AMA: Retool Head of Product Marketing, Kevin Garcia on PLG Product Marketing

I think PMM at Slack could help with land and expand in quite a few ways: * Help understand the first user and their use case * Help understand the first buyer and their use case * Help understand the customer journey within your most successful accounts * Develop a point of view on which personas and use cases are the most critical during lands and which ones are most critical during expansion—and start building what's needed to win them Slack can be used for many purposes—planning a major launch, team syncs, etc. Understanding who the first user is across your entire customer base will help shed a lot of light on the pockets where you are doing really well (e.g. there are a ton of PMs signing up to collaborate with their team on product launches). You want to know their: * Role * Seniority * Department * Motivation for signing up / first use case. You can get some of this from your own data, enrichment tools, surveys. etc. Then you want to understand who the first buyer is. Who is the first person to enter a credit card or sign a contract. For a tool like Slack, you have a TON of non-B2B use cases (e.g. friend group chats, community groups, weddings) on the free plan. So you want to be able to run the same kind of analysis you did above, but this time focusing on the people who either 1) add a credit card or 2) book a demo with sales. Are they the same person as above? Their boss? Their IT team? Knowing the gaps is HUGE in identifying how purchase decisions are being made and who is influencing the final decision. From there, look at your ~100 top accounts (by revenue). Go back and find the answer to the questions above. What was their journey to get to where they are now. What were their use cases? And, more importantly, what are the patterns across these accounts. At this point, you now have a deep understanding of how you land users in general, how they convert to paid users over time, and can overlay how your top accounts either model or break away from those insights. Now you can go influence Product, Sales, CSM teams to execute on campaigns, updates, launches, etc with you that will help drive more users to activate the right use cases (that lead to the most revenue) faster. I think PMM providing this depth of research is hard, but it gives you an incredibly solid seat at the table and helps you prioritize across different teams/projects—because the most powerful insights will have a ton of data to back them up.

When I think about improving onboarding, I think about the initial motivations and expectations users are bringing to my product and the specific pain points during onboarding. Here are questions you can ask: * Initial motivations and expectations * What initially motivated you to sign up for our product? * What problem were you trying to solve/what were you trying to do? * How much time did you dedicate to solving this problem with our product? * What expectations did you have before using our product? * What resources did you explore before using our product? * Were there areas of the product or use cases you expected to see in the onboarding? * Have you used a product like ours in the past? * Specific pain points * Where did you get stuck? * At what point before that did things become unclear or frustrating? * At what point before that did you feel unsure about what to do next? * What information or resources would have been helpful to have during the onboarding? * How would you redesign the onboarding flow to better suit your needs? * How much do you want to be guided through the process versus be able to explore the product independently?

At Retool, we've evolved our structure around the product-led and sales-led sides of our business. About half of our team is focused on sales-led growth, partnering closely with demand generation and GTM teams on everything from integrated campaigns, analyst relations, enablement, and more. The other half is focused on our product-led growth. Retool sells to developers, so at our company that means partnering closely with growth and content marketing, as well as product, on everything from SEO to developer marketing to build alongs and more. Both sides of the team lead product launches, run competitive/customer programs, and work on foundational ICP/customer research. But this structure helps us give PMMs more focus and clearer success metrics to align their work with.

