Transcript for:
Lecture on Product-Led Growth (PLG)

pod I always say is actually fundamentally dlg data LED growth so when you give away your free product what you want to get in exchange are two things one is the broader reach because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry two you want to understand the usage behavior of those free users which features do they use and which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate retention rate all of that if you don't have a foundation of data and an understanding of how to analyze those data you're giving away a free product for nothing welcome to Lenny's podcast where I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and growing today's most successful products today my guest is Helix you I've heard some listeners have been doing listening parties with this podcast where their team listens to an episode all at the same time over zoom and shares their insights and lessons in a shared chat and I would say that this episode is a great candidate for that it's incredibly packed with advice on how to start and optimize your product-led growth motion we talk through common pitfalls that you probably run into or to get started Kayla's favorite tools what she recommends for an initial plg oriented Team how to audit your existing funnel Plus tangents on how to improve your activation and retention and some foundational overviews of product-like growth and some of the Core Concepts associated with it like I say at the end of the episode this episode delivers tens of thousands of dollars in value something you won't find for free anywhere else I am really excited to bring it to you with that I bring you hila to you after a short word from our sponsors this episode is brought to you by amplitude if you're setting up your analytics stack but not using amplitude what are you doing anyone can sell you analytics while amplitude unlocks the power of your product and guides you every step of the way get the right data ask the right questions get the right answers and make growth happen to get started with amplitude for free visit amplitude.com amplitude power to your products today's episode is brought to you by Nero an online collaborative whiteboard that's designed specifically for teams like yours I have a quick request head on over to mymeraldboard at nero.com Lenny and let me know which guests you'd want me to have on this year I've already gotten a bunch of great suggestions which you'll see when you go there so just keep it coming and while you're on the mirror board I encourage you to play around with the tool it's a great shared space to capture ideas get feedback and collaborate with your colleagues on anything that you're working on for example with Miro you can plan out next quarter's entire product strategy you can start by brainstorming using sticky notes Library actions a voting tool even an estimation app to scope out your team's Sprints then your whole distributed team can come together around wireframes draw ideas with the pen tool and then put full mocks right into the mirror board and with one of miro's ready-made templates you can go from Discovery and research to product roadmaps to customer Journey flows to final mocks all the in Miro head on over to miro.com Lenny to leave your suggestions that's miro.com Lenny thank you welcome to the podcast thank you Lenny for having me I'm so excited I'm excited as well I don't know if you know this but you have the very unique distinction of having two posts in my top 25 most read posts of all time and my newsletter which are the two parts of your series on how to add a product-led growth motion and so I'm really excited to dig into product-like growth and help more people be successful product like growth awesome I should have made it three posts three parts I like that ambition there's always more yeah well I think the next the next Milestone is get into the top ten get two into the top ten yes yes okay maybe this podcast will okay this podcast will be in the feed of the newsletter so maybe we'll get there okay no pressure no pressure one question I want to ask you is anything come out of writing those guest posts has anything good happened as a result I always take a very long-term view for writing I enjoy writing myself um spend actually four months on that one uh after it's published I I see a lot of shares kind of um and people writing very long summary of it that's always like a very encouraging and also many people I didn't expect reading it reach out to me let me know hey I read that for example I think Ravi he is also on your podcast I didn't know him personally one day he's just like hila I read that that's awesome and I uh a bunch of friends in VC and they they kind of read that they told me it's great I even have a advisory client kind of landed because of that as well so it's it's awesome amazing it makes me really happy to hear all that I was also curious is anything we're going to get into the details of all the stuff you wrote about and even beyond what you wrote about but is there anything you're thinking has shifted on having after having written that that Series in terms of plg I wouldn't say it say it's shifted completely because I always believe you don't need to be a prg purist meaning there are kind of people who are like plg is the future is only saying you don't need sales right I I was never like that but recently kind of by working with a few of my clients I witnessed in reality like many startups actually are having both they have a plg motion they have a sales team as well plg motion is perfect for lowering the barrier for more people to try broader the reach it's a kind of a volume kind of game and then the sales motion you can have very targeted list of big customers you you go after you close them and it's a big order usually Revenue a very strong foundation for a company and I've seen actually like a lot of my clients that are doing they have both they're doing that they try to get the benefit of both from their early stage and it's super cool is the simple way to think about this trend that eventually everyone will need to do both it's not one or the other it's just both and it's just a matter of when you add the other I would think so because if you are like let's say if you are in the sales motion dominanted kind of traditional B2B software industry your competitors will be adding plg right as soon as they add in they will have a benefit of attracting more end users and end users become Advocates to the employer to the clients and you you lose that and if you are only in prg somewhere else may go after the big customers it takes time for plg to go to the big customer and close them right so you lose a little bit time there as well I think eventually you need both cool that's kind of the way I've been seeing it like I did a few series on uh product LED like traditional product like growth companies slack and figment all those guys and they all add sale teams eventually like lassion was famous for being product LED only and so like everyone ends up adding sales team I think more recent trend is sales LED Enterprise e products are all just realizing they need a product growth component so that's kind of what I've been seeing too yeah exactly but I would say it is easier if you have plg from early on if you are pure sales LED you try to add plg that's the harder to to change basically interesting to set a little Foundation before we get into a lot of this stuff it'd actually be helpful just to explain like what is product like growth just simply because that people hear this term a lot and it'd be helpful just to understand it broadly and then also just like why is it so popular why does everyone want a product like growth component to their business just use a simple example um in b2c product when you think about Facebook when you think about a lot of the the the products you use every day as an end consumer It's Always by default product LED growth because there's no sales team email the LTV of the product doesn't support that I think plg the term become popular because traditionally in B2B world cells is the main motion you need a sales team to close the deal after the contract is signed the end users can now finally use it right but nowadays it's not necessarily a case you can have your B2B SAS product develop in a way to allow end users to try before you buy so that's the reason I think this has become being more popular and the fundamental driver behind this is the user of B2B softwares are also human it's the same human using b2c softwares and we're already trained to use product try and before we make any decision and we demand that in p2b as well so like it needs to happen and more and more companies are capturing that Trend basically and they're trying to utilizing that as a entry point to either disrupt existing B2B players or build something really awesome for end users so that's why it's becoming more and more popular to pull on that thread a little bit more even to help people like visualize a product collect growth product what makes it product LED like there's a self-serve component is there anything like what are attributes are just kind of common elements of something that's product LED versus sales lead let's say yeah definitely I think maybe we can use a product as an example right like think about Zoom how me uh or you maybe everyday users how we get to no Zoom is not necessary through a sales team call me code or email me code and introducing me this showing a demo of zoom and I get to know Zoom right it's because like maybe Lenny you hosted a webinar I joined and I get to just use this software already without even knowing it's zoom and then afterwards I may one day think about I want to do this myself and I just do that in a sign up and I already create a host of webinar and I can pay if if I need a paid plan or I can use a lot of more advanced features when I let's say hit the 40 minutes limit I can already click that and then pay and become a paid customer already so I think the Key Properties also plg products think about it should have a very low barrier to entry usually it has a free version free trial you don't need to get get approval from your boss to use it you can use it today and then it has some sort of a self-service checkout flow