Product Led Growth Strategy: 2025 Guide

In this post, I will explain how to execute your product-led growth strategy:

What is Product Led Growth (PLG) strategy?

Product Led Growth transforms how companies acquire and convert customers by putting the product at the center of the growth strategy. PLG is different from traditional approaches because the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, and expansion, not just sales teams. This strategy creates a self-sustaining growth engine where companies generate revenue from upsells, reinvest that revenue into product improvements, enhance user experience and self-serve capabilities, create viral growth, and word-of-mouth marketing.

The core philosophy centers on creating a product that delivers so much value and provides such a seamless user experience that it naturally attracts and retains customers without heavily relying on traditional sales and marketing tactics. PLG isn't just an innovation feature, but its operational strategy is aimed at building a self-sustaining flywheel.

What makes PLG particularly powerful is its alignment with modern buyer behavior. Hubspot research shows that "54% of prospects want to learn how a product works on the first call, yet only 23% of sellers are willing to show that". This gap creates a natural opportunity for PLG approaches to meet buyer expectations.

Deep dive: The Real Journey to PLG

2. What are the main benefits of adopting a PLG strategy?

PLG delivers multiple compounding benefits that traditional sales-led growth approaches cannot match. We disrupted the industry by offering the first-ever product-led, freemium experience. We democratized access to compliance tools.

The most compelling benefit of PLG is the organic growth: I found out a whopping 40% of our PLG Sign-Ups came from Word of Mouth!

PLG cuts through the clutter. It allows users to experience the product value firsthand. This direct experience creates powerful network effects.

One of the most significant benefits is scalable growth: PLG is a scalable process rather than a linear growth motion. You don't need more headcount to make it grow. This efficiency makes PLG particularly attractive for resource-constrained companies.

Deep dive: Why I believe in Product Led Growth

What are the three pillars of Product Led Growth?

1. Product: The Foundation and North Star

The first pillar is the Product itself. I emphasize that the product must deliver value independently, enabling users to reach their “aha moment” and activation without human intervention:

Read more about The Product in Product led Growth:

This means:

• Building a self-guided product value journey

• Develop product led growth bumpers

• Creating a robust support ecosystem (documentation, videos, automated emails)

• Making product discovery intuitive with clear progress indicators

• Obsessing over time-to-value and enabling natural value discovery

Our product became the primary driver of word-of-mouth growth, while our small team focuses on high-value customers requiring additional handholding and customization.

2. Led: Orchestrating the Experience Across Teams

The second pillar is Led, how the product experience is orchestrated and championed across the organization. “Led” is about putting the product at the forefront of the customer journey and ensuring every department contributes to the product’s success:

Read more about Led in Product led Growth:

Key aspects include:

• Leading the PLG roadmap and commuicating it

• Cross-functional collaboration (product, engineering, design, marketing, sales, customer success)

• Leading with product experience in every customer touchpoint

• Using onboarding, lifecycle marketing, and support to reinforce the product’s value

• Creating a transparent, easy-to-use, and trustworthy product journey

This is what ‘led’ truly means in product-led growth, putting the product experience at the forefront and making it the primary driver of our growth strategy.

3. Growth: Driving Scale and Continuous Improvement

The third pillar is Growth, using the product as the engine for scalable customer acquisition, activation, retention, and expansion. Growth in PLG is achieved through continuous learning, iteration, and optimization:

Read more about Growth means in Product led Growth:

Growth is measured by:

• Product usage and customer engagement

• Virality and word-of-mouth (network effects)

• Upsell and expansion through paywalls and advanced features

• Funnel optimization, activation analysis, and growth accounting

We knew growth was happening when: Customers were using the product (for real!), They were inviting colleagues and employees to use it (internal networking effect!), They were hitting paywalls and buying (revenue!), They were letting others in their network know about us, signifying virality and word-of-mouth growth (external networking effect!).

Deep dive into Product Led Marketing:

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