Tackling Digital Product Management: Part 3

Welcome & Introductions

Roger Snyder | 00:00:00–00:04:30
Good morning everyone, and welcome to another edition of a Productside Executive Series webinar. My name is Roger Snyder and I’m the Vice President of Marketing at Productside. Thank you so much for joining us. I would say “this morning,” but depending on where you are in the world it could be afternoon or even evening.

Roger Snyder | 00:04:30–00:06:00
Today we are continuing our series about Digital Product Management. This is Part 3, and we’re talking about Product-Led Growth. I’m joined today by Susannah Axelrod and David Nash—there are their lovely faces. They’re both based in the Portland area. I’m in the Santa Cruz Mountains and, if you know that area, you know I’m unfortunately close to having to evacuate due to fires. But I’m excited to be here with you, virtually, from my home.

Roger Snyder | 00:06:00–00:07:30
David and Susannah, how are you folks doing this morning?

David Nash | 00:07:30–00:08:30
I think we’re probably doing better than you today, Roger. My goodness. Is there a chance you’re going to have to run out in the middle of the webinar?

Roger Snyder | 00:08:30–00:09:00
Not in the middle, but we may have to evacuate this afternoon. We roll with the punches, right?

Susannah Axelrod | 00:09:00–00:09:30
We’re all pulling for you, Roger—and for California. We’re watching what’s happening up here in Oregon, too.

Roger Snyder | 00:09:30–00:10:30
Thank you so much. It’s actually a beautiful blue-sky day here. We love our summers, and I’m just going to let this one sink in and last a while. Not quite 70°F yet—it could be worse. But this time of year is always a little bittersweet: the days start getting shorter and you know summer’s winding down.

Speaker Backgrounds & Series Context

Roger Snyder | 00:10:30–00:12:30
Let’s introduce our audience to your backgrounds and expertise. I’ll say a little bit about each of you.

Roger Snyder | 00:12:30–00:14:00
Susannah has held Product Management and strategy roles for more than 25 years. She started her career as a consultant working with tech companies and VCs in the thriving startup community in Israel. Later she held Product Marketing roles at Intel, launched a new product at Intuit, and led Product teams at Sage, Thomson Reuters, Verizon, and open-source startups in the developer tools space.

Roger Snyder | 00:14:00–00:15:00
She’s an award-winning speaker, leader, and mentor with community organizations including Portland ProductCamp, PDX Women in Tech, and the Portland chapter of Women in Product. So, welcome Susannah, and thank you for bringing your expertise to our audience today.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:15:00–00:15:30
Thanks, Roger. Great to be here.

Roger Snyder | 00:15:30–00:17:00
David Nash is a recognized expert in Product Management, Product Marketing, entrepreneurship, and team development. He has delivered generations of successful technology products—hardware, software, SaaS, systems, and services—and is an expert in B2B SaaS pricing, user experience, and in-app user engagement.

Roger Snyder | 00:17:00–00:18:00
My favorite part of his bio is that he has repeatedly built PM best practices and high-performing teams. He’s recognized as a community builder, coach, and “bar raiser,” and is the founder of CloudCamp Portland, held annually since 2012. Welcome, David.

David Nash | 00:18:00–00:18:30
Thank you so much, Roger. And based on that intro, Susannah sounds like someone I really want to work with—so I’m glad I get to do that every day.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:18:30–00:19:00
Same here. We’re both passionate about this stuff.

David Nash | 00:19:00–00:19:30
Just a quick note before we dive in: as Roger mentioned, this is part of a continuing series on Digital Product Management. This is Part 3, and the content you’re seeing today draws directly from our new Digital Product Management curriculum at Productside. We’ll talk more about how this fits in a little later.

Housekeeping & About Productside

Roger Snyder | 00:19:30–00:21:00
Let’s quickly go over some housekeeping items. After this webinar, we’d love for you to stay engaged with our Product Management community. Now more than ever, it’s helpful to connect with your peers. We have a LinkedIn leadership group where you can join others and use it as a forum to get together during these challenging times.

Roger Snyder | 00:21:00–00:22:00
In the chat box I’ll paste a link to the LinkedIn group so you can easily join and become a participant—not just a listener, but a contributor as well. We’d love to see conversations continue there.

Roger Snyder | 00:22:00–00:23:00
We love interacting with our audience, so during this webinar we encourage you to ask questions or share feedback. Please use the questions box and we’ll leave time at the end to answer as many as we can.

