An introduction to product management in the PLG era

About six months ago, my manager offered me the opportunity to shift to another product in Yotpo, with a new team focused on PLG — product-led growth and low-touch. PLG is a business methodology, where the user funnels are all driven by the product, and a low-touch model means minimal human interaction with the customer.

Since starting my PM career, I’ve worked on high-touch products (the more traditional approach, with a salesperson and account manager), so I realized that I’d need to make many changes from the way I worked before.

I’ve learned a lot in these past six months that I’d like to share. So if you’re considering shifting to a PM position in a PLG company, or if you’re interested in learning more on this topic, this post is for you! I’m going to outline what I’ve taken from my journey and what’s worked well for me.

Account managers — out, your customers — in,
new ways to collect feedback

There aren’t any account managers in the PLG world who can represent the customers’ voice and open feature requests. So understanding the customers’ needs and requirements isn’t easy, but it’s still absolutely crucial. So if not through account managers, which other options do you have?

Let’s go through the techniques I’ve used to collect feedback and reveal many opportunities:

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes

One of the first things I did was focus on understanding what the customer is experiencing, by simply trying everything myself.

Start from the beginning — the signup or before, and walk through the entire process — the onboarding, billing, settings, etc. You’ll probably find plenty of ideas for improvement or new features that can be added. I recommend using the same process for other teams (e.g., developers, product designers, etc.), while discussing the issues and opportunities. You’ll be surprised by the number of ideas you will get.

Interviews, interviews, interviews. Get to know your customers and their needs

In low-touch products, the customers usually won’t have a relationship with someone at the company. As a result, it’ll be more challenging to set up calls with them. Unlike in high-touch products, where an account manager connects between the customer and the PM.

Still, the most beneficial thing you can do is talk to your customers, get to know who they are, their sentiment on the product, the strong and weak points, and what they would want and don’t currently have. You’ll also build a relationship with some of them, which can help you to reach out to them with specific questions in the future.

It’s not always easy to encourage customers to hop on those calls. Here are a few tips:

• Make it easy to schedule the meetings (I use Calendly), and be flexible with your available slots if you have customers from different time zones
• Offer a gift card, and mention it in the header of the invitation email (many people won’t even open the email)
• In the invitation, make the interview sound informal and friendly, so they won’t feel intimidated by the need to prepare

Make some popcorn and watch real sessions

Sometimes, what your customers don’t say to you might be more important than what they do say. One way to gauge some of those missing or hidden parts is by watching the recorded users’ sessions (we use FullStory). You’ll find dead clicks that you can fix, UX issues — e.g. when users are looking for the action button for a long time, confusion on where to go next, etc.
It can take a lot of your time, but let’s be honest, that’s a binge you can benefit from :) You can focus on customers from categories you didn’t interview, or areas in the product that you feel you didn’t get enough information on.

Data is your new best friend

Data plays a significant role in the PLG world, as you don’t necessarily know where the customers are struggling and what the most significant opportunities for improvement are. For those reasons, you should control tracking and maintaining your data. Make sure everything is monitored, because any piece of data can be helpful. We use Amplitude as a BI tool, and Amplitude Chrome extension to see which events are fired for each action in real-time.

Build dashboards for the essential parts of the product, to get an idea of where you stand. Measure the key metrics, such as product activation, conversion, retention, and churn. Those dashboards can help you explore the usage and engagement of features, find the significant drops in user funnels, what brings customers back to the product, and much more.

Make some detours — indirect ways to get feedback

There are several other ways you can get feedback from your customers. Some of them might sound like finding a needle in a haystack, but investing some time in that might be worth it:

NPS score & feedback
The net promoter score indicates how likely it is that your customers will recommend your product to others. You can use the score itself to measure satisfaction after feature releases and UX changes, and you can also use the textual feedback they sometimes fill in. Managing that feedback can result in actionable steps to improve the product.

Cancellation reasons
When customers churn, they sometimes fill in feedback about the product or why they left. Since you don’t have a churn call with the customers in low-touch products, getting this information is crucial. You can get insights on the pricing, the features and functionality, and your competitors.

App reviews
Read what your customers write about the product in their review (e.g., in the app store). When the feedback is indirect, the customers sometimes feel free to say what’s on their minds.

Support tickets
You can collect this information by reading the support tickets, or regularly talking to the support agents to hear what customers are complaining about. You might find that issues arise frequently and can be solved within the product.

PLG & Product management — adjusting to a new way of work

There are a lot of other differences when managing a product in a PLG mindset that I call ‘release-measure-iterate-repeat’. What do I mean by that? Let’s take a closer look at the key differences:

Release — short and gradual phases state of mind

Instead of building a well-organized three-milestone plan and starting to work on it, break the project down into small pieces. You can never anticipate your users’ reaction. So try to release the first small part of the project, and see how it works and the effect on the KPIs you’ve defined.

Based on the result, it’s your chance to pivot or try new options before investing too much time. Another way to look at that is that sometimes the partial solution will be good enough and improve the metrics, and you’ll be able to move on to your next thing. I spend some of my time improving existing features and not only building new ones, thus, knowing when to stop is crucial.

Measure — when building dashboards becomes a hobby

In low-touch products, it’s not easy to consult with your customers. So no one will necessarily tell you that you did something wrong after releasing a feature that you thought would make a difference. Building dashboards for a new feature should become part of the release process.

After the release, closely monitor the data and measure the feature’s success, based on the metrics you defined when you planned it.

A quick tip — to further research something you saw in a dashboard, pull the information of some users and watch their recorded session (e.g., in Fullstory)! I use it a lot when I see a drop in a funnel, and track the users’ steps before they drop.

Iterate — the story behind our home page

At this point, after measuring the success of your release, you can make improvements and re-release it to check if the improvement helped, or make changes if something went wrong.

And now comes the best part. With a real-life example, let me take you through this ‘release-measure-iterate’ process. We decided to revamp our homepage — as for our KPIs, we wanted to improve the conversion rate, upgrades and engagement.

This is the old homepage:

We only made some of the changes we wanted to (short and gradual, as we said), and released to 50% of the customers:

Then, we measured the results and found a decrease in the KPIs we wanted to improve compared to the old homepage,- the conversion & engagement rate were higher in the old homepage.

We rolled it back to the previous version, and started working on a new iteration. To know what went wrong, we used many of the techniques we’ve talked about above — monitoring the data, watching sessions, talking to Support, and more.

This is the home page after the changes:

We measured it again and finally saw an increase in all the KPIs — including a 36% increase in conversion rate of free customers that subscribed to a paid plan and a 40% increase in engagement.

This wasn’t the end of the process, and we are still optimizing the homepage with new improvements.

Are you ready to start your journey?

Shifting from working on a high-touch product to the PLG world isn’t trivial, especially if you are working on a previously built product for high-touch customers.

As the PM, you should wear the hat of the salesperson, the account manager, and the marketing manager. As well as make the product easy to install and adopt, self-explanatory, and make sure that customers can easily and quickly grasp the value behind it.

The journey has been super exciting and challenging for me, and I get to learn more about that from each day that passes. I hope your journey will be as fascinating and that you’ll find my tips helpful along the way. Good luck!