if you need a better version you can buy yourself as well and this product basically the free product will spread on its own in some way or another okay perfect I think that was really helpful I think we dive in to some of the meat of the discussion that um that we have planned and where I thought it'd be fun to start is the common pitfalls that people fall into when they're trying to add a product-led growth motion and so what are the most common ways people fail when they're trying to figure out product like growth the first of all as I mentioned you need to have some sort of vehicle right a lot of the companies if you go to the their website especially B2B companies you will see the biggest CTA is called book demo like they don't have anything else you the first step for you to do is submit a form and kind of basically explain yourself to this company I'm from who and who company and I want to use the tool can you come back to me and allow me to see a demo of your product that means the the entry point to plg is cut off instead the first step is you need to either have a free product free trial some sort of a low barrier entry for anyone who stumbled upon this product to give it a try a lot of companies don't have that that's the first I would say hurdle or peaceful and especially if you're a sales LED and you already have all those things figured out you try to go to add plg it's not as easy as just say add a kind of free trial CTA on your website you need to build this free experience you also need to convince your sales team your existing product team your marketing team hey let's try this out because before this process is super clean like everyone only get only selected filtered leads right and sales work on those but now you you need to allow more people in and there need to be more understanding of their behavior data the process need to change so like it's actually a whole process so I'm saying that's first one and along with that is some companies didn't think it thoroughly and they are just kind of saying oh poj is cool let's do plg and then they maybe spend three months uh build a kind of some sort of a very basic free trial like and then they think that's it they think the leads welcome conversion will come self-service Revenue will come it's not that easy it's not that simple it is definitely an entire motion so I would say you need to commit to it maybe you can do some thinking collecting some data build your conviction but to a certain point you need to commit to at least a year or even two years kind of road map to build this entire thing out and change the process internally sometimes as well to support that the last one I would say a lot of times the the company is committed they want to do this but they don't know the right way or they don't have the foundation they don't have the expertise of plg their internal team they're really good at sales or maybe really good out as the traditional motion but they don't have this part of expertise and Foundation a common thing I see is that company want to do qrg and they have no usage data at all and they're like I would just doing pod but pod I always say is actually fundamentally DOD data-led growth so when you give away your free product what you want to get in exchange are two things one is the broader reach because free product spread itself is lower barrier to entry two you want to understand the usage behavior of those free users which features do they use and which features kind of correlates with a higher conversion rate retention rate all of that if you don't have a foundation of data and and understanding of how to analyze those data you are giving away a free product for nothing like you're really not being able to utilize all of that to build your plg motion so I think data foundation and expertise in terms of how do I design that user Journey that journey is very different from the sales user Journey like those are sometimes missing in company when they just begin to doing this and in those cases I think it's super helpful to maybe either find someone who have done this as a advisor or hire someone like you need to have that expertise in-house or or through advisor to support your POG motion this is great we're going to talk about the data piece more in depth later but on the commitment piece I thought that was really interesting I imagine many times Founders or leaders think they have commitment and then they realize maybe not so much yeah are there any kind of flags that tell you that like oh you're not actually committed to working on this for a year or two years whatever it takes the reflex I've seen basically uh sometimes like they they first of all they think about prg equals launch of reversion or launch a free trial like they made this assumption in their head oh I already have a product I already have a software that's working customers are using now if I add a free version if I open a free trial that's it like that's basically plg and I will have conversions I will have people becoming a product qualified leads just because I have it hey I opened this for you just just come and use it and and convert I think that's when red flag basically they are not thinking about the entire thing through understanding the implication not only the free product it's really just a start you need to think about how to activate how to design the upgrade paths how that those teams like those new growth teams work with other like sales and marketing teams all of that so that's one the other one is like they they don't have a dedicated team they just basically assign one person to to the same right they are Imagine hey we already have this it's not it's not that big of deal you can just figure this out by borrowing resources from everywhere and try to coordinate all the stakeholders from sales marketing product like that person need to be a magician in order to be successful in that basically and I think the third thing is like basically they are really doing this because it's trendy they didn't think about the deeper strategic reason why this is a good fit for their business right do you have a product that's relatively low complexity doesn't require a lot of customization for the customer to see value like time to Value need to be relatively short or you can figure out out a way to make it short and then do you have a lot of potentially end user SNB business they are interested in the solution they want to try that out if you do not have both if you for example develop a software for the airfly companies like a boring boring or defense companies like only three Target customer exist in the entire world you don't probably you don't want to do VOD right so like think deeper about the fit and then commit and I would say those are the Red Flags Okay so on that last point I thought that was really interesting we talked about how every company probably should add a product-led growth piece but I think what you're also saying is actually not every company there are some companies like defense contractors are probably going to be sail away I think it's a spectrum right I would say the defense company defense software company is a pretty extreme yeah example yeah and of course in those case I don't think it makes sense but I think majority of B2B software I've seen you've seen we've used even some more complicated ones like Salesforce used to be this example of like sales motion right they are they are the they are the pioneer of SAS and they do this so well but they begin to add and look into kind of self-service portal and all of that and even a lot of the bigger players are looking into that so I think majority of the B2B software probably they are in the middle of the spectrum rather than the defense company you kind of shared some of the attributes of what allows you to be product LED like quick time to Value if you have this in your head like what are some of those bullet points of like what you need to figure out for it to be successful potentially this product would the first thing is that animation you you are able to build a have a vehicle right have a free version have a free trial sometimes it's an open source product a lot of like uh developer products start as an open source product it has its constraints but it's also a great kind of vehicle for POG or you can build if none of those are option you can build a really realistic kind of experience for example I I remember amplitude they are pursuing pld now but they used to have a lot of barrier like as an end User it's hard for me to put that code into my product and see my data right but they build a really realistic interactive demo that's getting closer to plg so it's not pod but it's getting closer and you can already see the value and play with it yourself so that's the first step have a vehicle the second step is time to value basically just because you have this vehicle it doesn't mean people will come and use it and see value so you need to figure out how do you give your users a warm start and help them get started I was talking with a kind of company today they just realized like we have this tool and when people come in into the free trial they are asked to do some action but nobody know how to do that like they may not have everything ready to take that action so we're like what about we gave them some simple video or sample action they can they can try right it's not the same as they do it themselves but it's better it's getting closer and after that you can ask them to try this thing on their own and they need to do more work so kind of think about all the ways you can reduce time to Value it doesn't need to be this big aha moment in the first five minutes but and this gave them some mini aha moments right so so that's the first two second thing third thing is think about from there if they get aha moment if they want to buy you need to have this self-checkout flow ready self-service flow it's the foundation it you have it it doesn't mean they will buy immediately but they at least it gave them this option to do that themselves and the fourth thing I would say between this kind of activation usage aha moment to this conversion moment actually there's a big gap and what is the gap how you can understand the Gap how you can guide people along that journey is basically you need to have