the end like almost being the outcome of acquisition where only few selected customers get to experience the product. And the focus is more on qualifying based on marketing content. The right leads for sales guys longer sales cycle and very high touch leading into customers who then are able to access very few are able to access product before they actually buy it. Now on the other hand if you see the PLG or the product-led growth flywheel a lot of the companies are moving to this model where we are getting access to the end users to the product early on in their lifecycle either via free trials, limited trials or POCs. So as you can see the product journey now has been totally reversed where the product journey starts rather at the beginning of the journey of the prospect or the customer where the acquisition stage happens they sort of try out your product and that's what we call the PQL product qualified leads which are more high quality leads for your sales teams to kind of close on and they are sort of onboarded and product plays front and center role from the get go which accelerates the sales cycle in the journey. Now the key part to all of this is mapping your user journey, right? Mapping that core features of valued drivers towards desired outcomes. So almost think of it as different stages of your users or customers if they are in the free trial stage how do we onboard them that initial value sort of true value and convert them into paying customers or if they are already paying customers what are the key goals of value drivers during the onboarding phase then taking them to a little bit of more advanced level and focusing on initial value and so on and so forth. So it's critical to have that journey mapped out for your product and for your customers and users that like brings a lot of cross-functional alignment and that will help you define the right touch points and the right omni-channel touch points for your customer experience onboarding and sort of journey for the users and customers. So quick question, have you mapped your customer journey for your customers at your company? Yes, no or no we are considering it would love to hear from you all where are you in that phase of mapping the customer journey for your product. So going into a little bit of strategy but also tactics on how to sort of leverage this product like both Flywheel to drive those journeys for your end users. So like again, as you can see product being the front and center and that's where sort of PMs play a very critical role today in the customer's journey like really using that product experience at every stage of the customer journey. So the next few minutes I'm going to touch upon the core two concepts which are highlighted in yellow on the right. Number one, how to drive better time to value through the product or leveraging the product as a vehicle and secondly sort of driving those adoption journeys within the product after that initial onboarding. So starting with the first one, the driving better time to value through the product. So I'd say the key place there that we've seen work very well with our customers who are doing this personally we are doing this at Gainsight as well is starting with mapping your personas and objectives and the aha moments for your end users or customers. Like for example, at Gainsight PX we advocated four to five different personas. So mapping out your persona, like example, engineering teams use our product or product managers use our product or it's above the line or below the line, CTOs or CEOs. And then sort of mapping out objectives for each of those personas and what those aha moments look like when they're initially starting to use your product. From there sort of even measuring signups and usage is again particularly focused more on free trials. So what are the signups? What is the usage and sort of qualifying those PQL product qualified lead and optimizing on organic and organic demand. And I'll talk a little bit about that in the next few slides onboarding them to core functionalities and using our onboarding checklist which is sort of a bot sitting within your product. And lastly, keeping them engaged with in-app and email messaging. Again, retention is very critical in the first few days or the first week when the user signs up with your product. So let's double click on each of these strategies on tactically how you could execute on it. This is a great data point which I'd love to or which I always love to share is 65% of the SaaS companies today have started to offer free trials or demos. So optimizing that user signup or flow is critical which means reducing that sort of fiction point and optimizing the landing page but also capturing their persona and objectives. So if you see these two screenshots these are actually screenshots from our game set PX signup workflow. Whereas the first question sort of we ask the user to self-identify in terms of their role and second identify with a multi-check questionnaire of hey, what might be your desired outcomes or priorities from the product. And this sort of what this does is it feeds into our PX product or tracking mechanism where we are tracking our attributes both at the user level and at the account level. Now, you may ask that, hey, today if I implement this workflow, what about my users or customers who've signed up in the past? I'm hoping whatever tool that you guys are using at least in game set PX, we have these out of the box integration and collaborations where historical users can be updated with their account and user attributes and some of the user and account attributes that you may want to think about tracking outside the account level, revenue, health score, renewal date and risk in terms of green, yellow, green, yellow, red. And then at the user level, signup date, any personas, our role, objectives, so on and so forth. This really helps you slice and dice the data of your product usage and analytics in a very categorized and sequenced way. And also that helps you take very actionable steps and do personalized messaging and customer engagement based on those account and user attributes that we've