Leader Spotlight: Decoding product-led growth, with Maria Thomas

Maria Thomas is Chief Product Officer at Rebrandly, a platform that enables users to create, share, track, and manage branded links. She began her career as a product management consultant at Accenture before becoming a senior PM at Microsoft. From there, Maria worked in product at Intuit before serving as VP of Product Management at Insightly and Bitly, and later serving as Chief Product Officer at Buffer.

In our conversation, Maria dives into how organizations can incorporate an effective product-led growth (PLG) strategy. She discusses how product-led growth emphasizes collaboration between all parties —especially marketing and product — as well as how it empowers fast, efficient growth experiments. Maria also shares examples from her time leading Buffer’s PLG strategy.

How PLG relies on evangelists of the product

Could you start by defining product-led growth and discussing how it differs from traditional growth strategies?

Product-led growth is a business model. It has become increasingly popular over the last five years, as it’s often a more efficient way to go to market and scale a product, compared to relying solely on sales and marketing. Of course, it does require some upfront investment.

The fundamental difference between traditional growth motion, which is typically sales-led, and a product-led growth motion is that the product itself presents the value, describes it, and is accountable for helping grow monthly active users, as well as retaining them.

I also would argue that the missing piece in how we traditionally define product-led growth — where product is the primary drive of user acquisition and retention — is that we are also trying to get our users to become evangelists of our products and lead growth through word of mouth. I would almost venture to say that it should be defined as user-led growth instead of product-led growth.

Product-led growth as a term was defined in contrast to sales. But I think what we are really trying to do as PLG leaders is to spread the word about our offering through our users who would then describe it to their friends, colleagues, and other people in the organization. And that’s how we as a company would ultimately grow.

In addition to evangelizing the product, do you find that with a PLG model, users provide feedback that helps a team iterate and improve the product?

Absolutely. Customer feedback loops are one of the most important prerequisites for the PLG motion. So, listening to users through other means than sales is very important. The sales-led growth (SLG) approach provides us — the product leaders — with an important signal. When customers talk to sales representatives, they describe what they love about the product, what they’re missing, the reasons for buying the product, the reasons for not buying, etc.

Sales-led growth has its advantages because it has very clear insight from customers. But when the sales team is not speaking to all prospects, the important prerequisite for PLG is to make sure that you have customer feedback loops built in through data or qualitative analysis to still retain that important signal.

Do you recommend augmenting a PLG model with sales and marketing?

Yes, I find that helpful, but it does depend on the company’s model. For example, I recently wrapped up four years at Buffer, a company that has chosen to not have a sales team at all. To unlock the next stage of growth, most companies are more focused on PLG, but do some sales-led motions as well. At the end of the day, some customers prefer to speak to a human to get a demo to understand the nuances of a product.

Also, not every product is suitable for PLG motion. For example, if a company is focused on a fairly narrow market and has identified a fairly small market segment as their ICP, they know exactly who they’re going after and have a great solution for them. In that case, sales-led may be a successful and efficient way for the company to go to market.

On the other hand, if a product has more of a broad appeal and applies to large portions of the market, then I would recommend investing more in the PLG. With PLG, you can scale sales motions more easily. Sales teams are expensive at the end of the day, and PLG can take a company to scale, grow faster, and grow more efficiently globally.

Shifting from sales-led to product-led growth models

If a company is currently using a traditional sales model but wants to move to a PLG model, what shifts does it have to undertake to make that happen?

First, you need to invest in a solid user experience. Traditionally, the sales-led growth model was winning because salespeople are available to help explain how the product works. They book demos with clients, and they walk them through how to use the product. With PLG, the product has to do that job. So, a company needs to invest in product development to make sure that features are meeting its customer’s needs, pay close attention to that, and invest heavily in UX. The high-quality bar should apply across the board — not just to the product, but also to the company’s website, support interactions, help center, etc.

The second important strategic shift is to embrace some version of a freemium or trial strategy. In some versions of SLG, the only way to get access to a product is to first speak to sales. The PLG motion assumes that the user can get access to the product right away, either through a free plan or a trial. That’s an important strategic shift that requires a mental adjustment and, in some cases, almost an emotional adjustment. You’ll see a higher volume of leads who try the product via trial and then churn. That’s very different funnel math than SLG.

Lastly, as companies shift from being sales- or marketing-led to product-led, there’s a higher need to invest in solid data infrastructure. You will need to have reliable, high-quality data that you can track at scale so you can follow the user from sign-up through paid conversion.

You mentioned that companies need to get comfortable with the different quality leads that come in with a premium version. Do you tend to notice an uptick in cost as well due to a higher need for support?

Yes — the volume of support tickets will increase as you shift to product-led growth. The more you can make that experience as self-service as possible, the more you can get ahead of and control those costs. Otherwise, you’ll see a significant influx of tickets going to your support team.

What helps mitigate these costs is having easy-to-understand, frictionless onboarding, as well as product education that’s built into the product. Also, I don’t recommend putting all the advanced features in front of your users all at once. That will reduce support tickets and the need for human touch via product education.

There are some real costs associated with freemiums and trials. You’re going to have some people who access the product without any intention of becoming a paid customer. It’s also important to have security teams within your company to make sure that you have real leads in your funnel — not bots or bad actors who are trying to create an account in your product for nefarious reasons.

The collaboration between marketing and product

In your experience, how has responsibility for PLG been structured within an organization?

I get asked that question often — does PLG mean that now product teams run the company? No, PLG actually requires a really strong collaboration between all parties, particularly between marketing and product. A strong PLG motion has to have a marketing strategy wired for product-led growth. That means having things like a strong content marketing channel, social media marketing, a customer community, and a frictionless web experience.