a very good grasp of data you need to have the foundation to understand their usage their behavior and then you can design a user journey in the product in email in all those tools to guide user to The Next Step so like have a very strong data Foundation there I would say I think those are the main thing and there are other things like your pricing need to be relatively simple if your pricing is super complicated they they need to whenever they they pre for example they try the product they love it they have a self-check called flow but in order to decide how much they need to pay they need to send your sales a kind of some information you need to do a quote then that's broken right or they're already confused about this process so that is another kind of important thing as well cool so just to summarize I took notes on this uh kind of the things that you got to get right if you want to add a product-led growth component there needs to be something free and kind of self-serve that you can just start using on your own there needs to be a quick time to Value there needs to be a self-serve checkout experience you need a data Foundation I really love your the way you phrased it where like kind of one of the benefits of product like growth is the data component that'll help you understand what to build and how to monetize these folks and then the last piece is pricing uh that's simple that people understand yeah yeah yeah just imagine you are building uh you're selling kind of something on e-commerce side you need all of this right just in order for the B2B buyer to buy or software in plg motion you need to make all those those available to him it doesn't mean if you view this it will happen again right that's the data experimentation a lot of that need to be there to support a lot of iteration and make this work awesome Okay so we've been going in a lot of directions we started with pitfalls and things you probably you well we all run into that may set you off track but let's zoom out again and let's get into just say you're convinced we need to invest in adding a product-led growth motion to our product what's the first step that you recommend for people to go down I think the first step actually I would recommend Founders and leaders to just understand what's plg funnel what's cell sled funnel what's this SLG funnel because when I I remember when I begin to work on plg at Gill lab it was not that clear to me right it's there's a lot of things you can read but they are not all super clear what is plg like how is that different and through working on that myself I begin to develop this conviction and kind of this clear picture the biggest difference from SLG and plg is that the sales funnel traditionally work like something you have marketing team working on the top of funnel brain visitor and then they need to have a process to turn the visitors into lead and leads is something it is basically very uh very popular and widely used in the B2B business and you go through some qualification process and leads need to be from your target kind of customer Target industry the company needs to meet certain size but they also need to show interest in how marketing team historically get interest is how much they interact with your marketing campaigns do they open an email do they read three white papers do they go to this webinar right like that's how they gauge interest and for each positive action you did as a buyer they had some points to you and once you reach certain points you become this marketing qualified leads basically those are the better ones with Futures through that process and if we give that to the sales team and sales team has more process but then they choose some of them work on them and they close some of them so that's kind of traditionally B2B sales that motion works and then product line funnel is is different it's much more similar to b2c basically you can still have people visit your website and they sign up for a free version or free account or free trial the most important thing the biggest difference is now you want them to use the product you can still send all the marketing emails all of that but those are supplemental those are kind of trying to get them to the product to to use to try and the usage product usage is the almost like the leading indicator for success for plg versus in the sales funnel it's like almost like how many do you get and do they interact with the marketing campaigns right which in the old days it's what you have because nobody can access your product unless the contract is signed but nowadays that's almost like an artificial barrier it's not there right you can totally build a product in a free version to allow people to use so usage becomes so important and that's the biggest difference from the usage then you have two potential conversion paths one is that if this product is not that expensive the price point fits in most companies budget some companies may just use their credit card and they buy a lie right that's awesome you then don't even need sales team to be involved and it's very similar to the b2c product e-commerce product buying process and it's awesome right like because it's automated you don't need to have more sales team involved it's low cost it's efficient it can happen on its own every day like it will just add up to your revenue and then the other potential conversion pass is where the product usage is high but also this customer this Potential Prospect fits into your ideal customer profile file red is a from a Fortune 500 company or it's from a Target industry that you know they they need your solution then this customer worth more of your time and you you should actually not even even if they may want to buy on their own you may want to still have your sales team or have your customer success team to reach out to them to understand a little bit more of the situation and give them some white globe service hopefully you can even close a bigger deal than if they would have Buy on their own right so that's another pass I call that pql pqa like sales pass and that stands for product qualified lead right product qualified leads product qualified account so the first step is for you to understand those two funnels and then think about if you want to add plg right what is this journey what are the steps along that funnel you need to establish for your product in order for your user to be able to like in like convert in that funnel so you talked about these two funnels one question is are they basically the same for almost every product or should you try to figure out what's like really unique about my funnel and then second is there an example of product that you think about like here's the sales lead funnel for them and then here's the product LED version of that just to give make it a little more real even maybe I can give an example first and then we can talk about the other question so I think use the lab as an example since that's where most familiar Sealab actually have a Enterprise sales team very strong sales team from the very beginning but the company also we started at from open source product maybe describe what gitlab is for folks that aren't super familiar with it yeah so gear lab we are a developer platform devops platform basically engineer teams developer teams they use the this product to manage their their entire uh devops process from storing their code kind of managing the Version Control releasing cicd like security scan all of that like it's an all-in-one platform to for that team so for the sales of that motion right like I mentioned the teams will the the our marketing team were working bringing a lot of visitors to our website and they sign up for a free trial free for free accounts and then we have this lead nurturing and Lead scoring process to surface which are the good ones for our sales team and our sales team we have uh SNB we have like the the mid Market we have Enterprise and they each kind of took their buckets of leads and work on them and close them they become Revenue and then how the product lab funnel work for us is someone maybe as a developer I heard about gilab I go to website I see oh I can actually sign up for a free account I may use it for my personal project my company may be using another solution but I have some side project I'm doing as a developer I want to use skill lab to host that and I I did that right and so you begin to see this individual user is having some usage but nothing to do with his company and then one day maybe this this person's employer they're like we want to look into some other Solutions we have way too many point solutions for each step of devops now we want to potentially consolidate them so what are the options and this engineer raised his hands hey I have been using the lab for a very long time and I really like it I think we should check them out and then this team maybe this engineer manager or or CTO depending on the size of company they're like okay he went to their website and he kind of signed up for a free trial because that allowed him to test some more advanced features in 30 days and but but he already has this person knows how to use it right this person already said the foundation with the free version and they they started the free trial they used their 30 day to do a proof of concept the entire company already using it or part of their process and they're like oh awesome I tried this feature that feature that feature it's a really it's a great tool it can support our workflow and I I'm pretty sure we we should be able to kind of uh get Roi from this this product and then in this case like they are like I only need five seats it's cheap I will just go to the pricing page and check out the pricing and buy from there or like in some cases this is a big company and we see like this big companies using our product our sales team get that data signal they may send an email and reach out and say hey I saw you are checking out how can I help and that may start a sales conversation eventually become a become a contract from there great thank you so for sharing that example maybe a last question on this first step of mapping out the funnel do you recommend people just get in front of a whiteboard and just sit together and like here's what it would be potentially if we added a product