 Hello, everyone. It's great to be here. Today I will be talking about product-led growth. I know, I know, some of you might be tired of this topic already, or at least all the buzz around it. But I'm going to try my best to make this tactical, relatable, and practical. I'll be sharing some real-life examples of the work we've been doing at Amplitude. And I'll also be sharing some of the hard lessons I've learned during my past two years there. As product people, understanding the nuances and opportunities of PLG is going to be extremely important, especially how it relates to the rest of the business. You might be thinking, what's new here? Product is already at the center of your universe. But for the rest of the business, it can feel a little bit like our world has been turned upside down. So I want to leave you with two things today. I want to leave you with some practical ideas that you can take back to your company. I want to leave you with a better understanding of the business impact of PLG, especially how it relates to the rest of the business and your counterparts in marketing and sales. Before we dive in, who am I? I'm the very imposter here at ProductCon. I head up growth marketing at Amplitude. My team oversees user acquisition. We own our website, our paid and organic channels. We have a retention pod that focuses on user activation and engagement. And then we have a monetization team that focuses on driving upsell and cross-sell all on top of our product. So I work with PMs, designers and engineers every day as all my work evolves around getting users into our product, make sure they use our product, and hopefully eventually pay us for it. I want to start by us getting on the same page about what PLG means. I think chat GBT perfectly encapsulates the confusion out there. Is PLG a business model or a go-to-market strategy? How is a product so compelling that it can acquire its own users all by itself? And it's a freemium pricing model at prerequisite? This definition is a bit all over the place, isn't it? It's because we're confused. Confusion in, confusion out. It's not really chat GBT's fault. I really like John Cutler's free versions of PLG. He observed these inside Amplitude and I did too. And I also see them often on my LinkedIn feed. I would recommend you finding the post and reading through it in its entirety. So you can spot these different versions inside your company. But very briefly right now. PLG is a tool chest. It's about having different skills and tools, like experimentation, pricing psychology, SEO, that sets normal product apart from product-led growth. PLG is a motion and model. Here we're talking about an actual go-to-market strategy. A growth motion or motions. The last one is my favorite. PLG is a mindset. It's about feeling good about product, believing in the power of good products. Now, when I just started at Amplitude, I couldn't distinguish these three. And so I had a really hard time. I thought I was on the same page as my leadership, my manager, my teams. But I was wrong. I was ready to go, disrupt our go-to-market motion with PLG. But most of the company was in the mindset mode. You can imagine my disappointment. That was about a year and a half ago and since then I probably built about 276 slides on what PLG is, how PLG works, how we apply PLG across a customer journey, what PLG is not, the business opportunity of PLG, what teams should be involved. You get the picture. So my first learning for you here is that make sure that you and your business are on the same page that everyone is talking about the same thing. And if you're just getting started, you have to develop all three versions of PLG. You need to have the right skills and tools. You need to have the right mindset. And you need a strategy. I think one in three come naturally to most of you in here. So today I will be focused on two. PLG as a strategy. As product people, you're going to have to take a lot more accountability for key things like revenue and new sign-ups. So let's make sure you're ready for that. So just so we're all clear in this room right now, PLG is a growth motion across acquisition, retention, and monetization. Acquisition. Is your product able to drive new users to sign up? Retention. Are users able to activate and engage in your product without any help or intervention? Monetization. Are users able to self-serve checkout without any help from sales? Now, if you're lucky, you have or are you able to invest in product growth across each stage of the journey. Most companies do not. Let's take product acquisition as an example. Let's look at Zoom. Someone signs up for a Zoom account, create a Zoom link, and invites their friends to the Zoom call. All these friends are going to experience the power of Zoom, see the value from it, before even having signed it up, and then they're prompted to sign up at the end of the call. Calendly is another great example here. You sign up for Calendly, you invite everyone in your network to use this Calendly link, and they get to experience the product, Calendly, before having even signed up for themselves. If we continue with the Calendly example, they also have Prata-led retention. Super easy to get started with Calendly, super easy to use Calendly. They also have Prata-led monetization. Just put in your credit card and you're on your way. No sales needed. Now, most companies do not have it this easy. They have to rely on marketing and sales. For example, Amplitude, we rely on my teams to drive acquisition, marketing led acquisition. We also have professional services and customer success teams that focus on adoption, making sure users are engaged in our product and know how to use it. And we have massive sales teams that are solely responsible for monetization. So to Zoom and Calendly to some extent, and that's because most successful companies have two or three motions running simultaneously. And that's what I'll be running through next with you. How Amplitude is driving growth across acquisition, retention, and