For any PMM role, I tend to evaluate the PMM on research mindset, storytelling, and ability to execute. Here's how I'd focus my search (and what I'd ask) for PLG PMMs: * Research mindset * What I'm looking for: PLG tends to be very focused on scaled channels (e.g. SEO/SEM, social) and product usage. As a result, much of the research these PMMs will do is scaled—running large-scale surveys, digging into product usage reports, etc. I'm looking for individuals with who can be self-sufficient in following the product funnel, running scaled research, and making calls on strategy when they aren't able to "call every customer" to connect the dots. * Question I've asked: Describe a time when you made a strategic recommendation for improving a product's adoption funnel or user journey based primarily on quantitative data sources rather than direct customer interactions. What types of data did you analyze (e.g. product usage metrics, survey results, website analytics)? * Storytelling * What I'm looking for: In PLG, you don't lean on a sales team nor field events for as much of your product storytelling as you do in SLG. Instead, you rely on digital channels like the blog, YouTube, review sites, newsletters, etc. Your website is also much more important in driving your overall revenue. So I look for PMMs with a strong background in launching and doing storytelling across digital channels. Think PMMs who know how to create killer video content. PMMs who can distill the entire buyer journey into the homepage and pricing page. * Question I've asked: Tell me about a successful digital marketing campaign or web experience you've executed to drive awareness and adoption of a product offering. What were the key channels and content formats you leveraged? How did you approach distilling the product's value proposition and buyer journey into compelling content? * Ability to execute * What I'm looking for: When it comes to the digital channels, the website, video, and in-product experiences—experimentation is critical. You simply can't reinvent each of these things each time you have to launch. I'm looking for someone who is able to ship iterative changes fast, has the follow through to apply what they learn from one channel to others, and has the taste to avoid creating a choppy experience for the sake of optimization. * Question I've asked: Describe a situation where you had to iterate on an in-product experience through rapid experimentation and iteration. What was your process for identifying opportunities, prioritizing tests, and shipping changes quickly? How did you ensure insights from one channel informed improvements across other touch points while maintaining a cohesive experience? I think take home assignments are an excellent tool for both the candidate and the hiring manager. At their best, they are a way to signal to the candidate "this area of PMM is hugely important for this role" and a way for the candidate to showcase some of their skill. For every role, I tend to think hard with the associated product team on which of the above is the biggest gap, and then choose a take home assignment based on those needs.

Every successful SaaS company needs to find, activate, retain, and monetize users. Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy that aims to make the product—as opposed to sales or marketing teams—the primary (or only) way that users hit these milestones. Just like being a PMM at a sales-led company, you need to: * Define your user * Define your buyer * Understand the urgent problems they want to solve * Understand the habits you want them to keep/break * Understand the value they get from your product (and their willingness to pay) Every PMM needs to provide these insights and build stories around them to win the market. The big difference for PLG PMMs is how you arrive at these insights and who you influence. Product-led growth requires PMMs to keep a much stronger pulse on product usage at every stage. You still market to customers directly, but the primary team you enable also shifts from sales teams to product teams. In short: the role you play is the same, but the methods are quite different.

I recommend you: 1. Learn how to get your own insights 2. Learn what's worked for others 3. Develop your own taste You'll notice most of these lean toward taking action versus "required reading." That's on purpose. The best way to learn PLG is by doing it. Learn how to get your own insights Build up your skills in collecting and synthesizing data * Book a 1-hr lunch with someone on your data or product team to walk you through how they measure product usage today. * Read 10-50 customer support tickets and develop a point of view on the most common issues customers are facing. * Pretend you're the target user. Record yourself going through the signup and onboarding flow. Identify 2 things you'd want to change. Do the same for a competitor. * Ask a question about the product funnel, then try to find the answer. That might mean building a new dashboard. Or customizing an existing one. Or learning SQL. Learn what's worked for others See how other's do it, apply what makes sense * Ben Williams (The Product-Led Geek) published a great post with all my favorite PLG thinkers, including my all-time favorite: Lenny. * Don't just copy what they do. Focus on how they problem solve. What steps do they take? What questions do they ask? When do they call something a success (or not)? Develop your own taste Become comfortable having a point of view * Take inventory of every major product update from last year. Pretend your CEO has asked that you help the team understand which update was the least impactful to customers. Research. Write up your findings in 500 words or less. * Research the 3 biggest customers (by revenue) you lost last year. Go deep on their history with your product. Really get a feel for where things fell apart. Write up your findings in 250 words or less.