like growth motion yes yes and I think it's not that it like the devil is in the details uh just mapping all the big steps is not that hard right you think about I have a marketing side already I can build a free version and then they use the free version and I build a checkout flow and like and that's it that's the the story right but that's that's the first step if you don't even have those components right building like a mapping or the funnel will allow you to see amazing checkout slow and missing free version like you already identified that but the devil is in the detail one layer down how do you design an experience for each of the steps what do you say on your marketing side right to drive free sign up in the free sign up with how do you guide them to use the three most important features uh and in the checkout flow which payment option do you offer so that customers from everywhere can buy very smoothly so that's that's the next layers kind of detail that's actually has so many opportunities for optimization maximization and all of that that's actually a really good segue to the next question which is just okay mapped out the funnel what do you do next if you don't have the foundational components you need to build all of that but if you kind of have something if you already have this funnel exist right it's just not working perfectly at least but it's working it's there I think the next step is you need to pick a starting point like where do you want to focus first to drive the Maximum Impact personally I'm a big fan of finding leverage like I think doing growth is always about finding leverage if you can always find the area that with relatively small investment can give you the biggest results that can be such a kind of a momentum can Empower you through future experiments and more work and just like finding Leverage is a is a beautiful thing in in my mind so I always want to do that so when I think about Pica starting point one thing I actually do with a lot of my advisor clients as a first step is we do a full funnel audit full plg funnel audit think about we go through me as a kind of end user in her journey pretend I am interested semi-interested and I want to buy from the website does that kind of attract me does that is it super clear the value proposition and then from there going through the sign up of the pre-account or free trial is that smooth and when I begin to use the product do I get to my aha moment like fast or I'm very confused and frustrated abandoned at that moment and from there if I'm like think this is good right I hit my aha moment I want to buy can I even buy like you you you will you will never believe like when I do this audit there are so many no hanging fruits usually in this process for example one client when I go to the checkout flow the kind of checkout form is so confusing they asked a bunch of questions that only let's say UK customer need every word every other places they don't need to answer but they ask the question anyway and I as a U.S kind of based person is very confused and I drop off at that point and then there are other things like for example the AHA moments like I talked about I don't know what to do when I land on the inside product for the first time I'm super excited and ready but I don't know what to do like I'm so lost and confused that's usually a pretty big Focus area and opportunity area like just getting your users to Aha moments they are already over so many hurdles here but don't just like turn down them and they they leave because it's so confusing might be helpful just to explain an aha moment and how people hear this term a lot and it's like a simple way to think about what is an aha moment I think it has a moment as a first time a user experienced value of your product so it is kind of it gets popular because Facebook has this like example from the early growth days like you add I think you add 10 friends in seven days you hit your aha moment but there are many layers under that the reason why Facebook use start to define the aha moment is because in early days if you add these friends right you begin to form some connection you can see interesting feeds you can interact with your friends and that's social interaction it's the core value of Facebook and Facebook leaves by looking at a lot of data if you meet that data metric criteria it's it's kind of very likely you will hit that aha moment but I think for a lot of especially we're talking about many SAS products B2B software right the value of such a product is usually either you see a workflow can be supported by this it can save your time it can save your money it can help you make more money or it just meet some of this pain point that you you you never get to solve like on your own without a software product so at gilab we actually did a bunch of analysis we're trying to understand what is the aha moment for our new users we ended up have something along the line of two users two features used in the first 14 days so kind of it's very similar to Facebook's kind of the format but deep down because we are a platform we are a team product two users is talking about the team components whatever the first user is trying and using that is so valuable he or she is confident to invite another co-worker to come in that itself is a very very value valuable action and indicates this first user is seeing value and if together they use two or more features that means they are seeing the collaboration the platform components of the product and within the first 14 days because it has to be reasonably quick but not unrealistic because where are where are complicated product where now Facebook we're not Zynga or our game game app like it's hard for you to figure it out in the first day so is yeah I think it's a very important concept for any prg company to figure out because that's often the biggest opportunity area I see aha moment in activation is often interchangeable right so those are kind of two things you'll hear and just to reframe resay what you say so gitlabs activation slash aha moment Milestone was two users using two features in 14 days and I imagine the way you got to that was you looked at at what point does retention improve if they got to a certain Milestone right is that roughly yeah exactly so there are how you can get to that right first of all we um the internal team our growth team actually we did some brainstorming we think about what are the potential action or or behavior that indicate they are getting value we ideally want to do something like they may be successfully um merge their first PR or they success successfully round their first pipeline all of that like there are some potential high value actions we can think of we just list all of them and then the next step is we did a correlation analysis to understand hey those are the 10 high value actions We believe We want to look at if a used new user did this action what's the maybe 30-day conversion rate oh and not 30 day 90 day conversion rate what's the 30-day retention rate because we look at both sometimes um you you you only look at retention or you only look at conversion it doesn't give you the full picture so we look at if you did this action let's say if Lenny you are trying our product you are able to successfully merge the pr in your first 30 days does that improve your likelihood to convert does that improve your likelihood to retain and we compare across those 10 high value actions compared with the average and we begin to see oh some actions actually if you do that it lifts your conversion lift your retention much bigger and those are the 10 days for potential aha moments and from there the reason why we ended up not picking one single action for some for some products actually you can pick a single action if y action really stands out I don't know for Airbnb in your days probably is your your goat you go you book a hotel you go to there you are so happy right you live a high star review that's the key action for this platform for gilab we have so many different workflow components teams are here for different reasons some are here for security some are here for like cicd so that's why we ended up combining like two actions right it can be any of the two high value features the next step is actually you need to launch some experiments to try to get more people to do those high value action and you then see do I see higher conversion do I see higher retention because in data you are only isolating correlation you are not proving causation you just saw people who are doing this are more likely to convert but it doesn't mean if you get people to do this they won't convert so experimentation is the step you will find only kind of validate that Hilo this is amazing it's like a mini podcast on an activation uh we should do another one just on this and then in the show notes I'll link to a couple posts that are written with a bunch of advice on setting activation milestones and improving them I forget if you've contributed to that post or not but if not we should add some some of these stories but let's get back to our cork we have enough to talk about on just product like growth and so just to um summarize the audit that you do I wrote some notes as you were talking and maybe we can keep going from that point what you look for when you're auditing uh a product to see where they need where they may pick a starting point what I wrote down is what are you just excited to try it like is a landing page pulling you in to can you actually use it on your own and just try it three do you get to the aha moment where you're like okay I get it I'm excited and then can actually buy this on my own is that roughly the audit is there anything more to that exactly and I'm I also look at their initial first few emails they send to me because sometimes you know magically can help a lot like if I'm frustrated the first time the other day I'm trying your product I'm frustrated I'm like I I will give up and then in the night and I saw you now I'm like okay maybe I just clicked the CTA and give it one more try and that time actually I figured out I get to the aha moment so I also look at the email that first initial emails and then when I map this out I asked the company to give me the data at very high level for each of the steps how