In this week's podcast episode, Akash Gupta delves into the concept of Product-Led Growth (PLG), exploring its definition, misconceptions, and the seven essential layers that contribute to a successful PLG strategy.
Featured Links: Follow Aakash on LinkedIn | Aakash's Product Growth website | 'What we learned at Pendomonium and #mtpcon Raleigh NC: Day 2' feature by Louron Pratt
Chapters
Key takeaways
Episode transcript
Randy Silver: 0:00
Hey, it's the Product Experience and I'm Randy Silver. It's early in the year when all of our plans for growth are in that amazing stage of all, seeming amazingly achievable. How to achieve them is the hard part, and when you want to talk growth strategies, Aakash Gupta is at the top of our list. I sat down with him at Mind, the Product's Rally Conference to chat about seven key approaches and the best ways to make them work out about seven key approaches and the best ways to make them work.
Lily Smith: 0:28
The Product Experience Podcast is brought to you by Mind, the Product part of the Pendo family. Every week we talk to inspiring product people from around the globe.
Randy Silver: 0:43
Visit mindtheproductcom to catch up on past episodes and discover free resources to help you with your product practice.
Lily Smith: 0:50
Learn about Mind the Product's conferences and their great training opportunities. Create a free account to get product inspiration delivered weekly to your inbox. Mind the Product supports over 200 product tank meetups from New York to Barcelona. There's probably one near you.
Randy Silver: 1:07
Hey, we're here in Raleigh, north Carolina, at Pandemonium. I'm here with Aakash, who's just got off the stage did an incredible talk about product-led growth. But for anyone who wasn't here and didn't get to see you on stage, before we get into the topic, can you just do a quick intro? Just what are you up to these days and how did you get into the world? Can you just do a quick intro? What are you up to these days and how did you get into the world of product and PLG?
Aakash Gupta: 1:27
Yeah, so, after a 15-year career in product management, where I started as an ICPM and I rose to a VP of product at a PLG company, apollo I learned a lot about product growth, and what I think was unique about my background is I did B2C and B2B, so that's what I started writing about, and there were very few content creators who wrote about both. There were mainly content creators who wrote about B2B, saas, product-led growth, and so that's where I really found my niche, and, as I found that product market fit from my content and my product, I realized I can earn more, be more in control of my schedule, be happier as a creator than a VP of product, and so having the best of all three worlds meant that early this year, I took the leap.
Randy Silver: 2:11
Well, fantastic and we're really glad you did. Okay, before we get into some of the deeper dive stuff, that you're an expert on, plg, product-blood Growth. It's this phrase that's thrown around and there are lots of different definitions. People have different understandings of it, so where does it come from? What's your take on how to define it?
Aakash Gupta: 2:30
Yeah, there's like two big misconceptions first about that phrase. So the first is that product-led growth does not mean product management-led right. It's not that the PMs are suddenly better than sales or better than marketing. And then the second misconception is that product-led growth is self-serve. So a lot of these companies they'll attribute your product-led revenue and your sales-led revenue and so they'll say, well, everything's self-serve, that's product-led. But really what I think product-led growth is, it's a way of organizing your company and setting your strategy so that your product does the acquisition, the conversion, the activation, the monetization and the expansion for you.
Randy Silver: 3:10
Makes sense. So does the word product get in the way of doing this, right? Sometimes we go in and talk to people about this approach to things, and it's really just a good management. It's just a good way of setting up your company. It's really just a good management. It's just a good way of setting up your company, optimizing sales, optimizing marketing. It's not product management-led. But yet people still hear it and it's like oh, you're making a political play for more power, Right.
Aakash Gupta: 3:34
They think that it's a political play.
Aakash Gupta: 3:35
So when Blake Bartlett invented the term in 2016, he wasn't a PM In fact, he'd never been a PM, so I don't think he was as sensitive to the dynamic that it might create internally to the company. But what he was seeing was he was a partner at OpenView, a venture capital firm, and so what he was seeing was that there were two models of companies. There was this model of company that might have a lean sales team, might have three, five people, might have one or two marketers, and is doing 100 million ARR. And then there's this other model that has like a 200 person sales force, 50 marketers, also doing 100 million ARR. And he double clicked on the efficiency of those companies, specifically the ARR per headcount, and he said what's driving this? And what he realized is that those companies had the product doing the work a lot of the work of the acquisition of leads, a lot of the work of converting those leads, a lot of the work of expanding the revenue you get from those leads, and so that's why he created this phrase.
