Day in Life: Head of PLG

Stay tune for the "Week in Life"

Author

Gary Chan
January 06, 2025

A Day in the Life: Leading Product-led Growth in a High-Stakes Environment 🚀

Every morning starts with the same ritual - waking up and checking my phoe for a potential notification of a new sale. As the Head of Product-led Growth, my days are a balance of driving revenue and ensuring our customers succeed. My goal is to hit our aggressive quarterly sales quota closed by the Product and Growth team. Let me take you through a typical day in my world.

Morning: The Revenue Pulse Check ☀️

The first thing I do? Check our sales dashboard. In the PLG world, transactions happen 24/7, and there's nothing quite like waking up to new conversions or expansion revenue. We're a sales operation at heart, focused on building a self-sustaining business machine. This immediate pulse check on our sales pipeline sets the tone for the day ahead, focusing on overnight sales, pending deals, and immediate action items for the team.

Mid-Morning: Review Fire Fighting & Customer Success 🔥

Once at my desk, I dive into what I call the "temperature check" - assessing any urgent matters that need immediate attention. This will typically take me about 1-2 hours to review and pick which firefights to extinguish. This includes:

  • Customer escalations and support tickets

  • Potential churn signals

  • Team alerts about critical issues

  • Integration challenges or technical concerns

The tricky part? It's crucial to distinguish between genuine churn risks and minor concerns, though the line isn't always clear. This ambiguity is part of the job, and it requires a delicate balance of observation and action. This morning routine allows me to manage customer retention and renewal from a high-level perspective. 

Afternoon: The Proactive Growth Engine 🎯

Post-lunch is when the real growth work begins. I dedicate 2-3 hours to what I call "revenue mining" - to identifying and engaging with high-potential customers. This process involves analyzing customer usage data, reviewing engagement metrics across our platform, and examining interactions with paywalls, support tickets, community forums, and email campaigns.

I spent a lot of time gathering insights from these scattered data sources to build tailored sales proposals for each customer from tools like BI platforms, HubSpot, community, and support tickets. Then, I would create personalized outreach to sell advanced features and lock annual contract deals. 💵

A significant part of my day also involves live interactions with customers. We're constantly refining and experimenting with our:

  • Onboarding Calls: Showcasing our product's value to new customers

  • Pitch Refinement: Continuously experimenting with our onboarding and pricing pitches

  • Customer Value Demonstration: Ensuring we effectively communicate our product's benefits

Each interaction is an opportunity to optimize our approach and drive sales.

End of Day: Strategic Planning 📊

As the day winds down, my focus shifts to the bigger picture. With our quarterly MRR goals always in mind, I:

  • Review the day's progress

  • Plan upcoming week's priorities

  • Align team efforts with monthly targets

  • Evaluate ongoing experiments and their results

With our eyes always on the prize – our Monthly Recurring Revenue and quarterly revenue goals – we're constantly pushing to meet and exceed our targets.

The PLG Mindset: Always On, Always Optimizing ⌚️

Leading PLG is a unique blend of sales, customer success, and product strategy. Success requires staying close to customer signals, moving quickly on opportunities, and maintaining a careful balance between reactive support and proactive growth.

We're continuously experimenting and optimizing, remembering that in the PLG world, every customer interaction is a potential growth opportunity, and every data point tells a story.

In this high-stakes environment, the key is learning to read these signals and act on them strategically. It's a challenging role, but one that sits at the heart of modern SaaS success, driving innovation and growth in an ever-evolving landscape.

Read about Product-led Growth and Roadmaps

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I am Gary Yau Chan. 3x Head of Growth. Product Growth specialist. 26x hackathon winner. I write about #PLG and #BuildInPublic. Please follow me on LinkedIn, or read about what you can hire me for on my Notion page.