📕 Have you read the PLG Bible?
Blast from the PLG past 🙃
I have learned the term “Product Led ” back in 2018. The book that had product-led and SaaS in the title was my onboarding textbook in the company I’ve joined with a task to build self-serve as the first step to the PLG g2m.
I took a look yesterday after a long time, and find it actually still very much fresh and actionable, 5+ years after publishing.
Mickey Alon, the deep product thinker, is one of the authors of the PLG Bible. He actually built one of the first e2e tools to enable the PLG → his in-product analytics and engagements all-on-one startup product is today’s Gainsight PX product.
Book is freely available on Gainsight PX site - and it has all you need to know about PLG, x-functionality silos breaking nature, and goes further, just deep enough on onboarding and SaaS metrics - very useful if you are new to the field. Little bit longer read, not in format of snippets for us with the attention deficit grown over time 😅 - but very much worth reading!
🙈. 🙉. 🙊.
Thanks to my boss back in time, the visionary CPO, I’ve had the pleasure to talk few times with one and only Mr. Mickey Alon, and learn from him. Eventually I have shared some of the experiences with PLG implementation in Pulse for Product conferences back in 2020 and 2021.
Pulse for Product 2020 → start from 5min00sec → on experiences on starting PLG in high touch B2B company; mostly on initial steps → instrumentation, in-app engagements, CES (as in Customer Effort Score), surfacing in-product events to Customer Success Managers.
One thing where I was definitely wrong, looking back → KPIs for x-functional team. Never handover! The key to success is to work in ONE team, with ONE metric. I’ve learned that the hard way 😅.Pulse for Product 2021 → start from 8min08sec → this time I spoke mostly about what happen in the year, shared lessons learned on the journey to PLG.
🦖. 🦖. 🦖.
For all those treating PLG as a new concept in hyped LinkedIn posts, few pre-historic stories from telco industry (as I am sure there are 1000s of stories from other industries, telco is the one I am familiar with):
we have used “show, don’t tell” heavily - for new features adoption, but also for acquisition, in B2B too - even when expensive hardware was involved - for example, a way to show value of BlackBerry was via free trial - executives tried it for free with full feature set for a limited time and got hooked and converted (ancient pre-iPhone times).
In B2C “SIM sampling” was heavily used for acquisition, with logic - seed the market with free SIM cards with free data package pre-installed, with purpose to get early adopters on brand new mobile internet and a fresh gross intake.
I still remember modeling and calculating the business case for the sampling and proving it very much positive…
…. long, long time ago when dinosaurs walked the Earth 😅.