monetization. And how we blend the Prata-led motions with our existing sales and marketing motions. So let's start with acquisition. Now, if you're still with me, you might be thinking, Francisco, you just said it's really hard to do. You have to be Zoom or Calendly. First, you're right. Second, thank you for listening. We don't have true product led acquisition at Amplitude, but we do have the ability to have the product drive new users into existing accounts. We know that having more users inside Amplitude reduces churn, it increases retention, and it expands the use cases of Amplitude within a company. So because of that, we're always working on improving our activation, sorry, our invite and sharing experiences. Last year, we made some significant improvements to our sharing model, making it easier for users to share content outside of Amplitude. By improving the share model, we saw a 41% increase in conversion to share a chart. And what's more, we saw an overall 4% lift in users sharing. That's huge. We also made minor improvements to our invitation flows, improving simple things like our email prompts, and creating an extra email nudge for users who forget to sign in when they're invited. Small things like that can move the needle. We also made improvements to our new user sign up flow. If you've ever signed up for Amplitude, you might remember it's kind of a process. We ask you a lot of questions. So last year, we worked on slimming the screens down, reducing the number of questions we asked people up front to reduce friction. We also added things like enrichment, so it would be easier for users to sign up. By reducing the number of screens, adding enrichment, we saw a 60% increase in conversion from sign up to creating an account. So while you may not have true product-led acquisition, you're still able to invest in expanding your user base for existing accounts using your product. Now, this brings me to my lesson number two. While it's really rare to have true product-led acquisition, like Zoom and Calendly, having a free plan of your product can help unlock acquisition for you. It reduces friction and increases value up front. Having worked with many other SaaS companies in the past, I can see the stark difference. It's way more efficient to have a free plan. I have to do less work, right? We just get users into the product. It's classic show, don't tell. At Amplitude, we know that the most efficient way to monetization is to get users into our product and see the value for themselves. So if you're right now out there building a business case for adding a free version of your product, make sure you include the potential upside of having a free plan from an acquisition unlock perspective. Now, let's talk about retention. Retention is huge for us at Amplitude this year. Retention is split into two parts, activation and engagement. Our big focus this year is activation. We define activation in two parts, set up and aha. Set up for us is when a user connects a data source and creates their first chart. A ha for us is when a user either saves the chart or shares the chart, both indications of value received from Amplitude. Now, all this talk about metrics brings me to my third learning, which is metrics. With PLG, all your key business metrics are going to change. Now, quick pulse check here because this is a product conference and I'm a marketer. How many in here know or think they know what an MQL is? Marketing qualified lead. I need hands. I see a few hands, not as many as I would have hoped. It's not really that important. But it's important if you want to know what keeps your counterparts in marketing up at night. My point here is that in an old business model, pre-PLG, all your metrics would be key sales and marketing KPIs. In a product-led growth world, they will all change to product metrics. As product people, it's up to you to really understand what is an activated user? What's an activated account? What does a retained user and retained account look like? What is driving monetization? What kind of retention drives monetization? What are the key behaviors? This takes lots of deep analysis and work to figure out. At Amplitude, we're constantly working on these metrics and tinkering with them ourselves. And once you find them, you need to share them with the rest of the company. You can't be the only team that cares about these metrics because you will need help. And so you have to go out and talk to everyone about these key metrics. Don't get me wrong. At Amplitude, we still care very much about MQLs and SQLs. We still have to run our business. But we're warming up the business to these new product KPIs. We're surfacing them every week, reporting on them, educating everyone on them, bringing them along on the journey with us. So at Amplitude, as I mentioned, we're tackling activation this year. As you can see from this very pretty final chart, we have quite the drop-off from a user creating an account to them actually connecting a data source. We know it's complicated. We know it's a technical thing to set up Amplitude. And this brings me to my fourth learning, which is that product growth is a team sport. I know we just landed on a definition of PLG five years ago. Five minutes ago. But unless your product is as intuitive and simple to use as Calendly, you need support. Everyone needs to care about this. So at Amplitude, while product and engineering are the ones striving the in-product activation roadmap, we have many other teams who are gold on activation metrics as well. Take my team in growth marketing, for example. We work on one-to-many onboarding programs. We build trigger emails to force or create a habit. We work with our education teams on building education materials and making it easy to get started with Amplitude. We continue to improve our documentation and support forums. So when a user has a question doing setup, there's an answer right there for them. We even have sales involved. It just shows how important activation is for