captured. Once we've done that, creating that onboarding checklist on the left, you will see this is a screenshot from the inside PX, this is a sort of a, what we call is a knowledge center board, sits in one of the corners of the screen and is a home to the key articles, key in app guides and resources that we believe are critical to the new users. And it's also sequenced in a way where we would want user to follow the sequence as they start to use the product. So you should choose a tool or a product which does the heavy lifting for you of being that onboarding checklist as a one-stop shop within your application. And you can totally personalize that first mile experience for your end users. So it's almost like think of it as an onboarding checklist. And as I previously mentioned, once you have your journey mapped out, personas and objectives mapped out, we're tracking or capturing those user and account attributes within the tool that you're using, you can actually personalize or you should be personalizing by customer stage because as you might know, customers who are in onboarding versus customers who are in adoption phase, the goals might be very different. Even segmentation customers who are high-end ARR, their goals might be very different from SMBs or digital-led customers. And then of course, personas and objectives like a product manager might come in to look at data versus a CPO might just come in to look at dashboards. So again, capturing those user and account attributes and personalizing your in-app messaging and guides or like the onboarding flow is super critical in ensuring that quick time to value for your users as you're onboarding them, especially super critical in free trials and POC stages. Here are some core metrics that you should be thinking about tracking now. This specific example is focused on free trial and PQL. Again, thinking of generating pipeline using product qualified lead. So as you can see on the left, this is product qualified lead sort of widget which is focused on and just for reference, this is a screenshot that we've taken from Gainsight PX. So this is a sort of a custom dashboard where you can choose and put your own metrics. So tracking, who are the product qualified leads? What is the time to value for those users in the trial phase as you can see at the bottom? It's a three-step workflow where the drop-off is, how many steps it takes for your users to actually complete a workflow? What is the time duration actually between completion of workflows? Where is the drop-off? Can we optimize it from product perspective or can we step in and show them in-app guides to help complete those initial workflows? On the top middle, you can see SEO or organic and in organic attribution. So again, that attribution of your paid campaigns or search engine optimization, that's a great way for your marketing teams or demand-gen teams to see, okay, these are my good-paying ROI channels versus these with relatively less so it helps make those investment decisions. Lastly is cohort analysis, basically retention analysis of daily user retention for trials. And then on the top right or the middle right, you'll see aha moments during the trial where you can actually compare what are the features that are driving most value, quicker time to value and your users are finding it most useful in those first five to seven days of sign-up. So double-clicking on that custom dashboard, sort of the dashboard that you see here, each of the widgets are actually clickable. So here's one example of path analyzer as product teams, you probably want to identify those friction points in the initial user workflow. So delving into the user journey, using path analysis, understanding the aha moments, unexpected discoverability issues helps us optimize our product workflows or make roadmap decisions. And secondly, in the short-term, we can cover up for that by showing temporary in-app guides and workflows to guide your users to initial time to value. Again, this is a screenshot out of the box from Gainset PX, which is called path analysis report. This one is a screenshot of our out-of-the-box support of funnel analysis. So tracking critical milestones, this truly helps you understand the number of steps or clicks it takes your users to complete a critical workflow, the time that it takes for your users to go or navigate from step one to step two, where the drop-off is, this really helps you monitor and optimize your critical value drivers or workflows in your application and track against the adoption goals for your product. User retention, as I briefly touched upon initially, the golden standard should be about north of 30% user retention week over week. Particularly in free trial, you might want to track daily user retention. So again, this is a screenshot of out-of-the-box support from PX, which is retention report. You can really measure how well your product is retaining users week over week, which features are actually helping retain customers most and even identify some growth and successful cohorts, like growth cohorts, which are probably at risk or successful behaviors, which then can be replicated to your at-risk cohorts. So then lots of great insights to delve in here and thinking about it as, okay, how can I drive time to value for my users? Thinking about in two key buckets, looking at insights and data and driving actions out of it in terms of roadmap strategy. And secondly, short term, can we put in product guides, helps checklist to help the users complete that workflow and get to initial time to value real quick. And lastly, you want to keep your users engaged, especially if they are in free trial POC mode. And initially if you are onboarding your users, you want to make sure you're using omni-channel approach to keep them engaged and that channel and messaging is super contextual. So we can drive that contextual messaging as we discussed by identifying the persona stage objectives and ensuring we're meeting the users where they are and helping them where they are getting stuck. So almost like if you look at this screenshot, it talks about starting with an email and, okay, for