The ultimate guide to adding a PLG motion | Hila Qu (Reforge, GitLab)

29:35Hopefully, you can even close a bigger deal than if they would have buy on their own, right? So that's another pass. I call that PQL, P2A, like sales pass. In that sense, for product qualified lead, right? Product qualified leads, product qualified account. So the first step is for you to understand those two funnels. And then think about if you want to add PLG, right? What is this journey? What are the steps along that funnel? you need to establish for your product in order for your user to be able to convert in that funnel. So you talked about these two funnels. One question is, are they basically the same for almost every product?

30:18Or should you try to figure out what's really unique about my funnel? And then second, is there an example of a product they think about? Here's the saleslet funnel for them, and then here's the product -led version of that just to give me a little more real even. Maybe I can give an example first, then we can talk about the other question. So I can use Gillab as an example since that's where I'm most familiar. Gillab actually have an enterprise sales team, very strong sales team from the very beginning. But the company also started from an open source product. Maybe describe what Gillab is for folks that aren't super familiar with it?

30:53Yeah. So Gillab, we are a developer platform, DevOps platform, basically engineer a team developer teams, they use this product to manage their entire DevOps process from storing their code, kind of managing the version control, releasing, CSED, security scan, all of that. It's an all -in -one platform for that team. For the sales of that motion, I mentioned the teams, our marketing team will work in bringing a lot of visitors to our website, and they sign up for free trial for free accounts. And then we have this lead nurturing and lead scoring process to surface which are the good ones for our sales team.

31:39And our sales team, we have S &B, we have the mid market, we have enterprise, and they each kind of took their buckets of leads and work on them and close them, they become revenue. And then how the product -less funnel work for us is someone maybe as a developer, I heard about Gillab, I go to website, I see, oh, I can actually sign up for a free account. I may use it for my personal project. My company may be using another solution, but I have some side project I'm doing as a developer, I want to use Gillab to host that, and I did that, right? And so you begin to see this individual user is having some usage, But nothing to do with his company.

32:23And then one day maybe this person's employer, they are like, we want to look into some other solutions. We have way too many point solutions for each step of DevOps. Now we want to potentially consolidate them. So what are the options? And this engineer raised his hands. Hey, I have been using GILAB for a very long time. And I really like it. I think we should check them out. And then this team, maybe this engineer manager or CTO, depending on the size of company, they're like, okay, he went to their website and he kind of signed up for free trial because that allowed him to test some more advanced features.

33:02It's 30 days, but he already has this person knows how to use it, right? This person already set up the foundation with the free version and they started the free trial. They used this 30 day to do a proof of concept, the entire company already using it a part of their process. And they're like, oh, awesome. I tried this feature, that feature, that feature. It's a really, it's a great tool. It can support our workflow. And I'm pretty sure we should be able to kind of get our eye from this product. And then in this case, they are like, I only need five seats. It's cheap. I would just go to the pricing page and check out the pricing and buy from there.

33:46Or like in some cases this is a big company and we see like this big company is using our product. Our sales team get that data, say, no, they may send an email and reach out and say, hey, I saw you are checking out. How can I help? And that may start a sales conversation eventually become a contract from there. Great. Thank you, Story of sharing that example. Maybe a last question on this first step I'm happy at the funnel. Do you recommend people just get in front of a whiteboard and just sit together and like Here's what it would be potentially if we added a product like growth motion Yes, yes, and I think it's not that it like the devil is in the details Just mapping all the big steps is not that hard right you think about I have a marketing site already I can build a free version and then they use the free version and I build a check out slow and like and that's it That's the story, right?

34:42But that's the first step. If you don't even have those components, building like mapping out the funnel will allow you to see amazing check out slow, amazing free version. Like you already identified that. But the devil is in the detail. When they are down, how do you design experience for each of the steps? What do you say on your marketing side? To drive free sign up, in the free sign up, what how do you guide them to use the three most important features. In the check out flow, which payment option do you offer so that customers from error wear can buy very smoothly? That's the next layer kind of detail.

35:22That actually has so many opportunities for optimization, maximization, and all of that. That's actually really gets like way to the next question, which is just, okay, mapped out the funnel. What do you do next? If you don't have the foundational components, you need to build all of that. But you kind of have something. If you already have this funnel, exist, right? It's just not working perfectly, but it's working. It's there. I think the next step is you need to pick a starting point. Like where do you want to focus first to drive the maximum impact? Personally, I'm a big fan of finding leverage.

35:59I think doing growth is always about finding leverage. If you can always find the area that with relatively small investment can give you the biggest results, that can be such a kind of momentum can empower you through future experiments and more work. And just finding leverage is a beautiful thing in my mind. So I always want to do that. So when I think about Pika starting point, one thing I actually do with a lot of my advisor clients as a first step is we do a full funnel audit Full PLG funnel audit think about we go through me as a kind of end user go through the entire journey I'll pretend I'm interested semi interested and I want to buy from the website does that kind of attract me, does that?

36:54Is it super clear the value proposition? And then from there going through the sign up of the free account or free trial, is that smooth? And when I begin to use the product, do I get to my aha moment fast? Or I'm very confused and frustrated, abandoned at that moment? And from there, if I'm like, think this is good, right? I hit my aha moment I want to buy, can I even buy? Like, if you will, you will never believe like when I do this audit, there are so many low -hanging fruits usually in this process. For example, one client, when I go to the checkout flow, the kind of checkout form is so confusing.

