Choosing a product-led growth approach
What kind of growth work does this business need next?
How I use it
Start with the business and the customer
Who gets value, what do they pay for, and how do they discover, evaluate and adopt the product?
A self-serve consumer product and an enterprise workflow can both grow through product usage, but their buying processes and useful measures differ. Product-led growth can work alongside sales and customer success.
Establish the stage
With an unproven proposition, the job may be learning whether anyone wants it. With first customers, it may be making value repeatable. With durable retention, it may be finding distribution or expansion that scales.
These are working hypotheses: different customer segments can be at different stages.
Find the constraint
Use customer research, funnels, cohorts and the economics to distinguish weak demand, slow activation, poor retention, limited distribution and weak monetisation. Improving a step that is already good can produce less value than tackling the step that prevents everything else working.
Choose a mechanism and a next decision
State how the work should change useful behaviour and the business outcome. That might mean shortening time to value, enabling collaboration, improving repeated use, supporting account expansion or testing a new route to market.
Decide what evidence would make you continue, change direction or stop.
An illustrative choice
- Value is unprovenTest the propositionDoes someone want the thing you’re building?
- Value is inconsistentImprove the experienceCan the right customers reach value and stay?
- Customers keep getting valueTest repeatable growthCan distribution or expansion work economically?
Different customer groups can need different work. These are useful starting questions, rather than fixed stages every business must pass through.
A workflow product has plenty of trials, but few teams complete a useful task and fewer return. A referral programme might create more trials while adding pressure to the same weak journey.
The working priority is to understand and improve first value for the right customer group. Distribution becomes more attractive once there is evidence that those teams stay. If retention is already strong in one segment, a focused distribution test for that segment may be justified now.
What to watch for
- Treating PLG as a requirement to remove every human interaction.
- Assuming an AI feature creates demand or durable value by itself.
- Using a company-wide average to hide a promising or struggling segment.
A brief for the next discussion.
One current growth constraint, a chosen approach and a reason to defer the alternatives.
Choose the approach
Where is your growth work getting stuck?
Use the growth diagnostic to find where to focus, or talk it through with me.