How to influence using Product Data?

TLDR: Pause. Listen. Let team come up with the ideas

Author

Gary Chan
February 04, 2025

The Journey Begins: Starting from Zero Data

When we launched PLG in 2022, we had no data—zero. About nine months in, we had customers coming in the door, visitors on the platform, free users signing up. We started seeing retention rates and tracking where people clicked inside the platform.

But here’s the thing: just having data doesn’t mean you can immediately influence product decisions. A lot of folks on your team—whether it’s product, engineering, or design—might not be familiar with how this data ties back to your ultimate goals. So what do you do?

Aligning Teams on Metrics That Matter

One of the first steps we took was aligning our team on PLG Metrics. Here’s how we broke it down:

  1. Start with Business Outcomes: For us, the big goal was increasing sales and closing deals.

  2. Define Supporting Metrics: We bubbled this down into measurable goals like activation rates, time-to-value, retention, and paywall clicks.

  3. Create Clarity: We held sessions to clearly map out how these metrics bubble up to the larger business outcome and how they cascade down into actionable tasks for each team.

This alignment gave everyone—product, engineering, and design— clarity on what success looked like and how their work contributed to it.

Empowering Teams Through Ownership

Once we had alignment, I took a step back and asked the team: “How do we go about solving this?” My role wasn’t to give answers—it was to guide the team and create space for them to brainstorm solutions and taking ownership. 

I found success by pausing to listen, asking the team how we could solve specific challenges, and letting them present their inputs. I made sure to document who proposed what and encouraged collaboration. My job became championing their approach, not providing all the answers.

I fostered a sense of ownership within the team. By empowering them to experiment and iterate, they became more invested in the outcomes.

There is No Fail

Once aligned on metrics, we moved into execution mode. This meant testing ideas through A/B testing paywalls, experimenting with onboarding flows and tooltips. We prioritized efforts based on potential impact and kept tests manageable to ensure faster iteration cycles. These experiments took time—about two or three months from start to finish—but they gave us valuable insights into what worked and what didn’t.

For example, one of our paywall tests converted just one customer—but instead of calling it a failure, we saw it as a sign that there was interest there. So we iterated with new designs and calls-to-action until we found something that worked better.

Takeaway:

  • Pause and Listen

  • Support Initiatives

  • Champion Ownership

  • Reduce Testing Scope & Efforts

  • No "failure", just signals to go deeper

Empowering Junior Team Members

Once this process was in place, I started handing off ownership of specific initiatives to junior team members—like junior PMs or designers—so they could lead projects themselves. They worked closely with engineers and designers while I stepped back into more of a traffic-directing role.

This approach not only freed me up but also gave them valuable experience running experiments and iterating based on data.

Conclusion

Influencing your team with product data isn’t about having all the answers—it’s about creating alignment, empowering ownership, fostering experimentation, and embracing learnings. By championing these practices at PLG, we’ve built a culture where data informs strategy and drives meaningful results.

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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.