37:37They ask a bunch of questions that only, let's say, UK customer need. Every word, every other place is they don't need to answer, but they ask the question anyway. And I as a US kind of based person is very confused and drop off at that point. And then there are other things like, for example, that I have moments that I talk about. I don't know what to do when I'm laying down the inside of product for the first time. I'm super excited and ready, but I don't know what to do. Like I am so lost and confused. That's usually a pretty big focus area and opportunity area, like just getting your users to have moments.

38:16They already over so many hurdles here, but don't just like turn down them and they leave because it's so confusing. It might be helpful just to explain an aha moment. You know, people hear this term a lot. And it's like a simple way to think about what is an aha moment. I think it as a moment, as a first time a user experienced value of your product. So it is kind of, it gets popular because Facebook has this like example from the early growth days like you add, I think you add 10 friends in seven days, you hit your aha moment. But there are many layers under that. The reason why Facebook used that to define aha moment is because in the early days, if you add this friends, right, you begin into form some connection, you can see interesting feeds, you can interact with your friends.

39:12And that social interaction, it's the core value of Facebook. And Facebook leaves by looking at a lot of data. If you meet that data metric criteria, it's kind of very likely you will hit that at a moment. But I think for a lot of, especially we're talking about many SaaS products, B2B software, right? The value of such product is usually either you see a workflow, can be supported by this. It can save your time, it can save your money, it can help you make more money, or it just meet self -dispaint point that you never get to self, like on your own, without a self -aware product. So at Gillab, we actually did a bunch of analysis.

40:01We're trying to understand what is the Hamilton for our new users. We ended up have something along the light of two users, two features used in the force 14 days. So kind of it's very similar to Facebook's kind of the format, but deep down because we are a platform, we are a team product, two users is talking about the team components. Whatever the first user is trying and using, that is so valuable, he or she is confident to invite another co -worker to come in. That itself is a very, very valuable action and indicates this first user is saying value. And if together they use two or more features, that means they are seeing the collaboration, the platform components of the product.

40:55And within the first 14 days, because it has to be reasonably quick, but not unrealistic. Because we are a complicated product, we are now a Facebook, we are not Zingha or Game app. It's hard for you to figure it out in the first day. So, yeah, I think it's a very important concept for any PRG company to figure out, because that's often a biggest opportunity area I see. Aha moment and activation is often interchangeable, right? So there's kind of two things you'll hear. And just to reframe, re say what you say, so GitLab's activation slash aha moment, milestone was two users using two features in 14 days.

41:39And I imagine the way you got to that was you looked at at what point does retention improve if they got to a certain milestone, right? Is that roughly how you got to? Yeah, exactly. So there are how you can get to that, right? First of all, we, the internal team, our growth team actually, we did some brainstorming. We think about what are the potential action or behavior that indicate they're getting value. We ideally want to do something like they may be successfully merged their first PR, or they successfully round their first pipeline, all of that. Like there are some potential high -value actions we can see in cost.

42:19We just list all of them. And then the next step is we did a correlation analysis to understand, hey, those are the 10 high -value actions we believe. We want to look at if a new user did this action, what's the maybe 30 -day conversion rate? and not 30 day, 90 day conversion rate, what's the 30 day retention rate? Because we look at both. Sometimes you only look at retention or you only look at conversion, it doesn't give you the full picture. So we look at if you did this action, let's say if Lenny, you are trying our product, you are able to successfully merge the PR in your first 30 days. Does that improve your likelihood to convert?

43:05does that improve your leg food to retain? And we compare across those 10 high value actions compared with the average. And we begin to see, oh, some actions actually, if you do that, it lifts your conversion, lifts your retention much bigger. And those are the candidates for potential aha moments. And from there, the reason why we ended up not picking one single action For some products, actually, you can pick a single action. If it actually really stands out, I don't know, for Airbnb in your days, probably, your book hotel, your go -to there, you are so happy, right? You leave a high star review.

43:46That's the key action for this platform. For GILAB, we have so many different workflow components. Teams are here for different reasons. Some are here for security, some are here for CSED. So that's why we ended up combining like two action, right? It can be any of the two high value features. The next step is actually you need to launch some experiments to try to get more people to do those high value action And you then see do I see higher conversion do I see higher retention because in data you are only Isolating correlation you are not proving causation you just saw people who are doing this are more likely to convert But it doesn't mean if you get people to do this, they will correct.

44:32So experimentation is the step. You will finally kind of validate that. Healow, this is amazing. It's like a mini podcast on activation. We should do another one just done this. And then in the show notes, I linked a couple posts that are written with a bunch of advice on setting activation milestones and improving them. I forget if you contributed to that post or not, but if not, we should add some of these stories. But let's get back to our cork. We have enough to talk about on just product like growth. And so just to summarize the audit that you do, I wrote some notes as you were talking. And maybe we can keep going from that point.

