Product-led Growth Best Practices Will Only Get You So Far

Product-led growth (PLG) is a proven go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies. Leaders like Zoom, Spotify, and Canva offer free versions of their products to drive engagement and customer acquisition. The idea is that if users experience the value of the product first-hand, they’ll convert to loyal paying customers.

But, as more companies adopt the methodology for their tools, PLG strategies become table stakes rather than competitive differentiators. The best practices that might have helped you stand out a few years ago are now run-of-the-mill.

So, how do you make sure your product-led growth efforts stand out, improve the user experience, and go beyond the typical best practices you see day-to-day?

What are the product-led growth best practices?

Freemium and free-trial pricing models have spurred the movement toward product-led growth.

Because the purchase happens later in the customer lifecycle, the user evaluation period is longer and more thorough. Users can evaluate the product for what it offers, how it solves problems, and its ease of use. Instead of relying on marketing messages and sales calls to make a purchase decision, the user evaluates and engages with the product before converting.

This simplifies the recipe for success. If a SaaS tool provides more value than it costs, the user will convert.

There is a lot of literature out there on foundational strategies for PLG. Generally, the industry’s product-led growth best practices include specific tactics related to the following:

• Develop a product-first company culture so that the whole organization is focused on delivering the best product experience.
• Emphasize free trial or free accounts in marketing and sales to increase registrations.
• Minimize friction during sign-up with a clear, personalized, and engaging onboarding experience.
• Make it clear to freemium or free trial users what they are missing out on and what they will get by converting to a paid account.
• Prioritize account expansion over net new users with plan upgrades and customer marketing strategies.
• Gather customer feedback, review user behavior, and conduct testing to measure and improve the product experience.

While all of these are true and valuable, they will only get you so far, and it’s hard to know how to actually make them happen.

Best practices are for beginners

One of our favorite mottos at The Good is that “best practices are for beginners.” Yes, it is important to stick to foundational truths in SaaS optimization work: stay user-centered, establish consistent research practices, iterate your way to success, etc. But, to scale your SaaS organization, you need to go further.

There are many reasons for this, including:

• Best practices are tethered to the past, but your tool is not
• What works for your competition won’t necessarily work for you
• Sticking religiously to best practices holds you back from making data-backed improvements
• Prescribing solutions without diagnosing challenges sets you up for failure

Best practices can be a good starting point for companies looking to dip their toes into product-led growth or optimization, but they’re like training wheels. Once you’ve mastered them, they quickly cap how much you can scale. True growth demands a more tailored approach.

In his book, Opting In To Optimization, Jon MacDonald notes, “Above-average businesses—the ones converting their target customers in droves—are learning in real-time from every click and movement of their current users.”

As established, the ultimate goal of product-led growth is to leverage the product itself to improve acquisition, conversion, and retention metrics. So, how do you actually make that happen once you already have the foundational elements in place?

How to leverage PLG to go from product-market fit to scale

For companies that have outgrown best practices and are ready to scale, here are a few ways to take your product-led growth strategies to the next level.

1. Review the ROPES framework and identify levers you haven’t pulled

First, start by looking at the big picture with the ROPES framework.

The ROPES framework was designed by our team to help product-first SaaS leaders think about, optimize, and improve the end-to-end customer experience. It goes deeper than simple best practices and keeps the product at the center of everything you do by covering the user journey from registration to cancellation. Ultimately, it helps product-led companies:

• Define key stages in the customer journey
• Identify important metrics to measure each stage
• Understand the elements, forces, and factors that help or hinder engagement

Looking at your organization through the lens of the ROPES framework provides context to what makes a great product experience, what levers you can pull at each stage of the customer journey to improve acquisition, conversion, and retention metrics, as well as who on a SaaS product team should be leading the phase.

Once you have the foundational elements of product-led growth in place and are hitting a plateau, review the ROPES framework and identify which areas you aren’t fully leveraging to encourage engagement.

2. Optimize your team

Next, take a look at your team structure and ensure that the right people are leading the right stages of optimization. For example, the registration phase should be driven by the marketing team in collaboration with UX designers, while the product stage should be owned by the product team.

But don’t let this hold you back from letting cross-team collaboration happen. It’s important as a product leader to:

• Bridge the gaps and translate messages across teams
• Stay open-minded and ready for the unexpected
• Bring in people who might not always be part of the ideation phase but can offer a lot of valuable input

That’s because creativity doesn’t just come from the top.

Emma Leyden, product leader from IDEO, Title Nine, and more, says, “I have a deep belief that everyone is creative. I think that engineers are some of the most creative people in any organization. When I say that, CEOs look at me shocked, but engineers are closest to the work and want to ship products that will actually be used, so they have a good idea of what should be built.”

Leveraging your entire team to bring creative new approaches to PLG and allowing the right teams to drive their stages of the product forward allows for the proper balance of collaboration and ownership.

3. Deepen your feature moat

If you’ve reached a plateau in your PLG strategies, it might be time to dig into your feature moat.

A feature moat is when a product offers such unique and superior product features that the competition can’t quickly replicate them. There’s literally a gap—a moat—that your competitors will be scrambling to cross.

Think of it like this: If your product is a great solution, it will change the lives and work of your users. Their needs and preferences change. They develop new problems that you’re positioned to solve. Each solved problem represents a widening moat between you and your competitors.

How do you create this advantage? By continuing to drill deep into user needs and pain points even after you’ve achieved product-market fit.