many people are on your website how many people go to sign up how many people hit this aha moment we need to Define that we need to usually a lot of discussion like how many people get to the aha moment how many people started self-checkout and being successful and then like that between the my experience from a user perspective and the data we usually immediately begin to see oh this is the biggest opportunity uh usually activation commercial are two of the common starting places this episode is brought to you by ahrefs you probably know ahrefs as one of the leading all-in-one SEO tools used by companies like Facebook Uber Shopify LinkedIn Pinterest and thousands more but ahrefs is not just for big companies with their new ahrefs webmaster tools you can optimize your personal website like a professional for free you can scan your website for over 100 common SEO issues that might be hurting your performance in search engines plus get advice on how to fix those errors you can have it automatically browse your website's internal and external links and get actionable insights from your backlink profiles and you can learn what keywords your website ranks for and see how you stack up against your competitors visit hrefs.com awt and start improving your website's visibility that's ahrefs.com awt okay so let's let's get into that then so you've done this audit what other advice you have for folks to figure out where they should start and invest in that part of the product to help launch product like growth you can do a audit like this yourself right just imagine you if you're a b2c user trying to buy a product you want to we want it to be easy ideally plg for B2B can be that easy as well so go through that process and identify where is confusing where do you get stuck if you find that you have a problem with activation meaning if you enter it into the product you're like what do I do I don't know what should I do and maybe I just come left and then if that's the biggest opportunity activation then you need to think about find the right aha moment metric as the first step as we just talked about because that's the success that's the goal post and then design a product experience to help more people together and I usually think about do is better than that show is better than hell meaning you want to remove all the frictions and somehow give them a warm start give them some simple template gives them some simple thing they can play with initially in that very moment already and you can supplement that with your email to bring them to the product if they don't do that so that's activation if activation is okay but your conversion your self-check checkout flow usually there are also room for improvement many companies I work with when I try to buy I cannot even find where to buy like it's very hard to find like where do I click to start this checkout process or they may have some frictions in the checkout flow where it's not localized uh one company when I look at their data they find that India has very low success rate which is expected but we begin to say it's because the payment solution they choose actually doesn't support that market well and they added another payment solution immediately they are seeing much better success rate and it's if they're already in a checkout you don't want to lose any of them right like just do a hundred experiments to get to as much as get get to as much higher kind of commercial impossible because you don't want to lose any of them so activation conversion usually are two great place to start and then from there I would say think about your pql pico a motion which is the other conversion pass which is if you also want to have cells blended into this right product LED cells motion how do you set up the structure the foundation so that you can know what are some data signal to tell you those are better leads and what are some customer criteria in terms of size segment you should set up how do you get those data and then how do you handle hand this to your sales team how they can close using those data use not using use this knowledge that's another a very big opportunity area that's a bigger kind of effort compared to those two low hanging fruits and the last thing I would say product LED acquisition is a great place to start if you your product is a collaboration software think about airtable and and like it's club figma right I as part of my workflow so I invite my team to join I spread this out if you have that use case you can build that into a product that's awesome that's kind of very powerful so there's a lot there so let me try to summarize what you just shared and how connects so you have a self-serve product you've kind of gotten to a point where you can sign up and try something for free and then you do this audit of like where along this journey do we think the biggest opportunities lie in the most leverage lives and these you have these I think four buckets of opportunity acquisition which is like top of funnel do you want to double down and invest there first or activation which is like help people see the value more quickly bucket three would be uh you call the conversion which essentially like help them buy it more efficiently and then there's like a bucket of retention of just like keeping them around longer which I don't know if you mentioned this but I know you're just like that's probably not where you want to start so it's even not worth chatting about too much yeah cool and so so the question basically a founder or product team has to decide is where which of these three buckets so they go in on when they're trying to add product like growth acquisition activation or conversion it'd be cool maybe just like one example of each of these three buckets like what's a product that did a good job here and then you also talked about how to know which one to start with maybe just like again just a quick summary of like you should probably start activation if this if you have something like that you should probably start always activation activation is actually a common good starting place for most B2B software because usually B2B softwares are not designed uh to really get you to use quickly historically a good example there are I think all the best prg companies they do an awesome job that's all that's almost like my criteria to say whether this is a great plg product or not think about Miro as an example if you go through their activation experience then sign up to usage they ask very limited questions very targeted they drop you kind of they ask you about your use case what are you here for are you here to do a brainstorm session are you here to develop a roadmap and they quickly gave you templates to get started just like in maybe five minutes you finish the the entire Journey from go to the website and sign up answer a few questions and you are already using you know using the template the product they provided to do the thing you want to do that's time to Value that's just success I think that's a a really great standard for all the plgs like a B2B product try to follow so that's the activation is a usually a good place if you don't know where to start like do that and then conversion I would say is a place again worth investing but there are two layers uh one is there's self tackle flow just do some experiments there you can actually go to any e-commerce website like I don't know go to Lululemon go to Amazon make your conversion process as easy as theirs that should be your goal the consumers shouldn't be confused about complicated pricing where to find uh like all of that so that's a that's a always that's a place always worth investing testing more because that's Revenue so close to be to be kind of added into your book and then the pql picoa part the other more complicated paths I would say that's something you want to figure out activation and self-checkout a little bit and you want to have some reasonable user number and then invest there otherwise it can be a little bit kind of jumping too fast and jumping to to a head and then her position a product that acquisition is a great place to invest if you have a collaboration workflow you have some in her internal viral components in your product think about figma think about like calendarly even ready it can spread this product is so easy you can build something to allow it to spread on its own okay that was uh I'm hoping that was really helpful because I think a lot of people are like where where do I start what do I do to help start moving down this road of product like growth and like what I'm hearing generally is just activations probably where you want to Focus which is essentially getting people to your value quicker and what's cool about that and we had a podcast with Lauren isford from formally airtable and out notion talking about all the ways to do that and interestingly one of the biggest levers for attention and moving retention is often onboarding and improving Activation so win-win yeah definitely and I I would talk a little bit about retention expansion if using that's helpful yeah I know I didn't talk about that in the post and there are people asking hey do you plan to write another post on this specific topic so the reason why I didn't cover too much retention expansion is as you mentioned it's not a usually a first place to start I call retention the messy needle it's actually a messy part of the entire funnel a quick activation conversion those are fast those are almost like almost sometimes shorter time span right you have a lot of lever and you can test very quickly and that acquisition is a very big leverage you need to get more users always retention is super important but it's a little bit messy it's over a very long period of time and your customers can be at any given moment they can be retained or not just cancel or they just decided not to use anymore you already already lost them so it's a very messy part but how I think about retention there are two steps one is how to build a habit in their usage pattern so that they are using this maybe every week every day like the the key to do that is first of all your product you need to have a high enough frequency like if you are using this was per month it's not likely you can build this into a product into a habit like when I before GitHub I worked