45:07What you look for when you're auditing a product to see where they may pick a starting point. What I wrote down is, one, are you just excited to try it? Like is a landing page pulling you in? Two, can you actually use it on your own and just try it? Three, do you get to the aha moment where you're like, okay, I get it, I'm excited. it and then can actually buy this on my own. Is that roughly the audit? Is there anything more to that? Exactly. And I also look at their initial first few emails they sent to me because sometimes the email magically can help a lot. Like if I'm frustrated the first time the other day, I'm trying your product, I'm frustrated.

45:44I'm like, I will give up. And then in the night, and I saw a email, I'm like, maybe I just clicked the CTA and gave it one more try. And that time actually, I figured out I get to the aha moment. So I also look at the email that first initial emails and then when I map this out I asked the company to give me the data at very high level for each of the step. How many people are on your website? How many people go through sign up? How many people hit this aha moment? We need to define that. We need to usually a lot of discussion Like how many people get to the aha moment? How many people started self checkout and being successful?

46:25And then, like, that between my experience from a user perspective and the data we usually immediately begin to see, oh, this is the biggest optimality. Usually, activation conversion are two of the common starting places. This episode is brought to you by Atrefs. You probably know Atrefs as one of the leading all -in -one SEO tools, used by companies like Facebook, Uber, Shopify, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and thousands more. But, Atrefs is not just for big companies. With their new Atrefs webmaster tools, you can optimize your personal website like a professional, for free. You can scan your website for over 100 common SEO issues that might be hurting your performance and search engines, plus get advice on how to fix those errors.

47:10You can have it automatically browse your website's internal and external links and get actionable insights from your backlink profiles, and you can learn what keywords your website rings for and see how you stack up against your competitors. Visit hrefs .com slash AWT and start improving your website's visibility. That's hrefs .com slash AWT. Okay, so let's get into that then. So you've done this audit. What are their advice you have for folks to figure out where they should start and invest in that part of the product to help launch product like RIP? You can do a audit like this yourself, right?

47:44I just imagine if you are B2C, user trying to buy a product, you want it to be easy. Ideally, POD for B2B can be that easy as well. So goes through that process and identify where is confusing, where do you get stuck? If you find that you have a problem with activation, meaning if you enter into the product, you're like, what do I do? I don't know what should I do. when maybe I just left. And then if that's the biggest opportunity activation, then you need to think about, find the right aha moment metric as the first step as we just talk about, because that's the success, that's the goal post.

48:27And then design a product experience to help more people together. And I usually think about, do is better than that show is better than tell. meaning you want to remove all the frictions and somehow give them a warm start, give them some sample template, give them some sample saying they can play with initially in that very moment already and you can supplement that with your email to bring them to the product if they don't do that. So that's activation. If activation is okay but your conversion, your self -check, check outflow. Usually there are also room for improvement. Many company are work with.

49:11When I try to buy, I cannot even find a word to buy. It's very hard to find like, where do I click to start this checkout process? Or they may have some frictions in the checkout flow where it's not localized. One company, when I look at their data, they find that India has very low success rate, which is expected, but we begin to say it's because the payment solution they choose actually doesn't support that market well and they added another payment solution immediately they are seeing much better success rate and it's if they're already in a check out you don't want to lose any of them right like just do a hundred experiments to get to as much as get to as much higher kind of a conversion impossible because you don't want to lose any of them So activation conversion usually are two great place to start.

50:07And then from there, I would say think about your PQL, PQLA motion, which is the other conversion pass, which is if you also want to have cells blended into this red product, product -led cells motion, how do you set up the structure, the foundation so that you can know what are some data signal to tell you those are better leads. and what are some customer criteria in terms of size, segment you should set up, how do you get those data and then how do you handle hand this to your sales team, how they can close using those data, using this knowledge. That's another very big opportunity area. That's a bigger kind of effort compared to those two low hand and the last thing I would say product -led acquisition is a great place to start.

50:58If your product is a collaboration software, think about air table and like it's cloud figment, right? I as part of my workflow, I invite my team to join. I spread this out. If you have that use case, you can build that into your product. That's awesome. That's kind of very powerful. So there's a lot there. So let me try to summarize what you just shared and how it connects. So you have a self -serve product. You've kind of gotten to a point where you can sign up and try something for free. And then you do this audit of like, where along this journey do we think the biggest opportunities lie in the most leverage lives and these, you have these, I think four buckets of opportunity acquisition, which is like top of funnel.

51:42Do you want to double down and invest there first or activation, which is like help people see the value more quickly. Bucket 3 would be, you call it conversion, which essentially helped them buy it more efficiently. And then there's a bucket of retention of just keeping them around longer, which I don't know if you mentioned this, but I know you're just like, that's probably not where you want to start. So it's even not worth chatting about too much. Cool. And so the question, basically, a founder or product team has to decide which of these three buckets of these go in on when they're trying to add product like growth, acquisition, activation or conversion.

52:16It'd be cool maybe just like one example of each of these three buckets like what's a product that did a good job here And then you also talked about how to know which one to start with maybe just like again just a quick Summary of like you should probably start activation if this yeah, if you have something like that You should probably start with activation activation is actually a common good starting place for most B2B software because usually B2B software are not designed to really get you to use quickly, historically. A good example, there are, I think, all the best PRG companies, they do an awesome job.

