It begins with “Culture”
PLG has caught up well within the product ecosystem comprising of people working with organizations that are predominantly into building products. But, there still are many inherent gaps to fill.
Understanding PLG (Product Led Growth)
One has to hand it to each of those team members who work in such companies where PLG (Product led growth) is more of a cult practice whilst also accepting that it seems to have caught up well over the past 5 yrs., especially within the organizations that are into building products predominantly in the SaaS / PaaS space.
So, the term product led growth simply put is the manner in which the product wholly & solely drives everything that one could possibly figure in the funnel right from building Awareness all through each of the stages from Acquisition to Referral as represented hereunder by the Pirate Metrics framework (AARRR).
The most notable differentiator of such an organization would be the practice over how all the teams viz, Engineering, Design, UX, Marketing, Sales & Customer Success aligns not only towards providing a sustainable income source to begin with, but also laying out a foundation of an impervious surface over which scaling becomes easier via providing continuous seamless experiences to the users underpinned completely by the capability of the product alone.
Defining a CULTURE!
Let’s take one of the most common exercises that demonstrates how information gets mangled / lost as it makes its way between people, for the record an average of 10-15% of the overall context / stub / idea is lost at each step.
So going by this, by the time the information reaches the 4th person almost 87% of the original idea / context is lost which is not abnormal at all even if you happened to have a team with the members of the highest IQ. There are ways to overcome this problem and maintain context over the transmission taking its regular, natural course.
And, the suitable place to start off is to try and build a protocol / define a standard for all the teams to follow wrt a certain task / deliverable / goal / OKR which could be over adhering to particular methodology / framework that suits them the best.
NOTE: In case you want to know more about this I have written about various frameworks that the industry uses for regular communication and building a shared understanding across stages of the product life cycle over my previous post entitled “Relevance is KING!”. Check it out here.
It usually would take the synergies of all teams involved to be completely sold over the vision of the product and then start to strongly believe that product is indeed at the heart of everything. That done, it is about putting in their quantum of work now in contributing towards executing their action plans taking them a step closer to achieving their deliverables over each silo.
But, how does one go about making that a default in an organization given the fact that there are (n) cross-functional teams in there?
The natural & most obvious answer – “it is in the hands of leadership”.
The reason leadership is important here is they are the ones who carry the powers over defining, framing, measuring, (if need be) changing / making amends & enabling teams to follow / adhere to what could be termed “a culture” over these specific steps:
But, all that said and done, as of today with teams spread out globally and much more diverse more often than not there are many challenges that affect the smooth functioning and impede teams from gelling and performing optimally. As much also as these questions:
Is it really that easy to bring about changes in a product / team / organizational culture?
Does it stop at doing the above 9 steps? And come to think of it are those really enough?
If something more is required, what is it? And, what are the challenges there?
Overcoming Challenges
Defining and maintaining a culture across a team / product / organization is definitely easier said than done because changing something at a micro-level is never going to be really enough, not to mention knowing the right strings to pull.
One would need to think of a culture change as really big macro-level change where everybody’s thinking & mindset right from the top all the way to the bottom needs to undergo a seamless transformation.
There could be many challenges that one would have to face when they think about beefing up a team’s abilities by way of soaking them into a culture. Let’s explore some problems, causes, reasons over some real-world issues and also some workarounds / solutions in each case.
