Background

Wiser Solutions’ sales and onboarding strategy has traditionally been extremely manual and labor intensive, with long sales cycles and white glove onboarding for any new customers or features. This is unsustainable for growth over time, so introduced mandatory Product Led Growth processes into new feature design, and had our team take time away from net new work to revisit aspects of existing products to establish better PLG patterns.

Challenges

Teaching the team about Product Led Growth
Everyone, including myself, was inexperienced in PLG methodology. Of course we were aware of common UI components, like the use of tooltips and product tours, but PLG is so much more than just adding those into an existing UI.
If we wanted our PLG efforts to be impactful, we had to stop thinking about getting the user informed, excited, and trained as being an afterthought in the design process. It had to be woven into Discovery from outset.
PLG for existing products
Our design team expanded rapidly in 2023-24 to account for the influx of products due to Wiser Solutions’ M&A strategy. A huge hurdle was going back and looking at fully-fledged products already in the market, and do in-depth, highly critical audits to discern what aspects were driving value and see how we can put those front and center to drive excitement and make aha moments happen sooner.

Kick-Off

I sent copies of Product Led Growth by Ramli Jon to every member of my team and had them learn about what we were going to be embarking on. This book is a fantastic primer and breaks down the PLG process into bite sized, intuitive, and actionable steps. We needed to have everyone on the same page and using the same lexicon to talk deeply about this.

Next, I organized a virtual offsite to kick off the effort. I took all of the designers on my team away from their new feature improvement for a week straight to discuss what we were going to begin doing and ideating on how to make the ideas in the book into tangible artifacts and functional processes. The offsite agenda was:

Monday and Tuesday began with in-depth discussion on each of the core elements of PLG, paired with design thinking exercises relevant to the discussion. For example, I gave a 40 minute presentation on the concept of the “First Strike” then had everyone on the team get into groups and find examples of First Strike moments in the products that they were responsible for.
Wednesday was used to break up the normal monotony of an offsite by giving everyone the day away from work with the caveat that they needed to find an excellent example of PLG being used in their day-to-day life so that they could come back and give the group a presentation on it.
Thursday kicked off with presentations of what we found and how we could learn from each example. During the afternoon we began creating product pitches a la Shark Tank, shared our draft with each other and iterated on our messaging.
Friday morning, Wiser product leaders and a few members of our C-Suite were invited to participate in our mock product pitches as “Sharks” and decide if they wanted to “invest” based on how well the pitch was given. This was super fun! We spent the remainder of Friday talking about how we could make all of our learnings this week into actionable processes to take into our day-to-day.

Assigning Champions

One of the ways I sought to level up my team was to make each of them a champion over an aspect of the PLG process based on their personal interests. I never want to be an autocrat and have my team feel like they are expected to follow my whims. So by giving each person ownership, I’m getting them used to managing their own processes, assigning work, delegating tasks, and feeling responsible for the success of others. I wanted to bridge the gap between individual contributorship and wider visibility, building their managerial skillset.

Artifacts

I was the champion of the process kickoff. I put together a series of instructional meeting templates and time-boxed discussion topics to that product ownership teams could land near where they needed to get without having prior knowledge of PLG. This consisted of a set of FigJam boards with boxes for the teams to fill out during early Discovery, referring back to these artifacts when finishing or beginning stages of the Discovery process.

Likewise, I also added new assets to the existing Discovery Calendar Miro board.

How did it turn out?

So far, so good! We’ve begun new forms of constant testing and iteration based on usability data that we hadn’t considered gathering until now. There isn’t a week that goes by without some A/B testing on every single one of our products. Relationships with stakeholders are improving because core product teams need to collaborate with the Marketing, Customer Success, and Data Science regularly. We’re seeing incremental improvement constantly, and are thinking about how we engage both current and potential customers more designedly.

This is a muscle that our design organization is still building and I’m so excited to see us continue to grow.