Product Led Growth Strategy and Differentiation
Interviewing a PLG expert to understand how to identify, select and align a strategy focused on who you serve and what unique value proposition you provide.
👋 Hey! This edition of our newsletter is about the latest podcast episode. The next release will be about communicating and connecting Product Vision to strategy, ending the product vision series!
One of the key elements of a solid product strategy that generates growth based on your product success, is building and sustaining strong differentiators. But finding, validating and aligning on that differentiation is hard work.
In this episode we explored strategy creation with Leah Tharin, Head of Product at Jua.ai and Product Led Growth expert. We covered many aspects of strategy creation, starting with the importance of determining your target user, how to identify opportunities that you can later select for your differentiation, and all the way down to how to summarize it in an inspiring one-pager.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, Google, and YouTube, and read on for my takeaways and highlights of the episode.
My takeaways from this episode
Leah’s first principle is to create something that is simple, that people in the ground can understand: a 1-pager. She starts by understanding “who are you selling to” and defining the differentiators (comparing SmallPDF with Adobe, it was all about simplicity). You can assess the clarity of your 1-pager and differentiator by asking people “what’s our strategy” and checking if it's aligned with your message.
To find your differentiators, always focus on outcome: is it connected to customer success? For example, simplicity means easy to use, and you can assess that it’s really easier for your users (versus competitors).
The first step in the strategy journey for Leah is making sure you don’t miss something valuable (insights phase in my mental model). So you explore what could be good without “crossing off” anything. It’s the opposite of management drafting a couple of points and then finding good ideas for that. She collects insights in a tree shape, based on Miro instead of spreadsheets to help avoid “ranking” stuff (things first in the spreadsheet get more attention.
The next step is to select, and she tries to find substantiation for each part of the tree (market and product data). A broad analysis on an area gives you the confidence to invest more in more detailed research to confirm it, and then you start building initial versions to further validate it (Business assessment protects research investment, research results protect engineering investment).
To create a Product Led Growth strategy, you first need to put in place many “basics”. For example, having a good data infrastructure is a typical example.
Leah made a final point on keeping the strategy inspiring, and not merely dry numbers. This ties back to the one-pager (or what I would call the synthesis) and explaining for whom and why this is important, besides the goal.
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What an amazing episode that was, good job Nacho. Thank you so much.