To my last point, if the website is fully optimized for sales motion but the product is optimized for PLG, the PLG motion will not work. Therefore, PLG really can only succeed in a strong cross-functional alignment scenario where marketing and product teams collaborate very closely. The same reality applies if there’s a sales team as well. All three teams need to be aligned to effectively have a bifurcated funnel.

You talked about how product and marketing have to work closely together for PLG to work. Do you have an example that you could share from any of your roles?

I’ll start by emphasizing how important product marketers are in a PLG motion. In my view, everyone should have a product marketer skill set. Every product manager should be a product marketer, and every marketer should be a product marketer. These are people who can look at the product or feature, understand it, and describe it to somebody else.

At companies where I lead, I tend to implement a close collaboration structure between the product growth and marketing growth teams right away. We have a weekly, hour-long meeting to review all the data available to us. How many people signed up that week, how many of them activated, how many of them became paid customers, etc.? We also discuss all the ongoing experiments. All teams come to the table as equals, and we deliberate and discuss our next hypothesis for unlocking growth.

Traditionally, when we think about SaaS companies, we often talk about the battles between sales and marketing. Marketing says, “Hey, I’m sending you all these great leads,” and the sales team responds with, “Well, those leads are not converting.” With PLG, we opened up a new frontier to this conflict. Marketing teams now say, “Look at all the great product sign-ups that we’re sending you,” and product teams say, “OK, but they’re not activating or retaining.” The marketing teams have to satisfy the quality of leads for the sales team, as well as for the product teams.

Running growth experiments

How does PLG affect the relationship between sales and product?

Let’s say a feature is missing or the product experience is not intuitive. Sales can’t do much about it, but the product team can. That’s a very important difference in the tension between marketing and product teams. If I’m in the product seat and the marketing team is sending me leads that are not activating, I can experiment with different ways to get them to activate either by reducing friction or maybe adding an extra feature, etc.

That’s another reason why the PLG motion is so popular — product teams are now empowered to talk directly to marketing rather than via sales. They can actually act on what’s missing for customers who don’t convert.

Is there an example or success story you could share??

Sure. A great growth experiment could be putting product value — even a free sign-up — on your website. Companies such as GoDaddy have done this for years. You can go to their site and instantly search for a custom domain without having to create an account. Another example is Rebrandly. You can shorten a URL on the Rebrandly website without having to sign up.

At Buffer, we implemented several pre-sign-up tools. For example, we built an AI assistant that users can access without an account. That helps demonstrate the value of the product. A certain percentage of users who see this value will go on to become loyal customers.

Prerequisites and KPIs for product-led growth

You mentioned before that user loops and data are important components of a product-led growth strategy. Are there other important prerequisites?

I think the most important prerequisite for a successful PLG motion is already having product-market fit. Companies that are still trying to find this and don’t have a clear value proposition yet are too early for a successful PLG motion. Another critical prerequisite is having a strong data analytics infrastructure. It’s really hard, in my experience, to run a PLG motion if you cannot trust the data that’s available to the product teams. If you don’t have reliable data, it will fail.

What key metrics do you focus on to measure the success of PLG strategies, and how do they differ from those prioritized in sales-led or marketing-driven strategies?

Sales and marketing-led strategies typically focus metrics around lead conversion rates. Many PLG companies are equally concerned with revenue, but generally one of the North Star metrics is focused on the number of active users like MAU or DAU. This is because PLG hypothesizes that the product teams will ultimately find a way to convert active usage to drive revenue.

Activation rate is also very important for PLG. This is defined by what percentage of new signups on a weekly or monthly basis complete the key action and then, out of those active users, how many become paying customers. These are the metrics that we typically obsess over in PLG motions. An example of a successful activation for a social media scheduling tool is if the customer published a social media post to their audience. If they just tried out the product but didn’t actually post to their network that wasn’t considered true user activation.

Do you measure other actions that could point to deeper engagement?

100 percent. The key action is the activation rate, which helps you measure the success of new users coming in and activating. But don’t stop there. Product teams should continuously analyze the entire breadth of user engagement. They should look at the different types of features the user is actively using, as well as the quantity and frequency of each. All of these are good indicators of a user’s likelihood to later convert to a paid plan.

The importance of T-shaped skills

When you’re hiring for a product-led team, what types of characteristics or traits do you look for?

I would define what I look for as cross-functional agility. By that, I mean a person’s ability to work across not only engineering and design teams, but also with marketers, customer success, and sales. I would be delighted to see a growth product manager have experience working in marketing. The same applies to growth marketers — if they have experience working in product, that’s terrific. I am looking for more T-shaped skilled people who can stretch into different domains.

The second most important thing to me is being very comfortable with data. They should understand what high-quality data means when they see low-quality data, know how to structure an experiment, and know how to structure a good hypothesis. Data skills are paramount. If they don’t know their way around data, it would be challenging for them to be successful.

Lastly, is there a company that stands out to you for having highly successful PLG strategies that have adapted over time?

Absolutely. Some classic examples of successful PLG are companies like Slack and Dropbox. Slack is an especially great example — we all draw from their playbook. Despite having products primarily originally built for enterprises, they have been able to grow in all market segments. That’s because they have an excellent trial and a very intuitive UX.

They have evolved their PLG into user-led growth because their users evangelize the need for Slack in any organization. That’s why Slack communities are popping up not only in work environments but even in education environments and local communities. Slack has become so ubiquitous because of that word of mouth.