Roger Snyder | 00:23:00–00:24:00
Our most popular question is always, “Can I watch this webinar later?” The answer is yes. We’ll send a follow-up email after the webinar that includes a link to the recording, so you can watch it again or share with colleagues.

Roger Snyder | 00:24:00–00:25:30
Before I hand things over to Susannah and David, I’ll take a minute to introduce Productside. We empower Product Managers and Product Marketers with the knowledge and tools to build products that matter—products that matter to you, to your customers, and hopefully to your company and the world.

Roger Snyder | 00:25:30–00:26:30
If you need help improving your Product Management or Product Marketing skills—or your team’s skills—we offer a variety of services: training, consulting, coaching, and more. I won’t read the whole list, but check us out at Productside.com to see how we can help you expand your career or elevate your Product Management discipline.

Roger Snyder | 00:26:30–00:27:30
Recently we announced a new live course: **Digital Product Management**. This course focuses on the key skills and tools needed by Product Managers to quickly and iteratively discover, design, deliver, and grow digital products—ensuring your customers are delighted and your business goals are achieved.

Roger Snyder | 00:27:30–00:28:30
I’ll paste a link into the chat where you can learn more about our Digital Product Management course. At the end of this webinar we’ll provide a special discount code so you can sign up with a discount. We’ll share the amount and the code when we get there.

Roger Snyder | 00:28:30–00:29:30
This webinar is part of our Product Management Leadership Series and also part of a three-part mini-series on Digital Product Management. Today’s topic—Product-Led Growth—ties into our theme of “Implications of Change,” because PLG is a new way of thinking about how companies grow.

Roger Snyder | 00:29:30–00:31:00
A bit about today’s audience: nearly 50% of attendees are Product Managers or Product Marketers, and over 20% are Product Management leaders—directors or VPs. That’s perfect for today’s topic. As a PM, you’ll get ideas on how to inject Product-Led Growth into your product. As a leader, you can think about how to support PLG across the organization and help your PMs drive this change.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:31:00–00:31:30
We also see a big “Other” category in the attendee roles, which is always interesting—we’d love to hear what roles you’re in during the session.

Roger Snyder | 00:31:30–00:32:00
All right. With that, I’ll turn it over to our experts, David and Susannah.

What Is Product-Led Growth (PLG)?

David Nash | 00:32:00–00:33:00
Thanks, Roger. This is the third in our Digital Product Management series. We visited with you in May and June for Parts 1 and 2. This is Part 3. As Roger mentioned, all of this content is drawn from our new Digital Product Management curriculum. It’s the curriculum I always wished I had when I was leading Product teams.

David Nash | 00:33:00–00:34:00
Product-Led Growth is a huge topic. We’ve got less than an hour, so we’ll give you a meaningful overview and some practical starting points. If you want to go deep, the course is where we really unpack everything.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:34:00–00:35:00
To kick this off, I have a question for you all. We’re not launching this as a formal poll, but think about it mentally. We put up a list of practices earlier—things like free trials, in-product onboarding, product-qualified leads, usage-based pricing, viral referrals. Each of those is a best practice and a potential signal that you’re doing Product-Led Growth.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:35:00–00:36:30
Now, let me ask David a quiz question using these logos on the slide: Slack, Zoom, Atlassian, Dropbox, GitHub, and others. What do these companies have in common?

Susannah Axelrod | 00:36:30–00:37:30
A) I use them all. B) They send me constant notifications. C) They’re very successful SaaS companies. D) They’re Product-Led companies. E) All of the above.

David Nash | 00:37:30–00:38:00
I’m going to go with E: all of the above—with the possible exception of GitHub, which I haven’t used in a while. But yes, they’re extremely successful SaaS companies, they’re definitely Product-Led, and they do send a lot of notifications.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:38:00–00:39:00
Correct—ding, ding, ding. These are all big-time SaaS companies, and they’re all Product-Led. If you’re not using them personally, you’ve at least heard of them. So what does it actually mean to be Product-Led?

Susannah Axelrod | 00:39:00–00:40:30
First and foremost, a company is Product-Led when it relies on **product usage** and **user experience** to drive growth. Growth here means customer acquisition, retention, and expansion. Product is at the center of the business model—not just an output of Sales and Marketing.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:40:30–00:41:30
In a Product-Led company, many functions we usually think of as separate—Sales, Marketing, Product, Design, Engineering, Customer Success—are aligned around one core goal: making users successful in the product. Growth flows from that.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:41:30–00:42:30
Most of us come from **Sales-Led** companies, with long histories of success using Sales and Marketing as the primary engines of growth. Moving to a Product-Led model is not an overnight change. For many startups in that logo slide, PLG was baked into their DNA from the beginning, but more established companies can absolutely move in this direction.