at acorns we started as an investment app and the whole thing is kind of passive investment passive investing you bought some ETFs and then you basically don't even need to check and you just keep adding money and it will it will grow and after 10 years is awesome it's actually a the right investment philosophy but when I work as a head of growth it make a big challenge for me because like think about said it forget it they don't even need to go to go back to a product to be successful and that make it very hard as a head of Worlds to driving engagement Drive retention I don't even know whether they're retained or not if they're they're not coming back right I can only catch from other indicators so I think one one thing I would say about building habit is think about how to build those habit feature or collaboration feature into your workflow already into the product already that is the reason they can retain fundamentally if it's high frequency it if it involves collaboration with other people if it's part of their workflow so that's the first step you can obviously use a lot of the loops to reinforce that you can send them an email if they take certain action and get them back and to repeat that action but fundamentally you need to build that into your product and that the next part around retention is I think it I actually think extension is part of retention basically you already have a steady usage flow you are using this habitually like every week every day what are the right moments to prompt you to think about maybe buying more and there are three buckets of product product lead extension the first one is up upgrade to a higher tier the second one is buying more seats buying more license the third one is if you have some sort of some sort of a consumption add-on component just consume you more right like for gilab you can go from bronze tier to like a silver tier you can go to a higher tier and then you can buy more seeds and you can also buy more cicd minutes to consume those are all the different moments how I how you can do that is really understand data understand usage and trigger a lot of the right conversation at the right moment to the right person and you can again a lot of similar tactics you're using activation conversion actually can be beautifully applied in expansion because it's almost a combination of getting people to the AHA of that feature use that feature try that feature getting them to convert you're leaving all these gold bricks that I have to resist not follow getting off track with because there's so much like retention is its own conversation we could have maybe just one question along those lines what's uh something that you've launched that had a tremendous impact on retention is there an example of just like wow that really had a big impact you talked about frequency maybe but what comes to mind I can share some of my example at a course my um I think there are two things one thing is actually very similar to what you just said when I was asked to work on retention I did a bunch of analysis the biggest leverage for me is actually Activation so I ended up doing tons of experiments in activation I identified what are the features to for users to take experience value quickly so that they are more likely to retain for us it's a feature called recurring investment which makes sense in hiset but at that time nobody's caring about that like there we have some other very cool investment features called Roundup investment so nobody is really paying a lot of attention on this but when I look at data I saw recurring investment has a high correlation with retention so I did a lot of work trying to get more people to set this up and which has been a great success actually in a very short appear over time and then from there I would say we begin to add more use cases that has a higher frequency let's like I mentioned right if your only come here once per month to check our investment it's very hard to retain you uh we don't have any lever to engagement with you as well if you you are not in a product so we ended up adding IRA account retirement account we ended up our adding spending account like a debit card like more high frequency use cases those use cases come with higher frequency and better retention by Nature so now you change the problem from how do I improve retention to how do I I drive adoption of higher frequency use cases so I did again a bunch of experiments how to drive more adoption of retirement account once you have a retirement account Ira there's tax consequences all of that there's very hard for you to be so you flip the question into again adoption activation problem in that case as well amazing thank you for sharing those oh man there's so many other things we could talk about retention but uh we have enough to talk about on product like growth so there's two other areas that I want to touch on one is data and infrastructure and what people should know about how to set that up for success and the other is hiring your team and how to build out your product life growth team so starting with the data piece maybe just as a big picture just like what are the buckets of data and infrastructure people should be thinking about that they're going to have to invest in or should start thinking about early I think there are two big buckets the first bucket is product usage data as I mentioned a lot of B2B software they're really lacking in that because when you sell via sales team you don't need to know so many details so granular usage data all of that the second bug hit is I call this customer 360 database because product usage data is one component is the most essential in order for your product LED growth motion to be successful you also need to connect that with your marketing teams marketing campaigns your CRM your sales force like who are the customers post bags what their stage so those ideally need to be connected so that you have a 360 picture of your customer if I have a Airbnb as a potential like a Target account do I know there are users from Airbnb that are using my product which features are they using and uh and do I send any marketing campaigns to each of them do they respond all of that all of those ideally need to be connected but in reality it's like all over the place it's all in its own tools in most of the B2B companies what are just some tools that you think people should check out start with maybe what's like gila's recommendations on like an initial stack or areas to explore in terms of tooling I I say there are two piece one is infra the other piece are some tools that are kind of secondary so from infrastructure perspective on data tool my first two usually one is some sort of a data Hub segment right yeah this next one is some sort of a product Analytics tool think about amplitude I know post hog is actually a pretty popular one it's an open source product Analytics tool there are mixed panel panel all of that so have some sort of data Hub data collection tool and have some sort of part of analytics too that's the data infrastructure and then you need to have an experimentation tool because like I said you can now just imagine you build everything and everything works perfectly so you need either like optimizely I know amplitude has some experimentation components uh Apple is a new and upcoming one like you need some tool to allow you to do experimentation the third piece I think that's pretty essential I counted in the ifra is some sort of a life cycle marketing tool I know many B2B companies they use HubSpot or they use something like for their email marketing but those are usually lease nurturing and it's very different from life cycle marketing tool meaning you need to connect with segment amplitude you know what customers are doing your product your design your email your in-app uh your push notification based on their behavior at the right moment to the right person and you measure success by do they take the right action in a product versus the the nurture email marketing to his do I get them to read the article open the email I had 10 points to their lead score and their next step further in their this this funnel so data 2 experimentation to lifecycle marketing to those are the infra and then from there there are a lot of plg tools you can add on top to make your day-to-day much easier just to start and so like that that are most most essential for acquisition you need to have some sort of a leader like a data enragement tool think about Zoom Evo clearbid because the biggest difference between B2B and b2c is that you still need to know about their company like you you want to know this person but you also want to know this person's company right that's a very important thing and you can get a lot out of those data enrichment too and then you can design your journey differently based on that for Activation I a lot of my clients are finding a lot of value in those tools like app cues user-led basically the tools that allow you to build onboarding flow quickly in a product without engineer kind of resource so you need to do some initial integration but as soon as you did that a marketing manager pn or or someone can just build some customized onboarding step by step slows himself I think that's quite neat because you need to test the tongue in that area and the in terms of conversion I would say there are many product LED gross product LED sales tools I think those are great if you want to build out your pql pqa kind of conversion pass think about endgame pocos top playing Pace like there are a couple of them wow amazing that was an awesome list and really well structured is there anything else along the data or infrastructure piece that you want to touch on before we move on to hiring in the team I just want to go back to the point as I mentioned product LED growth is data-led growth deep down so like in most of the situation when I see a company want to get started where they are really missing or they need to invest more is data so if you identify you have a gap in this area don't feel bad as well like a lot of specific companies are in the same shoes and if you can invest the time money the team the tool to figure this out the benefit of this right the data collection usage understanding usage data can not only Power your plg motion it can