customer clicks on the link, what is the path, if they don't click on the link, what is the path and it follows two different work streams or workflows from there. So keeping the users engaged is critical, especially in the first seven to 14 days to ensure we are maintaining hydration and driving them to outcomes and values from your product. Lastly, on this topic, we'd love to share this example from Adobe. Adobe is using Gainsight PX and they carried out an experiment where they had a feature discoverability challenge of a feature which was almost like tucked away six to seven steps away and they nurtured the users with contextual messaging to help them complete that seven-step workflow and it actually helped them overall produce a 300% lift on completion of that workflow or that adoption of that feature. So super sticky for them and the guides really helped them drive up discoverability and adoption of that feature. And definitely, we used segmentations and targeted of specific cohort and groups of users and put interval scopes in right frequency and leverage hotspots so that it's less invasive as you can see on the left screenshot. Again, these are out of the box capabilities available in Gainsight PX. I'm hoping any tool that you use to drive these end product guidances and journeys also provide you these kind of features and functionalities. Secondly, as I mentioned, we'd love to touch upon a little bit on driving adoption. Once we've onboarded our customers and users in the free trials phase or even in the onboarding phase, taking them to the next level of adoption and that initial and true value. So let's review some of the high level strategies that you might want to leverage here is measure the usage of the key value drivers, right, again, using a tool like PX to understand the usage and adoption of your key value features and drivers, making decisions based on the data that you collect, either roadmap decisions or guiding them at various specific steps. Then from there, increasing awareness of the advanced features with contextual guides, very similar to the example I shared with respect to Adobe. And embedding your knowledge center into the product, like most of us in B2B companies have a documentation website which lives outside of the product, which means multiple clicks and more user fiction for our users to get help on how to. So we can bring that resource that center into the product and make it a one-stop shop, whether it's respect to providing feedback or getting help or looking at various knowledge resources that your company might be offering. We are already reducing that time to value and fiction for the users. So let's double-click on a couple of tactics to execute some of these strategies that I'm sharing here. Journey mapping, I shared this a few slides ago, but again, want to re-emphasize on, especially when we are trying to drive adoption, how important critical it is to have your journey mapped out for your product and differentiated by various personas because you might have five personas and the journey for all five personas may look very different in your product. So it's critical to have this journey mapped out and have it differentiated between onboarding versus initial value versus true value. And that sort of drives to advocacy renewal and expansion. And this is an example that we've taken, that the journey that we mapped at Gainset PX for our customers. Co-metrics want to start out by sharing the key metrics that you should be thinking about tracking and measuring in terms of adoption phase of your customers. So on the left, as you can see, what are my key value drivers? How is it trending? What is the adoption? What is the sentiment of the customers, right? Like based on NPS feedback or specific surveys that we may be running into the product to get their initial feedback, I touch upon that a little bit more in my next few slides. What is the frequency that my accounts are logging in? Is it like what is the trend? What is the daily active monthly users? So almost like think of it as the depth and then lastly habit or stickiness which is the breadth of adoption as well, right? So kind of treating this as a dashboard which you probably review every day and see for anomalies and then from there sort of double clicking into these widgets to understand deeper insights from these reports. So one thing to look at or start out with is golden features or your sticky features, right? Tracking the trends and adoption of your value drivers and golden features. What is bringing your users back to the product? Which features are increasing stickiness and investing in that governance and integration of those features and discoverability. So that's very critical when you're thinking of tracking adoption and value drivers of your product. Secondly, I would say is breadth of adoption to dry success place, right? So sort of golden feature that we just spoke about or value drivers directly come into this concept. This is a screenshot from our health score which we use in our Gainsight CS platform. And this is an example actually of how we are tracking the health score of our customers, breadth of adoption of how they're using PX, right? There's depth of adoption which is the frequency or like your MA use or DA use and then breadth is how well they are using your product with respect to specifically key value drivers or golden features of your product. And this helps you inform your customer success teams or your customer facing teams to see, hey, these features are adopted well, these features aren't. So here's where the CS teams need to double click or double down on in their next monthly sinks and a great data point for product teams to see trends or where there are overall adoption issues and kind of double clicking into that and seeing what optimization workflows that may need to go into your product. From there, once you've understood the adoption of our key value drivers, overall health score, taking this play into activating those features, again, sharing that example of Adobe where we discovered, hey, this feature which is seven clicks away, this is actually