Randy Silver: 4:32
And lots of people think it just means, oh, let's do freemium and go from there. But it's not just that, is it?
Aakash Gupta: 4:38
Actually slapping on a freemium or a free trial is a good way to fail your product-led growth motion. You know there's so many growth leaders. They'll get hired in and unfortunately they have a pretty short average tenure and it's because that's what the first thing they'll do. They'll add FreeMem, They'll add free trial. But the problem is, if the rest of the company isn't set up to drive that, if your VP of marketing isn't ready to drive leads and give over some of those leads and focus on those types of channels instead of traditional marketing channels, if a VP of sales isn't ready to create a product-led sales motion, is still focused on their outbound prospecting and generating sales-generated leads and SQLs, then you're not going to create that PQL motion, You're not going to create that PQA motion that drives success. So really you need to think about product-led growth across all seven layers that we're going to talk about in a second, in order to really drive success.
Randy Silver: 5:29
Okay, good, you brought up the seven layers. That's exactly where it's about to go. So do you want to just do a quick overview of what the seven layers are and then let's start digging deep into what does good look like now and how has PLG matured in the space for these? So from the start, the first one was go to market and what comes after that?
Aakash Gupta: 5:47
Yeah, so go to market and that's number one Information for decision. That's number two Activation, that's three Retention, monetization, expansion, and we skipped free to pay conversion. So you need to think about all seven of those layers.
Randy Silver: 6:02
Okay so, let so. You need to think about all seven of those layers. Okay, so let's start with the beginning Go-to-market. This is, as you said, the most basic layer for this, and the leader in this space was Slack for a long time. But why is that and where has it?
Aakash Gupta: 6:14
gone, yeah. So if you think about it I'm not criticizing Slack you know what they were doing in 2018, that took them to 8 million daily active users in four years. Pretty crazy, even today, if you're able to drive that. But if you look at what was their go-to-market motion, if you look at their marketing channels, for instance, very traditional marketing channels, brand advertising channels, display ads, google search ads, pinterest ads, facebook ads, tv buys, billboard buys, bus buys these were the types of things they were spending money on. If you look at a leader in 2024 like Canva, they've had 170 million monthly active users since that period, when Slack got to 8 million daily active users, and has been relatively flat and gotten out-competed by teams right. What did Canva do to not lose to the giant in their space which was Adobe? They acquire you right when you might need them If you haven't even heard of them.
Aakash Gupta: 7:08
If you're searching for building an Instagram post, canva comes up first. If you search for building a yearbook, canva comes up first. If you want to create a TikTok ad or a YouTube clip, the first search result on Google is Canva. And then they have these amazing landing pages where immediately, from one click, without a credit card, you get into the product and then, when you get into the product, you don't have a blank canvas like an Adobe with confusing layer tools and all sorts of stuff. It's as simple as your Google Slides, where you just choose a template and boom, you have a pretty good Instagram post. You've gone from zero to one in 10 seconds. You customize that template 50 seconds later post You've gone from zero to one in 10 seconds.
Aakash Gupta: 7:46
You customize that template 50 seconds later. In a minute. Only you can get to aha that wow, I could use Canva to create a good Instagram post. So it's a totally different model from Slack, which is like the traditional marketing channels and Slack they really focused on we're better than emails. That was their entire positioning strategy. If you look at the positioning strategy of Canva, they never mentioned Adobe. They're just focused on you and your use case.
Randy Silver: 8:10
But Canva's got this thing where I'm searching for it, at a point where I have a problem, and Canva can help me solve my problem with specific actions very, very quickly. Slack's got a totally different thing. It's more of a long-term lock-in. It requires a crowd of people, a network effect. Is it really fair to compare them that way? If you were doing and you're essentially competing with something that is free, which Adobe is not, you know this. Microsoft Teams is thrown in into the Microsoft license. So what would you do differently as Slack now, to try and take advantage of the way that Canva approaches things?
