What it takes to be a PLG product manager

You see a lot of articles about doing the product management job, including from me (reading list). But what about the product-led growth speciality? This post gives you the top skills, expected results, and hidden traps.

Hint: If you’re not obsessed with customer delight and also data analytics now, you better be by the end of the week!

Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash

Role overview

A Product-Led Growth Product Manager brings products to life through self-service onboarding, meaningful digital trials, and compelling product-led proof of value. They’re often responsible for the PLG strategy for a single product or a whole portfolio with a focus on the user “aha” moments, frictionless journey, and scalable customer acquisition and adoption. They never do it alone — they collaborate cross-functionally with Design, Product Management, Marketing, and Development to identify common components and exploit opportunities to improve user journeys.

Top skills of a PLG expert

• Researching the market and users to identify PLG touch points in cooperation with product SMEs, Sales, and Design. Key touch points are top of funnel, trial conversion, and retention.
• Focusing on product experiences and features that drive user adoption and expansion. Your job is to surface the most meaningful aspects of your product (aha moments) to customers, so they can experience and derive value from their usage. Customers should be able to say “aha” well before purchase.
• Finding and measuring adoption and usage patterns, such as effective onboarding, user education, differentiated value props, and expanded use cases.
• Monitoring and measuring components to uncover friction and refine growth strategies over time. If you can’t count it, then you’ll never know if your PLG tactics are effective. This role includes a maniacal focus on the data.
• Experimenting with progression, conversion, and adoption. Following onto measurement, you use experiments to continually improve your customers’ experiences along their user journeys. A good PLG Product Manager learns how to run light-weight experiments and clearly document successes and failures.

So those are some key skills. How they get applied in a day-to-day manner follows this pattern:

1. Use a growth mindset and be comfortable working in a cross-functional role with a highly distributed team.
2. Define technical requirements to support product growth, especially with Development for in-product experiences and with Marketing for website/content experiences.
3. Iterate fast to improve the customer journey to meet the market with a compelling product. Your strong analysis uses data to drive decision-making. And you go fast by using agile methodologies to increase velocity and to deliver iteratively.

Expected business results

If you’re interviewing, you best have tangible outcomes that look something like these:

• Increase number of customers. Improve retention rates. Reduce churn.
• Add new revenue on top of other channels, such as face-to-face sales or ecosystem wins.
• Boost all routes across buyer journeys, such as pushing Marketing-derived leads to closure, whether that’s through self-service purchases, digital sales, or even face-to-face sales.
• Measurably impact all parts of the buyer funnel: discover, learn, try, buy, and expand. For example, exceed benchmarks for traffic and engagement of your content. Be able to attribute the number of demos or trials to your win rate. Build pricing tiers that are competitively attractive and let customers scale their usage. Leverage your nurture to drive user engagement in expansion plays.

Photo by CARTIST on Unsplash

Hidden traps in PLG

And of course, there are always traps. These are just a few. Share your own in the comments.

• Wrong north-star metric: You’re chasing a goal that PLG can’t achieve.
• Bad or partial data: Your analytics or performance system lacks data integrity. Perhaps, only part of your webpages are being tracked. Maybe, your analytics tool was loaded with partial data (one month’s versus one quarter’s).
• Lack of experiments: PLG is by nature a fast-paced environment. So you will need to consistently test. What was working a year ago might not perform as well today.
• Thinking you’re doing PLG, but you’re only marketing to fill the face-to-face sales pipeline. Alternately, another trap is that you have zero sellers or CSMs to drive large, profitable, or strategic deals.
• Poor product-market fit: Folks need to love your product, full stop.
• Market is so small that face-to-face sales can cover: If your product has a niche, small set of potential users, it’s likely easier to engage with them one-on-one.
• Poor stakeholder relationships can derail growth hacking. You need Marketing, Design, Development, even Sales to make PLG a success.

So now you know what a PLG Product Manager is responsible for and what success looks like. Maybe not so surprising, a PLG Product Manager has many of the same work experiences as your garden-variety Product Manager!

If you need to learn about PLG (also referred to as product-led growth, growth hacking, or digital self-service), check out Forbes, McKinsey, and this background reading here.