Positioning and Product Led Growth

If you’re not sure what exactly product led growth is, I’d recommend heading over here to check out a pretty definitive guide. In this post, though, I want to address another issue: What role does positioning play in product led growth?

First lf all, nearly all open source startups would fit into the definition of product led companies. Because the core philosophy of product led growth is a focus on the end user experience. Growth comes not from executives making buying decisions but from rank-and-file engineers looking for a solution to a day-to-day annoyance.

First of all, product-let growth doesn’t mean that ‘no sales or marketing efforts.’ It simply means that instead of focusing those efforts on executives who will be thinking about ROI and business bottom lines you’ll need to focus on end-users — the engineer who doesn’t want to write another YAML file, the developer who is tired of things that work on the local machine and break in production, the infosec pro who hates being seen as a roadblock to deployment by the entire IT organization.

Positioning and PLG

So what does positioning have to do with it?

For product led growth to work, a couple things have to happen:

  • End users have to discover your product — this could be on Hacker News, from a colleague, from a podcast you appeared on, but they do have to discover the product somehow

  • The end user has to understand immediately how the product will make their life better

  • The product has to deliver the value it promised, so that the end users become internal champions

Seems simple, right?

But to do this effectively, you need to understand:

  • What are the pain points that the end user is experiencing?

  • What triggers an end user to try your solution?

  • What would the end user do if you didn’t exist?

  • What does your product enable that would otherwise simply not be possible?

  • What type of end users get the most value out of your product?

It’s important to understand all of those points because in a product led growth model, you don’t get hour-long conversations with buyers to clarify any confusion about what you do and the circumstances under which your product is most valuable. You have to communicate that completely clearly not just in the marketing copy on your homepage but also every podcast episode the founders guest on and in every quote in the press.

All of those questions above, that you need to run a successful end-user focused marketing campaign, are cornerstones of positioning. But it can be harder for product-led companies to answer questions about, for example, what end users would do if their solution didn’t exist. This is simply because of the sales process — if you have a self-service sales process (or a self-service download, as with an open source project), you might not get enough interaction with end users to really understand what is most valuable about the product or what they would do otherwise.

Helping end users become champions

Part of the idea behind product led growth is that as you recruit more users, they become your champions, leading to large enterprise deals or account expansion throughout the company. But it’s also your job to make this as easy as possible for the end users.

That means:

  • Having resources that connect the value you provide to things buyers do care about (uptime, ROI, productivity, etc).

  • Understanding and communicating the pain points your product solves for buyers (it should, after all, provide value for both users and buyers)

Your core positioning should be user-focused in a product led growth model, but you also need to keep in mind the value higher-ups get from your product as well.

Avoiding confusion

I want to go back to something I mentioned earlier — in the product led growth model, you don’t have a high-touch sales cycle. This makes clear positioning absolutely critical, because confusion will ultimately kill your company. There’s no opportunity to explain anything — a potential user either gets it or they don’t. This is true both pre-”purchase,” even when there is no money exchanged — say, with an open source project, a freemium version or a free trial — as well as after the end user has started using the product.

Product led growth will only happen if you position your products so that everything makes immediate sense to your end users. This also makes it easier for them to tell others about the product, both colleagues and higher-ups, thus leading to, well, growth.

Positioning is key. Don’t think that just because your product is awesome you’re doing product led growth right. If your product isn’t positioning well, even the most amazing product will struggle.

Emily Omier