Aakash Gupta: 8:47
So, if you think about Slack, what is your ICP these days? Right, they're part of Salesforce. Salesforce. Who are their main customers? Enterprises, really big enterprises. So what could a product-led channel be for enterprises? Really the question yeah, is there a product-led channel? And this is one of those things where even product-led influencers will debate about it, like me and Wes Bush. We had just a debate recently on my own podcast about this, and what I would say is that you can still be product-led and, in fact, slack still is product-led with those big enterprises.
Aakash Gupta: 9:22
So there's three things that they do really well. Number one is go in from the user, not the buyer. So what, actually? What happens with the Slack deal? How the enterprise sales rep will do it. When they're talking to the buyers, they'll say you have seven instances of Slack already on your company that users have set up at their company. So that's getting into users instead of buyers, showing that there's usage at your enterprise account. So then you can monetize it. So that's one.
Aakash Gupta: 9:50
The second thing is then creating these dashboards for your salespeople to create this product-led sales motion where they can clearly see okay, these are all the workspaces, this is the activity, this is the number of messages. These are the people on it so that they can go talk to the buyer about it. So it's creating that. And further on top of that, the third thing is they create all the infrastructure within their sales team to enable that. So they have this concept of a product qualified account where, if we've had 15 bottoms up users use it, that's going to ping that. This goes into an enterprise account sales rep's territory and then that enterprise account rep will have a BDR whose whole job is to book a meeting with that enterprise. So all of the sudden, that enterprise just goes from they haven't used the product, they have no information about the product to oh, we have users of the product and the sales rep is enabled to act upon that. So that's how Slack stays product ledled, even while targeting enterprise.
Randy Silver: 10:47
Yeah, when I was in enterprise IT, I would have Dropbox come in with a very, very similar play. So definitely sounds familiar and it's a really good, effective play when it works. Okay, so that's good, marco. Let's talk about information for the decision. And, speaking of Dropbox, they were the lead at one point there, exactly.
Aakash Gupta: 11:06
They really did a lot well, if you think about it right. So the information for decision what I like to do is help product leaders, who are leading this area, have a mental model of what surface areas matter. So the two surface areas that really matter for information for decision one is your pricing page, because it's typically the second most visited page on your website after your home page, and then the second is your lower funnel marketing. So this is like do you have a referrals channel, which is what Dropbox did, right? And so if you double click on the referrals channel, how did it work? It was on a user to user level. Yep, if I refer Randy, I can get eight more gigs of space, so that's really good for getting a user, but is it as good for getting an account? It's not quite as good.
Aakash Gupta: 11:50
So what do the leading 2024 PLG companies use for information for decision? They're often using a pricing page. That really clearly helps. You see, this is enterprise functionality. Without a long table, which Dropbox had, it was just like a long table of check marks. Instead, it's like these are the four to five things that our enterprise plan has. You should go to that enterprise plan, or these are the four to five things our pro plan has. These are the four to five things our free plan has.
Aakash Gupta: 12:16
So it's that really clear pricing page so that you can segment yourself into the right account well, from the get-go. And then, second, instead of that referrals program, it's a templates gallery. That's what you see, Miro Canva Notion everybody focusing on is this templates gallery, because what it does is it allows everybody in the account to figure out their use case right In a Notion. For example, what a PM is going to get out of it versus what an engineer is going to get out of it versus what a designer is going to get out of it is different, but if they can find those templates that are relevant to them really quickly, they can go from haven't used the product to aha moment to retained much faster.
Randy Silver: 12:53
And it's the adoption and the advocacy within the organization for absolutely, and we could spend hours talking about the optimum pricing page and all that. I think we're not going to do that one today. Maybe some other time, Okay. Your third level, though, is free-to-paid conversion and the concept of a reverse trial. I love this, yeah so well free-to-paid conversion.
