Hacking: Product-Led Growth

Product-led growth impact

In the lesson on north star metrics, we briefly talked about product-led growth and fostering an environment that supports the pursuit of it within the business. The importance of this can’t be understated for an AI/ML product manager. The ultimate goal of building a product strategy, choosing the optimal metrics and KPIs, and getting alignment from our leadership team and main stakeholders is to make our product successful—said in another way, to ultimately achieve product market fit. How does product-led growth relate to this?

Balancing growth

There is philosophical debate these days about whether companies should be marketing-led, sales-led, or product-led. Depending on where we are in the ecosystem of a company, we might have a bias for favoring our own designation. As product managers, we might have this bias as well, but if we take marketing- or sales-led growth to its natural conclusion, we might be faced with a predicament. Marketing crafts a message that might resonate beautifully with the audience but might not actually align with what’s being built. Sales may line up the ideal marquee customers for a company to take on, but they will be forced to reactively dictate what product should be built based on a handful of customer preferences. Neither of these is centered on reality.