52:55That's almost like my criteria to say whether this is a great PRG product or not. It's about Miro as an example. If you go through their activation experience, sign up to usage. They ask very limited questions, very targeted. They drop you kind of, they ask you about your use case. What are you here for? Are you here to do a brainstorm session? Are you here to develop a rune map? And they quickly gave you templates to get started. Just like in maybe five minutes, you finish the entire journey from go to the website and sign up, answer a few questions and you are already using, using the template they provided to do the thing you want to do.

53:38That's time to value. That's success. I think that's a really great standard for all the PLG, like a B2B product, try to follow. So that activation is usually a good place if you don't know where to start. Like do that. And then conversion, I would say, is a place, again, worse investing, but there are two layers. One is the self -tech optional. Just do some experiments there. You can actually go to any e -commerce website like I don't know, go to Lulu Lemmung, go to Amazon, make your conversion process as easy as theirs. That should be your goal. The consumers shouldn't be confused about complicated pricing where to find like all of that.

54:27So that's always, that's a place always worth investing testing more because that's revenue so close to be, to be kind of added into your book. And then the PQL PQA part, the other more complicated path, I would say that's something you want to figure out activation and self -check out a little bit, and you want to have some reasonable user number and then invest there. Otherwise, it can be a little bit kind of jumping too fast and jumping too ahead. And the acquisition, a product acquisition is a great place to invest. If you have a collaboration workflow, you have some internal viral components in your product.

55:13Think about Figma, think about like Canon early, even right? It can spread. This product is so easy. You can build something to allow it to spread out its own. Okay, that was, I'm hoping that was really helpful because I think a lot of people are like, where do I start? What do I do to help start moving down this road of product -like growth? And like what I'm hearing generally is just activations, probably where you want to focus, which is essentially getting people to your value quicker. And what's cool about that, and we had a podcast with Lauren Isford from formerly our table, Now It Notion, talking about all the ways to do that.

55:51And interestingly, one of the biggest levers for attention and moving retention is often onboarding and improving activation. So win -win. Yeah, definitely. And I could talk a little bit about retention and expansion using that helpful. Sure. Let's see. Yeah, I know. I didn't talk about that in a post. And there are people asking, hey, do you plan to write another post on this specific topic? So the reason why I didn't cover too much retention expansion is, as you mentioned, it's not usually a first place to start. I call retention the messy middle, it's actually a messy part of the entire funnel.

56:31Activation, conversion, those are fast. Those are almost like, sometimes shorter time span, right? You have a lot of lever and you can test very quickly. And the acquisition is a very big leverage. you need to get more users always. Retention is super important, but it's a little bit messy. It's over a very long period of time. And your customers can be at any given moment. They can be retained or not. Like they just cancel or they just decided not to use anymore. You already already lost them. So it's a very messy part. But how I think about retention, there are two steps. when he's how to build a habit in their usage pattern so that they are using this maybe every week, every day.

57:23Like the key to do that is first of all, your product need to have a high enough frequency. Like if you are using this Wesper mouse, it's not likely you can build this into a habit. Like when I before Gila, I worked at a course, We started as an investment app and the whole thing is kind of passive investment passive investing you bought some ETFs and then you basically don't even need to check and you just keep adding money and It will it will grow and after 10 years is awesome It's actually a the right investment philosophy But when I work as a head of growth it make a big challenge for me because like think about said it, forget it.

58:12They don't even need to go to go back to the product to be successful. And that make it very hard as a head of growth to drive engagement, drive retention. I don't even know whether they're retained or not. If they're not coming back, right? I can only gauge from other indicators. So I think one thing I would say about building habit is think about how to build those habit feature or collaboration feature into your workflow already, into the product already. That is the reason they can retain fundamentally. If it's high frequency, if it involves collaboration with other people, if it's part of their workflow.

58:53So that's the first step. You can obviously use a lot of the loops to reinforce that. You can send them an email if they take certain action and get them back and to repeat that action. but fundamentally you need to build that into your product. And that the next part around retention is, I think actually seeing the extension is part of retention. Basically, you already have a steady usage flow. You are using this habitually like every week, every day. What are the right moments to prompt you to think about maybe buy more? and there are three buckets of product -product -led extension. The first one is up, up, up, up, up, up to a higher tier.

59:39The second one is buying more seats, buying more lessons. The third one is if you have some sort of a consumption, add -on component, just consume more, right? Like for a GILAB, you can go from browns tier to like a silver you can go to a higher tier and then you can buy more seats and you can also buy more CACD minutes to consume. Those are all the different moments. How I how you can do that is really understand data, understand usage and trigger a lot of the right conversation at the right moment to the right person. And you can again a lot of similar tactics you use in activation conversion actually can be beautifully applied in expansion, because it's almost a combination of getting people to the a half of that feature, use that feature, try that feature, getting them to convert.

1:00:34You're leaving all these gold bricks that have to resist, not follow getting off track with, because there's so much. Like retention is its own conversation we could have. Maybe just one question along those lines. What's something that you've launched that had a tremendous impact on retention? Is there an example of just like, wow, that really had a big impact? You talk about frequency maybe, but what it comes to mind? I can share some of my example at a course. My, I think there are two things. One thing is actually very similar to what you just said. When I was asked to work on retention, I did a bunch of analysis.