Aakash Gupta: 13:18
The reason I made it originally it wasn't part of the seven layers actually, but the reason we had me and Jared Herman, the co-creator of these seven layers actually. But the reason we had me and Jared Herman, the co-creator of these seven layers, who also does a lot of company deep dives, added this as a layer is because it's a neglected lever and just a few experiments here are often huge wins for your product growth leaders. I highly recommend if you're a new growth leader, just start at this layer, often because reverse trial is a good one. So recently, two companies I profiled implemented reverse trials. Both almost doubled their free-to-pay conversion rates. And doubling is not easy. Anyone who's ever worked in this layer they've seen like 10% jokes. So what is the freedom?
Randy Silver: 13:55
Yeah, but this sounds like freemium. But there's a difference.
Aakash Gupta: 13:58
There's not. So freemium. That's what most people do, right, when they want to go PLG, they slap on freemium. Maybe they slap on free trial for their more expensive paid plans. Reverse trial says you came in on freemium or you came in on a lower plan. We're going to give you the Bugatti, we're going to give you the enterprise plan for two weeks, for one month, for three months even, and then you're going to get used to using all that stuff and then, after two weeks or a month, we're going to block access to that and we're going to say to continue using that, you need to pay.
Randy Silver: 14:28
We'll give you just a taste. This sounds more like a drug pusher model.
Aakash Gupta: 14:37
It really is, or common B2C companies use this. So Spotify uses a reverse trial. Most people don't even know this, but the first 14 days you use Spotify free, there's no ads. Then they hit you with all the ads and all of a sudden you're like I love that ad free experience. I guess I'll pay. Or Elon Musk just did this with Tesla, where he gave everybody a month of full self-driving for free. In the end he generated $160 million in ARR for Tesla, because that's how many people converted when he ended that free month Makes sense.
Randy Silver: 15:00
I like ProgPad's approach to this as well, where they'll give you you sign off an Ephraimium type model, but the only way to extend it before you convert to paid is to start using more features. So every time you use a feature, you extend your F2P for a few more days.
Aakash Gupta: 15:16
That's awesome, yeah, gamify the length of the free trial, but create an incentive to convert to paid at the end.
Randy Silver: 15:22
Yeah, and it's not an infinite thing. You can't keep doing it, there is a limit, but it's just getting you hooked on more and more features and becoming more essential. It's a really nice model. Yes, coincidentally started by one of the co-founders of Mind the Product, so she doesn't know what she's talking about. Okay, so it actually goes segues really nicely. It's almost like these layers have a set order to activation, so actually using the product. So back a few years ago, the leader in that was Box. What were they doing? Right?
Aakash Gupta: 15:50
So Box, if you think about it and we're comparing 2018 versus 2024 across all these examples so in 2018, dropbox IPO. So what did Box have to do? They needed to do something right. So they had been a sales led growth company. They had IPO to 2016. They needed to do something right. So they had been a sales-led growth company. They had IPO'd in 2016. They were doing meh. If anything, they were down from their original IPO stock price. So Aaron Levin, the CEO of Box, decided to go all in on product-led growth. He hired the best product-led growth VPs, he hired the best PMs, he hired the best consultants, and so what they did is what's called a funnel onboarding and in 2018, this worked really well. In fact, I've talked to companies like Lempire that also implemented this in 2018. So what did they do? Basically, it said like you can't do anything in the product until you do this next Upload some files, create a folder structure, add your teammates, connect to whatever other data thing you're using, right? So it's like it worked pretty well.
Randy Silver: 16:46
Micro bits of friction, but things that actually made sure that the product was useful and successful for you and you hit that habit moment.
Aakash Gupta: 16:52
So that's really good for activation. You need to get them through setup, aha and all the way to habit. But when you look at the best-in-class companies today, what they're doing like Amiro, for example is first they're figuring out which funnel should we force you down by asking just one or two qualification questions Are you a PM, are you an exec, are you a designer? Then we can force you down the path that's relevant for you and on top of that, they're not just relying on onboarding. So we talked a little bit about your homepage. That's your homepage. Messaging we talked about at the very first layer. Well, now think about your in-app homepage. You should continue the learning journey. You should get people activated into all of the extra features you've built out outside of those core features. You should make it really easy to contact support, contact sales see a YouTube video demo. I see a YouTube video demo. And so getting that personalized landing homepage in app related to whatever role and job to be done you have, is really powerful, and that's what we see these days.
