Hello to Canada’s SaaS Community,
Product-led growth is the strategy behind many unicorn startups—it can also help steer away from becoming a “feature factory” mired in custom requests. Partho Ghosh, now the VP of Product at Uberall, has been a tech product leader for over a decade and seen many teams tease the cliff edge. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Partho shared a few tips on how you can avoid this same fate.
Key takeaways:
- If your roadmap is increasingly filled with custom requests, you could be headed to “feature factory” territory.
- Make sure your roadmap balances product vision work, features that drive growth, tech debt, and custom requests to drive near-term revenue.
- PLG is not just one motion; you have to figure out which approach works best for your org based on your ICP’s buying style and the value your platform can deliver without human intervention.
Co-Founder/Producer, SAAS NORTH Conference Editor, SAAS NORTH NOW
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A product-led growth (PLG) strategy requires building features.
But you don’t want to become what Partho Ghosh, VP of Product at location marketing platform Uberall, calls a “feature factory.”
A feature factory is a nasty detour from PLG where you end up spending the majority of resources building one-off features for the sake of short-term revenue growth, rather than strategic visioning.
While this can be beneficial from a near-term revenue perspective, it significantly hamstrings long-term growth opportunities.
Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Partho shared his tips for avoiding the fate of becoming a feature factory.
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Step 1: Recognize the signs
How much of your roadmap is custom requests?
Partho said the more that is—or the faster that percentage grows—the more likely you are to become a feature factory.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ever build a revenue-generating custom request, though.
In Partho’s experience across Canadian tech icons like Unbounce and Hootsuite, he’s learned product roadmaps need to balance customer feedback and custom requests with long-term vision, expansion, and general maintenance.
“It’s just important to know you’re saving an amount of time for your vision and the things that you think are going to really win the market long term, while also doing enough to make sure that you’re generating revenue and keeping customers sticky and happy,” said Partho.
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Step 2: Allocate resources correctly
Partho said most roadmaps tend to have four categories with resources allocated to each:
- Vision: Big, into-the-future features or platform evolutions.
- Maintenance and tech debt: Ensuring you continually refactor and fix issues to avoid bugs as you grow.
- Planned growth: This is related to planned features to drive adoption and expansion across your user base.
- Custom requests: Builds that, for example, help you win significant new revenue.
Speaking about Uberall specifically, Partho said about 40% of capacity goes to long-term vision (and the features or platform updates necessary to achieve it). From there, 15-20% is assigned for enterprise requests. A further 15-20% goes to partnership requests, 10% to growth and adoption features, and the remaining capacity goes to maintenance and tech debt.
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Step 3: Identify your persona-value-PLG fit
One mistake Partho has seen over the years is founders assuming product-led growth is a single-tactic strategy.
In reality, Partho sees PLG as four different, distinct approaches.
To make PLG a success, founders need to identify which level fits best based on how your ideal customer wants to be sold to and the value your product can deliver without human intervention.
Option 1: Self-serve, trial, or freemium
This is the “classic” PLG motion, and works well for intuitive platforms where value is immediate and uncomplex, and the persona does not want to talk to a human to solve that problem (e.g. an audio transcription platform sold to solopreneurs).
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Option 2: Sales-assist PLG
In this model, a trial or self-service onboarding can become a lead generation system for a bigger sale. This approach works well for more complex platforms or with buyers who may have more nuanced use cases that require onboarding support.
This model can also work if your product is intuitive to use, but has significant required set up. Rather than hoping for prospects to figure it out themselves, a sales-assist model means a real human closes the deal and helps them get started.
Option 3: Expansion-assist PLG
Rather than a PLG approach for new revenue, you can build certain features that enable self-serve upgrades or jumps to the next level.
For example, this might be an opportunity for someone to buy one-off expansions for usage-based platforms. If they buy a certain number of times, that triggers a Customer Success or Account Management reach out to discuss upgrading their plan.
Option 4: Traditional account-based management
This model has a human intervening at all steps, but the product becomes a key sales enablement tool.
For example, building intuitive walkthroughs, dummy accounts, or quick integrations so Sales Reps can easily show prospects what a feature will look like. The same goes for expansion, enabling CS to demonstrate the additional value someone would get if they upgraded.
“You have to get the buy-in on what the right version of PLG is for your company or you really won’t go far,” said Partho.
Balancing tension is part of the job
While buy-in is required and PLG is a cross-company motion, Partho acknowledged that you simply will not get 100% support.
Sales leaders might push back, suggesting PLG will hurt their team’s commissions. Product might not like building certain features. CS may feel like Sales is getting more PLG support than they are, or vice versa.
This tension is going to happen—and Partho said it should be cause to experiment with your PLG approach rather than to cancel it altogether.
“You can’t just flip a switch and then make the change happen right away,” said Partho. “You got to test your way out of it. You got to experiment. You have to figure out what’s the right mode.”