Strengthen your PLG strategy with expert advice from Maria Thomas
“Every user interaction is an opportunity for delight,” explained Maria Thomas, Rebrandly’s Chief Product Officer, during her presentation at SaaStr 2024, “and delight is what turns users into evangelists.”
Understanding the journey from delight to evangelism and its power to drive acquisition, expansion, conversion, and retention is the core concept of product-led growth (PLG)—and what differentiates PLG from other growth strategies.
In September, Rebrandly welcomed Maria Thomas to its executive leadership team. Previously, Maria had been a member of Rebrandly’s Board of Directors, where she served the company’s growth strategy in partnership with Five Elms Capital. Maria has led innovative product teams at PLG powerhouses like Buffer and Bitly—and her devotion to building best-in-class products and integrations helps Rebrandly provide scalable, trustworthy, and secure link infrastructure for businesses, developers, and creators worldwide.
A champion of PLG and an industry leader in product development, Maria brings her considerable knowledge to Rebrandly as the company scales its brand and product strategy. Her knowledge and passion come with significant experience in strategic operations and marketing technology, spanning responsibilities from product engineering and design to management and technical innovation.
Learn more about developing a winning PLG strategy and how Rebrandly can help, below.
PLG decoded: Maria’s talk from SaaStr 2024
Maria recently shared her experiences leading PLG organizations at SaaStr 2024, “PLG Decoded: How to Succeed as a Team.” Throughout the presentation, she gave insight into how product-led growth empowers teams to build engaging experiences at scale and how to transform these interactions into user relationships that drive meaningful growth.
Getting started with PLG
“PLG isn’t just about your product,” Maria explained, “it’s about unleashing your users’ potential to expand your growth.” PLG functions differently from more traditional growth strategies. Instead of focusing on funnel optimization and lead conversion, PLG is about creating a self-sustaining growth engine through user evangelism and product experience.
PLG isn’t a great fit for every business. Only adopt this strategy if your product exists in a broader, horizontal market. Narrow markets or products with a $10K plus price point aren’t a good fit for PLG because there’s not enough opportunity to scale the number of user relationships required to kickstart your organic growth flywheel. Maria suggests a hybrid approach for those situations, incorporating a more robust and sustainable sales motion with your product-led strategy.
Metrics and tracking for PLG companies
Adopting a PLG strategy will change how your team thinks about growth, specifically how they track growth effectively. “Revenue is a lagging indicator,” Maria explained. “If you’re going with a product-led motion, you’re probably focusing on increased market share and going after many customers and logos. Therefore, product and engineering organizations should use a metric like MAU instead.”
Monthly active users (MAU) is the leading indicator of PLG success—it shows how well your growth engine is running and how user acquisition ultimately impacts your bottom line. That’s not to say members of your leadership team shouldn’t still have revenue goals; that’s also important. However, the work team should focus on MAU as their North Star. Understanding how to track your PLG motion effectively ensures your team can come together and drive results as you scale this strategy.
Practical advice for leading a collaborative PLG team
To be successful with PLG, you must have transparent and proactive collaboration across EPD (Engineering, Product, and Design) as well as marketing. Maria shares some practical advice on how to make this kind of collaboration work:
- Keep it simple. Focus on the handoff between the website and the product. What drives your user acquisition? Who are your ideal customers? What do they need to activate?
- Have a weekly meeting between marketing, product, data, and finance teams to analyze data, create hypotheses, and build experiments to test those hypotheses.
- Include your product marketers in every product roadmap and strategy meeting. They are the connection point between teams and help drive your strategic objectives.
- Set clear goals and objectives for marketing and product teams. Holding them accountable for your company’s growth makes it easier to track results at scale.
Marketing teams should be accountable for product signups. From there, you can refine your ideal customer profile (ICP) and start understanding what features they need to become activated and retained customers. Product teams will be responsible for activation, retention, and paid conversion for those new signups.
Defining those responsibilities ensures everyone on the collaborative product and marketing team understands their role in driving PLG. Maria breaks this down further with some specific advice for structuring these teams within your organization:
PLG advice for go-to-market teams
- Set your North Star as new sign-ups, focusing on the types of people who activate and convert the best.
- Use organic channels like content marketing to build strong relationships with users and potential new signups. Share a minimum of two blog posts per week.
- Leverage community via Slack, Discord, etc., to connect your team with new users and help turn them into evangelists.
- Use social media to stay top-of-mind and relevant for potential new leads.
- Use product launches to drive new user acquisition. Every launch or product update is an opportunity to strengthen your connection with your user base.
PLG advice for product teams
- Set your North Star as MAU, focusing on activating and retaining the go-to-market team’s new signups.
- Add value before signup to kickstart the relationship with leads and help them understand your value. Consumer products like Notion and Canva are great examples.
- Democratize your data for every team. Everyone involved needs to understand how their work contributes to building your PLG flywheel.
- Focus on user experience (UX). A sub-par product experience will hurt your PLG motion.
- Use new feature releases to drive user acquisition and refine your ideal customer profile.
The important thing to remember when thinking about building PLG into your business strategy is that every interaction with users is an opportunity to strengthen your relationship. The experience with your product matters just as much, if not more, than the value it creates for users. And your team needs to understand how their individual contributions make an impact.
To learn more, check out Maria’s presentation on YouTube. The audience had some great questions about more nuanced aspects of PLG.
Enabling PLG with Rebrandly
As a PLG company, Rebrandly understands the resources you need to drive successful product-led motion for your business. Here are just a few of the ways our product can support your growth goals and foster strong and lasting relationships with users:
Brand-building and trust
Since user evangelists are such an essential part of building a successful PLG flywheel, it’s important that your brand is easy to identify and stays top-of-mind in every channel
With Rebrandly’s branded, trustworthy links, maintaining consistency throughout the product experience is simple by creating custom URLs that are memorable and encourage conversion. That consistency strengthens your relationships with users and builds trust, which you can use to foster the rapport needed to turn a new user into an evangelist.
Link analytics
Maria said it best to the audience at SaaStr 2024, “Data is a must. Data needs to be democratized and in the hands of every person in EPD.”
Rebrandly’s link analytics help your team gather the insights to drive product-led growth. When your team understands how potential leads, new signups, and users interact with your links, they can build better experiments to optimize that experience. And you can quickly analyze the results of those experiments to determine which are most successful at driving growth.
Cross-functional collaboration
Your team must be able to work together effectively to drive product-led motion. Create multiple workspaces to oversee link creation within and across departments or accounts with Rebrandly’s team management and collaboration features.
Rebandly’s market-leading Reviewer Role feature, for example, gives teammates in a workspace the ability to view and comment on links without directly making changes. Simplifying this experience ensures that everyone involved with your PLG efforts can work together efficiently and focus on crafting the features and experience your customers deserve.
Security and compliance
Rebrandly is the industry’s most secure link management solution. With SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA compliance built into the product, you’ll never have to worry about your link reputation and its impact on user experience. Users can trust that your reputation is solid and have confidence that their data privacy is your top concern.
Check out our Customer Stories page to learn how Rebrandly has helped drive PLG success for other organizations.
