Product-led growth is being discussed in boardrooms and among more leadership teams as an essential tool in the toolbox for rapidly scaling companies. The potential is exciting: make the initial user experience so intuitive and useful that companies can ‘self-serve’ their way to signing up.

But what does a quality PLG strategy look like when it’s put into practice? And what are the risks of a poorly implemented PLG motion? Here’s the founder’s guide to the risks and opportunities of product-led growth in fast-growing tech companies.

Speaking on a McKinsey podcast last year, Atlassian Chief Marketing Officer Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir spoke about why a product-led growth model is so captivating: “You want your product to be easy to use, and easy [for the customer] to get to value, no matter what.”

Here, Zeynep touches on one of the most difficult problems to solve in software. Marketers and salespeople invest significant time and effort in finding and closing new customers, but if time to value takes too long, those customers may never fully utilise your software’s full capabilities and churn as a result. By making it easy and delightful for customers to discover new pieces of software, the thinking goes, PLG can minimise the risk of early attrition.

To learn more about PLG’s role in the customer acquisition and retention journey, We spoke to Alicia Carney, Head of Marketing at compensation data scaleup Ravio.

Sounds simple enough, but understanding whether your business is a natural fit for a PLG model is a more complex process.

Ravio’s customers include large enterprises and smaller scaleups. So which segments are generally the most receptive to a product-led approach? “It’s relevant to both segments, but I feel like ‘pure’ PLG is most useful for the small-to-medium size business customer,” Alicia says. The reality is that large enterprises expect a greater degree of hand-holding as they onboard to a new piece of software. “It’s important for companies building enterprise software to make sure there’s a ‘human in the loop’ who can guide new customers through the product when required, even if the user experience is designed around self-guided exploration.”

It’s in the name, after all: implementing product-led growth must be down to the product team, surely? Well-integrated technology is fundamental to a smooth PLG approach, of course, from the signup flow through to the in-app segmentation for different customer profiles. But the reality is that PLG is a multi-functional effort, involving product, marketing, sales and customer success.

The biggest change to the type of work done in the business, though, potentially falls on the sales and marketing teams. If PLG is designed to handle conversion – persuading users to begin paying for the product in-app – the job of salespeople and marketers alters dramatically, with more effort expended on driving users to the site and working out how to thoughtfully add value to their product experience.

For Alicia, adjusting to a new model of success is key for marketers and salespeople in a PLG context. “PLG reshapes your idea of the economics of a purchasing journey. If the product is doing some of the selling for you, that can help salespeople use their time more effectively and strategically. Then, you can also apply so many lessons from the product engagement itself and feed that back to the marketing team to apply at the top of the funnel.”

The information collected from a solid marketing engine is invaluable in shaping the product-led experience for users. “At Ravio, users land in the product and usually, we already know whether they’re from a large enterprise or a smaller business,” says Alicia. “That really helps us deliver an intuitive experience.” The same applies to different individuals’ roles:

It’s worth bearing in mind that sometimes, those processes don’t work quite as seamlessly as intended. Alicia recalls, “In a previous company, we built an onboarding experience that we thought was amazing. But we didn’t do enough testing of the messaging and potential user interactions. We’d laid out this really elaborate journey for users to follow, but we’d forgotten to get the basics right, and the results weren’t what we were looking for. That was a great reminder that PLG or no PLG, it’s all about doing the simple things well.”

The rest of the sales and marketing mix, from outbound to events and ads, is still going to be important. “You can’t just forget about the rest of your acquisition channels. For instance, programmatic SEO is starting to work very well for us right now, and we continue to test and optimise our top-of-funnel approach,” says Alicia. But with a PLG focus in the product itself, go-to-market teams can focus on getting users active on the product, with (hopefully) conversion and monetisation being seamlessly integrated into the user’s in-app experience.

So is PLG a magic bullet? Not quite. First, a successful product-led growth strategy requires a high degree of coordination between the product team and the commercial function. And, not all businesses will be a natural fit for a PLG model.

But thoughtful product experiences can add a new dimension to the overall commercial engine, and help build momentum in a sales process that might otherwise involve a high number of different interactions over email, on the phone and in person.

“Done well, PLG can add real value to salespeople and marketers because it allows them to put the product in the hands of a potential customer and let them discover use cases for themselves. It helps companies make selling a collaborative process that’s more of a dialogue, not just a one-way street,” Alicia thinks.