Randy Silver: 17:51
So contextual to role, but also potentially contextual to what you've previously done where you are in a process we see you've started something, a project, but you haven't completed it things like that Exactly.
Aakash Gupta: 18:02
Yes, you've dropped off on this plan or you recently launched this plan. Maybe Lemlist? Continuing their example, you recently launched this personalized image based email. That's one of Lemlist's huge hooking points they can just personalize an image and add text to an image. Well then, why don't you try personalizing a video so you can take them deeper down the rabbit hole, to give them more success, but also get them into things that have more friction, because creating a video is a lot harder than creating an image. Yeah, makes sense.
Randy Silver: 18:39
Product people. Are you ready? The word on the street is true. Mtp Con London is back in 2025. We're very excited for Mind the Product's return to the Barbican next March.
Lily Smith: 18:52
Whenever I hear people talking about the best product conferences, Mind the Product is always top of the list. If you've been before, you know what's in store. Oh, that rhymes. New insights, strategies, hands-on learnings from the absolute best in the field, plus great networking opportunities. And if you're joining us for the first time, I promise you won't be disappointed.
Randy Silver: 19:14
We've got one speaker already announced. That's Leah Tarrin, who you've heard on this very podcast. With more to come from the likes of WhatsApp, the Financial Times and Google, you know real people working in the field who will share real, actionable insights to level up your game as a product manager.
Lily Smith: 19:32
Whether you're coming to the Barbican in person on March 10th and 11th or tuning in digitally, join us and get inspired at MTP Con. London Tickets are on sale now. Check out mindtheproductcom forward slash mtpcon to find out more, or just click on events at the top of the page.
Randy Silver: 19:58
Okay. So you've got people, they've been activated, they're trying to do things, but sometimes they fall off, so return is the death of all of us, Exactly. So retention is the thing that comes next in your model. Yes, and you said, evernote was great at this in 2018, but not state of the art. Now, what's changed?
Aakash Gupta: 20:16
Yeah. So, as you know, as a growth leader and product leader, like in retention, you know your average chart is like you're just over time, you keep losing people. You keep losing people. Evernote actually had the smile chart infamous smile chart so they hit their nadir a year and a half in, where I think they had something like 10% retention Horrific. You're like, oh my God, my business is dead. But no, actually, after three years they hit the same retention level they had at month one. So they see people coming back and what drove. That is, for instance, their cost.
Aakash Gupta: 20:46
Device syncing that was the huge functionality. Apple Notes wasn't very good back in the day, so you could update it on your phone and it would show up on your desktop in real time. It would show up on your tablet in real time, so they had that. That was good. They also had notes and tagging so you could really easily search for things. Had notes and tagging so you could really easily search for things.
Aakash Gupta: 21:06
But if you notice all this functionality, it's very user-focused and what the trick to retention actually ends up being is you need to expand to users throughout the company and you need to create use cases for everybody and you also need to layer in additional functionality for use cases that your user has. So a great example of this is Figma. So Figma, they took over basically 100% of Sketch's market share in like two years. It was like insane. They just stole all of it. But how do they keep people, how do they maintain that? So they release features, like crazy Dev mode, figjam, which recently flies. So they're releasing all sorts of cool features. That's one thing, and then the second thing, as I said, is they're expanding into the whole account and they're creating these habit loops.
Aakash Gupta: 21:50
So what is Figma famous for? That cursor, right, you need to in real time see somebody's cursor. Now, adding that to your product has a lot of tradeoffs. Figma has performance engineers like a game company where they need to make sure that that cursor is looking in real time, because if you compare Slides or Canva's cursor, it's not as good. The frames are way lower. It's like you get half a frame per second, versus in Figma you're getting 30 frames per second of exactly where their cursor is. So it's highly performant, optimized for the team experience and because of that, figma embeds itself in teams, not users, Right? So a PM might leave and if they were the Evernote driver, then Evernote might just leave and they might switch over to Asana, or they might switch over to Notion or anything else, google Docs even. But if a PM leaves Figma, there's still all of that lock-in from the rest of their team as they've expanded into those other players. That makes sense.