really power your entire product team even your customer success team now you gave them the ingredients they need to develop the next feature based on not only what your customer asks for but also whatever is using right like your customer success team can take a much deeper view in understanding what the clients are using rather than just talk with the executives from the client and get a rough kind of charge of the situation so it is a I think it is a area worth investing and every B2B company should be investing in I'm trying to channel what uh listeners might be thinking right now and I imagine some people might be like what if I picked the wrong tool like I'm kind of stressed I have to do all this research I'm kind of worried about starting because it'll set me up for failure later which of these buckets do you think is most important to get right right from the beginning and any advice on how to just avoid messing that up to get started I would say probably a product analytics 2 is the first step and maybe like the the data Hub such as segment so if you have a segment and particle tools like that it allows you to plug into so many different tools you can basically try all the different tools and if it doesn't work you you just flick flip a switch you can try another tool so there is a benefit there but it is extensive so I I know companies may just go right into the product analytics too I would say it's hard to get it wrong completely right in order for product analytics to to be meaningful the first step is you need to collect the data you need to do some instrumentation you need to have the foundation and then because it's cabbage in cabbage out if you send a bunch of garbage data into your product analytics to your analysts will be just even more confusing right it's like he doesn't know whether to trust the data what to use so a lot of the company I work with the first step is maybe not looking into two but do an audit of your data instrumentation situation to understand how many of the key actions are you tracked is the format correct is the data right what are the gaps and you may need to do some real instrumentation reformatting and things like that before you even plug into a product Analytics tool to make it useful for someone that may want to do that audit is there a thing you would Point them to or I don't know blog course something to help them understand if they're doing it right or is it like bringing Gila on and and you need someone like you to kind of help them through it no you you can bring me but you don't have to bring me uh I think there are if you search on Google like just the data dictionary or data product usage data audit a lot of companies published template and spreadsheet you can use I can even send you a few after that would be amazing and then you can just go through basically the key idea is go through your product experience identify the key actions and go through your data instrumentation and see do they match and the success of this is you have a you identify the gaps and eventually you want to establish something called a data dictionary like I basically do that for a lot of my clients and the data dictionary will include here are all the key actions what's the event name for each of those and what are the property and things like that but you now know hey I have this action track this is the name if I have a new product manager analyst you can all refer to this and everyone know the same means the same definition rather than people are interpreting differently so that's a very important part to success even before the tooling awesome it also reminds me a previous guest Crystal wajia has an awesome post on why most analytics efforts fail and she talks a lot about this of how to set your events up for Success so we'll use that as well maybe one last thing here I'm trying to think about like what would screw people up most and it's probably not having a data warehouse an ETL yes sorts of Tooling in place because that feeds a lot of this is there anything you want to add there but just like the importance of a data warehouse and how to set that up some of the early stage companies I work with when they just get started in the very beginning they don't have data warehouse they just basically have their their their product and they have some sort of a Google analytics or amplitude and that's it it is pretty wild but it's working and they they can get to some place from from there but as soon as you begin to have data User it's time to get serious to establish a data warehouse have some ETL solution there are like I think there are the most common best practice best practice ones like AWS and things like that there are also some startups that are doing this and you can utilize as well but again if as soon as you become a serious business you should invest in that otherwise like it's pretty wild and it's pretty fragile as well and we say AWS you mean a redshift I imagine yeah cool awesome okay final area that uh we have time for which is awesome which is around building your team so maybe just two questions here what is what is your advice for starting the initial team investing in plg like how do you how does that usually look and what do you think people should do and then later how does that evolve over time how I see most companies started is um the founder or the leadership team realized that they need to do plg and they build the conviction like yeah they want to uh maybe initially there he's an even a dedicated team but they did something here and there they decided to invest in this and the common place to start is to hire ahead of growth or it can be a lead growth PN but someone who is relatively has a little bit experience in this area and then they begin to build this core growth Squad as the first gross team and I think that's a very common place to start the other the other place to start that's less common but I also think happening in reality is maybe they will start a cross-functional almost like a tiger team because if the initial Focus area is let's say they want to do product uh product qualified lead or like basically add that funnel that involves not only product team that will evolve data team because you you want to know what are the usage pattern that indicate this is a better leads you also need to bring sales team in because they need to work on those leads to close them so if that's the initial starting area a cross-functional tiger team is also possible and option but the most common way is higher ahead of growth usually a gross pm and then start a team with engineering design data to support that that core growth Squad and the main difference between these two one is dedicated we are going to dedicate full-time people to helping us grow yeah like say we talked about earlier let's say they're going to focus on activation yeah and that's their whole job versus tiger team is basically they're borrowing resources from other teams and this is kind of like a side project for them yeah a little bit for a period of time so it's temporary right it's kind of they they almost need to they want to get into I would say like usually the cross-functional team the tiger team is a little bit prayer prior to full commitment they are pretty much committed but they still want to try this out and get a final conviction and then they begin to dedicate resources and you asked about what's How do they they evolve from there before we actually get there maybe one more quick question which would you recommend like when does it imagine you you recommend a dedicated team you can do that when would it make sense to go the tiger team rap like in what cases one situation I would recommend is that if the initial Focus area is like I said product qualified leads the sales conversion pass because if you think about you have a head of growth or core growth PM that person usually has a gross PM background and is in the product organization and they are awesome if the initial Focus areas are activation conversion those those kind of involve a lot of experimentation right but activation conversion are relatively confined it's something the growth pm and engineer design data they can work on if your initial Focus area you felt like my biggest pain is actually do this pql thing it is a little bit harder for the growth PN to socialize all those cross-functional resources because you need to get pretty deep into Data he need to have a counterpart in sales even in marketing so in that case I think it it's possible that maybe you start a type routine you can combine both right you can have a gross PM dedicated but have some tiger team to be working with him or her on this pql project as well got it and I I like this term tiger team by the way I haven't heard that before sounds like a lot of fun very dynamic okay cool and then yeah what happens next after you have this initial team once you have this initial team it's important to give them the resources they need and gave them a initial Focus area gave them a support and a little bit time allow them to try things out and get some early wins and early win is the biggest scene I would say for and whenever you start a new growth team try to look for some opportunity try to get some early wins in whichever Focus area you choose and from there if you get some of the wins the team has some momentum there are more confidence from the organization in plg right it's time to potentially expand and formalize so fundamentally I think you should should not only think about a prg team you should think about the prg org because plg is a motion uh it's cross-functional by Nature it's not just a product team or growth team eventually you need to get to the place basically there is a head of Rose product that's the center of the prg at work but there's also need to be a health head of growth marketing that's his or her counterparts in marketing organization and then head of product LED sales that's that's the counterpart in the sales organization exactly how where they sit how how they sit it's different company by company the most common one is head of gross product report to product work head of gross marketing report to marketing head of product that sells report to sales but they have some sort of a very strong collaboration because they are working in the cell