Don’t rest, satisfied that you’ve learned enough about your users. Continue to leverage generative and evaluative research to uncover new insights into their behavior and needs. Ultimately, this is key to developing a customer experience that evolves with the user.

4. Transition from “launch and learn” to “test and learn”

When you are just starting to implement PLG practices, you may rely on hunches or best guesses. But as you grow, experimentation should happen pre-launch.

You are transitioning from “launch and learn” to “test and learn.”

Even in scenarios where you need to launch quickly, you should at least perform what Emma Leyden calls a “gut check.”

“Your ‘gut check’ can be done in low-effort ways. It won’t give you the most confident answer, but something as simple as showing a design to friends and family before you launch can teach you a lot.”

As a good rule of thumb, Emma encourages having some kind of user research scheduled every week, even if it’s as simple as letting someone see or use the prototype of a product and voicing their thoughts aloud.

While product intuition is important, it’s important to keep in mind we all have our biases. Sometimes, it’s hard to see our products from different perspectives, which is why testing or validating your ideas is essential.

5. Ditch generic benchmarks

Benchmarks are like best practices. They are a great starting point for companies looking to set goals, but for most SaaS companies, they are practically meaningless. We discuss the problems with benchmarking in our article “Why Industry Benchmarks are Bullshit,” but it comes down to this:

• Competitor data can be unreliable, inaccurate, or simply made up.
• Even niched-down industry data still contains too much noise.
• Your products, market conditions, pricing strategy, channel mix, and/or customer groups are just too different to control against even a true competitor.
• Goal-setting, testing, and learning are better alternatives to industry benchmarks.

Essentially, benchmarks are too simplistic to be useful, especially if you’re looking at only one metric, like conversion rate. And even if you match your competitor’s metric, it’s not like you’re going to stop optimizing your experience. You always want that number to improve.

So what’s the alternative? Instead of benchmarking against competitors, we recommend the recipe that works for top companies: setting strong data foundations, checking your assumptions about your audience and their behavior, and building a research practice.

Ditch generic benchmarks. Measure yourself against top optimization teams and identify high-impact areas for improvement instead.

6. Circulate your research across the organization

SaaS leaders with PLG foundations can improve how and when they share customer research to move from product-market fit to scale. Even if you have already established an ongoing research practice, to take this to the next level, improve how customer data and insights are circulated across teams.

When you skip this step, the disconnect between great research and doing something about the insights holds you back from building a user-centered culture and slows innovation.

To fully capitalize on customer insights:

• Give your research a home: Organize data into digestible, prioritized recommendations for teams across your company rather than overwhelming them with raw data.
• Identify patterns and form insights: Regularly circulate customer research to key stakeholders through internal newsletters, reports, or collaborative tools to align, identify areas for improvement, and uncover insights.
• Generate potential improvement ideas to address insights: Use shared insights as a foundation for brainstorming and decision-making across marketing, product, sales, and support teams.

By creating clear channels for sharing and proactively acting on research, SaaS leaders drive growth beyond what PLG best practices alone can achieve.

7. Try new free-to-paid conversion strategies

Converting free trial users to paid users is about demonstrating your product’s value. You can do this by strategically placing messaging throughout your site and/or app.

Keep in mind that your free trial signups already know the product is good. That’s why they signed up in the first place. Your job is to convince them that the value they’ll get from the product is worth the price.

You need them to conduct a cost-benefit analysis of your product and decide that it comes out on top. Highlighting benefits, offering social proof, giving product tours, and boosting user engagement are just some of the techniques to increase activation rates.

You can’t invite this kind of thinking unless you know your customers well. Exceedingly well. Only once you know what triggers them to buy can you build a user experience that entices them to convert.

Here are some strategies to consider for improving free-to-paid conversions:

• Remind users to upgrade early and often
• Drive users to value quickly
• Present gated features near free features
• Make your calls to action clear and consistent
• Be thoughtful about which features are gated
• Make free users aware of their trial time
• Offer a great onboarding experience
• Use paywalls to demonstrate paid features
• Clearly label your paid features

Remember, these are just ideas. Tailor them to your audience based on the issues you’ve identified and your proprietary user research.

8. Extend your capabilities with external support

Whether exploring new features, testing improvements, or mitigating risk, effective product-led growth teams use research at every stage of the product lifecycle.

Yet, research departments are often under-resourced, with typical staffing ratios at one researcher for every 50 developers. This imbalance leads to long research roadmaps that struggle to address the immediate needs of product teams.

In response, SaaS teams rely on external support to supplement their efforts and move beyond best practices to real, sustainable growth. One-off research projects can help, but sophisticated organizations find the most effective partners to work with them long-term.

Heidi Dean, Principal Product-Led Growth Manager at Adobe, says, “When you work with somebody long-term, they learn your products, the organization and your stakeholders. They understand the pain points that you’re dealing with, and then you just develop a shorthand.”

Integrating a specialized firm like The Good to come in and work on projects without much uptime can exponentially increase the user insights you receive and, in turn, the impact you can have on your organization.

Don’t get stuck at best practices

When you don’t push yourself past the comfortable, known best practices, you hold yourself back from scaling your SaaS tool.

If you recognize that you have reached that plateau, hopefully, this article has provided some inspiration for the next steps and areas in which you can focus your energy.

It can be tough to read the label from inside the jar, and if you want to get a fresh perspective to help you scale, reach out to our team. We bring years of experience optimizing SaaS user experiences and providing expert consulting for SaaS product teams.

After a short call to ensure a good mutual fit, we’ll get started supporting your product-led growth efforts with research, strategy, and experimentation.