Randy Silver: 22:49
Okay, so we've got everyone, but we may not be profitable with them. You know we've done the first peak of this, but now we need to make sure that we're actually monetizing them. And Trello was the back in 2018, was the top dog. What were they doing right then?
Aakash Gupta: 23:05
So they were like really like god tier, if you think about it. Like they were acquired by Atlassian, who was the PLG giant. Like I remember at the time when I was a product leader, like I used to just open up Trello and like copy their screens essentially into my own product. They were doing everything right. So what they did super well is number one. They had this power-up idea, similar actually to what you meant with ProdPad, where you basically you get benefits for doing stuff in the product Super smart. So they had the ProdPad sort of idea where we can get people into higher plans by giving them tastes or encouraging them to. They also had gamification so you could win rewards, you could win access to higher tiers. So that also helped with their monetization. But what they were limited by is they only had seat-based pricing. They didn't have a usage-based vector Right.
Aakash Gupta: 23:57
So where I worked most recently and was VP of product was at Apollo, when they became a unicorn. A lot of our growth was coming from NRR being way above 100% right, where each customer that we had each year when they renewed, they renew much bigger. So how did they do that? So Apollo was a contact database, so basically I could find your phone number on Apollo or your personal email address or your work email address or your prior work email address. We have it all right.
Aakash Gupta: 24:24
So companies would not just pay for a seat of another salesperson or another marketing person using Apollo, but also more contact information Right. And so that usage-based vector was huge because we also would get expansion, not just when they came up for renewal, but in the middle of the year. Oftentimes clients would just expand, they'd just buy 100,000 more contacts, 50,000 more mobile numbers. So having a usage-based hybrid vector is a huge trend. So my friend, kyle Poyer he runs the SaaS survey at OpenView. They talk to 2,000 SaaS companies every year and they get their data and what he found is that hybrid pricing that I'm talking about right now, where you have seat-based plus usage-based went from 0% in 2018 to 55% of SaaS companies in 2024. Interesting.
Randy Silver: 25:14
Okay, so we've got one more level on this. So you've got there. You got to that point, but you've plateaued on there. You've gotten every last penny that you can out of the people you've got. You need to go into new markets, you need to expand and let's see, you had SurveyMonkey was the leader a few years ago. They were state of the art. Yeah, again. What were they doing right and what does good look like now?
Aakash Gupta: 25:38
Yeah. So SurveyMonkey essentially they were really good at expanding your use of surveys. It was like, especially, they were really good at expanding your use of surveys. It was like, yeah, as a team, I'm getting a lot of ROI out of surveys, so I'm going to buy more surveys and maybe I'll hire a few more user researchers. So those are basically the two vectors for SurveyMonkey. If you look at a best-in-class expander, you have to think of HubSpot. Hubspot, most people don't know, but they've 17x their stock price since the IPO they. Hubspot, most people don't know, but they've 17x their stock price since the IPO. They're doing a lot right.
Aakash Gupta: 26:06
Where did HubSpot start? It started as a marketing email automation for blast emails. What did it expand into? It expanded into every use case for marketers, so everything a marketer might want to do. Then it expanded into sales teams. And how did it expand into sales teams? First with a free CRM, but now tons of paid products for sales teams. Then it expanded into customer support teams, customer success teams. So it has gone through the entire company. So they aren't capped at a limit for seats based on a particular department, because they'll just go into the next department, the next department and as more departments get locked in. As your marketing department is on there, your sales department inherently wants to stay on there more. They might even buy an 80% worse product like HubSpot compared to Salesforce, for instance, just because of the integration that it provides with the marketing.
Randy Silver: 26:54
And your procurement team will surely be happy with that as well regardless of the benefits of potentially diversifying, your CFO too, because they can negotiate harder with HubSpot. Yep Makes a lot of sense. Okay, so I'm in a position where I'm intrigued by this and my company can start working on this. I can't do all of this at once, though. Realistically, where should I start?