Why Product-Led Growth? Performance & PLG Index

Susannah Axelrod | 00:42:30–00:44:00
So why would you want to be Product-Led in the first place? One reason is performance. On the slide, we show the cumulative market cap of a set of public PLG companies tracked by **OpenView Partners**, a Boston-based VC firm that focuses heavily on Product-Led companies.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:44:00–00:45:00
This “PLG Index” of companies shows extremely strong performance—roughly $200 billion in combined market cap at the time of the data we’re using. Even compared to other SaaS companies, PLG companies are outperforming.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:45:00–00:46:30
Beyond stock price, PLG companies show advantages in **customer acquisition cost (CAC)**. Freemium and free trial models—hallmarks of PLG—tend to lower CAC. OpenView’s data shows that while acquisition costs have risen for most companies over the years, freemium and PLG companies have seen far less growth in CAC—about 30% less over a four-year period.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:46:30–00:47:30
Why? Because PLG improves **lead quality**. If you’re a salesperson walking into a company that has never used your product, you have to do all the education, demos, and persuasion. But if you walk into a company where 1,000 employees are already using your free or trial version, solving real problems, that’s a very different conversation.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:47:30–00:48:30
In that world, Sales can sell the “on top” value: enterprise features, visibility, security, compliance, integrations, and so on. Those are higher-quality leads and a better hit rate, without needing an army of expensive field reps chasing small deals.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:48:30–00:49:30
Another trend: even in B2B, a large percentage of buyers prefer to **self-educate**. Research from firms like Forrester shows that many buyers want to explore the product, read content, and try things themselves before talking to Sales. PLG supports that.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:49:30–00:50:30
And finally, PLG focuses everyone on **user happiness**. When you make end users genuinely happy and successful, they come back, buy more, and they tell other people. That’s where viral and referral loops come in—though “viral” has taken on a different connotation lately, the concept still applies.

David Nash | 00:50:30–00:51:30
Let me add one more point from the OpenView data. PLG companies in this index outperform in three big ways: higher revenue, higher revenue growth, and higher gross margins. They also tend to spend **less** on big, expensive Sales and Marketing campaigns and **more** of their revenue on R&D. That’s good for long-term innovation.

From Funnel to Flywheel

Susannah Axelrod | 00:51:30–00:52:30
To really understand PLG, it helps to contrast it with the traditional **Sales and Marketing funnel**. On the slide, we have a classic funnel on the right: Awareness → Interest → Consideration → Intent → Purchase. This is how Sales and Marketing typically interpret the buyer’s journey.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:52:30–00:53:30
Marketing’s job is to guide buyers from awareness through interest and consideration, and then “hand off” leads to Sales for that last mile—from intent to purchase. That’s where Sales works budgets, objections, negotiations, and closes deals.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:53:30–00:54:30
Why is it pictured as a funnel? Because at every stage, some people drop out. A lot of people become aware, fewer show interest, fewer still deeply consider, and a small fraction purchase. That lonely stick figure at the bottom is the new customer.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:54:30–00:55:30
Notice that Product Management is often invisible in this diagram. We might support with messaging, positioning, or demo content, but in the traditional model, we really become central only *after* the purchase—once the buyer is handed off to onboarding or implementation.

Susannah Axelrod | 00:55:30–00:56:30
In Product-Led Growth, we move from the **funnel** to the **flywheel**. Instead of a linear process with handoffs, we think in terms of continuous loops driven by product usage.

David Nash | 00:56:30–00:58:00
On the flywheel graphic we’re showing, you’ll see stages like Evaluate → Activate → Adopt → Retain → Refer. This is not a one-and-done journey. Users can move around the loop multiple times, deepening their engagement and bringing others along.

David Nash | 00:58:00–00:59:00
The key difference: the **product** is at the center of the flywheel. The product is what brings users in, delivers value, encourages them to return, and gives them reasons to invite others. Sales and Marketing still matter, but they are working with an engine that’s already in motion.

David Nash | 00:59:00–01:00:00
We also use **pirate metrics**—AARRR—to think about how we measure this: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral. These metrics become the KPIs for growth in a PLG world.

David Nash | 01:00:00–01:01:00
In the old model, Product often “wasn’t invited to the party” when it came to growth. In PLG, Product is not only invited—we’re expected to play a leading role in driving the growth engine. That’s a big opportunity for Product Managers.

