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USER CENTRICITY IN PLG

In Product-Led Growth (PLG) companies, the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion.

Even with hybrid go-to-market motions, for a large percentage of your users and customers you don’t have the luxury of human-to-human interaction to.

Everything is automated.

Your product is your voice (and your eyes, ears, nose and your ears, your

Therefore, staying close to users — understanding their needs, preferences, and pain points — is not just helpful; it is fundamental to success.

When product and growth teams prioritize user intimacy, they create a continuous feedback loop that drives product improvements, fosters user satisfaction, and propels organic growth.

Firstly, staying close to users allows you to build products that truly resonate with your audience.

It’s an ongoing process - once reached, you need to maintain product-market fit.

That means keeping your finger on the pulse of your users and their use of your product.

You have to regularly challenge your beliefs about what users love about the product, and what areas need improvement (they may not be so polite about it).

Doing this ensures that product development is aligned with actual user needs instead of hypothetical assumptions. It should be obvious that products developed based on direct user input are more likely to solve real problems, and have higher user engagement and retention. Yet so many companies drift away from this approach as they scale.

Secondly, understanding users at a granular level enables you to develop and execute on more targeted and effective growth strategies.

The deeper your understanding of user behavior and preferences, the more easily and more accurately you can identify and act on growth opportunities from optimising onboarding funnels to spinning up entire new growth loops.

And if your product and market lend themselves to product-led acquisition, delivering a product experience that exceeds expectations can turn satisfied users into enthusiastic promoters who drive organic growth.

Last but not least, you’d better believe that when…

• choice and competition in your market are increasing

• switching costs are decreasing

• the appetite and ability for users and their teams to more autonomously decide and act on choosing alternate solutions is increasing

…your competitors will be leveraging the agility that is provided by staying close to their users.

For PLG companies, staying close to users is not just a strategic advantage; it is the cornerstone of sustainable growth. I say the same about usage retention, but the two are inextricably linked. You won’t have strong usage retention if you aren’t staying close to users.

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5 WAYS TO WALK THE WALK

I challenge every product and growth team I work with to become the go-to experts about their users.

And as a leader, I want to lead by example.

How can you expect your teams to build and iterate on incredible products that elegantly solve meaningful problems if they don’t stay close to users?

And it’s not realistic or effective to expect them to stay close to users if all you do is talk the talk.

You have to walk the walk.

No leader is above this.

So here are 5 ways that as founders, or product and growth leaders, your actions can set the tone to establish a culture of user centricity.

1. Participate in cross-functional secondments

Whenever I join a new company in a product and/or growth role, and then on an ongoing periodic basis, I like to spend time working within other functions.

I’ve found the support function and customer success functions to be particularly great temporary homes. In these roles you get close to users on a daily basis.

With support in particular, you are right there when users most need your help. You get the unabridged version of their pains and frustrations. You get to better learn about the problems they’re trying to solve, and you get to understand how your product is getting in their way.

It’s a fast track to level up your empathy with users.

You’re not expected to lead any support cases, account reviews or any other such calls, but you should pair and shadow.

You also get the benefit of

• Creating strong relationships with cross-functional teams

• Learning more about both sides (external and internal) of that specific interface between your company and users

• Understanding and identifying opportunities to alleviate the challenges internal teams face

After your secondment, share your learnings with the wider team, and leverage them where it makes sense.

At CloudBees for example, a support secondment I did led to us adapting the product with significantly improved logging that streamlined problem diagnosis.

2. Be everywhere your users are

Your users hang out in different places. Whether it be Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Subreddits, Discord communities, Slacks or wherever, as a company you need to find them and be a helpful presence there.

But this is also a golden opportunity for leaders to stay connected to users.

When you see a user post about struggling with your product, don’t expect that someone in the social media team, or someone in DevRel will pick it up.

Follow up directly there and then.

And here’s another example:

Notice in both examples I’m not trying to just resolve the issue and close the conversation. I’m trying to establish a deeper dialog.

This type of behaviour is quickly noticed and mimicked, particularly when you bring learnings back to the team(s), for example in the weekly Impact and Learnings reviews.

3. Participate in user research

It’s a common and harmful pattern that as companies scale and quantitative data becomes more readily available, they take their eye off the ball when it comes to qualitative data.

As a leader you can establish a cultural norm of regular conversations with users of your product, and one of the most direct and effective ways you can do this is to actively participate in research activities.

• Join user interviews

• Join observational studies

• Attend session replay huddles

• Review and feedback on research proposals and interview scripts

• Join focus groups

No, you don’t need to be on every user interview or observation session, but make a point of joining them as a silent participant on a regular basis, and (ensuring you follow any interview scripts for consistency) take the lead from time to time.

At Snyk I also reinforced this by ensuring our Impact and Learnings reviews had a standing agenda item - ‘Developer Research’. Most often this section would be led by our Growth UX lead, or a Growth PM, but occasionally I’d step up.

4. Inform and communicate decisions with data from users

We all know the importance of product and growth teams making decisions that are informed by trustworthy data.

We often talk about that in the context of quantitative behavioural usage data but of course qual is equally important (and often more so).

As a leader, you are expected to ask the right questions to validate the assumptions and supporting evidence that the teams present. Doing that consistently further helps drive data informed behaviour within the org.

But there’s another opportunity that is less commonly seized by leaders - publicly communicating the thinking and data behind your decisions.

It’s easy to assume people understand the reasoning behind the decisions you’ve made, but that’s often not true.

Whenever you present or discuss a decision that you’ve made based on data from or about users, cite your sources and (in appropriate contexts) show your working.

This public reinforcement goes a long way in emphasising the importance of data from users being at the heart of how the team should think when making day-to-day decisions.

5. Amplify the voice of the user

As a leader, you are in a unique position to regularly have the eyes and ears of large sections of the company. Often on all-hands it’s the entire company.

Make a habit of starting or ending every one of those speaking / presenting sessions with featuring a quote from a user.

This is how you turn the platform you have into megaphone for the voice of the user, and everyone gets used to this user proximity as being normal and expected.

And don’t always make it a cheerleading session, either.

Draw attention to the voice of (justifiably) less-than-happy users too.

Combine this with #4 in the list here to share the actions that user feedback has driven.

GEEK SUMMARY

Leaders in product and growth should lead by example to foster user-centric cultures. Here are five actionable ways to do that:

1. Take cross-functional secondments: Spend time in support and customer success roles to understand user pain points and build empathy for both users and other user facing roles.

2. Engage with users where they are: Engage with users on the platforms they frequent and be responsive to their feedback.

3. Participate in user research: Regularly join user interviews and other research studies.

4. Make your data-informed decisions visible: Inform your decisions with user data and make the rationale visible to the team.

5. Amplify user voices: Regularly share user quotes and feedback in team meetings and all-hands to reinforce user-centric thinking.

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HELP ME IMPROVE

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That’s all for today,

Until next time!

Ben

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