The digital world is getting highly influential and becoming freemium. As a result, revenue generation becomes the most essential aspect of the product experience and falls under the direct responsibility of the product team. In this Blog let us see about Product Led Growth. 

Where does one need to start when building a product that gives a solution to the real-time problem while also assisting a potential audience through a buying decision? The Initial step begins with the product experience and its value.

Individuals can understand the power of product-led-growth with sample testing before buying a product, or taking a test drive before purchasing a car.  These are a few examples to understand the product experience.  For product managers, it is integral to understand the product and its experience. Ask the following questions to understand the product experience:

– Does the initial product experience lead to relevant, specific, and meaningful context?

– Do directional and social cues such as checklists, product tours, and empty states indicate high-value behavior?

– Does the key task completion is indicated through a success state?

– Are all the irrelevant points of distractions and frictions removed from the key workflow?

– Does the workflow include steps that can go away or appear later?

Build Product value

There are no products that appear fully complete with a loyal customer base and price tag. These are the outcomes of the dedicated teams that have invested effort and time into solving a problem. The solution of this issue is the source of value and commonly the primary focus of a product manager’s effort. The thoughts turn to monetization and revenue, it pays to keep the value front and center.

The product value is the key reason why customers utilize or want to use the product. The integral part here is translating value into income is determining the monetizable value. It is highly dependent on the product/item that users want to purchase. Hence identifying the monetizable value should be the initial step.

If the product-led model has to be successful, then you should understand the three categories of customers become essential.

Functional outcome: The main tasks that customers want to complete. Most brands can pinpoint this. For an eCommerce or ad-based platform, the task could be generating and acquiring leads that turn into potential customers. Whereas, for a business intelligence tool, understanding the business’s core KPIs can be the prime task.

Emotional outcome: This is based on how the users want to feel as an outcome of executing a key functional task. This could be anything like feeling motivated when you reveal the business-building insights or a sense of accomplishment when you complete a checklist.

Social outcome:  This is based on how the users want to be perceived by the audience by using the product. A complete understanding of the product’s social outcome is often overlooked, but it is essential to separate standard products from the great ones.  

Build a Product That Counts

What is the difference between a great idea and an actual product? Market validation and customer expectation, as they are the early adopters and feedback you receive from them can make or break the brand value.  Building something that adds value is essential to kick start your process of delivering more and ask why and whether some features are working. Here establishing the MVP is critical.  Take the MVP into consideration and introduce the product to the potential customers, allow them to interact with it and figure out feasible ways to monetize it, seek and analyze their feedback and finally start optimizing the product. This is one of the effective and productive ways to build a great product that adds value.

Get to know why your customer likes the product and what are the features that attract them and what are all the things that drive them away. All these insights will lead to a better product version that will fetch more potential clients and keep your product ahead of the competitive curve. 

Delivering as proposed 

To succeed in product-led growth, the proposed value of the product (promised by the sales and marketing team) needs to align with the experienced value of the product (actual product). The bigger the gap, the leakier your sales funnel.

Consider when a customer signs up for a product, they envision what the brand had promised. When brands keep their word about their promised quality, indirectly they convey and build trust.

However, this is not a simple task, this is one of the biggest challenges faced by the companies that attempt to crush the value gap.

When it comes to the product’s onboarding flow, when a user tries the product for the first time, especially for the B2B customers, they should experience the value quickly.

When end users fail to achieve a key task/outcome in your product quickly, it has a high ability debt. While some level of ability debt is unavoidable when building a new product or a beta version, a good product team will constantly figure out methods to improvise upon it.

Takeaway

The product team takes complete responsibility to ensure that the end results are as expected and successful. The success of the product relies mostly on the products that are able to generate revenue by offering more value for the customers. Through constant feedback, careful consideration, analysis, and focus across the product value, the message, the pitch, and the conversion can provide not only excellent user experiences but also act as a revenue generator as well. This was all about Product Led Growth: Building products that sell itself.