Customer-Facing PLG Best Practices

David Nash | 01:01:00–01:02:00
Let’s talk about some **customer-facing** best practices in PLG. We’ll group them into four buckets aligned with our flywheel: Activation, Adoption, Retention, and Referral.

David Nash | 01:02:00–01:04:00
First, **Activation**. This is about how customers find you and get started. In PLG, you remove friction from discovery and first use. People should be able to land on your site, understand the value, and get into the product quickly—often without talking to Sales or filling out long forms.

David Nash | 01:04:00–01:05:00
You also need to define what “activated” means. An activated user isn’t just someone who signed up; it’s someone who has experienced the core value of your product. At Productside, we talk about matching onboarding to that activation moment.

David Nash | 01:05:00–01:06:00
This is where **Product-Qualified Leads (PQLs)** come in. A PQL is someone who has actually used your product and hit a value milestone. They’re much more likely to convert than someone who just downloaded a whitepaper.

David Nash | 01:06:00–01:07:00
Companies like HubSpot, for example, classify PQLs into different tiers: users actively using the free product, users who have tried premium features, users who have hit usage thresholds, and so on. These are gold for Sales.

David Nash | 01:07:00–01:09:00
Next, **Adoption**. Once someone has tried the product, how do you turn them into a regular user? This is all about excellent **in-product onboarding**. Their first experience should be delightful and successful—especially if they’re on a free or trial plan.

David Nash | 01:09:00–01:10:00
A key principle: don’t ask for payment until you’ve delivered real value. Give users that “aha” moment first, then ask them to upgrade. It’s much easier to justify pricing once the value is obvious.

David Nash | 01:10:00–01:11:00
You need to instrument your product so you know which features drive that “aha,” which behaviors correlate with long-term use, and which actions correlate with upgrades. That instrumentation informs both Product decisions and your pricing and packaging strategy.

David Nash | 01:11:00–01:12:00
Then we move to **Retention**—turning regular users into loyal ones. Here, you want to make it easy for users to get help, give feedback, and discover more value within the product.

David Nash | 01:12:00–01:13:00
That includes in-app help, knowledge bases, contextual tooltips, and in-product feedback prompts like “Was this feature helpful?” The data from those interactions should feed back into your roadmap and UX improvements.

David Nash | 01:13:00–01:14:00
This is also where **whole product** thinking comes in: not just the core product, but support, documentation, community, and integrations. All of that contributes to retention.

David Nash | 01:14:00–01:15:30
Finally, **Referral**. You want to turn happy customers into advocates. That means making it easy for them to invite colleagues into the product, share content, leave positive reviews, and participate in community.

David Nash | 01:15:30–01:16:30
If I love your product, I should be able to send an invite to Susannah from inside the app and say, “Click this and start using this with me.” That’s one of the most powerful growth engines you can build.

Internal Competencies: Strategy, Org Design & Data

Susannah Axelrod | 01:16:30–01:17:30
It’s one thing to list best practices. It’s another to build an organization that can actually execute them. So let’s talk about **internal competencies** you need for PLG to work.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:17:30–01:18:30
We’ll highlight three areas: 1) Corporate strategy and vision 2) Organizational design and roles 3) Data, experimentation, and infrastructure

Susannah Axelrod | 01:18:30–01:20:00
First, **strategy**. Your product vision and roadmap need to be **PLG-aligned**. That often means investing in user experience, onboarding, and free or low-friction entry points—even if those investments don’t show immediate revenue.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:20:00–01:21:00
That can be hard for organizations used to tying every roadmap investment directly to near-term sales. Leadership and even the board need to understand that you are seeding long-term growth and that benefits may show up over several quarters.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:21:00–01:22:00
Second, UX needs to become a **north star**. In many B2B organizations, UX is still under-invested. In PLG, you can’t succeed without strong UX and user-centric thinking baked into everything you do.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:22:00–01:23:00
Third, you need a **culture of data and experimentation**. PLG is not “plan everything perfectly and launch once.” It’s about launching, learning, iterating, and continuously improving. That requires comfort with small experiments and adjusting based on evidence.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:23:00–01:24:00
Executives also need to track **PLG-oriented KPIs**: activation rates, daily active users (DAU), DAU/MAU ratios, time-to-value, free-to-paid conversion, churn, expansion, and so on—not just top-line revenue.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:24:00–01:25:30
Next, **organizational design**. Putting product at the center means some functions will need to shift how they work.