1:01:10The biggest leverage for me is actually activation. So I ended up doing a tons of experiments in activation. I identified what are the features for users to take, experience value quickly so that they are more likely to retain for us. It's a feature called Recurring Investment, which makes sense in high set, but at that time, nobody's caring about that. Like there, we have some other very cool investment features called Roundup Investment. So nobody is really paying a lot of attention on this. But when I look at data, I saw recurring investment has a high correlation with retention. So I did a lot of work trying to get more people to set this up, and which has been a great success, actually, in a very short period of time.

1:01:58And then from there, I would say we begin to add more use cases that has a higher frequency, like I mentioned, right? If you are only come here, was per month to check our investment, it's very hard to retain you. We don't have any lever to engagement with you as well if you are not in the product. So we ended up adding IRA account, retirement account, we ended up adding spending account like a debit card, like more high frequency use cases. Those use cases come with higher frequency and better retention by nature. So now you change the problem from how do I improve retention to how do I drive adoption of higher frequency use cases.

1:02:45So I did again a bunch of experiments how to drive more adoption of retirement account. Once you have a retirement account IRA, there's text consequences, all of that. There's very hard for you to be. So you flip the question into again adoption activation problem in that case as well. Amazing. Thank you for sharing those. Man, there's so many other things we could talk about retention, but we have enough to talk about on product -like growth. So there's two other areas that I want to touch on. One is data and infrastructure, and what people should know about how to set that up for success, and the other is hiring your team and how to build out your product -like growth team.

1:03:25So starting with the data piece, maybe just as a big picture, just like what are the buckets of data and infrastructure people should be thinking about that they're going to have to invest in or should start thinking about early. I think there are two big buckets. The first bucket is product usage data. As I mentioned, a lot of B2B software, they are really lacking in that because when you sell via sales team, you don't need to know so many details. So granular usage data all of that. The second bucket is I call this customer 360 database because product usage data is one component is the most essential.

1:04:06In order for your product that grows motion to be successful, you also need to connect that with your marketing teams, marketing campaigns. Your CRM, your Salesforce, like who are the customers, prospects, what their stage. So those ideally need to be connected so that you have a 360 -picture of your customer if I have a Airbnb as a potential like a target account Do I know there are users from Airbnb that are using my product which features are they using and And do I send any marketing campaigns to each of them? Do they respond all of that all of those ideally need to be connected? But the reality is like all over the place is all in its own tools in most of the B2B companies.

1:04:57What are just some tools that you think people should check out, start with maybe what's like heela's recommendations on like an initial stack or areas to explore in terms of tooling? I say there are two piece. One is infra, the other piece are some tools that are kind of secondary. So from infrastructure perspective on data tool, my first tool usually one is some sort of a data hub segment, right? The next one is some sort of a product analytics tool. Think about amplitude. I know post hog is actually a pretty popular one. It's an open source product analytics tool. There are mixed panel, panel, all of that.

1:05:38So have some sort of data hub data collection tool and have some sort of product analytics tool. That's the data infrastructure. And then you need to have an experimentation tool because like I said, you can now just imagine you build everything and everything works perfectly. So you need either like optimizely, I know amplitude has some experimentation components. Apple is a new and upcoming one, like you need some tool to allow you to do experimentation. The third piece, I think that's pretty essential I counted in the infra, is some sort of a life cycle marketing tool. I know many beachwee companies that use HubSpot or they use something like for their email marketing, but those are usually least nurturing.

1:06:29It is very different from life cycle marketing tool, meaning you need to connect with Segum and amplitude. You know what customers are doing your product, your design, your email, your in -app, your push notification based on their behavior at the right moment to the right person. And you measure success by do they take the right action in the product versus the lead nurture email marketing to his. Do I get them to read the article, open the email, I had 10 points to their lead score, and they are next step further in their leads funnel. So data to experimentation, to lifecycle marketing, to those are the infras.

1:07:10And then from there, there are a lot of PLD tools you can add on top to make your day -to -day much easier, just to start. I feel like that are most, most essential. So for acquisition, you need to have some sort of lead, like a data enrichment tool. Think about ZoomEvo clear bit because the biggest difference between B2B and B2C is that you still need to know about their company. Like you want to know this person, but you also want to know this person's company, right? That's a very important thing and you can get a lot out of those data enrichment tool. and then you can design your journey differently based on that.

1:07:51For activation, a lot of my clients are finding a lot of value in those tools like apt -use, user -led, basically the tools that allow you to build onboarding flow quickly in a product without engineer kind of resource. So you need to do some initial integration, But as soon as you did that, a marketing manager, a PM, or someone can just build some customized onboarding step -by -step flows himself. I think that's quite neat because you need to test the tongue in that area. At the interns of conversion, I would say there are many product -led, growth product -led cells tools. I think those are great if you want to build out your PQL, PQL, PQA kind of conversion pass, think about endgame, poke holes, top -playing pace, like there are a couple of them.

1:08:47Wow, amazing. That was an awesome list and really well -structured. Is there anything else along the data or infrastructure piece that you want to touch on before we move on to hiring in the team? I just want to go back to the point, as I mentioned, product -led growth is data -led growth deep down. So like in most of the situation when I see a company want to get started where they are really missing or they need to invest more in data. So if you identify you have a gap in this area, don't feel bad as well. Like a lot of crypto companies are in the same shoes and if you can invest the time, money, the team, the tool to figure this out, the benefit of this, right?

