Month in Life: Head of PLG

A Month in the Life of a Product-Led Growth Leader: Steering the Ship Through Data and Insights 🚣‍♂️ ⚓️

In the fast-paced world of Product-Led Growth (PLG), every month brings new opportunities to reflect, strategize, and execute. As a Head of PLG, my role involves constant analysis of our progress, identifying opportunities, and steering the organization towards sustainable growth. It's a whirlwind of assessing what we've accomplished and what lies ahead—a true progress update for the entire team. Let me take you behind the scenes of how we navigate these crucial 30 days, exploring the pressure scenarios and successes.

The Quarter's Pulse Check 📊 💗

We kick off each month by taking the pulse of our quarterly progress. This critical assessment helps us maintain perspective and adjust our tactics. Whether we're setting foundations in month one, hustling in the second month, or sprinting to the finish line in the last month of the quarter, our strategy shifts to match the moment. This rhythm helps us maintain perspective and adjust our tactics accordingly.

"Alright, folks, we're a third of the way through the quarter. Time to get real!"

• Are we crushing our revenue goals or do we need to kick it up a notch?

• Have we built a solid foundation for a strong quarter-end push?

• Where are we at - still warming up, in full hustle mode, or sprinting to the finish line?

• What can we learn from the last three months to level up our game?

Sales: Show Me the Numbers! 📊 💰

How many deals did we close? Any lagging deals we need to nudge? Onboarding calls - are we showcasing the value and closing the deal, or do we need to step up our game?

Our sales motion using the Superhuman Onboarding follows two distinct but equally valuable paths:

The Sprint Buyers:  🏃‍♂️

Some customers know exactly what they want – they're ready to embrace compliance and security features from day one. They done their research, and they want to dive right into the pricing. One call, maybe a few emails, and bam! Closed deal.  These "one-call closes" are gold, representing organizations with urgent needs and clear decision-making processes. While not common, these wins validate our product-market fit and showcase our platform's immediate value proposition.

• Characteristics: Committed to compliance and security, needs advanced features immediately. They are ready to talk about pricing and only have to review their internal decision-makers 

• Process: One-call sales, rapid conversion

• Significance: Indicates we are reaching customers with urgent needs

The Value Seekers:🌱

More frequently, we see customers who prefer to explore and grow with us. These are our "try before you buy" friends. They start with our freemium tier, thoroughly testing and experiencing our platform's capabilities and compliance firsthand. They are building confidence in our platform. We develop a clear roadmap for their compliance journey. Starting with essential features and naturally progress to advanced capabilities. Unlike our competitors' sales-led approaches that hide everything behind demos and hefty price tags, we believe in transparency and hands-on experience.

We're playing the long game here, betting that they'll need our advanced features as they grow. And when they do, we'll be right there, ready to level them up.

• Characteristics: Need activation and value demonstration before committing

• Process: Utilize freemium tier, experience platform capabilities

• Strategy: Encourage activation to build confidence in our platform

Marketing Monthly Performance Review 📊📈

Let's dissect that funnel:

• Traffic to signup conversion - are we irresistible or invisible?

• Signups to onboarding calls - are folks hungry for more or ghosting us?

• Onboarding to activation - are we delivering the "aha!" moment?

• Sales pipeline health - are we optimizing the marketing spent with close sales deals?

• Pricing and packaging experiments, SKU wins and losses - are we following up with customers and navigating the sales motion?

Engineering and Product Design: What's Launching? 🛠️

With two engineering sprints per month mean two opportunities to move our growth needle forward. We focus on three key areas:

1. Paywall Optimization: Did we roll out new paywalls to boost sales? Fine-tuning our monetization strategy to drive revenue while maintaining an excellent user experience

2. Activation Enhancement: How's our onboarding experience? Are we turning newbies into power users? Continuously improving our onboarding to help users discover value faster

3. Viral Growth Features: Any viral features launched? Implementing features that naturally encourage product sharing, creating stickiness, and reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC)

Most importantly, how are these upgrades impacting our CAC-LTV ratio? Maintaining a healthy CAC to LTV ratio so we can maintain a self-sustaining product-led growth motion.

Wrapping The Month Up 🎁 📊

While we maintain weekly win/loss updates, our monthly deep-dive serves a crucial purpose. As any experienced leader knows, posting updates once on Slack isn't enough – information needs repetition to stick. Our monthly updates reinforce key messages, celebrate wins, learn from losses, and align the entire company behind our PLG motion.

At the end of the month, we're pulling all the threads together:

• Engineering wins - what new paywalls or onboarding improvements did we launch? 

• Marketing success - how's our funnel looking? Which channels is working? 

• Sales magic - who's signing on the dotted line and why? how many more sales deals do we need?

• Roadblocks - what's holding us back? Competitors? Pricing? Features?

Communication is key. And keep proactively showcasing product-led growth value.

• Weekly updates to keep everyone in the loop

• A monthly recap to really drive it home

• Clear next steps so everyone knows how to Product Led Growth is evolving 

Looking Ahead to the Quarter 🔭

This monthly rhythm keeps us focused on what matters: delivering value to customers while growing sustainably. Depending on the month, it's a delicate balance of immediate results and long-term strategy, all guided by data and customer insights.

Remember: In the PLG world, every metric tells a story, and every story presents an opportunity for improvement. The key is knowing which stories to act on and when. We are prepping the wave, creating it, and riding to the end of the quarter. 

Read about Product-led Growth

1. Day in life as Head of PLG 🧢

2. Week in Life as Head of PLG 🎓

3. How to communicate product-led growth Roadmap to Stakeholders

4. How I sold 10 PLG customers with 1 paywall 🤑

5. PLG: 7 Types of Tech Touches Examples 💌

6. CAC LTV Payback Ratio Heatmap [Download Template] 💵

or

Learn more https://www.youtube.com/@GaryYauChan/videos 

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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.