• Sales needs to move from “sell before usage” to “build on usage.” They may fear cannibalization (“If we give features away for free, we’ll lose deals”), so you need to show them how PQLs can actually improve win rates.
• Customer Success needs to shift from doing all the onboarding themselves to enabling **self-service** onboarding and focusing on higher-value interactions.
• UX & Design become deeply integrated partners with Product and Engineering, not last-minute add-ons.
• Product Marketing uses the product as the primary lead magnet, while still producing content and campaigns.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:25:30–01:27:00
Finally, **data and experimentation**. PLG companies invest in analytics infrastructure, experimentation platforms, and data science. They track in-product behavior, run A/B tests, and use that data to inform both product decisions and go-to-market decisions.

PLG and Enterprise Sales

Susannah Axelrod | 01:27:00–01:28:00
A common question is: “What about **enterprise sales**? Does PLG mean we don’t need salespeople anymore?” The short answer is no—enterprise sales is still very important for many PLG companies.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:28:00–01:29:00
If you look at pricing pages for many PLG companies, you’ll see free and self-service tiers—and then an **“Enterprise”** tier that says “Contact us.” That’s where enterprise sales teams come in.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:29:00–01:30:00
Large customers still want custom deals: specific SLAs, integrations, security and compliance commitments, dedicated support, and tailored pricing. C-suite buyers in many industries still expect a personal relationship and negotiation.

Susannah Axelrod | 01:30:00–01:31:00
So PLG doesn’t eliminate enterprise sales; it **changes the starting point**. Instead of sales trying to convince a cold prospect, they’re building on a foundation where hundreds or thousands of users already love the product.

David Nash | 01:31:00–01:32:00
From a Sales perspective, PQLs are incredibly attractive. If I’m in Sales, I want more **product-qualified leads**—users who have already adopted the free or lower tier—because I can close more of those deals with less effort.

David Nash | 01:32:00–01:33:00
So one way to “sell PLG to Sales” is to show them that it makes their job easier and their numbers better. It’s not about taking away their role; it’s about feeding them better opportunities.

Summary, Next Steps & Course Offer

Susannah Axelrod | 01:33:00–01:34:30
Let’s summarize what we’ve learned today.

• Product-Led Growth is a model that uses your **product** and your **users** as the primary mechanism for growth.
• PLG companies are outperforming traditional sales-led companies in revenue, growth, and margins.
• Your company— even if it’s enterprise and sales-driven today—can adopt PLG best practices and become more Product-Led.

David Nash | 01:34:30–01:36:00
What can you do next?

1. Use the **PLG Maturity Assessment** we’ll send to you after the webinar. It will help you benchmark where you are across multiple dimensions and identify opportunities to improve.
2. Have conversations with your **Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, and Support** teams. Understand their concerns and show them the “what’s in it for me” of PLG.
3. Pick **one place to start**. Maybe it’s your pricing page, maybe onboarding, maybe instrumentation, maybe a simple referral mechanism. You don’t have to do everything at once.
4. Define your **metrics**. Whether you use pirate metrics (AARRR) or your own set, decide what to measure and review those metrics regularly.

David Nash | 01:36:00–01:37:00
And of course, if you’d like to go deeper, our **Digital Product Management** course dives into Product-Led Growth, onboarding, engagement, pricing and packaging, experimentation, and more.

Roger Snyder | 01:37:00–01:38:30
We’re offering a special discount code for this course. Use **PLG250** at checkout to get $250 off the live online Digital Product Management course. The code is valid for a limited time, and you can share it with colleagues. You can only buy one seat per checkout for yourself, but please pass the code along if you know others who’d benefit.

Roger Snyder | 01:38:30–01:39:30
We’ll also be sending you the PLG maturity assessment we mentioned—just because you showed up today. Use it with your team to spark discussion and planning.

Roger Snyder | 01:39:30–01:41:00
We have a number of great questions in the Q&A—about PLG in hardware, PLG beyond SaaS, and how to incentivize Sales and Support to participate in PLG. We’ve touched on some of those, and we’ll answer more in follow-up content.

Roger Snyder | 01:41:00–01:42:00
For now, I want to thank David and Susannah for sharing their expertise, and thank all of you for spending your time with us today. We hope you found this helpful.

Roger Snyder | 01:42:00–01:43:00
Our next webinar is focused on getting hired as a Product Manager—interviewing with a pro—and we’ll cover how to do that fully remotely. The registration link is in the chat.

Roger Snyder | 01:43:00–01:44:00
Once again, thank you David and Susannah, and thank you all for attending. Have a great rest of your day.