1:09:33The data collection, understanding usage data, can not only power your PRG motion, it can really power your entire product team, even your customer success team. Now you gave them the ingredients they need to develop the next feature based on not only what your top customer asks for, but also what everyone is using, right? Like your customer success team can take a much deeper view in understanding what the clients are using rather than just talk with the executives from the client and get a rough kind of college of the situation. So it is, I think it is an area of worse investing and a rebtobee company should be investing.

1:10:20I'm trying to channel what a listeners might be thinking right now and I imagine some people might be like, what if I pick the wrong tool? I'm kind of stressed, I have to do all this research, I'm kind of worried about starting because it'll set me up for failure later. Which of these buckets do you think is most important to get right from the beginning? And any advice on how to just avoid messing that up? To get started, I would say probably a product analytics tool is the first step and maybe like the data hub such as Segiment. So if you have Segiment and Particle tools like that, it allows you to plug into so many different tools.

1:10:57You can basically try all the different tools and if it doesn't work, you just flip a switch, you can try another tool. So there's a benefit there, but it is expensive. So I know companies may just go right into the product analytics too. I would say it's hard to get it wrong completely, right? In order for product analytics to be meaningful, the first step is you need to collect the data, you need to do some instrumentation, you need to have the foundation then because it's garbage in garbage out. If you send a bunch of garbage data into your product analytics to your analyst will be just even more confusing, right?

1:11:39It's like he doesn't know whether to trust the data or to use. So a lot of company I work with the first step is maybe not looking into to two, but do an audit of your data instrumentation situation to understand how many of the key actions are intract is the format correct is the data right? What are the gaps and you may need to do some re -instrumentation reformatting and things like that before you even plug into a product analytics to make it useful. For someone that may want to do that audit, is there a thing you would point them to or or I don't know, blog course, something to help them understand if they're doing a right or is it like bringing Heela on and you need someone like you to help them through it.

1:12:24No, you can bring me but you don't have to bring me. I think there are, if you search on Google like just the data dictionary or the data product you say to data audit, a lot of companies published templates and spreadsheet you can use. I can't even send you a few after all. amazing. And then you can just go through basically the key idea is go through your product experience, identify the key actions and go through your data instrumentation and see do they match. And the success of this is you have a you identify the gaps and eventually you want to establish something called the data dictionary.

1:13:05Like I basically do that for a lot of my clients And the data dictionary will include, here are all the key actions. What's the event name for each of those? And what are the property and things like that? But you now know, hey, I have this action track. This is the name. If I have a new product manager analyst, he can all refer to this and everyone know the same, means the same definition rather than people are interpreting differently. So that's a very important part to success even before the truly. Awesome. It also reminds me of a previous guest, Crystal Wajia, has an awesome post on why most analytics efforts fail and she talks a lot about this and how to set your events up for success.

1:13:49So we'll listen to that as well. Maybe one last thing here. I'm trying to think about what would screw people up most and it's probably not having a data warehouse and ETL. Yes. Sort of tooling in place because that feeds a lot of this. Yes. Is there anything you want to add there, but just like the importance of a data warehouse and how to set that up? Some of the early stage companies I work with when they just get started in the very beginning, they don't have data warehouse. They just basically have their product and they have some sort of a guanilitics or amplitude and that's it. It's pretty wild, but it's working and they can get to some place from there.

1:14:24But as soon as you begin to have data user, it's time to get serious to establish a data warehouse, have some ETL solution. There are, like, I think there are the most common best practice, best practice ones like AWS and things like that. There are also some startups that are doing this and you can utilize as well. But again, as soon as you become a serious business, you should invest in that. Otherwise, it's pretty wild and it's pretty fragile as well. And when you say WS, you mean a redshift, I imagine. Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Okay. Final area that we have time for, which is awesome, which is around building your team.

1:15:09So maybe just two questions here. What is your advice for starting the initial team investing in PLG? like how do you how does that usually look and what do you think people should do and then later how does that evolve over time? How I see most companies started is The founder or the leadership team realized that they need to do PRT and they build the conviction like yeah, they want to Maybe initially there he's an even dedicated team, but they did something here and there they decided to invest in this and And a common place to start is to hire a head of growth, or it can be a lead growth PM, but someone who is relatively, has a little bit of experience in this area, and then they begin to build this core growth squad as the first growth team.

1:15:58And I think that's a very common place to start. The other place to start that's less common, but I also see it happening in reality, Maybe they will start a cross -functional, almost like a tiger team. Because if the initial focus area is, like, say they want to do product -qualified lead, or, like, basically add that funnel, that involves not only product team, that will involve data team because you want to know what are the usage patterns that indicate this is better leads. You also need to bring sales teaming because they need to work on those leads to close them. So if that's the initial starting area, a cross -functional Tiger team is also possible option.

1:16:47But the most common way is higher head of growth, usually a gross PN, and then start a team with engineering design data to support that core growth squad. And the main difference between these two, one is dedicated. We are going to dedicate full -time people to helping us grow. Yeah. Like, say, we talked about earlier, let's say they're going to focus on activation. Yeah. And that's their whole job. Versus Tiger team is basically their borrowing resources from other teams in this kind of like a site project for them. Yeah, a little bit for a period of time. So it's temporary, right? It's kind of they almost need to, they want to get into, and say like usually the cross -functional team.