Aakash Gupta: 27:18
So the way I like to think about it, and the reason we presented it in this sort of like layered, sequential order of layers, is figure out what layer you're broken at, look at your benchmarks, look at your competitors and you want to find the layer going top down where you're broken, and obviously that's going to be your focus area. So let's say you're broken at layer two information for decision Then I think you shouldn't go more than two layers deeper than that, so you can focus on layer three and layer four. But it doesn't make sense to start focusing on retention, monetization, expansion Once you're three layers away from where you're broken. The problem is you don't have volume for learnings, for testing, rapid iteration and experimentation, so that's why you have to go top down.
Randy Silver: 28:00
That makes sense, okay, but if you're listening to this or watching us, then you're probably a product manager, and is this something that you can do by yourself, that you can implement, or what does it take to start getting this right in your company? We talked about product-led growth is not led by product managers, necessarily.
Aakash Gupta: 28:20
Yeah, product-led growth. Realistically, the CEO drives product-led growth because they need to hire a VP of marketing, a chief revenue officer, who are on board with that. It's going to be very different from the sales-led motions that they're used to. So the CEO is going to drive product-led growth. But assuming that you have a CEO that is driving product-led growth as a product manager, well, first of all, if they're not, you need to convince them to drive it right. Even if you are just an ICPM, you need to start to make the case. You need to help them understand and I always tell ICPMs don't trust your manager to be doing their job well, honestly, the tenure of an average ICPM is a lot longer than the tenure of a product leader.
Aakash Gupta: 29:05
Product leaders, companies just rifle through them really, really quickly. It's unfortunate, but that's the state of the play right now in this market, and so you need to actually be advocating and making the case. And one of the things that I've learned when I was at Google as a PM was the best PMs they don't just take the assigned area that they have, they actually think from first principles about. These are the seven layers. I know you assigned me to monetization, but our activation is broken. We need to go fix activation first and you know what? Your average product leader, your average CEO, will be really thankful that you thought that way, because that's thinking like an owner, that's thinking above your level. So, as a PM, yes, you may not have the power today to go operate in a different layer, but you should make the case over time and if not, if you can't actually shift your layer, maybe just shift teams to go to the layer that does have higher impact, to go to the layer that does have higher impact.
Aakash Gupta: 29:58
A lot of PMs come to me with advice with I'm worried. My company is doing rounds of layoffs Like Tesla and Amazon. Pms keep coming to me with that question and I always tell them go to where the execs are investing, go to the areas where there's a lot of growth potential, because those areas are never going to get laid off. And if the same thing applies for driving forward growth too, which is shift your product team's area, applies for driving forward growth too, which is shift your product team's area. One of my biggest unlocks when I was a group product manager was not taking what a VP of product told me as the five areas my team should be, but instead going back to them and saying I agree with three of those, but here's what the other two should be, and every PM should be doing that.
Randy Silver: 30:32
Yeah, yeah. And if you are an ICPM, an individual contributor, as a product manager, one of the key things there that you're talking, this is just basic stuff. This is outputs over outcomes. It's going back and talking to people that, yes, you want to fix this thing, this is your most important thing, but we're going to talk to you about how we're going to contribute to creating the condition for it or making it, rather than just putting some bandaid over here. That's not going to get you what you ultimately need. It's just window dressing. If I do what you told me rather than what you, actually need.
Aakash Gupta: 31:06
Yeah, it's outcomes over outputs Marty Kagan, 2008 inspired but it's also Ben Horowitz, 1997, good product manager, bad product manager. Everyone loves to hate on what he said when he said product manager is CEO of the product, but that's what he meant. You have to have that CEO mentality of what should I even be?
Randy Silver: 31:22
focusing on Well, think like, but rather than act like sometimes.
Aakash Gupta: 31:27
You can't boss anybody around. You have to lead without authority. But you'd be surprised, your average CEO, if they go to their VP or their CRO and tell them to do something. Most times they're not just going to do it. They still have to influence them?
