There's a lot of talk about product-led growth in recent times. Businesses with a PLG mindset do things differently, which is how they establish themselves as top product-led growth companies that serve as an inspiration for other businesses.

When your business is aligned with a proper product-led growth strategy by adopting the 3 pillars of product management, there's more room for success and improved user experience. The following sections shed light on what product-led growth is and what it takes to achieve this.

• What is Product-Led Growth?

Product-led growth is a business strategy that involves focusing primarily on designing a product to drive user acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion. When product-led growth becomes the center of your operations, all your teams come together to build, promote, and market products that directly contribute to your success.

Product-led growth strategy brings together the efforts of all teams to enhance the experience of your users. Today, the success of a business or a product largely depends on how well its users receive it. Therefore, when the product is put at the center of customer experience, businesses have more control over developing the product in ways that make it a hit.

• Qualities of Successful Product-Led Businesses

Product-led businesses are successful because they have a different perspective when targeting users. These distinct qualities, when incorporated into your strategies, can help you become a successful product-led business. Here are the three use cases that can establish a success scenario when you aspire to become a product-led business.

1. Pillar 1: Design of the End User

Designing products that enhance user experience should be the ultimate goal of every business. What makes a product an immense success is how useful the end user finds it. One big question when you intend to design a product keeping the needs of the end user in mind is- how do I know what my user wants? The answer to this question lies in the data collected from customer feedback and surveys.

You can leverage your business and product-specific data to integrate changes into your designs in ways that enhance your user's experience with the product. You can run iterative experiments during the different product development phases to produce data that gives you insights into what your end users want.

1. Pillar 2: Deliver Value Before Capturing Value

Businesses generally gauge their success based on how much value they capture with their products. When your primary goal is to capture value, you might take more steps to build a product that meets the goals of your business rather than meeting the needs of your customers. Therefore, the first and more crucial step towards success is delivering value by becoming the best offering in your area. This essentially means deriving more insights from what your customers actually want.

When your product is designed to benefit the users and provide the best possible customer experience, it automatically translates to capturing more value. Therefore, adopting a strategy that is user-oriented rather than solely value-capturing helps you take the right steps to deliver value, which results in capturing value for your business and moving towards product-led growth.

1. Pillar 3: Invest in the Product with Go-To-Market Intent

The practice of working on a product to finally emerge with a ready-to-launch version without considering feedback is an outdated practice. One of the 3 pillars of product management that should be an important part of your product-led growth strategy is to test your product at every stage of design and development.

This helps you make changes and modifications to the product design at multiple stages so that, when you launch a product or feature, it is largely based on real feedback from actual users, meaning your final product would be ready to hit the market. This gives you the chance to work on bugs, issues, and friction points and tackle them so that users effortlessly interact with the final product.

Some examples of the best product-led growth companies are Airtable, Slack, Pinterest, Figma, and Typeform. Their success speaks volumes about the efficacy of product-led growth. Transitioning from a sales-led approach to a product-led approach requires a bottom-up approach, allowing your customers to experience the product completely, understand how they feel about it, and work on the product to make it as customer-friendly as possible.

While it takes an efficient and talented team to build a powerful product, it takes an organization to be intuitive and insightful about the needs of the customers so that the product aligns well with their needs.