Is Product-Led Growth Really For You? (with Leah Tharin, Product-Led Growth Guru & Head of Product @ Jua)

One Knight in Product

Leah Tharin is a product leader, content creator, advisor and startup founder. Leah is now reinventing weather forecasting with Jua and is a well-known advocate for product-led growth. We went deep into her content creation process, how to work out if product-led growth is for you, and some of the steps you might take to get started.

A message from this episode's sponsor - My Mentor Path

This episode is sponsored by My Mentor Path. I'm a passionate advocate for mentoring and believe it to be one of the highest-leverage activities you can undertake to get ahead in your career. I try to do my part but am but one man, so I helped set up this FREE mentoring community to try to help out at scale. Sign up now as a mentor, a mentee, or both!

Episode highlights:

1. Product-Led Growth is all about "Show, don't Tell"

It's not necessarily a free trial/freemium, but it's more important than ever to let people understand the value they're getting from your product rather than hiding behind (possibly auto-generated!) marketing content.

2. Product-led growth does not replace sales-led growth

PLG just addresses a different segment in a better way than sales-led. For bigger deals, you still need a sales team, but product-led sales mean getting better quality leads by demonstrating the value upfront.

3. Product-led growth might not be for you... yet

There are some segments where PLG might not make sense. If people don't know they have the problem you solve, if they won't proactively search you out or recommend you or if your solution is super-innovative, maybe try PLG later.

4. Ignore the "product" word - this is a company initiative

The product management team doesn't own PLG. The whole organisation needs to align around what "success" looks like for a customer and optimise all incentives towards achieving that.

5. You need to objectively measure team success

People can't just rely on "product sense" to tell if they're being successful with PLG. Product organisations need to have good quantitative data & measure product satisfaction. Data should be tracked per team, not per user.

Contact Leah

You can connect with Leah on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or check out all of her lovely content on Leah’s ProducTea.