same Motion in same funnel but that's I think that's the next step think about this org once you have those counterparts in product in sales in marketing the next step is think about what are the metrics they own to make sure you can manage this funnel this Motion in a data driven way because the plg metrics are very different from SLG the top of funnel is more about high quality signups you are not just you don't want a lot of traffic you want free sign up free trials but it need to meet certain quality bar it's not just like anyone right and then the head of gross product he or her top kpi is about usage activation activated teams is a very very common metric and then maybe number of pqls if that that's another like you want to get those teams to certain usage threshold basically and then the head of product LED sales he will be focused on converting those pqls into Revenue so he will focus on a lot of conversion rate efficiency and maybe Revenue things like that got it and you're sharing a lot of org design verbally in the post virtual share obviously in the show notes you can actually see a diagram of what these look like to help kind of make it super clear I have maybe just one more question going back to the initial team what are the functions you recommend they have on this like MVP plg team the most important why is have a gross pm to be the elite right head of growth director of gross lead grows pm and then the gross PM as you know probably very well gross the end he's a PN but has a much stronger skill setting analytics experimentation very data driven think about metrics the gross PMS way of working is similar to other product manager but his kpis is actually more similar to the sales and marketing World he's very focused on the conversion rate the journey the funnel versus feature specifically itself and then the other functions you need to have so sure I would often say actually a data analyst needs to be the very first hire sometimes even try to find a gross PM uh who can do ant analysis if you're really small right you you can find that type of unicorn person or even before hiring growth peer and hiring analysts that I would actually go as far as that because without Insight without a lot of foundation if there is like your fermentation your effort is really directionalous in in a sense so growth PM analysts and from there definitely you need some dedicated engineer you need a designer designer can be somewhat not dedicated in early days but engineer needs to be some sort of a user research support as well it doesn't need to be dedicated but those are the core growth Squad okay real actual last question here for the growth pm in your experience are they most often coming from within the company already and they kind of shift to this role or do you recommend they find someone externally that's an excellent question um I have seen both I actually recommend if you can find someone internally maybe he's a PM he want to do gross or he is an analyst who want to become more like a product role I even have one client the head of Rose I work with used to be a investor relationship like head of investor relationship and he reports to the CEO and the founder he is very analytical he hasn't been a PM before but he can socialize the resource within the company to launch experiments in product in marketing in all of that and we I as an advisor come in guide him in the area he's not familiar with and we actually drive pretty good results together so I think prefer hiring return internally if possible if not if you really don't have anyone internally with that knowledge or with that interest you can look outside I would say map the initial growth PM higher to your starting point next if we already decided activation right he's the biggest Focus era try to find some PM gross PM with that experience and if if like the conversion is is focused here or acquisition is to focus here try to find someone without experience I love that advice we've reached our very exciting lightning round I've got actually seven questions for you the most ever we've had for a lighting round are you ready I'm I'm ready okay what are two or three books that you recommended most to other people this first one is called the uh novel uh yeah I don't know whether we read that one I really loved that one that's kind of a life-changing book for me I have a favorite do you have a favorite novellism that comes to mind um I learned finding leverage from him you talk about there are four type of Leverage it can be your writing it can be code it can be Capital it can be T so the reason why I invest a lot in writing is like I felt like that's my leverage and I love that the the second book is called how women rise I really love this one I gifted this to a lot of my female team member and I I really learned a lot from them and the third one is my book it's called so anything in Chinese if you don't read Chinese you cannot read it but I heard my friends told me if you are launching an email campaign if you're doing experiments have this book by the side will help with conversion rate despite its appearance that's amazing is there an English translation or is it only in Chinese right now sorry in Chinese so you have I see all right there's an advantage there if you can speak Chinese your conversion will go yes uh and then uh just uh the first book it was called The Almanac of Naval right okay is that yeah is that right yeah okay cool yes sweet and we'll link to all these okay favorite recent movie or TV show I watched a movie it's a sci-fi movie from China it's called the wandering Earth 2. it's by the famous author the scene Leo he's the author of three bodies I don't know whether you've heard them oh my God that movie is awesome it's it's kind of really cool I really highly recommend it I have to go check that out oh my God I heard they're bringing three body problems to Apple TV or Netflix there's like a show coming yes yes I look forward to that wow I watched many versions already kind of filmed is not none of them are good that's that's the problem it's so hard to do well oh man I'm not optimistic but I'm excited anyway yeah yeah favorite interview question that you like to ask when I interview like a gross PMS or analysts I will always ask what is the experiment you launched that has a very unexpected results and what did you do after that what do you look for in an answer there that makes you feel like they are strong so first of all they have to be launching a lot of experiments to get very unexpected answer so like if you are only they many people remember their success for the interview right they prepare that very well I don't want to ask like what's your successful experiment secondly I want to know just like why it's unexpected that reveals the deep deep level of their thinking how deep they are thinking if they are they should expect that based on what they described then they are now sinking deep enough they are not understanding customer enough and what they do afterwards is also awesome like how do you uh face a failure or unexpected result what are the clues you can pursue what are the actions you can take how do you learn something out of it I love it what's a favorite recent product you've recently discovered that you love I would say like similar to everyone Chad DPT but also um Lululemon yoga pens missing great what's something relatively minor you've changed in your product development process that has had a tremendous impact on a team's ability to execute yeah I I forced I added basically a section in the in the dark in the ticket stack as the PMs to write the success metric ahead of time as well as adding which of the growth level this is helping is this contributing to acquisition activation retention monetization and it forced them to sometimes think through deeply why are we even doing this sometimes they ended up not doing that by just writing at the doubt I love that next question I know you're big on children's books do you have a favorite children's book my favorite children's book is called someday and I recommend everyone to check it out and I basically is talking about how our children uh used to be our baby become our kids and when they they are taller and more stronger than us and they will remember us um oh yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna need to check that out now and final question I know you're big on growth Concepts you have all these Frameworks and Concepts and so what is your favorite growth concept I would say North Star metric because I find it's not only valuable to growth it's valuable to just everything right when I think about what do I want to do with my career does that fit my own personal North Star metric when I think about how I how how I want to raise my kids I think about what's the north north star metric for successful education or for my kid because it forced me to think long term it was force me to think about what value both to me to them not only by the society standards uh ARR Revenue like salary right and also what's my vision for myself and for my kids I love that reminds me of a recent guest where she always asks what are you optimizing for whether she's talking with her kids or her husband or her team yeah and a similar concept Gila this was incredible I think we've shared tens of thousands of dollars of value and it will probably lead to millions of dollars of revenue for a lot of companies and it's everything I hoped it would be thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much wisdom two final questions where can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you yeah they can find me on LinkedIn just search Gila g h i l a q-u you can find me I have a personal website that's under development but I contracted to my kid to my 12 year old so he you need to wait until summer and hopefully this summer if you can finish it yeah like if you you are a Founder uh you are looking for a growth advisor feel free to hit me up I'm always happy to just have a free have a call with Founders and leaders get to know more people and I'm I'm a gross nerd so like I always want to grow nerd about growth anyway amazing hila again thank you so much for being here thank you bye everyone bye thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com see you in the next episode