1:17:29The Tiger team is a little bit prayer prior to full commitment. They are pretty much committed, but they still want to try this out and guide again a final conviction and then they begin to dedicate resources. And you asked about what's how do they evolve from there? Before we actually get there, maybe one more quick question. Uh -huh. Which would you recommend, like, when does it, imagine you'd recommend a dedicated team. You can do that. When would it makes sense to go the tiger team route, like in what cases? When situation I would recommend is that if the initial focus area is, like I said, product qualified leads, the sales conversion pass.

1:18:09Because if you think about you have a head of growth or core growth PM, that person usually has a growth PM background and is in the product organization. And there are also if the initial focus areas are activation conversion, those those kind of involve a lot of experimentation, right. But activation conversion are relatively confined. It's something the gross PM and engineer design data they can work on. If your initial focus area you feel like my biggest thing is actually do this PQL thing, it is a little bit harder for the gross PN to socialize all those cross functional resources because he need to get pretty deep into data.

1:18:55He need to have a counterpart in sales even in marketing. So in that case, I think it's possible that maybe you start a Tiger Team. You can combine both. You can have a gross PN dedicated but have some Tiger Team to be working with him or her on this PQL project as well. Got it. And I like this term, Jiger team, by the way, I haven't heard that before. Yes, that sounds like a lot of fun, very dynamic. Okay, cool. And then yeah, what happens next after you have this initial team? Once you have this initial team, it's important to give them resources they need and give them a initial focus area, give them support, and a little bit time allow them to try things out and get some early wins.

1:19:39And early win is the the biggest scene, I would say, for, and whenever you start a new growth team, try to look for some opportunity, try to get some early wins in whichever focus area you choose. And from there, if you get some of the wins, the team has some momentum, there are more confidence from the organization in PLG, right? It's time to potentially expand and formalize.

1:20:11So, PRG team, you should think about the PRG org because PRG is a motion, it's cross -functional by nature, it's not just a product team or growth team, eventually you need to get to the place basically there is a head of growth product, that's the center of the PRG org, but there's also need to be a health head of growth marketing, that's his or her counterparts marketing organization and their head of product -led sales. That's the counterparting the sales organization. Exactly where they said, how they said, it's different company by company. The most common one is head of gross product, report to product work, head of gross marketing, report to marketing, head of product -led sales, report to sales, but they have some sort of a very strong collaboration because they are working in the same motion and same funnel, but that's I think that's next step.

1:21:09Think about this work, once you have those counterparts in product, in sales, in marketing, the next step is think about what are the metrics they own to make sure you can manage this funnel, this motion in a data driven way. Because the PLG metrics are very different from SLG, the top of funnel is more about high quality signups. You don't want a lot of traffic, you want free sign -up, free trials, but you need to meet certain quality bar. It's not just like anyone, right? And then the head of Gross product, he or her top KPI is about usage, activation. Activated teams are very common a metric and then maybe a number of PQLs, if that's another, like you want to get those teams to certain usage threshold, basically.

1:22:07And then the head of product led sales, he will be focused on converting those PQLs into revenue. So he will focus a lot on conversion rate, efficiency, and maybe revenue, things like that. Got it. And you're sharing a lot of org design verbally in the post, virtual share, obviously in the show notes. You can actually see a diagram of what these look like to help kind of make it super clear. I have maybe just one more question going back to the initial team. What are the functions you recommend they have on this like MVP field GT? The most important why is have a gross PM to be the lead right head of gross director of growth, lead growth PM.

1:22:53And then the growth PM, as you know, probably very well, growth PM is a PM, but has a much stronger skill setting, analytics, experimentation, very data driven, think about metrics. The growth PM's way of working is similar to other product manager, but his KPIs is actually more similar to the sales and marketing work.

1:23:20He's feature specifically itself. And then the other functions you need to have so sure, I would often say, actually a data analyst needs to be the very first hire. Sometimes even try to find a gross PM who can do analysis if you're really small and you can find that type of unique for person, or even before hiring gross PM, hiring analysts that I would actually go as far as that, Because without Insights without Love Foundation, there's like your fermentation, your effort, is really directional in the sense. So, gross PM analysts, and from there, definitely you need some dedicated engineer. You need a designer.

1:24:05Designer can be somewhat not dedicated in early days, but an engineer needs to be. Some sort of a user research support as well. It doesn't need to be dedicated, but those are the core gross squad. Okay, real actual last question here for the growth PM in your experience. Are they most often coming from within the company already and they kind of shift to this role or do you recommend they find someone externally? That's an excellent question. I have seen both. I actually recommend if you can find someone internally, maybe he's a he wants to do growth or he is an analyst who wants to become more like a product role.

1:24:48I even have one client, the head of growth at work with used to be an investor relationship, like head of investor relationship. And he reports to the CEO and the founder, he is very analytical. He hasn't been a PM before, but he can socialize the resource within the company to launch experiments in product, in marketing, in all of that. And I, I, as a advisor coming, guide him in the area he's not familiar with. And we actually drive pretty good results together. So I think prefer hiring internally if possible, if not, if you really don't have anyone internally with that knowledge or with that interest, you can look outside.