a key value driver but has discoverability issue. So then taking advantage of tool like PX where you're using in-app guides and walkthroughs to promote that features contextually to your end users, increasing the discoverability and nurturing your users on how best it addresses their pain points and drives value for them. These are, again, in-app guidances, screen shots which our customers have used PX to drive with respect to feature activation. Contextual user research, think of it as in-app responses or a mechanism to capture your user sentiment and feedback. There are a ton of surveys that you could do. So I would say start with identifying what your goal and objective is. In this particular case, it is the example that I've taken is for a product team who wants to understand overall is doing user research and wants to understand what are, where are my users sitting with the products key value drivers, right? So we have an opinion or start with a hypothesis based on the data that we have that here are my four or five key value drivers but let me research my users, let me ask my users how do they feel about it and what's their scoring? Understanding what do they value most and even leaving some open text questions to learn from your customers. So it could be as simple as what you're seeing on the right, which is a simple rating or it could be a little bit more detailed and robust based on the screenshot that you see on the left. Now the product benchmark for in-product surveys is about 30% response rate that we typically see with Gainsight TX and about 19% on open text questions where you can capture additional user insights. And if you just compare that to share email response rates for surveys that's about two to 3%. So I'd say this is quite a low effort and great ROI investment if you're using any such two law mechanism to capture feedback and sentiment from your end users. Communicating releases and outcomes like we've spoken about understanding adoption value from our key features, capturing user sentiment but also communicating release and outcomes in that adoption phase to your advanced users is so critical because the product teams are so much invested in ensuring that that product is adding new features and values to the end users. So promoting that is super critical and sharing the outcomes with your internal teams is also super critical. So when you think of release, so far traditionally everybody uses emails, release updates or announcements to expose the users to the new release updates. But as you know, so almost the open rate for emails or response rates are about two to 3%. So using those in-app announcements which takes about 30 seconds for your users to go over the highlights of your releases and then sort of for them to double click on from there wherever they need help is again low effort and high ROI. I would say from what we are seeing with our customers and ourselves as well. And lastly, scaling your support and education or training teammates, you can use these in-app product tours and guides and knowledge center board to promote educational videos, one to many upcoming webinars or office hours or enablement events, best practices, strategies. So again, great way for your cross-functional teams to scale and enable your end users. All right, lastly, cross-functional alignment and business metrics. We've spoken about driving time to value, we've spoken about driving adoption journeys, but tracking success and measuring success in KP as a critical, right? So if you think in terms of the product-led growth journey of your customers, these are the key milestones, acquisition, adoption, retention, expansion, advocacy. And as you can see in the bottom, the key teams who are involved are sales team, customer success team, post acquisition, but you may see the last line which talks about product team which is now more heavily involved from the get go, from the acquisition phase to ensure we are leveraging the product experience to drive that time to value from the get go and drive those PQLs leading to paid customers. Not going to go into the details of the milestones on top, but feel free to review this from the slide of what are the key milestones across each of these stages during the customer lifecycle. So sort of mapping back to the key KPIs for these key stages in the customer lifecycle, as you can see in acquisition. Earlier it used to be MQL and SQL, but now with product being front and center and getting access and reducing fiction to your end users early on, PQL is a great metric to track, pipeline generated, conversion rate, customer acquisition costs, these are again great metrics to sort of track and align. Typically, marketing and sales teams would be driving or be responsible with it, for it the product teams sort of go owning the PQL pieces. Then from there going to the adoption phase where as I mentioned, want to track the depth and breadth of adoption and the adoption of key value drivers and trends there. And then from there going into the retention which is typically owned by customer success, but again, product being the front and center to drive most of these, retention is big for any B2B company, GRR, NRR, verified outcomes and CSAT. And lastly expansion, which is again jointly owned by CSM sales team, but more increasingly product teams are participating in this to drive those NRR expansion cross set dollars and any new bookings. So hope this was helpful. And before we go into Q and A, would love for you guys to tell me what KPIs are you measuring today, conversion rates, use engagement, adoption, PQL, GRR, time to value NDR. That's all from my end. Thanks for attending. If you are interested in learning more about it, download our multiple playbooks that we have, PLG, growth led index, professional handbooks so on and so forth. We have pulse for product which is coming up live in San Francisco of the 17 to 18, lots of great speakers and lots of tactical hands-on and strategic sessions. So would love to see all there. Here are links to those specific events and I am open to any questions that you may have and answer them. Thanks for listening in.