Product Tonic Lab Meetup #8 — Culture

“How might we influence a “Product Led” culture?”

What we learnt:

• Concepts of product led growth
• Learn about product led from experience
• Apply product led concept

Product-led growth

Product-led growth (PLG) is an end user-focused growth model that relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. This can result in a stronger growth engine, lower customer acquisition cost and higher Revenue Per Employee (RPE).

3 Pillars of PLG

Design for the End User : putting the needs of real people first, listening to their problems — and committing to make consistent improvements to your product to solve those problems more effectively.

• Listen to the user
• Build a culture of continuous, rapid improvement
• Personalize where possible

Deliver Value Before Capturing Value : reduce all potential barriers to users solving an immediate problem

• Put the product first
• Deliver value quickly
• Introduce customer success before sales

Invest in the Product with Go-to-Market Intent : drive acquisition, conversion, and expansion.

• Invest in product data
• Build a growth team
• Run experiments

Traditional Companies vs Product-led growth

Product-led growth impacts company’s go-to-market strategy by placing the product at the helm as compared to traditional organizational structure where profit and cost centre operates separately.

Like other go-to-market strategies, product-led growth is a company-wide action plan that informs how sales, marketing, CS, engineering, and product teams measure success and contribute to growth:

• Sales/marketing led metrics 🠒 Product led metrics e.g. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral & Revenue (AARRR)
• Top down driven 🠒 Product working together with business stakeholders to drive value
• Focus on solutions 🠒 Focus on user problems by relying on data

There are many nuanced blockers that stops a company from being product-led. Some blockers are explicit, but most of them are nuanced — such as (lack of) transparency of information by C-level, (incomplete) structural changes made by the company even with best intentions, and how individuals are onboarded and what’re mantras they’ve been fed early on in their employment.

However, Product-led is not the only solution. Companies can be sales-led, marketing-led, customer-led, and much more — there may be more optimal fits based on the industry and structure of the company.

Leading Change

Bringing change in organization is possible through iterative lean approach and continuous improvements to establish trust among stakeholders.

Reference: Plays in Business

Insight from the exercise:

• Sharing of goals (KPIs/OKRs), information and data can help shift individuals from working on just their own goals, to striving for a more holistic, user-centric approach.
• It’s entirely possible for the decision maker (i.e. the CEO, CPO, etc) not to have all the details and necessary information. Thus, this is an opportunity for everyone else to influence the decision maker by data.
• One approach in designing a team is by involving the team member. We can invite them to participate and determine which role suits them best. As was seen in the exercise, this involvement in team design led to a high participation rate among all members.
• The exercise also highlighted how a leader manages his/her team. Some leaders might be more comfortable using delegative leadership style, i.e. the team members have a freedom of choice on how to get the job done, while others prefer to balance between delegative and authoritarian, to keep the team members in check. The leadership style often plays a role in determining what (or how good) the outcome will be.

Side Quest

• Product-led growth , explained
• Product-led companies: why and how they work
• Does company culture matter
• Reinvent your organisational culture
• Establishing true product culture
• Product leadership is hard
• Product vs IT mindset
• Product vs Project teams
• Differences of product, sales, marketing and customer-led growth strategy

Attributions

This is a personal summary notes for Product Tonic Labs 2021 that took place from April — Nov 2021

Product Tonic Lab is open source

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). This work is derivative of Prime/OS, Theory U concepts, #ProductBeer, #ProductTonic and The Collab Folks (TCF) “The Learning Circle v1-v3” and “TCF v1-v5.5”.

Materials in Product Tonic Meetups

This work is based on “The Collab Folks”, Cactus team and many sources.