Amplitude. So while we're making investments in the product side of the house and activation this year, we're also going to make investments out of the product. If you're an enterprise customer with Amplitude today, you get a 60-90-day implementation program where we help you with what questions to ask, what events to track, properties, how to use the product, how to get value from it, how to capture insights. Now, we can't do that for every customer, especially not the ones that don't pay us yet. But what we can do is that we can turn that enterprise experience into a one-to-many version to make sure that every single person, every single company that signs up for Amplitude is successful. We know it's a good investment because activated and engaged accounts drive monetization. Perfect segue into monetization. So for us, it's not product-led growth with monetization. It's product-led sales. It's product-led sales because we don't have self-serve monetization yet. It's very hard to add product-led monetization to an existing sales-led monetization motion. I'm not going to lie. When I was doing research for this talk, I was trying to find some success stories out there, and I could not. So hopefully Amplitude will become a success story on this very soon. Until then, we have product-led sales. Product-led sales is a very scientific definition. Product-led sales is if sales led growth and product led growth had a baby. We're mixing the motions together to make money. The key ingredient here is product usage data. Using product signals to identify accounts that are ready for having a discussion about upgrading. I don't think product-led sales as a concept or motion is entirely new. We just didn't call it this. We have had like customer success teams using customer health scores to reduce churn or mitigate churn. Even sales have had access to key product signals to identify accounts that have gone over their current limit. But I think what has further popularized product sales is the rise of free and freemium. Now users are trying before they buy. And while they're trying, there's so much to learn about them. So at Amplitude, we're still getting started on our product-led sales journey. But we've already learned so much. 50% of our new paying customers every year come from our free plan. So we need to know what they're doing in there. So one of the biggest learnings for me so far has been that proactively identifying accounts in our free plan and surfacing those two sales has performed much better than optimizing in the product for handraisers. So what we did is that we built a simple model where we looked at our free accounts and our paying customers and we looked at the behavior they had right before they were upgrading. And then we scored these accounts accordingly. And the accounts with the highest score we gave to the sales team. With these accounts with PQA, we saw a 3x increase in conversion from lead to sales pipeline. That means that sales is three times more likely to convert a PQA lead into a sales opportunity than any other lead, including an inbound demo request or anything like that. Besides that, we also have surfaced a lot more relevant data from the product to our sales team. We embed key account metrics directly in sales force for them. And we build an amplitude dashboard where they can go in and look at their accounts usage. What kind of paid features have they been interested in? Who were interested? What kind of charts do they use? Are they just using basic segmentation? Or do they have more advanced use cases? Who are the most querying users? Who are the most consuming users? So on and so forth. Arming sales with the right data to have the right conversations. This brings me to my last learning. For product sales to work, you have to become extremely close with sales. Like BFF close. Now, I know what you're thinking. Sales people are scary. Can't do that. But I'm here to tell you they're not that bad. And they're really not that bad if you share a sales target with them. When we were just getting started with product sales at Amplitude, we were gold. The product team, we were gold on surfacing as many handraisers as possible. So we were optimizing for that in the product. Just getting as many people in the product to raise their hand and wanting to talk to sales. And then we threw those leads over the fence to sales. The more leads we generated, the better we were doing. The more leads we generated, no more pipeline was generated over on the other side. Wasn't working. Now we share an actual pipeline target with sales. There's joint accountability across the journey. We optimize for quality, not quantity. And we make sure they have the right enablement and product usage data to have the relevant conversations they need to close these accounts. So where do you start? For Amplitude this year, we're going to continue to invest in product sales. Both for our land use cases, but also for our expansion use cases. We're going to continue to invest in self-serve monetization, making that a reality for us. And we'll be continuing the company-wide effort to improve activation. We know that improving activation is what's going to fuel growth for us this year. For you, it depends on where in the journey you're at. If you're just getting started, hopefully some of my ideas and examples were helpful. If you're way ahead of me, I'm jealous. Good for you. But I want to leave you with this. As product people, you have a unique opportunity to take a front-road seat right now. The way people buy software has changed. 20 years ago, it was sales-led growth with steak dinners and box seats. Ten years ago, it was marketing-led growth with the rise of inbound and HubSpot. Now it's product's turn. It's your time to shine. Seize the opportunity, have clear metrics across the product-led journey, and bring your counterparts in marketing and sales and the whole company on the journey with you. Most importantly of all, make sure you evolve. If not, your competitor will. Thank you.