Why we decide to redesign our organization to become a Product-Led SaaS company.
1/ The Mistake
Three years ago, Pierre-Luc and I decided to put our consulting assignments aside to build kopilot, a brand new information platform provided to the use of CEOs and founders from B2B service companies.
“Product-Led Growth is about helping your customers experience the ongoing value your product provides. It is a critical step in successful product design”- Nir Eyal.
We’ve made a lot of mistakes. Among them, applying to our operations the framework that a consulting firm operates. The consulting model implies that we sell an idea (or a project) to a prospect. To do so, we exchange long with the prospect, arguing about the undeniable qualities of the product. At a certain point in time, the prospect becomes a client, and the customer starts to experiment with the product. It happened that the product reality was disconnected from the users’ reality.
2/ Revelations
Late 2018, I had the chance to attend a keynote from Fabien Pinckaers, the CEO of Odoo. Odoo is a Belgian-based open source ERP, well known as the fastest-growing open source ERP over the world. Fabien P. lectured us about how the process may change the entire organization to make it über-efficient. It was all about the product; all teams were focusing on the product. It has sown the seed.
Several months later, we attended the Product-Led Summit. The Product-Led Summit is designed for Saas entrepreneurs to discover how to use their product as the primary vehicle to acquire, convert, and retain customers. From there, the ball kept rolling.
The revelation was flipping the sales model to give buyers the keys of our product. They should experiment with the product before purchasing it. Only a positive experiment should lead to sales rather than fine words, or promises.
“Buy only if you love it” became our new moto.
3/ Product-Led
Product-Led Growth isn’t a tactic or hack. It is a model that drives teams and companies to deliver the maximum value and experience to their customers directly from the products they build and design. Getting this right means that we need a deep understanding of those you want to serve and how to help each customer become successful.
Product-Led Growth aims to change how companies grow because it brings a focus on how the product can help with acquiring more customers. Customer acquisition doesn’t just become something marketing is focused on, the responsibilities for acquiring great customers expands to the product team as well.
We need to go beyond just giving people the option to try our product before they buy it. Our entire approach as an organization needs to shift. Instead of leading with sales and following with product, you need to make sure that every team has a hand in helping each user become successful.
- The marketing team will ask: “how can our product generate a demand?;”
- The sales team will ask: “how can we use the product to qualify our prospects for us?;”
- The customer success team asks: “how can we create a product that helps customers become successful beyond our dreams?.”
- The admin team asks: “how can we automate our processes based on the product’s inputs?”
4/ What about us?
By having every team focused on the product, we seek to create a culture that is built around enduring customer value. We immediately identified some gaps, between our intention and our reality.
We reorganized our organization around six main objectives. Four objectives relate to our operations. Two objectives focus on our organization. Each of these must be (or at least, should be) done through the app.
The four Objectives regarding our operations:
- Enrich product to increase in perceived value;
- Boost marketing to attract leads;
- Improve services to convert leads into users;
- Boost sales to convert users into subscribers;
The two Objectives regarding our organization:
- Reduce admin tasks to save time and money;
- Improve operations to become more efficient.
Each objective is divided into actionable items. Those items structure the thinking, and of course, require the different teams working together. By having all teams working together, we hope that we will cover more angles than previously.
Once done, we had to adapt our Jira, review the whole backlog in light of the new objectives. It was all about cleaning, updating, verifying each ticket was consistent with the objective at the upper level.
Conclusion
In conclusion, we are at the beginning of the journey. We faith this will help us to focus more on the product, and subsequently, more on the value it must deliver to all of its users.
This framework isn’t easy to implement. It requires more synchronization, more communication, more transparency, and more discipline. It also implies that the issue of one becomes an issue for everyone. The flipside of the coin is that the merit of the one is the merit of everyone in the teams.
We also hope it will provide more clarity in what each of us does contribute to the company and the responsibilities coming with it.
In a couple of months, we’ll do the retrospective… Let’s hope the framework will keep all of its promises. 🤞
Have a great day!
Laurent.