Randy Silver: 31:40
Absolutely. I think that was one of the fundamental things that CEOs can get fired to, and not everyone has the power to just say, jump, yeah. Last question on this We've talked a lot about companies that are successful with PLG. What companies shouldn't be doing this? What are the conditions where you say actually we should be sales-led? We should have a different approach to this.
Aakash Gupta: 32:02
So a lot of people feel this way. They feel like I'm in a sales-led market. For instance, I'm selling to some enterprise clients in an area where everyone else is sales-led, so I can't be product-led and I would really push back on that, the reason being you can have a sales-led outbound motion. Maybe that's what you need, Maybe you need a field sales motion. That doesn't mean you can't have a really good freemium product. That doesn't mean you can't have a really good demo tool.
Aakash Gupta: 32:30
So when I was at Google, one of the products I worked on was our Google Job Search API. That was an enterprise, sales-led, quote-unquote market. But we took a product-led approach because what we did is I built a demo tool that, let's say you were going to go talk to Coca-Cola as the enterprise sales rep tomorrow. Well, guess what? You don't need to do any work except for tell me that you're talking to Coca-Cola and I'll show you a side-by-side demo of Coca-Cola's current job search versus Google's job search. And in the demo the person can go in and type in product manager. They'll be able to see what the results were with Coca-Cola's existing search versus Google search. So that's an example of building a product to enable the sale.
Randy Silver: 33:09
So optimizing the sales process can be PLG as well.
Aakash Gupta: 33:12
Exactly and same with product qualified accounts. This idea of you can look at the usage data on that freemium plan or that free trial plan that you have. Once people reach a certain level, that's when you go and deploy your sales team. So even in a sales-led motion. Another example is Lempire. They create an outbound sales product, they still do outbound sales, but where does 90% of their revenue come from? Inbound PLG, even though they're targeting enterprise clients. Think about a company like Stats Inc. They have all of the biggest enterprise clients out there that you can think of Capital One, nike, airbnb, figma, notion. They also have this way where they do the sale because they're used to the big sales and motion, but all of the onboarding, all of the activation is through the product. So I think that the dichotomy of product-led and sales-led really should come to an end.
Randy Silver: 34:02
And it's also creating the relationship and the trust with the sales organization, so that, once you've got to that point, you can talk about creating even more efficiency and you're not a threatening person Now, you're a partner to them, exactly.
Aakash Gupta: 34:15
You always have to think about. If you're creating a product-led motion, how do I make that VP more successful in their KPI? Not maybe in the number of people in their org, because you might actually be cutting the number of people in their org, but how do I make sure they hit their number, their bookings number, their MQL lead number, their QLE number? And that, I think, is very possible.
Randy Silver: 34:34
Aakash, this has been fantastic. We've obviously only scratched the surface on a lot of this. You go way deeper in your newsletter and in your podcast. Just tell people where to find you if they want to go deeper on this.
Aakash Gupta: 34:45
Oh, thank you. Yeah, so you can probably just find me on LinkedIn. That's like the place I'm most public. The website's product-growthcom.
Randy Silver: 34:52
Fantastic. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Thank you Product people. Are you ready? The word on the street is true MTP Con London is back in 2025. We're very excited for Mind the Product's return to the Barbican next March.
Lily Smith: 35:17
Whenever I hear people talking about the best product conferences, mine the product is always top of the list. If you've been before, you know what's in store. Oh, that rhymes. New insights, strategies, hands-on learnings from the absolute best in the field, plus great networking opportunities. And if you're joining us for the first time, I promise you won't be disappointed.
Randy Silver: 35:39
We've got one speaker already announced. That's Leah Tarrin, who you've heard on this very podcast. With more to come from the likes of WhatsApp, the Financial Times and Google, you know real people working in the field who will share real actionable insights to level up your game as a product manager.
Lily Smith: 35:56
Whether you're coming to the Barbican in person on March 10th and 11th or tuning in digitally, join us and get inspired at MTPCon. London. Tickets are on sale now. Check out mindtheproductcom forward slash MTPCon to find out more, or just click on events at the top of the page.