1:25:32I would say mapped initial gross PM higher to your starting point. If we already decided activation, he's the biggest focus era, try to find some PM gross PM with that experience. And if the conversion is focus error or position, try to find someone with that experience. I love that advice. We've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got actually seven questions for the most ever we've had for a lighting round. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay. What are two or three books that you recommended most to other people? This first one is called the Amelnaf called novel. I don't know whether we read that one.

1:26:18I really love that one. That's kind of a life -changing book for me. Do you have a favorite novelism that comes to mind? I learned finding leverage from him. You talk about there are four types of leverage. It can be your writing, it can be code, it can be capital, it can be team. So the reason why I invest a lot in writing is like I felt like that's my leverage. And I love that. The second book is called How Women Rice. I really love this one. I gifted this to a lot of my female team member. And I really learned a lot from them. And the third one is my book. It's called.

1:27:02So if you Chinese, if you don't read Chinese, you cannot read it. But I heard my friends told me if you are launching an email campaign, if you are doing experiments, have this book by the side will help with conversion rate, just by its appearance. That's amazing. Is there an English translation? Or is it only in Chinese right now? Don't ring Chinese, so you have a word. I see. There's an advantage there if you can speak Chinese. You're in a conversional go. Yes. And then just the first book, it was called The Allmanic of Naval. Okay. Is that? Yes. Yes. Sweet and willing to all these. Okay. Favorite recent movie or TV show?

1:27:41I watched a movie. It's a sci -fi movie from China. It's called The Wandering Earth 2. It's by the famous author, the Xin Liu. He's the author of Three Bodies. I don't know whether you're hard on. Oh my god. That movie is awesome. It's kind of really cool. I really highly recommend it. I have to go check that out. Oh my god. I heard they're bringing three body problems to Apple TV or Netflix. There's like a show coming. Yes. Yes. I look forward to that. Well, I watched many versions already kind of film is not, not them are good. That's the problem. It's so hard to do. Well, man, I'm not optimistic, but I'm excited anyway.

1:28:21Yeah, yeah, favorite interview question that you like to ask when I interview like a gross pms or Analyst I will always ask what is a experiment? You launched that has a very unexpected results And what did you do after that? What do you look for in an answer there that makes you feel like they are strong? So first of all They have to be launching a lot of experiments to get a very unexpected answer So like if you are only they many people remember their success for interview right they prepare that very well I don't want to ask like what's your successful experiment Secondly, I want to know Just like why it's unexpected that reviews the deep deep level of their thinking how deep they are thinking if they are They should expect that based on what they describe then they are now thinking deep enough They are not understanding customer enough and what they do afterwards is also also like how do you Face a failure unexpected result.

1:29:22What are the clues? You can pursue what are the actions you can take? How do you learn something out of it? I love it What's a favorite recent product you recently discovered that you love? I would say like similar to everyone chat DPT but also Lulu lemon yoga pants Great. What's something relatively minor you've changed in your product and the process that has had a tremendous impact on a team's ability to execute? Yeah, I force, I added basically a section in the in the doc in a ticket stack as the PMs to write the success metric ahead of time as well as adding which of the gross lever this is helping is this contributing to acquisition activation retention monetization and it forced them to sometimes sink through the plea why are we even doing it sometimes they handed out not doing that by just writing it down.

1:30:23I love that. Next question I know you're big on children's books do you have a favorite children's book? My favorite children's book is called Someday And I become an everyone to check it out. And I basically is talking about how our children used to be our baby, become our kids. And when they are taller and more stronger than us, and they will remember us. Oh, yeah. I'm gonna, I'm gonna need to check that out now. And final question. I know your big on growth concepts. You have all these frameworks and concepts. and so what is your favorite growth concept? I would say North Star metric, because I find it's not only valuable to growth, it's valuable to just everything, right?

1:31:10When I think about what do I want to do with my career, does that fit my own personal North Star metric? When I think about how I want to raise my kids, I think about what's the North Star metric for successful education or for my kid? because it forced me to think long term, it forced me to think about what's value both to me, to them, not only by the society standards, or ARR revenue, like salary, right? And also what's my vision for myself and for my kids. I love that, it reminds me of a recent guest where she always asks, what are you optimizing for? Whether she's talking with her kids or her husband or her team.

1:31:51Yeah. And similar concept. But, Hila, this was incredible. I think we've shared tens of thousands of dollars of value and it will probably lead to millions of dollars of revenue for a lot of companies. And it's everything I hope to be. Thank you so much for being here and for sharing so much wisdom to final questions or can folks find you online if they want to reach out and learn more and how can listeners be useful to you? Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn just search Hila, H -I -L -A -Q -U. You can find me. I have a personal website as under development, but I contracted to my kid to my 12 -year -old So he immediately waited until summer and hopefully this summer he can finish it Yeah, like if you you are a founder you are looking for a gross advisor feel free to hit me up I'm always happy to just have a free have a call with founders and leaders get to no more people And I'm a gross nerd so like I always want to grow nerd about growth anyway Amazing.

1:32:51He'll, again, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Bye everyone. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or a leaving review, as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny'sPodcast .com. See you in the next episode.